What Common Core math technique was that check mocking?

[even_sven]

@BigT

And, like it or not, there is a good argument that this is all the fault of Common Core. The specific specifications are not necessarily as important as what resulted from them. It meant that schools that previously trusted their teachers to figure out textbooks now have a checklist–meaning it could be handled by people who don’t actually understand math and can’t actually teach it. It encouraged using a single system school-wide. (I went to a public fifth grade in the 1990s. Different classes had different books and different lessons, depending on what they thought would work best.)

Do you think states didn’t have standards before the Common Core?

The whole point of the Common Core is that fifty states having fifty standards boards each writing fifty wildly difference sets of standards for basic competencies is a really expensive, needlessly complicated, ridiculous way to do things. It makes it hard for kids to transfer, hard for teachers to share ideas across state lines (which they’d like to do now, with the Internet and all), and hard to actually measure what systems are succeeding and which aren’t.

There were standard before Common Core. There were smart and dumb curriculum decisions before Common Core. Teachers now have MORE choice, because they aren’t just stuck with whatever publishers thought it was financially worthwhile to publish textbooks for Wyoming’s standards.

If a given district or school took away any power to choose a curriculum, that’s a choice they made separate from the Common Core.

If Common Core just referred to what you guys claim, then everyone wouldn’t have thought “Common Core” when they saw this check.

People think “Common Core” because of a successful campaign by the Tea Party to turn this into an insta-wedge issue.