Reply to FYI: Indiana withdrawing from Common Core standards

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[quote=Anonymous]

And here's a math expert explaining in detail why the Common Core Standards are bad:

The Common Core’s Pedagogical Tomfoolery

By Ze'ev Wurman   Today

One frequently hears that the Common Core standards are merely standards and expectations that do not dictate curriculum or pedagogy. Common Core proponents argue that those national standards do not interfere with the ability of teachers to use their preferred pedagogical approaches, and do not further interfere with local autonomy over the curriculum. Here, for example, are Kathleen Porter-Magee and Sol Stern making the case why conservatives should support the Common Core:

Here’s what the Common Core State Standards are: They describe what children should know and the skills that they must acquire at each grade level to stay on course toward college- or career-readiness, something that conservatives have long argued for. . . . The Common Core standards are also not a curriculum; it’s up to state and local leaders to choose aligned curricula.

...n mathematics, my own area of expertise, the examples of curriculum and pedagogy are numerous. Look, for example, on a first grade standard:

1.OA.6: Add and subtract within 20, demonstrating fluency for addition and subtraction within 10. Use strategies such as counting on; making ten (e.g., 8 + 6 = 8 + 2 + 4 = 10 + 4 = 14); decomposing a number leading to a ten (e.g., 13 – 4 = 13 – 3 – 1 = 10 – 1 = 9); using the relationship between addition and subtraction (e.g., knowing that 8 + 4 = 12, one knows 12 – 8 = 4); and creating equivalent but easier or known sums (e.g., adding 6 + 7 by creating the known equivalent 6 + 6 + 1 = 12 + 1 = 13).

Were this a true content standard, it would have simply stopped after its first sentence: Add and subtract within 20, demonstrating fluency for addition and subtraction within 10. Yet the standard continues and lists at least four different ways students must use to show … what? Can’t they simply show they can add and subtract, correctly and fluently?

And lest you think this is just a fluke, here is essentially the same standard in the second and third grades:

2.NBT.5: Fluently add and subtract within 100 using strategies based on place value, properties of operations, and/or the relationship between addition and subtraction.

3.NBT.2: Fluently add and subtract within 1000 using strategies and algorithms based on place value, properties of operations, and/or the relationship between addition and subtraction.

In other words, students are not allowed simply to learn how to add and subtract in first grade, in second grade, or in third grade. No, they must use the training wheels that the authors want them to use, whether they can ride without them or not. What is this if not pedagogy, and a wrongheaded one to boot? Young children do not need four different ways to “explain” addition – at best, this could be guidance to teachers how to individualize teaching rather than expect children to know all these ways.

[b]One can argue that those are just suggestions. Unfortunately, this is incorrect. The Common Core assessment consortia (PARCC and SBAC) will test these wrong-headed “strategies,” paying attention to the variety of ways problems are answered rather than to correctness of results.[/b][/quote]

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