Nothing Common About the Common Core

I recently got a call from a parent looking for help in math for their child. In the past, I have said that math was one of the academic areas I was qualified to tutor. Now  I have to qualify that assertion to say that I tutor “old school math.”  My experience is invalid because "old school math" is only taught in 8 of the 50 states. The other 42, as well as 4 territories and the District of Columbia, have chosen to follow the Common Core.

Common Core is a teaching methodology that is based on standardizing math and English instruction across the country. The idea was to ensure that all high school graduates had the same knowledge so there were no competency gaps. Standards were also developed for each grade level. Every state decides whether or not to implement the Common Core standards in their curriculum. When it was first introduced in 2009, 48 states adopted the standards, motivated by federal funding for education through Obama’s Race To The Top Initiative.

The NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress), is an evaluation system administered by a federal agency under the Department of Education that has been testing 4^th, 8^th and 12^th grade students in public and private schools across the nation in different academic areas every two years since 1969. In 2015, it found that the performance of high school seniors in math had not improved since Common Core had been implemented and had even gotten worse than their performance in 1992 when the tests were first used, according to a blog in the Huffington Post last May entitled, “Results Are in: Common Core Fails Tests and Kids.”  There was a similar decline in reading performance with the implementation of Common Core. 

The author concluded that Common Core is designed in such a way that the majority of students are doomed to failure, especially if those students are poor, or have learning disabilities or are non-native speakers of English. What was ironic about the call I received was that both parents were engineers. They were both highly educated, native English speakers from an upper middle class neighborhood yet neither was able to help their child because they couldn’t understand the math.  Judging from the comments on the Internet, it is a “common” problem. Clearly there is something at fault in the way math and reading are currently being taught in the US from grades K-12 if the majority of graduating high school students are unprepared for college level work.

Math and English are both primarily “language” based academic subjects. Each has its own specific vocabulary, grammar and syntax. Understanding and solving a math problem is similar to reading and analyzing a literary passage or novel.  At higher grade levels math requires a conceptual understanding,  but in the beginning, it’s simply about acquiring competency with the fundamentals. The why is less important than the what and how. One of the problems with the current math curriculum is that material that was typically taught at higher grade levels is being introduced much earlier in Common Core before the foundation is laid.

An acquaintance who teaches math in high school compared solving such problems to building an automobile engine. It’s not enough to be given the engine block and the component parts and told to build the engine.  Knowing what the part looks like and what parts connect with it, along with knowing where it should be in the engine, and what order it must be put in is important in the assembly process. One of the algebra problems in the NY curriculum has students in Algebra I solving quadratic equations by completing the square. Before Common Core, working with quadratic equations was a skill that was  typically taught in an Algebra 2/Trigonometry course or higher, as it is in many other countries.

Reading works the same way. In earlier grades, the process of reading begins with visual recognition of words and their proper pronunciation. Later, students learn to define and use the words in simple sentences. When I was in 7^th grade I had a very strict but comprehensive English teacher.  I learned the essentials of language composition from a book called English 3200. It gave me practice naming the part of speech of each word in a sentence, the definition or function of that word, and the syntax, or its proper position in a sentence. Those were the building blocks of language. From there, it was simply a matter of acquiring the necessary vocabulary to create interesting and engaging prose and poetry pieces, and that is a matter of experience, in other words, spending a lot of time reading. The students I knew who were skilled writers were also voracious readers across all types of literature, and if I have to define what voracious means, there is already a problem.

Common Core focus the bulk of its reading curriculum in the higher grades on nonfiction, according to an article by Joy Pullman, writing for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. The language of nonfiction or informational literature is colloquial so it can be easily understood by a broad audience. Studying the text of Shakespeare or Chaucer or any of the Romantic poets, on the other hand, requires annotation and translation to modern English through the use of SparkNotes or similar supplemental sources. Pullman quotes a study by Sandra Stotsky and Mark Bauerlein claiming that “college readiness will likely decrease when the secondary English curriculum prioritizes literary nonfiction or informational reading and reduces the study of complex literary texts and literary traditions” to prove her assertion that the classics help students with higher level thinking and analysis.

A Wall Street Journal article by Jillian Kay Melchior earlier this year talked about the resistance to studying classical texts on college campuses across the country, including at such bastions of higher education as Yale. The students’ main objection appears to be the fact that classical literature is not applicable to the issues of the current population demographic. Yet the central concerns of humanity have not changed over time. Reynaldo Martinez, a student at  Hostos Community College, part of City University of New York in the Bronx says, “These works open your eyes to the way morality and education and equality are still needed in our society.”

A letter to the editor about the article draws an analogy to a course on U.S. presidents to say that “the ones studied would include those who had the greatest impact, served during challenging times, or made difficult decisions that are still felt by us today. The course wouldn’t select one president from a northern state and one from a southern state, one who was right-handed and one who was left-handed, one who was tall and one who was short, to ensure representation of all demographics.”  

An online comment to the article continues, “I am reminded of a certain football coach from some years back  whose name escapes me at the moment who called his team together after a lopsided loss to tell his players that we are getting back to basics and at the same time picked up a football and displayed for  all to see and said; "this is a football". He ends by saying, ”Maybe that's what we need to do with the education system in our country, get back to basics.” We can’t run before we learn to walk and a Race To The Top won’t be won if our competitors are stumbling to get their balance.