Gents- been hearing a lot lately on this Common Core stuff. I know next to nothing at all factual about it except conservatives hate it…libs love it. That, in and of itself is reason enough for me to be suspicious of it, and I am. I like to be as educated and up to snuff on a subject as possible when talking about it.
I DID do a search, found the CC website, and read Wiki on it. I still cannot get a feel for EXCACTLY whats good/bad about it. A couple things did stand out…doesn’t teach cursive writing, nor social studies.
So, I DO NOT want to hear baseless opinion, or anything political or bullshit about “Obama”. Just those of you who have kids in this, or who have opted out of it, or know anything factual about it, Id love to hear what you have to say about it.
Thanks for any info!
From my understanding and what the “goal” is is to help with critical thinking skills. Even if answers are factually wrong, it is trying to get the kids to understand how they arrived at their conclusion, and hopefully see the error in the logic. I have been one of the proponents to get more critical thinking skills into the classroom rather than sitting and learning facts that kids can regurgitate. Facts are great, but if you can’t articulate and put some logic behind it with at least an informed opinion, then what good are the facts.
The problem I have with Common Core is that the critical thinking skills are propping up the Liberal “emotional” agenda rather than the logic. My niece has come to me saying that they learned a lot about Islam one year. I asked her if it was all good, and she said yes. Asked about 9/11 and said it wasn’t brought up. There is a Common Core video called China Rising that stirs chills. Some facts are really suppressed.
Just like No Child Left Behind. Cool idea, until used.
I’ll add this video on “Common Core” and a comment… My wive’s 3 best friends are all school teachers, all have their Masters in Education, in Upstate, NY. The opinion that Common Core is bullshit is mirrored by all 3 of them. A small sampling, but one that I trust implicitly.
[video=youtube_share;DW0VxxoCrNo]http://youtu.be/DW0VxxoCrNo[/video]
So what’s so ****ed up about what the gal’s saying in the video? It’s not like she’s saying the kid got the right answer or isn’t correcting them. The goal is to teach the kids why the answer is correct and have the ability to explain how they derived the answer rather than just rote memorization of multiplication tables.
It brings the smart kids down to a “common” level.
Leveling the playing field.
That’s my take on it at least.
The new standards don’t accurately teach processes. They teach methods to game the answer. At least at the elementary level.
It is another case of a great idea made terrible by government intervention.
The idea is that we should teach critical thinking. You should not just know that 25-17=8. But you should also know WHY 25-17=8. It makes a lot of the math problems that you see look strange compared to what we had in middle school and lower level high school math. However it should lead to a better understanding of the subjects at hand.
Notice I say should…
What it really does is lead to more “teaching the test” much like no child left behind. It also takes a national view at education and ignores that different parts of the country face different challenges when it comes to education.
Are there ANY positive aspects of Common Core? I mean, anything that is pretty much agreed by all sides to be right about it?
Also…who invented or started it?
Lynne Munson founded Common Core.
An article she penned in 2007.
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/07/26/munson
There are no losers and everyone gets a trophy.
It’s about money and control. Federal influence over local educational decisions. The Feds dangle the funding carrot, evaluate whether your state/local educational delivery meets their approval, if so - you get funding. If not, well the economy can be tough these days, right?
Let’s start with the money. The money is always the carrot that the federal government offers the states.
The money trail for Common Core begins in 2009, with the passage of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, commonly called the Stimulus Bill. Among the bill’s many provisions was a $53.6 billion appropriation to the U.S. Department of Education, called the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund. Of that amount, $4.35 billion was set aside for the Race to the Top initiative.
States had to access the funds in a prescribed order. First was the Stabilization fund program.
In order to receive these funds, states had to assure the federal government that they would adopt “rigorous college and career ready standards.” The elements of the standards were dictated by the federal government in the America COMPETES Act, and as part of their application for Stabilization funds the states had to sign an assurance page that specifically required them to align their state programs to the language of that federal law.
The Stabilization funds were awarded in two phases, with states submitting an application outlining their plans to adopt the standards to receive the first phase, and then submitting a progress report showing that they were actually completing those plans in order to receive the second phase of their Stabilization grant. The U.S. Department of Education had to approve each state’s plan before Phase Two funds were awarded, effectively giving the federal government control over each state’s education programs.
Reference:
http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/faq.pdf
States who had successfully completed the Stabilization grant process could then compete for Race to the Top funds.
Google up the change to SAT tests and who is in charge and how he is related to common core and how it’s going to effect things for many who do not believe in common core
Wow…EXCELLENT INFO gentlemen…Ive got lots of reading to do when I get off work. Thank you all so much. Its looking like it is as I suspected…another bunch of lib bullshit that’s gonna do more harm than good, to our children AND nation.
F’n excellent summary. Do you mind if I use most of that?
From what I’ve been told by friends who are teachers here in CA, the way it works in the classroom is this:
Today I teach lesson 2.1, which is how to add single digits, 2+5, the book gives me 5 examples to teach the kids and that is it. Tomorrow I will teach lesson 2.2, addition of double digits, 45+53, again with just 5 examples. So on and so forth.
The problem with that I’m told is many teachers don’t expand beyond what the book has, they teach those 5 examples and that’s that, add in the teachers who got hired on with no teaching credentials during the mad rush of No Child Left Behind, they don’t know how to effectively teach. But then you have the students who if they don’t grasp one lesson, they are doomed as everything builds on it and the teacher is not allowed to take longer than specified in the books on each lesson, so if little Johnny failed to grasp how to multiply 2 by 6 then there is no way he is going to understand 34*46 when it is taught the very next day.
Kids aren’t widgets and trying to teach kids like you assemble cars is only going to work if you decide that it’s OK to leave some percentage of kids behind and completely snuff out the intellectual promise of the most gifted.
As harsh as it sounds, we spend far too much money trying to bring the challenged kids up to speed as opposed to using some of those resources to enable the truly gifted to soar.
Basic critical thinking skills teaching should be mandatory as part of the teaching curriculum (but I don’t know enough about CC to comment on that). It will produce people able to question what they are taught and learn to work through what they hear and see and see if it holds water. The problem is, many fail to understand it is a learned skill, like language, or math, etc. and even educators by and large don’t appreciate that. It may be more natural for some than others to apply some critical thinking to a topic, but no one is simply born with it. It’s a mental process and skill that needs to be learned and honed, and I can think of very few mental skills that would be more beneficial overall than teaching from a young age that skill set they can apply to everything in their lives. First college I went to, a rec for all students to graduate was a basic course on critical thinking called (aptly) Critical Thinking 101. I didn’t appreciate at the time (being a snot nosed kid) that it was an important concept it was, but I came to realize it should be taught as early as possible. This vid does a nice job of summing the basic essential concept I thought:
Many consider themselves as “critical thinkers” when their comments show nothing of the sort.
I have first hand experience with the failures of “Everyday Mathematics”, which is tied into the whole Core thing, but came out before the whole Common Core wave hit. I actually removed my children from our local elementary school and ended up homeschooling them over it. My kids would come home with homework that included long division before they had been introduced to multiple number multiplication. The entire process was so convoluted that it made it impossible for them to master mathematics. If there is one benchmark of elementary education that should not ever disappear, it would be the mastery of basic mathematics; addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
I am all for critical thinking; who isn’t?? “We” have been teaching critical thinking for decades and centuries, but it seems to me that the parents have more to do with this than the school system. That’s where I learned my ability (or inability) to critically think and think through problems…maybe reinforced by a couple awesome key teachers here and there.
We homeschool so I don’t have a dog in the fight, but it seems to me that there are better ways to do this.
I don’t know much about Common Core but from what I’ve seen, it looks even worse than the crap I had to go through. If I had my way, there would be very little left of the curriculum from K-12. They need to focus on being a good learner, not memorizing facts.
To touch on something in your OP, dropping cursive and penmanship is one of the worst ideas our school system has had in a long time. I learned the basics in 1st grade and have had to teach myself the rest. I’d probably just throw anything I got from my peers that is handwritten away before I’d attempt to decipher their scribbles.
Also, as other posters have mentioned, math is an extremely important skill. It teaches critical thinking more than anything else short of formal logic instruction. I like some of the thought behind trying to break it down into fundamental steps but they are going about it all wrong. I’ve taken more math than probably 95% of the population and from that experience I can say for a fact that it is something we don’t need the government trying to change. For the most part, math instruction is the way it is for a reason.