The Education Invasion. Joy Pullmann
why her daughters were getting less rigorous math instruction than her son had received, Furtado stumbled onto something much larger than the Connected Math Program. She learned that Massachusetts had recently joined most of the other states in replacing their curriculum requirements with a new set of national standards. “I finally came across Common Core,” she said, “and all the puzzle pieces fell into place.”
What Is Common Core?
The Common Core State Standards are a 640-page set of blueprints for K–12 math and English curriculum and tests. This initiative is the biggest education overhaul in the United States since No Child Left Behind, which in 2001 mandated that schools focus on standardized tests in math and reading in exchange for a gush of federal funds, and established penalties for low-performing schools such as forced restructuring, mass staff layoffs, open enrollment in nearby districts, and loss of funds. But NCLB left it to the states to formulate their own standards and tests. Common Core goes further: it specifies what a set of unelected committees thought every child should “know and be able to do” at each grade level. The introduction to the curriculum requirements says the document lays out “a vision of what it means to be a literate person in the twenty-first century.” That vision somewhat resembles the way we think of our electronic devices: “The Standards are intended to be a living work,” the introduction explains, so “as new and better evidence emerges, the Standards will be revised accordingly.”2
The Common Core idea of “a literate person in the twenty-first century” differs fundamentally from the conception of the human person that inspires classical education, a more timeless and transcendent view of human nature. In the classical vision, the human person has a soul that needs to be nourished on what is enduringly good, true, and beautiful, as expressed in civilized man’s greatest achievements — in literature and art, in politics and science. Classical education also equips children with time-tested intellectual tools to navigate the world, including efficient ways of doing math.
Common Core falls short in both respects — in building a solid foundation of cultural knowledge and in teaching practical skills. Instead, it serves up cumbersome process requirements wrapped in obscure jargon. Here’s the kindergarten English standard labeled RF.K.3.b (which is code for Reading: Foundational Skills, Kindergarten, standard 3.b): “Associate the long and short sounds with the common spellings (graphemes) for the five major vowels.” This might sound sophisticated to many adults, but it’s almost completely incoherent, as Dr. Terrence Moore demonstrates:
Presumably the authors of the standard are telling teachers to teach children the long and short sounds of the vowels. But that is not what it says. Rather, students are supposed to associate (know?) the long and short sounds when they see “the common spellings . . . for the five major vowels.” What?
Now ask yourself: How many ways are there to spell the letter A? I can only think of one, unless you mean to distinguish between capitals and lower case, which is not what is being said. A is always spelled A. . . . Why learn only the short and long sounds? Every vowel except for e has more than a long and a short sound. The letter A, for example, has four sounds: /ă/, /ā/, /ah/, /aw/, as in at, tape, want, talk. Consider the word father. You do not call your father your făther, nor your fāther. Yet this simple truth about the code that is the English alphabet is lost on the very people who are in charge of writing “standards” for our children’s schools.3
This is just one example of the nonsense that “education experts” have determined to be the optimal way to teach language skills. Moore collects many others in The Story Killers: A Common-Sense Case Against the Common Core. His book is the place to go for a thorough critique of the standards and the kind of curriculum they spawn.
Common Core kills stories in part by recommending that children read progressively less fiction and more “informational text” as they go through school.4 It suggests assigning sections of the U.S. Code, for instance, which consumes time that could be better spent on studying classic literature. The emphasis on nonfiction does not mean students will get a solid grounding in a cohesive body of cultural knowledge, as some proponents have claimed. Far from it. An appendix to Common Core does mention elements of cultural knowledge that are central to a classical education, but it mangles them, as Moore points out. For example, it selectively quotes the Bill of Rights and then recommends blatantly biased secondary materials to interpret it as a racist, sexist document. As for the fiction on the recommended reading list, some of it is rather disturbing. The list for high school students includes The Bluest Eyes, a Toni Morrison novel featuring graphic descriptions of pedophilia, incest, and child rape.5 Among the other books on the list are Black Swan Green and Dreaming in Cuban, which also include graphic descriptions of sex and sexual violence.6
While the language standards are deficient in the good and beautiful, the math standards bring counterproductive complication to the enduringly true. Common Core introduces standard mathematical algorithms a year or two later than the world’s highest-achieving countries do, and it revives what was mocked as “fuzzy math” not long ago. The document is replete with calls for “visual models” and time-wasting techniques for solving problems, as in this “number system” standard for sixth grade (6.NS.1): “Interpret and compute quotients of fractions, and solve word problems involving division of fractions by fractions, e.g., by using visual fraction models and equations to represent the problem. For example, create a story context for ⅔ divided by ¾ and use a visual fraction model to show the quotient . . . .”7 This kind of demand drew a vigorous critique from Marina Ratner, an internationally respected professor emerita of mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley. “Who would draw a picture to divide ⅔ by ¾?” she asked. “This requirement of visual models and creating stories is all over the Common Core. The students were constantly told to draw models to answer trivial questions.” What’s worse, “A student who gives the correct answer right away (as one should) and doesn’t draw anything loses points.” In Ratner’s judgment, the Common Core math standards are inferior not only to those of high-achieving countries but also to the old California state standards.8
A mother in Indiana named Heather Crossin learned about the new demands for inefficient methods in fall 2011, around the same time Michelle Furtado began her investigation. Crossin’s third-grade daughter brought home an assignment to determine which of two bridges was longer, one that measured 448 feet or another that was 407 feet, and to explain how she arrived at her answer. Simple enough, right? The girl correctly picked the 448-foot bridge, but the teacher marked her answer incorrect because she hadn’t returned a scripted response to the question of how she knew, like this: “I compared the addends in the hundreds column, and saw that four and four were equal. Then I compared the addends in the tens column, and saw that four was greater than zero. Then I compared the addends in the ones column, and saw that eight was larger than seven.”9 Crossin objected, saying her daughter could practice ten math problems in the time it would take to answer a single one in that fashion. She thought such a time-wasting exercise deprived her daughter of practical math fluency, and the research backs her up.10
Frustrated parents across the nation have been piling up examples of similarly convoluted or incomprehensible math assignments on social media. Young children are taught to add by making hundreds of dots. Traditional ways of doing arithmetic — such as stacking numbers and adding up the columns from right to left — are prohibited. Math problems require many more steps than necessary. Children cry over homework assignments that take them (and their parents) hours to figure out. Parents wonder why the “experts” are making things so complicated and abandoning methods that have worked for generations.
Spreading Tentacles
Common Core starts by dictating what kids must encounter in class, but then it goes much further. Its creators and supporters have linked that one set of documents with myriad other mandates and programs, so its tentacles extend across the whole educational landscape. That wide reach is achieved mainly through the second major component of Common Core: the federally funded tests that influence not just curriculum, but also school funding, teachers’ job security, data collection on kids, college acceptance, and much more.
Because