Soapbox time. Many of you don’t know what Common Core is or don’t care (because you don’t have children in K-12 any longer), but I’m here to tell you the evils of Common Core throughout our society. And it’s not as obvious as you would think.
Common Core was established to sound good and is not based on sound teaching principles. It was started in response to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which established minimum standards for schools to meet in order to show that they were successful in teaching students. Failure to show success meant loss of federal funding for those school districts. Sounds great, right? Accountability is good, right? But here is where the wheels fell off the wagon.
The way states and school districts began to measure and try to exhibit success was through standardized testing. If a school district could provide data that the students were doing well on these tests, they would satisfy the NCLB requirements. So, through Common Core, they could teach what was necessary to do well on the testing. Hence the start of ‘teaching to the test’.
Long before there was Common Core and standardized testing, there was teaching how to learn. Kids were taught how to learn things in their own way and how to think (and I’m not talking about kids who require special education, because that is an entirely different analysis). For example, memorizing the ‘times table’ – to this day I can quickly tell you what any single digit number x any single digit number equals because of such memorization. Very few kids in school (or recent graduates for that matter) can do that.
Here is another example: when my youngest child was learning division in math, he asked for my help. So I began by drawing the long division symbol (you know, the right parenthesis with the horizontal line on the top). My son says, “What is that?” I said, “It’s the division symbol, for long division.” He says, “I’ve never seen that.” I asked him, “Aren’t they using this to teach you division?” and I showed him an example of how it worked. He said, “No.” I thought to myself, WHAT? How on Earth are they teaching division? Again, Common Core destroys a very basic (and for decades successful) method of teaching math.
“So what?” you say. Who cares? Well, I’ll tell you, beyond the fact that our kids aren’t learning how to learn.
Imagine now you’re at your job (or you are the business owner) and an employee doesn’t know how to make sure a customer is paying the correct amount? Or they don’t know how to do simple accounting / bookkeeping? Or whether the sale is profitable? Or how to solve a problem? Or how to speak to a customer with proper grammar? Or how to write a report? etc. etc.
You now have a profound negative impact of Common Core on our economy – both in a micro and a macro sense. We are graduating an entire generation of people dependent upon computers and calculators, instead of thinkers and problem-solvers. And life is not a series of standardized tests. Indeed, life is a series of unexpected tests with varying problems that require independent, critical thought to solve.
Common Core is evil to the core. And regardless of the good intentions of those who came up with the concept, the implementation of it is atrocious and harmful to our kids.
Common core IS evil. It makes kids feel dumb, trying to figure out this mess. When they are smart. Math is math.