The
“Common Core” emerged from Ensuring U.S. Students Receive a World-Class
Education, a report published in 2008 by the National Governor’s
Association. The very first item on the list was to “Upgrade state standards by
adopting a common core of internationally benchmarked standards in math and
language arts for grades K-12 to ensure that students are equipped with the
necessary knowledge and skills to be globally competitive.”
Prior
to the Common Core, most state standards (including Indiana’s) were based on
recommendations issued by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics
(NCTM). In general, the Common Core math standards are the NCTM
standards, further informed by Adding it Up: Helping Children Learn
Mathematics, a 2001 report by the National Research Council comparing
mathematics education in the U.S. with that of other countries (particularly
the 20 or so whose students routinely outperform U.S. students in mathematics,
science, and problem solving).
The
new standards require a new approach to mathematics that many find
counterintuitive. For example, a problem from a third grade module is:
Use
the break apart and distribute strategy to solve the following problem: 7 × 8 =_____
In a
traditional curriculum, there is no “strategy” for solving this problem: students
are expected to remember that 7 × 8 = 56.
But
studies of children as they were learning basic arithmetic revealed that
they used a variety of strategies to acquire this knowledge; one of the more
important is known as decomposition/composition, where a number is broken down
into its components.
Thus a
possible response to the preceding question would be to break apart 8 into 5
and 3:
7 × 8 =
7 × (5 + 3)
= 7 ×
5 + 7 × 3
= 35 +
2
= 56
While
this approach appears in the Common Core, it actually originate with the
NCTM standards, which recommend that students in grades 3-5 should “develop a
sense of whole numbers and represent and use them in flexible ways, including
relating, composing, and decomposing numbers.” A similar sentiment is expressed
in the learning standards of Finland and South Korea, two countries whose
students regularly outperform U.S. students on international mathematics
assessments.
Even
Texas, one of the more conspicuous non-adopters of the Common Core, incorporates
this approach into their own standards: “Determine products using properties of
operations (e.g., ...6 × 8 = 6 × (5 + 3) = 6 × 5 + 6 × 3 = 30 + 18 = 48),”
which appears in the Texas Third Grade standards. The similarity between the
approaches used by Common Core states and non-Common Core states is no
accident: both base their standards on NCTM recommendations and Adding it Up;
decades of research on how children learn mathematics; and careful examination
of the curriculum of other countries.
So will the Common Core be abandoned? Perhaps,
though as long as we hope to provide our children with a world-class
mathematics education, its replacement will be the Common Core under a new
name.
Common core material is available at EngageNY under a Creative Commons non-commercial license: in effect, school districts can use the materials free of charge, as long as they attribute the material correctly.
Read more answers to Common Core questions