UC Berkely math Prof Marina Ratner: CC is a step backward
To: Williamson Evers <evers@stanford.edu>
*Wall Street Journal*
American students are already struggling against the competition.
The Common Core won't help them succeed.
I first encountered the Common Core State Standards last
fall, when my grandson started sixth grade in a public middle school here in
Berkeley, Calif. This was the first year that the Berkeley school district
began to implement the standards, and I had heard that a considerable amount of
money had been given to states for implementing them. As a mathematician I was
intrigued, thinking that there must be something really special about the
Common Core. Otherwise, why not adopt the curriculum and the excellent
textbooks of highly achieving countries in math instead of
putting millions of dollars into creating something new?
Reading about the new math standards—outlining what students
should be able to learn and understand by each grade—I found hardly any
academic mathematicians who could say the standards were higher than the old California
standards, which were among the nation's best. I learned that at the 2010
annual conference of mathematics societies, Bill McCallum, a leading writer of
Common Core math standards, said that the new standards "would not be too
high" in comparison with other nations where math
education excels. Jason Zimba, another lead writer of the
mathematics standards, told the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary
Education that the new standards wouldn't prepare students for colleges to which
"most parents aspire" to send their children.
I also read that the Common Core offers "fewer
standards" but "deeper" and "more rigorous"
understanding of math. That there were "fewer standards" became
obvious when I saw that they were vastly inferior to the old California
standards in rigor, depth and the scope of topics. Many topics—for instance,
calculus and pre-calculus, about half of algebra II and parts of geometry—were
taken out and many were moved to higher grades.
As a result, the Common Core standards were several years
behind the old standards, especially in higher grades. It became clear that the
new standards represent lower expectations and that students taught in the way that
these standards require would have little chance of being admitted to even an
average college and would certainly struggle if they did get in.
It remained to be seen whether the Common Core was
"deeper" and "more rigorous." The Berkeley school
district's curriculum for sixth-grade math was an exact copy of the Common Core
State Standards for the grade. The teacher in my grandson's class went through
special Common Core training courses.
As his assigned homework and tests indicate, when teaching
fractions, the teacher required that students draw pictures of everything: of 6
divided by 8, of 4 divided by 2/7, of 0.8 x 0.4, and so forth. In doing so, the
teacher followed the instructions: "Interpret and compute quotients of fractions,
and solve word problems involving division of fractions by
fractions, e.g., by using visual fraction models and
equations to represent the problem. For example, create a story context for 2/3
divided by 3/4 and use a visual fraction model to show the quotient . . ."
Who would draw a picture to divide 2/3 by 3/4?
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.
For California, the adoption of the Common Core standards
represents a huge step backward which puts an end to its hard-won standing as
having the top math standards in the nation. The Common Core standards will
move the U.S. even closer to the bottom in international ranking.
The teaching of math in many schools needs improvement. Yet
the enormous amount of money invested in Common Core—$15.8 billion nationally,
according to a 2012 estimate by the Pioneer Institute—could have a better
outcome. It could have been used instead to address the real problems in
education, such as helping teachers to teach better, raising the performance
standards in schools and making learning more challenging.
*Ms. Ratner is professor emerita of mathematics at the
University of California at Berkeley. She was awarded the international
Ostrowski Prize in 1993 and received the John J. Carty Award from the National
Academy of Sciences, of which she is a member, in 1994.*
Source: http://online.wsj.com/articles/marina-ratner-making-math-education-even-worse-1407283282 Aug. 5, 2014 8:01 p.m. ET
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