Friday, April 4, 2014

The Elitist Common Core Standards

The Common Core is the new K-12 curriculum that the Obama Administration is pressuring all states to adopt.

I have a deep concern about it, and it's not the absurd arguments of the Religious Right.

The problem with the Common Core is--in the name of high standards--forcing all students to learn arcana that is utterly useless.  Only the out-of-touch PhD.-riddled committee could have mandated it.

I make this argument more powerfully with specifics in an op-ed published today in The Daily Caller.
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2 comments:

  1. Buck BardApril 4, 2014 at 5:33 PM

    So what do we do for basic standards for things like math and science? Are you arguing against these particular standards, or having national standards?

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  2. Marty NemkoApril 6, 2014 at 6:35 PM

    Yes, there should be basic national standards but before requiring esoterica, critical basics such as having an intuitive understanding of number, place value, estimation, and probability should be required. For perhaps half of students, that could take years to acquire even survival level skills. But the Common Core standards requires teachers to--cover all sorts of less critical-to-life math such as the associative rule for equations, quadratic equations, graphing non-linear curves, etc.

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