Does Common Core make the grade? • There is, unfortunately, little in common between what Massachusetts did and what the U.S. Department of Education is trying to advance. • Massachusetts’ success was built upon a relentless focus on academics, specifically on literacy, math, and the liberal arts. Common Core emphasizes experiential, skills-based learning while reducing the amount of classic literature, poetry, and drama taught in English classes. Its more vocational bent includes far greater emphasis on jargon-laden “informational text” extracts, and it supports analyzing texts shorn of historical context and background knowledge. • The impact on English classrooms in Massachusetts, which adopted Common Core in 2010, has been to reduce the amount of classical literature studied by more than half. Goodbye Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. • In math, consider the view of Stanford University Emeritus Professor of Mathematics James Milgram, the only academic mathematician on Common Core’s validation committee. (He refused to sign off on the final draft of the national standards.) He describes the standards as having “extremely serious failings,” reflecting “very low expectations,” and ultimately leaving American students one year behind their international peers by fifth grade and two years behind by seventh grade. • One major practical effect is that American students will not get to Algebra I in eighth grade, which is critical if our students are to be college-ready in mathematics. Another is the insistence on using an experimental non-Euclidian approach to teaching geometry—an approach that has never been successfully implemented at the middle and high school levels anywhere.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 10:42:26 +0000
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