By Tamara
On the heels of two posts about Washington state's adoption of the common core standards comes an article in the New York TImes decrying those standards as the wrong way to improve U.S. students' math skills and "quantitative literacy". Sol Garfunkel (executive director of the Consortium for Mathmatics and its application) and David Mumford (emeritus professor of mathmatics at Brown) posit a more applied "real-life problem" approach to math would better equip students for 21st century careers and life in general.They argue a course of math study based on finance, data and basic engineering would improve basic skills and more realistically prepare students for work because "how often do most adults encounter a situation in which they need to solve a quadratic equation?" Such an applied math curriculum in their opinion would create what they call "quantitative literacy".Whereas in their estimation the Common Core Standards are, as Mark pointed out, a re-wording of what we have been doing for decades. According to Garfunkel and Mumford what we have been doing is not producing "quantitative literacy" and thus we are falling behind.
It is no secret that higher ed and industry find high school graduates woefully ill prepared for both upper level and applied math. So I have to wonder along with Mark, if the folks that get our graduates are questioning the value of Common Core standards, why have 40+ states signed on? Now full disclosure: I am a fan of nation-wide standards. Finland, Singapore and South Korea have completely turned around their education systems and achieved profound proficiency from their students in all disciplines after adopting national standards. We as teachers complain we are not consulted enough about decisions impacting what we do in the classroom. But do we in K-12 education seek to consult with higher ed and industry about decisions we make that impact their ability to work with our students? Perhaps the time has come for a sincere effort at "vertical alignment". Otherwise Mark may be on to something about the real winners in the Common Core Standards adoption being the test/textbook publishers.
Mark-
“Someone stands to profit from all this, and it will not be schools, teachers, or even taxpayers, in my opinion”
Agreed!
How is it that the areas of society that should be benefiting us all (education/healthcare…) end up the domain of for-profit business? The idealist in me wants to believe if the “for-profit” entities were pulled out of the equation we could make more headway in education reform.
@Tamara… I’ve received a number of emails and one phone call from solicitors wanting me to review (at no cost to me!) their revised standards-aligned curriculum to help enliven our PLC! and Boost Student Achievement thanks to Effective Alignment with Common Core Standards!
Someone stands to profit from all this, and it will not be schools, teachers, or even taxpayers, in my opinion.
Kristin, I so agree with you about the change in demographic of college freshmen being a reason that professors feel kids are unprepared. It used to be that colleges got at least the top tier or two if not the cream of the crop…now, a broader cross section of the population is attempting (attempting, not necessarily completing) a four year degree, which means that a greater proportion enters with skills that are (gasp!) average or worse.
Well, thankfully, I think we’re moving away from text books. I haven’t seen a lit anthology or history text in a few years. My husband just poked around on the Khan Academy’s website to see if it would be useful for his 5th graders, and it’s AWESOME. I don’t even think we need math books anymore.
I also like national standards. I think the refrain of “They’re not prepaaaaarrrrreeed” at the university level is caused, more than anything, by a change in the demographics of university freshmen. High schools are pushing really, really hard to get kids to university whose parents may not have even graduated from high school.
I know that first-generation university students aren’t “new-” three of my four grandparents were the first in their families to go to college, and the fourth didn’t go – but public educators are working really hard to teach in a way that allows potentially under-prepared students to be successful. We have all these strategies. We work on relationships. We work on cultural context. I think we’re way ahead of universities.
At least in Seattle, the communinity colleges are doing this same work of teaching really hard for the student – but I don’t hear the same attitude from universities. What I hear a lot of is stuff like, “I assign a paper, and they can’t do it, I assign a novel, and a week later they haven’t read it!”
We don’t do that kind of assigning anymore in high school. It’s not “assign – assess.” It’s “diagnose – preteach – teach carefully – assess – reteach – assess – meet the learner’s needs.”
Maybe it’s time for universities to sit down with community college and high school teachers and learn a thing or two about teaching students who aren’t yet at the graduate level in their field.