To continue my discussion of the Common Core educational standards, I will now discuss popular complaints about the teaching methods and curriculum of the Common Core as outlined in my previous blog.  The first major criticism about the Common Core standards is that the teaching methods, specifically regarding math, are way too over complicated and unnecessary.  I have seen hundreds of posts on social media like Facebook and Twitter about parents who are frustrated with the seemingly nonsensical methods that Common Core teachers want children to use in order to solve fairly straightforward math problems.  One picture that has popped up frequently on my social media websites is attached below and details how an engineer was unable to use the number line in order to count back by 100s and then by some unknown increment value to get the answer to 427-316, and was instead frustrated by the over complication of this basic subtraction problem that he could solve in under five seconds.  Another example that demonstrates the perceived over complication of mathematics involved in the Common Core standards is shown below and involves breaking numbers down into tens and ones and adding, and repeating this process twice in order to get the final answer of 46 when adding 29 and 17.  This method is seemingly much more complicated than the previous method of addition, as shown by the fact that it takes up more than double the amount of space on the paper than the simple methods that college students today were taught when they were younger.  Critics of the Common Core find these new methods of performing simple math to be completely unnecessary and too complex.  If the old methods of solving arithmetic worked, why change them?

The next common critique of Common Core is that it removes the possibility for teachers to teach creatively.  If all teachers are required to teach the same material in the same way, then there is supposedly no room for teachers to branch out and customize their curriculum to make the class interesting and unique in the eyes of their students.  David Greene, a former teacher of 38 years and author of “Doing the Right Thing: A Teacher Speaks” wrote for US News that in order to ensure better test scores as mandated by the Common Core, teachers are required to use “purchased resources, materials and scripted curricular modules solely developed for test success”.  He alludes that this uniformity has removed any opportunity for creativity or diversity in the classroom and is the fault of the standards.  He also states that the average teaching tenure has dropped from 15 years to less than five in the past 20 years and claims that this is attributed to frustration of teachers from inability to do their jobs to the best of their abilities in order to try and stay within the Common Core framework.  He makes a comparison between teachers being required to teach only through the methods prescribed by Common Core and requiring a brain surgeon to only “follow the book” while operating: an unforeseen problem occurs, the surgeon cannot make a change of plans because he must follow the book, and the patient dies.  The same thing happens when Common Core standards are required: the teacher runs into a question from a student or a problem getting a particular student to understand the methods proposed by Common Core, he or she cannot make any changes to the curriculum for fear of losing his or her job, and the student does not learn or understand the basics that are required for higher levels of education.

The issues that people have with Common Core educational standards go much farther than the aforementioned over complication of simple math problems and the removal of creativity and uniqueness from individual teachers’ curriculums.  One other major complaint that some people have about Common Core is that it propagates the practice of teaching in order to take a test rather than for the sake of knowledge.  This issue of widespread standardized tests and the fact that students are being trained to learn material in order to pass tests will be discussed in my next blog.  In addition, despite the various problems that students, parents, and teachers have with the Common Core standards, there are some benefits that will be discussed in a future blog.

Sources:

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2014/03/17/how-common-core-standards-kill-creative-teaching