:lol I like all your venting.
Bostonian, I certainly see your "correlation is not causation" on the algebra 2 -> college success metric. Indeed, few of my students in college STEM classes (in a university with rapidly increasing competitiveness for admission) have a solid understanding of the concepts contained in algebra 2.
By going through ST Math (a manifestation of CC math forced online) rigorous = tedious. That's (hopefully) not what the ed speak people are thinking.
So seriously, what are the ed speak people actually thinking when they say that one curriculum is more rigorous than another?
As a corollary, I'm going to need the ed speak responses to rigorous curricula to allow my DS to formally subject accelerate through this tedious errr, rigorous, curriculum.