Excerpts from
Two Moms vs. Common Core
How an eight-year-old’s homework assignment led to a political upheaval
By Maggie Gallagher ~ May 13, 2013
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Excerpts from
Two Moms vs. Common Core
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"Indiana has become the first state to retreat from the Common Core standards ....
Common Core is a set of math and English standards developed largely with [Bill] Gates Foundation money [actually a joint venture with UNESCO, which will be explained more fully in a upcoming article] and pushed by the Obama administration and the National Governors Association.
The standards define what every schoolchild should learn each year, from first grade through twelfth, and the package includes teacher evaluations tied to federally funded tests designed to ensure that schools teach to Common Core.
Over 40 states hurriedly adopted Common Core, some before the standards were even written, in response to the Obama administration’s making more than $4 billion in federal grants conditional on their doing so.....
How did the bipartisan Common Core “consensus” collapse? It collapsed because some parents saw that Common Core was actually lowering standards in their children’s schools....
“Instead of many arithmetic problems, the homework would contain only three or four questions, and two of those would be ‘explain your answer,’” Heather told me. “Like, ‘One bridge is 412 feet long and the other bridge is 206 feet long. Which bridge is longer? How do you know?’” ... She found she could not help her daughter answer the latter question: The “right” answer involved heavy quotation from Common Core language.
A program designed to encourage thought had ended up encouraging rote memorization not of math but of scripts about math....
Professor Milgram was the only math content expert on the Validation Committee reviewing the standards, and he concluded that the Common Core standards are, as he told the Texas state legislature,
“in large measure a political document that . . . is written at a very low level and does not adequately reflect our current understanding of why the math programs in the high-achieving countries give dramatically better results.”
...“Eventually,” Heather recalled, “our principal just threw his hands up in the air and said, ‘I know parents don’t like this type of math but we have to teach it that way, because the new state assessment tests are going to use these standards.’”
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/347973/two-moms-vs-common-core