Ignore Common Core?

Can college math faculty ignore the Common Core?  Specifically, can those of us working in developmental mathematics ignore the Common Core?

If you need to read more about the Common Core Math Standards, take a look here http://www.corestandards.org/the-standards/mathematics. The Standards are listed for each grade K to 8, and then high school by area of mathematics.

As you might know, a primary motivation for the Common Core was that of alignment … getting K-12 outcomes to align with expectations, especially for college readiness.  This alignment is connected to the standardized tests used for ‘No Child Left Behind’ (NCLB) as well as some teacher evaluations.  [A current theme in teacher evaluations is the use of ‘value added models’ (VAM), which is a statistical methodology to estimate the impact of individual teachers; I may address VAM in a future post.]

A logical approach might be to think that … if a student places in to developmental mathematics … there is no reason that we need to be especially aware of the Common Core.  If this placement is accurate, we might conclude that the Common Core ‘did not work’ for whatever reason, so our work is independent.

Look at the situation in a different ‘frame’:  Because the Common Core is closely tied to standardized testing and NCLB, the mathematics assessed is often discrete skills with a focus on procedures and simple applications.  This emphasis in K-12 will, therefore, tend to produce students in college — whether ‘developmental’ or not — who have a less complex package of mathematical proficiency.   

I have been suspecting something like this happening in the last few years (even before Common Core, though the Common Core will expand the impact) … students obtain about the same average scores on placement test even though their functioning, mathematically, is more limited.  Solving a linear inequality might go okay for them, and then difficulty emerges when there is a discussion about how to represent the solutions in a different way.  Finding slope from two ordered pairs might be okay, and then confusion appears when slope needs to be interpreted in words or a context.

Recently, I did a post on “Lockhart’s Lament”; in that essay, an observation is that a sure way to ruin a subject is to require all students to ‘take it’.  With the Common Core, we have a movement to make all students take the same subject for almost all of their K-12 experience.  Since this ‘subject’ is almost always tied to standardized tests and sometimes to teacher evaluations, the forces operate on the subject to reduce all topics to operational steps.  (I’m reminded of the “paint by numbers” analogy in Lockhart’s Lament.)

Policy makers are often looking for simple solutions, which makes the Common Core look very attractive as well as standardized tests.  If only we could present ‘understanding and reasoning’ as simple solutions for the mathematical needs of K-12 students.  Are not those the central enablers of success for students  in our college courses?

We ignore the Common Core at our own peril.  Some college faculty actively support the use of the Common Core mathematics standards, and there is a real danger that this wish will be granted.  There is no single mathematical standard in the Common Core that I object to; the tragedy is that the summation (or integration in the mathematical sense, if you will) of the Common Core is a worsening of the mathematics problem in colleges … starting with developmental, but including all college mathematics in the first two years.
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2 Comments

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  By Kathryn Van Wagoner, September 4, 2014 @ 3:46 pm

  Jack, will this topic be discussed at AMATYC? Please email me any info you have about such potential conversations. vanwagka@uvu.edu
  thanks,
  Kathryn Van Wagoner

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  By Jack Rotman, September 8, 2014 @ 4:56 pm

  Kathryn:
  Sorry to say … I don’t know how much the Common Core will be discussed at AMATYC. Zal Usiskin is doing a keynote on the Common Core, and I noticed one session.
  Jack

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