Is Common Core destroying math education?

Third post that’s been sitting as a draft for a while.

You’ve all seen this, right?  Articles in various sites showing, as in this example, “The Ten Dumbest Common Core Problems.”  Or the kid whose math paper, while correct, fails to use “friendly numbers.”  Or other flaky examples of Common Core math that tries to get kids to learn a convoluted process to find a result, rather than plain ol’ borrowing, or carrying the one, or traditional methods of long division.  Plus the assignments reported on in the Daily Caller which add political indoctrination to the math curriculum.

And then there’s the claim that Common Core is insufficiently rigorous, and won’t get students the math they need to go on to STEM majors in college.  Apparently, this primarily affects California, where the standard track covers algebra in eighth grade, so students are on track for calculus in their senior year.  But does this work?  Are the majority of eighth graders really capable of a track leading to calculus?

The actual standard track in the “official” standards online consists of, at the high school level, Algebra, Geometry, Algebra II, and an undefined senior-level class which is presumably, most often, precalculus or, alternatively, a statistics class or a mathmatics course related to a vocational course of study.  But the standards presume there’ll be a separate track in which Algebra is covered in 8th grade, then Geometry, Algebra II, Precalculus, and Calculus.  So I don’t really see any difference in this respect between this and the current tracks at the high school my son’ll be headed into next year — a separate track for students who are headed into STEM fields or want to keep their options open, versus kids headed into non-math oriented fields.

And, per an article that was a top hit for a search for common core math calculus, by one of the Common Core authors, the biggest issue is not getting enough kids to Calculus as seniors, it’s ensuring that they learn enough in their prior classes that those kids to attempt Calculus actually succeed.

In any event, the worksheets showing up on the internet are labelled “Common Core,” but they are not official Common Core worksheets, in some kind of nationalized textbook/workbook.  These are flaky publishers who have labelled their worksheets as aligned to Common Core, nothing more.

On the other hand, if the actual outcome of Common Core is, in fact, to end differentiation and tracking in general, well, that will be a bad outcome.