Last day to send email to Governor Scott and the Florida Dept of Education.


below is a bunch of talking points to use with their source.
Send to flstandards@fldoe.org


send to Governor Scott and the Florida Board of Education,


PLACE YOUR MESSAGE HERE




Additional expert comments on common core standards


 


 


Karen R. Effrem MD and Randy Osborne, September 2013, Florida’s Common Core Standards Policy Analysis available at http://www.flstopcccoalit...


 


Academic Quality, Rigor, and International Benchmarking


Though Common Core proponents claim that, by implementing the standards, students will graduate better equipped to compete in the global marketplace, research reveals that the standards are academically of lower quality than current state standards. In fact, a study performed by the Fordham Institute suggests that the Common Core math standards are inferior to Florida’s current standards. The creative and academic development of students has been diminished using the Common Core standards. No proof has ever been provided that Common Core standards were ever internationally


benchmarked, though the proponents continually make this claim.



 



 


From the Talking Points for Standards Hearings from the Florida Stop Common Core Coelition http://www.flstopcccoalit...


The Common Core standards are academically inferior and not rigorous


a.       No evidence of international benchmarking causing five respected academics to not sign off on final version


b.      No evidence they will work


c.       Bill Gates, their greatest proponent, said, “It would be great if our education stuff worked, but that we won’t know for probably a decade.”


d.      Research by the more liberal leaning Brookings Institution indicates that Common Core is unlikely to improve achievement


e.       They will only prepare children for a non-selective community college


f.       The English reading standards emphasize skills over knowledge


g.      Writing is stressed far more than reading, yet one cannot write well if they don’t read well


h.      Informational texts are emphasized over the understanding of literature which is what provides the ability to think critically


i.        There is delay or omission of important math concepts that prevent college success or STEM careers


The Common Core standards are not developmentally appropriate, making demands of children they cannot fulfill, creating stress, and decreasing the desire to learn and be engaged in learning with over five hundred early childhood professionals signing a statement to that effect. Here are a few examples:


a.       Makes demands of kindergarten children that many adults have not learned, such as to “participate in collaborative conversations with diverse partners about kindergarten topics and texts with peers and adults in small and larger groups,” follow agreed-upon rules for discussions,” and “continue a conversation through multiple exchanges.”


b.      Expects first grade students who are just learning to read to distinguish “shades of meaning” for various words


c.       Instead of learning the meaning of words based on their base meaning, young children are expected to learning the meaning based on suffixes


Documents from the federal and state governments, and various groups admit an emphasis in the standards on the teaching, testing and data collection of subjective non-cognitive, psychological attitudes and attributes:


a.       The writing standards emphasize emotional, opinion-based writing in the younger grades


b.      Instead of learning and knowing math facts which allows for the ability to solve problems, first grade students are expected to “Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.”


c.       Requires third grade students to know their own or others’ state of mind


d.      The testing consortia developing the federally supervised national tests will be sending individual data from the assessments of these psychological traits to the US Department of Education for “research


------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- -------


Teacher Comments on Common Core on Utahns Against Common Core


PublishedAugust 12, 2012 | ByOak Norton


To all the teachers out there who see Common Core for what it is, thank you for paying attention and valuing freedom and a strong education for our children. Please resist Common Core in whatever way you can. Here are a few comments from or about other teachers which may be of benefit to you.


If you are unaware of just how deficient the new standards are, please read these comments by nationally recognized experts Dr. Sandra Stotsky (helped put Massachusetts at the top of the nation’s performance AND just volunteered to give Utah the best ELA standards in the nation for FREE), and Dr. Jim Milgram, international math standards expert who testified to the legislature to help us get our 2007 math standards. You can see what they say about Common Core here:


http://www.utahnsagainstc...


 


http://www.utahnsagainstc...


 


http://www.utahnsagainstc...


 


Teacher 1


I just attended the Core Academy for math as an elementary teacher and was told for 4 straight days that the common core does NOT require math facts or the teaching of standard algorithms. I was taught how to teach solely using discovery learning or weird, unusable, at least with larger numbers, fuzzy math algorithms which actually make understanding place value unnecessary to solve problems requiring regrouping. What? I thought the core was supposed to help teachers REMEMBER to teach skills and standard algorithms … I am devastated and do not even know if I can teach in Utah if this is the direction we are going…aligning ourselves with Washington state which is all discovery and has some of the poorest performing math students in the country…where they still believe Terc Investigations is great Curriculum. May the saints preserve us all.


Teacher 2


I teach in the ________ district.  Our district is adopting the core and is very involved in training their teachers.  I will be attending meetings at my school to receive training.  What can I do, if anything to keep my job, but not be chained to teaching the core?  Last year, we implemented the writing portion of the core.  I followed the core.  My students did not accomplish as much with the core, as with the program I had been using.  This year, I am quietly going back to the writing program I used before.  This year we will be implementing the core math curriculum, I think I will quietly take ideas that I like, but keep teaching what I know works.  Any advice?


Teacher 3


Last Tuesday, Rep. Kraig Powell hosted a forum in Heber on Common Core. In attendance at this meeting were a number of teachers and administrators including Wasatch Superintendent Shoemaker. At lunch, a teacher who is involved with trying to get Utah off Common Core, was speaking with Sup. Shoemaker and another long time teacher’s name came up that this teacher had student-taught under. The Superintendent told this teacher how fortunate it was that she student-taught under her because she was a master teacher. She told the Superintendent that this long time teacher told her she wasn’t thrilled with Common Core and the Superintendent replied, “I’m not surprised, a teacher like her wouldn’t be.” The exact note this master teacher had sent her was “too bad districts aren’t questioning [common core] instead of parents. As a teacher, I am having common core shoved down my throat. We’re back to the 70’s. Way to go on your endeavors. Smile


Teacher 4


I am a 3rd grade teacher at a Charter School in Utah. I am becoming very frustrated with Common Core, and I am starting to feel helpless, and feel that I am failing my students, which will one day affect me as they grow up and enter the workforce.


I attended the Math CORE Academy this summer and was told that Utah is not going to suggest a math book that will meet the new standards, instead I have to use whatever math book my school is using  to create work for the students. It is incredibly difficult to teach the Common Core using Tasks with the math book we have, and I imagine it is just as difficult with any math book. First of all, it takes 2-3 hours to create a Task using a math book, I had to help create 2 at Core Academy. Secondly, the instructors encouraged us to leave out key pieces of information so that the students could construct their own knowledge. I cannot imagine elementary students doing well in Algebra or Calculus after spending years learning that whatever number they come up with is correct. I am frustrated that students are required to make a guess to solve the problem, and of course, they are correct, because any number they choose would work. They would then see that their classmates all chose different numbers, and yet all of the answers are correct? How confusing for an elementary student! I have decided to send these Tasks home as extra credit so that the parents in my class can see what to expect in the next school year. I am sure I will get many complaints that the problems are unsolvable, because important information has been left out! I believe that math has right and wrong answers, and that teaching students that any answer can be correct is foolish.


I am so upset that cursive has been removed from the Core! I had such a successful year last year teaching cursive. When I ask students during the first week of school what they are excited to learn in 3rd grade, at least 10 students say learning to write in cursive! I already had 2nd graders telling me they were so excited to be in 3rd grade so they could learn cursive. I am then supposed to deny them something they want to learn!? That is absurd! Even before the actual cursive instruction began, I had many students trying cursive on their own and asking if they were doing it correctly. My students became better readers because they learned cursive last year, seeing italics or cursive in books did not confuse them any more. Most of my students handwriting improved considerably once they could write in cursive, especially the boys’ handwriting. If I can’t teach cursive, the students will miss out on developing those fine motor skills- many suggest typing, but my students will only get keyboarding once a week, and yet I have set aside 20 minutes each day for them to learn cursive. I think it is also a way of self expression. I write in cursive all of the time; my signature is part of who I am. So, this generation will not be able to create a signature for themselves? Nor will they be able to read any handwriting other than print. It is so much fun for me and my students when I write on the board in cursive and they can read it! How empowering for them! They are all able to write faster in cursive, and even in third grade they realize this. They are learning to concentrate, and focus their attention- which is very helpful for all other areas of learning. They are learning to slow down, and watch what they are doing. They are learning the you have to work hard to get good at something, and yet they improve quickly enough that they are motivated to stick with it, they can see week by week that they are getting better. They are learning that practicing something over and over will help you get better. These skills are, in my opinion, only found in handwriting. There is nothing else that I can teach them that they can see improvement day by day, and that they can see themselves getting better at. Writing, math, science, social studies- none of these can show the student progression, nor help in motivating a student to keep trying. I am hoping that I can change my administrator’s mind about letting me teach cursive, but if they don’t I will certainly make sure the parents of my students know that I feel it is an important skill and I suggest that they teach their students at home.


If it comes down to being on the principle’s good side or doing what’s best for my 28 students, I’m going to do what’s best for my students. If I get fired, then I’ll look for another job and hope I can find one.


------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- -------


From Psychological, Data Collection, and Developmental Issues with the Common Core/Next Generation Sunshine State Standards in English Language Arts and Mathematics


Karen R. Effrem, MD , President of Education Liberty Watch and Co-Founder of the Florida Stop Common Core Coalition


 http://www.flstopcccoalit...


 


A more comprehensive list of these subjective, controversial, psychosocial and sociocultural standards is available in Appendix A of this document, but here are a few examples:


CCSS.Math.Practice.MP1 Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.


 


Comment: Admitted by an educator based on CASEL criteria to be a psychosocial skill for “Responsible Decision Making” that “includes problem identification and problem solving; evaluation and reflection; personal, social, and ethical responsibility.” This is also admitted by the US Department of Education report discussed above to be a “non-cognitive,” “21st Century” skill. So, if a student fails the questions related to this subjective national standard on a federally funded, federally supervised national test such as PARCC, which is still under consideration in Florida, or some other national test like ACT that will be doing “behavioral assessment,” will that data in their permanent data file to be seen by employers and colleges and who knows who else show that they are not personally, socially, and ethically “responsible”?


CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.2.3 Write narratives, in which they recount a well-elaborated event or short sequence of events, include details to describe actions, thoughts, and feelings, use temporal words to signal event order, and provide a sense of closure.


 


Comment: Admitted by Nancy Orme of Anchorage School District to correspond to socioemotional learning standards for “Self-Awareness” that require students to “demonstrate awareness of their emotions;” “recognize and label emotions/feelings;” and “describe their emotions and feelings and the situations that cause them (triggers).”7


CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.3.5c - Distinguish shades of meaning among related words that describe states of mind or degrees of certainty (e.g. knew, believe, suspected, heard, wondered)


 


Comment: This requires abstract thinking and knowing children’s state of mind, others’ states of mind and applying it to the meanings of various words. According to Piaget, children are not really capable of abstract thinking until eleven or twelve years of age. Knowing states of mind is quite a subjective endeavor at any age.


CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.W.5 Develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach.


 


Comment: This standard has been acknowledged by an educator based on criteria from the Collaborative for Academic Social and Emotional Learning to be a psychosocial skill that deals with “Self-Awareness/Management and “focuses on identifying and recognizing emotions; self-efficacy; control of oneself; self-motivation and discipline; goal setting; and organizational skills.”8


That there is psychological and attitudinal teaching in curriculum and lesson plans aligned to the Common Core is also very clear:


September 9, 2013 Political Party Activity for middle school students



 



Comments on the Florida Common Core English Language Arts Standards


Sandra Stotsky Prepared for a hearing in Tampa, Florida October 15, 2013 http://www.flstandards.or...


 


My comments on the Florida Common Core English Language Arts Standards were prepared at the request of Florida Parents against Common Core, a large group of parents across the state and The Florida Stop Common Core Coalition. My testimony begins with General Comments. These comments are followed by conclusions based on my analysis of Common Core’s English Language Arts in Appendix A. I end with a short summary and recommendations to Florida’s legislators and governor.


Appendix A provides 40 pages of comments on Common Core’s individual standards for vocabulary and reading in eight grades—kindergarten, grade 1, grade 2, grade 3, grades 9/10 and grades 11/12—and in the “Anchor Standards.” The format used for comments on individual standards is the one provided by the Florida Department of Education on its website. Because of the large number of standards, the comments are for only the vocabulary and reading standards (for informational and literary texts).


 


General Comments


1. Most of Common Core’s college-readiness and grade-level reading standards are content-free skills. Skills training alone doesn’t prepare students for college. They need a fund of content knowledge. But Common Core’s ELA standards (and its literacy standards for other subjects) do not specify the literary/historical knowledge that students need. They provide no list of recommended authors or works, just examples of “complexity.” They require no British literature aside from Shakespeare. They require no authors from the ancient world or selected pieces from the Bible as literature so that students can learn about their influence on English and American literature. They do not require study of the history of the English language. Without requirements in these areas, students are not prepared for college coursework.


2. Common Core’s ELA standards stress writing more than reading at every grade level—to the detriment of every subject in the curriculum. There are more writing than reading standards at every grade level in Common Core. This is the opposite of what an academically sound reading/English curriculum should contain, as suggested by a large body of research on the development of reading and writing skills. The foundation for good writing is good reading. Students should spend far more time in and outside of school on reading than on writing to improve reading in every subject of the curriculum.


3. Common Core’s writing standards are developmentally inappropriate at many grade levels. Adults have a much better idea of what "claims," "relevant evidence," and academic "arguments" are. Most elementary children have a limited understanding of these concepts and find it difficult to compose an argument with claims and evidence. It would be difficult for children to do so even if Common Core’s writing standards were linked to appropriate reading standards and prose models. But they are not. Nor does the document clarify the difference between an academic argument (explanatory writing) and opinion-based writing or persuasive writing, confusing teachers and students alike. Worse yet, Common Core’s writing standards stress emotion-laden, 2 opinion-based writing in the elementary grades. This kind of writing is not helpful to the development of critical or analytical thinking, and it establishes a very bad habit in very young children. There is no research evidence to support this kind of pedagogy.


4. Common Core expects English teachers to spend at least half of their reading instructional time at every grade level on informational texts—a percentage from which students cannot benefit intellectually. Common Core lists 10 reading standards for informational texts and 9 standards for literary texts at every grade level. However, there is NO body of information that English teachers are responsible for teaching, unlike science teachers, for example, who are charged with teaching information about science. English teachers are trained—by college English departments and teacher preparation programs—to teach the four major genres of literature (poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction) and the elements of rhetoric, not a large body of information about the English language.


5. Common Core reduces opportunities for students to develop critical thinking. Critical, or analytical, thinking is developed in the English class when teachers teach students how to read between the lines of complex literary works. Analytical thinking is facilitated by the knowledge that students acquire in other ways and in other subjects because it cannot take place in an intellectual vacuum. )" As noted in a 2006 ACT report titled “Reading Between the Lines:” “complexity is laden with literary features.” According to ACT, it involves “literary devices,” “tone,” “ambiguity,” “elaborate” structure, “intricate language,” and unclear intentions. Critical thinking applied to low-complexity texts, ACT concluded, is inferior to critical thinking applied to high-complexity texts. By reducing literary study in the English class in order to increase informational reading, Common Core not only reduces the opportunity for students to learn how to do critical thinking, Common Core, in effect, retards college readiness.


Conclusions from the Analysis of Individual Standards in Appendix A


1. Most of the statements that appear as vocabulary, reading, and literature standards in the Florida Common Core English Language Arts Standards document are not standards at all. They point to no particular level of reading difficulty, very little cultural knowledge, and few intellectual objectives. These statements are best described as skills or strategies when they can be understood at all. They therefore cannot be described as rigorous standards.


2. Florida’s Common Core standards are not “fewer, clearer, and deeper” than Florida’s previous standards. They appear to be fewer in number because very different objectives or activities are often bundled incoherently into one “standard.” As a result, they are not clearer, nor are they necessarily deeper. It is frequently the case that the statements are not easily interpretable.


3. Many of Florida’s Common Core ELA standards are poorly written. They need to be revised by experienced, well-trained high school English teachers for clarity and readability before they are used to guide curriculum development anywhere.


4. The vocabulary standards, which should be the strongest set of ELA standards because of the importance of vocabulary knowledge in reading comprehension, are weak and poorly written. Moreover, they often contain inappropriate pedagogical advice. This advice is a particular disservice to children who need strong vocabulary development.


Summary


(1) Common Core’s ELA standards are NOT rigorous. They were designed to allow mid-level grade 11 students to enroll in credit-bearing courses in non-selective colleges. 3 (2) Common Core’s standards are NOT internationally benchmarked and will not make any of our students competitive.


(3) There is NO research to support Common Core’s stress on writing instead of reading.


(4) There is NO research to support Common Core’s stress on informational reading instead of literary study in the English class.


(5) There is no research to support the value of “cold” reading of historical documents, a bizarre pedagogy promoted by the chief architect of Common Core’s ELA standards.


(6) Available research suggests exactly the opposite of what Common Core’s chief architect promotes in the ELA classroom.


Recommendations


Florida’s legislators and governor should require:


1. A return to its former ELA standards, standards that are academically stronger and clearer than the standards the state department and board of education chose to replace them with. Florida could also adopt and revise ELA and mathematics standards from states whose standards were internationally benchmarked and first-class (e.g., California, Indiana, and Massachusetts). It could even consider adopting Minnesota’s mathematics standards, which are not Common Core’s because mathematicians at Minnesota’s own universities protested the adoption of Common Core’s mathematics standards


2. Entrance exams tailored to Florida’s own institutions of higher education. Florida’s legislators could ask engineering, science, and mathematics faculty at their own colleges/universities to design and approve an entrance test in mathematics and science for admission to their own state institutions. They could also ask this faculty to design with Florida high school math and science teachers the syllabi for the advanced mathematics and science courses high school students take. Why should federal education policy-makers,



 



General Comments on the Florida Common Core Mathematics Standards


Prepared for Florida State Board of Education Hearing


Tampa, Oct. 15, 2013


Ze’ev Wurman, Palo Alto, CA


 


1. The rigor of the Common Core mathematics in the context of international expectations.


To understand the many seemingly conflicting opinions about the Common Core, ranging from claims that they are exceedingly demanding and developmentally inappropriate, to arguments that the Common Core mathematics trails international high achievers by a year or two, one needs to understand that both claims can be simultaneously true. The reason is that the Common Core mathematics is highly uneven across grades and in its coverage across content areas. To see the overall nature of those standards one needs to examine their flow in detail.


The Common Core starts very aggressively in Kindergarten, often exceeding what international high achievers expect of their children. For example, Common Core expects kindergartners to characterize and classify complex two and threedimensional shapes such as hexagons, cylinders, cubes, or cones; it expects kinders to translate concrete addition and subtraction situations to written number sentences and equations. Similarly, it expects first graders to compose and decompose two and threedimensional shapes into more complex shapes, or understand abstract transitivity – for example, that if A is larger than B and B is larger than C, than it must follow that A is always larger than B. Such skills are a year or more ahead of what is broadly expected across the world and are bound to unnecessarily stress teachers and students. This “fast and furious” pace quickly slows down in grades 2 and beyond, where student’s endlessly repeat arithmetic standards that expect them to apply this “property” to that particular operation in one way, then next grade to apply another “relationship” to the same operation, to yet another “strategy” the following grade to explore the same. While this endless meandering takes place in grades 2 through 6 with arithmetic of integers and fractions, the Common Core neglects to develop supporting algebraic concepts such as the fact that when equals are added to equals the results stay equal, understanding of the area of a triangles, the circumference of a circle, or the sum of angles in a triangle. Even a key fraction skill – converting between common fractions, decimals and percent – barely shows up in the standards, despite fractions being supposedly the focus of the Common Core. As a consequence, by the middle school the Common Core finds itself a year or two behind what high achieving countries teach their children. Worse, even when the Common Core belatedly expects American students to master arithmetic with the standard algorithms, they are bound to be confused because of the plethora of indiscriminate “strategies” and “models” they spent their time on in prior years. Small wonder that Andrew Porter, the Dean of University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, noted with surprise in his evaluation of the Common Core that “Highperforming countries’ emphasis on ‘perform procedures’ runs counter to the widespread call [in the Common Core] for a greater emphasis on higher order cognitive demand.”


Three other comparative studies found essentially the same: that despite Common Core’s aggressive start in kindergarten, by grade 8 it falls by a year or more behind international high achievers. Nowhere is it more clearly visible than by Common Core’s reversal of our own longstanding efforts of having more 8th graders study algebra: Common Core reversed this trend and firmly pushed Algebra 1 back to the high school. Only a single recent study of Bill Schmidt and Richard Houang from Michigan State University claims to have found the opposite: that the Common Core is on par with other high achieving countries. Yet if one carefully reads their paper it becomes painfully obvious that even their own data doesn’t support their paper’s conclusions, which are based mostly on sleightofhand visual manipulation.


In fact, it turns out the main value of the Schmidt & Houang study is to illustrate how incoherent and fragmented Common Core mathematics actually is when compared to the content sequence of high achieving countries


2. Common Core’s collegereadiness.


A major claim of the Common Core is that it will prepare all students to be collegeready. Yet Jason Zimba, a key author of the math standards, clearly acknowledged that this readiness is at most for nonselective community colleges. In his words: “for the colleges most kids go to, but not for the colleges most parents aspire to.”


This is not really surprising to anyone who had looked closely at Common Core’s high school mathematics. Common Core’s definition of collegereadiness claims to include content of Algebra 2 and Geometry, yet its definition of those courses includes only a fraction of their traditional content.


Arithmetic and Geometric series are barely touched on, logarithms and logarithmic functions are undeveloped, as are conic sections, polar coordinates and functions, or mathematical proofs.


Full Algebra 2 content is barely sufficient for a fouryear college entry to being with, as is clearly demonstrated by California Early Access Program that has been testing student readiness for the


California State University (CSU) system for almost a decade. Less than 30% are fully or partially ready for CSU after Algebra 2, in contrast to about 90% being ready after an additional math course.


Again, this shouldn’t surprise anyone. Common Core replaced high school diploma with its notional “college readiness” certificate to graduate high school. Yet unless one believes that close to 100% of seniors can become truly college ready, something had to give: it is politically unthinkable that we will fail half or more of our high school seniors because they won’t be deemed college ready. Consequently, Common Core had no choice but to offer a fake definition of collegereadiness.


In other words, the hope that Common Core’s collegereadiness will reduce college remediation seems misplaced. If at all, it is bound to increase remediation rates when large number of seniors declared collegeready by fiat will head for fouryear colleges.


3. Improvement in STEM preparation and STEM success.


It is sadly ironic, but STEM readiness is bound to be the biggest casualty of the Common Core.


To be prepared for a STEM career, students need to enter college at least ready to take calculus. For more selective colleges and more demanding STEM careers, freshmen must start with advanced calculus in college. This is undisputable, and widely known. Jason Zimba again: “[Common Core is] not only not for STEM, it’s also not for selective colleges. For example, for UC Berkeley, whether you are going to be an engineer or not, you'd better have precalculus to get into UC Berkeley.” Just to make it crystal clear, he recently repeated it: “If you want to take calculus your freshman year in college, you will need to take more mathematics than is in the Common Core.”


Indeed, to get to calculus in their senior year, students need to start with Algebra 1 in the 8th grade. Even to get to precalculus the Common Core is missing large chunks of necessary content as I described above. It is, therefore, unsurprising, that the College Board Vice President in charge of AP Calculus recently declared that “AP Calculus is in conflict with the Common Core … and it lies outside the sequence of the Common Core because of the fear that it may unnecessarily rush students into advanced math classes.”


Does it mean that nobody will take calculus anymore in high school, or be ready for STEM careers? Clearly not. Children of affluent parents will keep on getting extracurricular support and tutoring for acceleration, as their parents are keenly aware of what is really needed for such careers. Such parents will also insist that school in their affluent neighborhoods will keep providing advanced content and offer acceleration. The hardest hit group will be students from challenged backgrounds, whose families tend to be unaware of what is actually needed for STEM careers, whose parents have difficulty providing the needed extracurricular support, and who attend schools that cannot afford to offer much beyond the Common Core.


In other words, the Common Core actually stacks the deck against disadvantaged students. They will no longer be able to rely on schools to provide the needed content as a part of school’s regular curriculum; all the while they will be told that they are “on track to be college ready.”


A cruel joke indeed. If Florida wants to prepare more students for academic careers, if Florida wants to broaden the access to STEM for more students from disadvantaged background, if Florida wants to reduce the achievement gap by raising the floor rather than by lowering the ceiling, Florida would be well advised to take excellent and proven state standards such as Massachusetts’ or Indiana’s, and at most tweak them slightly to adjust for Florida’s unique circumstances.


 


General Comments for High School Mathematics:


Missing parametric equations and functions


Missing mathematical induction


Poor coverage of complex numbers and functions


Poor coverage of polar coordinates and curves


Poor coverage of trigonometric functions


Limited content for statistics


Limited content for linear algebra


In summary, the full content of Common Core high school mathematics is insufficient to provide the equivalent of even a strong trigonometry and linear algebra course, let alone pre-calculus.


------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- -------


Milgram on CC vs IN Math Standards  Dr. Jim Milgram at Stanford, professional mathematician Comments on the Common Core math Standards.Oak Norton , July 20, 2012, Milgram on CC vs IN Math Standards http://www.utahnsagainstc...


 


Indiana parents Erin Tuttle and Heather Crossin were distraught over the low quality textbook their school was using for Common Core implementation. It was of the “fuzzy math” constructivist variety. They contacted their local legislator and complained about it and began a dialog into the Common Core standards. This legislator had a few questions and they pointed them to Dr. Jim Milgram at Stanford, the professional mathematician on the review committee and one of our nation’s leading authorities on math standards writing. The Q&A below further illustrate the low level the Common Core standards were written to.


1. Why would we want to adopt Common Core Math Standards over Indiana Math Standards?


Mathematically, there is no good reason to adopt Common Core Math Standards over the Indiana Standards.  Indeed, the Indiana standards were/are? one of the top 4 or 5 state standards in the country, and are approximately at the level of the top international standards. The Common Core standards claim to be “benchmarked against international standards” but this phrase is meaningless.  They are actually two or more years behind international expectations by eighth grade, and only fall further behind as they talk about grades 8 – 12.  Indeed, they don’t even fully cover the material in a solid geometry course, or in the second year algebra course.


2. What are the differences between Common Core Math Standards and Indiana Standards?


Basically, the differences are described above.  Both standards were authored with the help of the professional mathematics community as distinguished from the mathematical education community.  But — as someone who was at the middle of overseeing the writing process – my main duty on the CCSSO Validation Committee — it became clear that the professional math community input to CCSSI was often ignored, which seemed not to be the case with the Indiana Standards.  A particularly egregious example of this occurred in the sixth and seventh grade standards and commentary on ratios, rates, proportion and percents, where there are a number of serious errors and questionable examples .But the same issues are also present in the development of the basic algorithms for whole number arithmetic – the most important topic in grades 1 – 5.


It was argued by some people on the Validation Committee that we should ignore such errors and misunderstandings as they will be cleared up in later versions, but I didn’t buy into this argument, and currently there is no movement at all towards any revisions.


3. How do they compare with international standards?



As I indicated above, they are more than two years behind international expectations by eighth grade.  The top countries are starting algebra in seventh grade and geometry in eighth or ninth.  By the end of ninth grade the students will have learned all of the material in a standard geometry course, all the material in a standard algebra I course, and some of the most important material in a standard algebra II course. This allows a huge percentage of them to finish calculus before graduating high school.  (In a number of the high achieving countries, calculus is actually a high school graduation requirement, but where it is not, typically, half or more of the high school graduates will have had calculus.  Also, it is worth noting that in these countries the high school graduation rate is typically 90% or higher for their entire populations.)



Bill Gates’ Giant Admission on Common Core Published September 30, 2013 | By Oak Norton


Writing in the Washington Post, Valerie Strauss shares video of Bill Gates’ recent Harvard Interview, (the one where he blames IBM on Ctrl-Alt-Delete), showing that Gates’ education initiative Common Core, is a giant experiment and we won’t know if it works for perhaps another decade.


It would be great if our education stuff worked, but that we won’t know for probably a That’s what Bill Gates said on Sept. 21 (see video below) about the billions of dollars his foundation has plowed into education reform during a nearly hour-long interview he gave at Harvard University. He repeated the “we don’t know if it will work” refrain about his reform efforts a few days later during a panel discussion at the Clinton Global Initiative.


Hmmm. Teachers around the country are saddled every single year with teacher evaluation systems that his foundation has funded, based on no record of success and highly questionable “research.” And now Gates says he won’t know if the reforms he is funding will work for another decade. But teachers can lose their jobs now because of reforms he is funding.


Read the rest: http://www.washingtonpost...  Valerie Strauss  September 27 at 12:54 pm It would be great if our education stuff worked,


 


 


Safari Woman
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