Dummy’s guide to Common Core: what is and isn’t

Time out. There are no Common Core curricula or textbooks. None! Tweet Now Follow Learning Success

Defining Common Core

So what is Common Core?

Standards. That’s it. They just say what a child should learn and be able to do by when. And only for English language arts and mathematics. Sorry, any of the supposedly Common Core science or history concerns are total bogus. They’re not Common Core, because there is no science Common Core. They’re usually just poorly written curriculum.

Are they good standards?

As a teacher from Louisiana (one of the lowest ranking states educationally in the nation), I like them a lot. They’re more specific, clear, rigorous, and feasible (most of the time) than to what I was previously accustomed. If you’re from a state that already had excellent standards, your state might not even have chosen to join Common Core, or if it did, they might look a lot like your past standards.

If you really want to know whether or not you like the standards yourself, you’re going to need to compare the old with the new. Unfortunately, it would be a bit of a long article if I compared the standards of all fifty states to the Common Core. For the sake of this comparison, let’s not use a high-performing or low-performing state as our example. Since Virginia ranks about the middle of the country (26th according to the Report Card on American Education), it should work fairly well.

Virginia’s 2009 Mathematics Standards of Learning vs. Common Core State Standards

Take this as our first example. This is actually the 4^th grade standard that was indicated in the video I mentioned above claiming to compare the Common Core method with the past method. What do you think? Is there one method for each?

It is true Common Core states some methods a student should be able to utilize, though it’s the student’s choice which one to use (note: “equations, rectangular arrays, and/or area models”). I would find it gravely negligent of a teacher to ignore the equations method (that’s your standard algorithm) when teaching, but ultimately under Common Core the student should be exposed to enough methods to choose one or two he/she likes to use.

All about specifics

As a teacher, the Virginia standards on the right provide little guidance to me (or to the parent). I suppose I realize the child should be able to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, but it’s less clear to me how much more the child should be able to than the year before, when the child was also learning to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. I also am not made aware of the different methods the child could potentially use.

I teach kids with special needs, and this is major.

A lot of times the standard algorithms just didn’t work for my children. They couldn’t hold all those numbers in their heads or keep the regrouping neat on their papers. We had to find alternative methods. Unfortunately, some of my students’ teachers in the regular education setting did not like my students using their alternative methods. They wanted all the children on a single method, which was easier to grade. Common Core relieves these children. It says any of the above methods will work, for the stage the child is at. It legitimizes some of the alternative methods children with special needs frequently utilize.

Now what curriculum a school chooses or what methods a teacher utilizes is to up to them, but Common Core has made it clear what the child should learn.

Virginia’s 2009 English Standards of Learning vs. Common Core State Standards

Interested in how ELA compares? Here is a 3rd grade ELA example.

In this case, the third grade standards are quite similar. I think Virginia was mostly headed in the same direction that Common Core went with this area. The Common Core is a little more ambitious (suggests texts on history and science, not just directions), and it seems to me to be a little more clearly written. However, they’re really quite similar.

So you tell me, are they good? 

What It Is and It Isn’t

Common Core is a set of standards. I like them mostly, but I think America frequently misses the point in educational standards anyway (re: children aren’t factory products). However, I like them better than most states’ standards before Common Core. You don’t have to like them though. They’re not perfect, but I don’t think they really changed a whole lot for the country.

So why did classrooms across the country change dramatically following Common Core?

It seems to me it was a great excuse for publishers to write and publish lots of fancy (and expensive) new books and programs, telling school districts, they needed these, because they were Common Core-aligned. And they raced each other to write and publish them as fast as possible so they could get their own claim on the market.

Fast is not good when it comes to curriculum-writing.

I really believe that’s the core issue here. Not Common Core. It’s hastily written curriculum.