In case you missed it, last week the Wake County School Board showed just how clueless they are about Common Core.
The Wake County board dove in front of Common Core by attacking parents in their own district who dared to advocate for their child in front of the Academic Standards Review Commission last week.
The News and Observer reported the comments of some of the board members.
I went and matched up those comments to the Wake Board’s video of their work session. After seeing the video, I might have been too kind using the term ‘clueless’.
The News and Observer Editorial staff then doubled down on the Wake Board’s comments and said that Common Core was not to be blamed — Teachers, parents and kids were.
Barry Garelick is has a degree in math from the University of Michigan and the author of a book that through anecdotes reveals the failings of math under Common Core. The book is called Teaching Math in the 21st Century and I highly recommend it.
I’ve also blogged about Garelick’s multi-part article series that deconstructs the math under Common Core .
Garelick weighed in on the comments on the News and Observer article:
Currently, with the adoption and implementation of the Common Core math standards, there has been increased emphasis and focus on students showing “understanding” of the conceptual underpinnings of algorithms and problem-solving procedures. Instead of adding multi-digit numbers using the standard algorithm and learning alternative strategies after mastery of that algorithm is achieved, students must do the opposite. That is, they are required to use inefficient strategies that purport to provide the “deep understanding” when they are finally taught to use the more efficient standard algorithm. The prevailing belief is that to do otherwise is to teach by rote without understanding. Students are also being taught to reproduce explanations that make it appear they possess understanding – and more importantly, to make such demonstrations on the standardized tests that require them to do so.
Such an approach is tantamount to saying, “If we can just get them to do things that look like what we imagine a mathematician does, then they will be real mathematicians.” Forcing students to think of multiple ways to solve a problem, for example, or to write an explanation for how they solved a problem or why something works does not in and of itself cause understanding. It is investment in the wrong thing at the wrong time.
The “explanations” most often will have little mathematical value and are naïve because students don’t know the subject matter well enough. The result is at best a demonstration of “rote understanding” – it is a student engaging in the exercise of guessing (or learning) what the teacher wants to hear and repeating it. At worst, it undermines the procedural fluency that students need.
Understanding, critical thinking, and problem solving come when students can draw on a strong foundation of domain content relevant to the topic being learned. As students (non-Learning Disabled as well as Learning Disabled) establish a larger repertoire of mastered knowledge and methods, the more articulate they become in explanations.
While some educators argue that procedures and standard algorithms are “rote”, they fail to see that exercising procedures to solve problems requires reasoning with such procedures – which in itself is a form of understanding. This form of understanding is particularly significant for students with LD, and definitely more useful than requiring explanations that students do not understand for procedures they cannot perform.
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Barry is absolutely right. Nobody who studies the CCSS standards can come to any other conclusions. The school board either hasn’t looked at them, or doesn’t to now enough about education to judge them or is content to be fed the official government lies. If you don’t know anything about teaching math, maybe you won’t be upset to learn (or even notice) that the CC standards don’t include prime factorization, matrices, geometric proof of any type, and dozens of other basic math concepts. How about asking the college math teachers who are horrified at how little the CC-educated students know and can do, compared to pre-CC students. That deep understanding is a total myth.
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