Common Core Math Standards - Progression or Regression?
After reading "The Common Core Math Standards: Are they a step forward or backward?" I took the opportunity to reflect.
The discussion to the question about math wars struck different and sometimes opposing chords with me. There were topics and quotes that really resonated with me and topics I strongly disagreed with. For example, it is possible that students can perfectly understand multiplication as repeated addition, but have never bothered or were never forced to memorize multiplication facts. I agree with W. Stephen Wilson, when he says, “this permanently slows students down,” (page 47). On the other hand, I highly disagree with Wilson when he claims that “statistics and probability [are] irrelevant for college preparation,” (48). When we look at the relevance of teaching a particular concept solely through the narrow lens of a college placement test, we are being completely myopic in this approach. I’m not alone in this view when I claim that statistics and probability could be the most relevant topics in the sciences and probably the real world. I hate to think that a member of the National Governors Association-Council of Chief State School Officers “feedback group” defines the importance of a mathematical topic by the number of times it appears in SAT questions.
I began to investigate the Common Core in more detail. I came across an article highlighted by Diane Ravitch (one of my favorite educational philosophers now for renouncing NCLB which she helped spearhead (unless of course this was strictly a political move then I was duped like the rest)), exposing the mathematical teaching inexperience of the authors of the Common Core and their close ties with major testing companies. Wurman (p 48) also points to the inexperience of the authors of the Common Core describing a nonchalant introduction of an untested approach to geometry. It makes me wonder what was the goal of changing the curriculum? Some companies made lots of money with the adoption of the Common Core. Is the purpose to sell textbooks? Make your MAP tests look more promising? The cynic in me sees standardized tests as a corrupt segment of education and I can barely see the innocence of the adoption of Common Core. It is even more dismaying to read Ze’ev Wurman’s conclusion that the Common Core is two years behind school expectations in high achieving countries (p 49) and would not even help students reach “the admission requirements[s] of most four-year state colleges,” (p 50).
In writing curriculum for an entire nation, you are not going to please everyone, but regardless of your view of a particular nicety, these standards adopted by the majority of the nation are not up to par.