It gets your attention, as it should, when a professor from Cal-Berkeley denounces Common Core as a major step backward in the area of math education. And that's just what happens this morning in the Wall Street Journal, where math professor Marina Ratner relates what she discovered about Common Core from observing what they're teaching her grandson.
Does drawing a picture to demonstrate 2/3 divided by 3/4 sound like a good way of learning the material to you? If not, then you have an ally at UC-Berkeley:
This requirement of visual models and creating stories is all over the Common Core. The students were constantly told to draw models to answer trivial questions, such as finding 20% of 80 or finding the time for a car to drive 10 miles if it drives 4 miles in 10 minutes, or finding the number of benches one can make from 48 feet of wood if each bench requires 6 feet. A student who gives the correct answer right away (as one should) and doesn't draw anything loses points.
Here are some more examples of the Common Core's convoluted and meaningless manipulations of simple concepts: "draw a series of tape diagrams to represent (12 divided by 3) x 3=12, or: rewrite (30 divided by 5) = 6 as a subtraction expression."
This model-drawing mania went on in my grandson's class for the entire year, leaving no time to cover geometry and other important topics. While model drawing might occasionally be useful, mathematics is not about visual models and "real world" stories. It became clear to me that the Common Core's "deeper" and "more rigorous" standards mean replacing math with some kind of illustrative counting saturated with pictures, diagrams and elaborate word problems. Simple concepts are made artificially intricate and complex with the pretense of being deeper—while the actual content taught was primitive.
Yet the most astounding statement I have read is the claim that Common Core standards are "internationally benchmarked." They are not. The Common Core fails any comparison with the standards of high-achieving countries, just as they fail compared to the old California standards. They are lower in the total scope of learned material, in the depth and rigor of the treatment of mathematical subjects, and in the delayed and often inconsistent and incoherent introductions of mathematical concepts and skills.
Obama Administration uses the classic tactic of dangling grants
It's important when we look at the problems with Common Core not to get caught up in some of the fiction about how it came about. To listen to some people, you'd think Barack Obama sat down and personally wrote the curriculum. He didn't, but when you realize what Common Core really is, and where it really came from, it's no less an indictment of the U.S. education establishment and those who support it.
The premise of Common Core is that it creates a core curriculum that will be standard for every state in the nation, such that kids in some states don't fall behind kids in others in terms of their proficiency. And why did we need to do this? Well that's when you get into the usual rationalizations that we're "competing with China and Germany" or whatever, and so we need to make sure our kids are as good as their kids, whose governments are supposedly holding them to the highest standards.
The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers developed the curriculum. The Obama Administration uses the classic tactic of dangling grants to entice states to adopt it.
But as Ratner discovered, Common Core doesn't do what its supporters claim it does, especially in math, where lead curriculum writers said at a 2010 conference she attended that the standards wouldn't really be all that high in comparison with other nations, and would not be helpful in preparing kids for college.
So why impose the standards at all? I realize there is a school of thought that Common Core is designed to brainwash kids into liberal mushheads, and I'm sure there is content that got snuck in that falls under that category. But my broader guess is that a bunch of people who got themselves in a position to drive the process became more interested in being clever than in achieving the actual goal. And with so much money and political capital behind the effort, no one was willing to back up and admit that the content they produced was substandard and didn't achieve the announced goal.
That's how we ended up stuck with inferior curriculum that the federal government is using its granting power to pressure states to adpot. It's a classic case of what happens when you let the self-styled "best and brightest" in Washington take over a function that folks at the local level can do perfectly well for themselves. Every time we start panicking about some supposed competition with China and Germany, it doesn't mean we have to abandon common sense and put Washington in charge of what we've usually left to local leaders. But for the left, everything is an excuse to consolidate power at the federal level.
And when you do that, you end up with rot like Common Core - an effort so flawed that even at UC-Berkeley, they can see what a disaster it is.
