The Emperor Has No Clothes. The Common Core standards are an overly complicated way of doing the same thing we have always done. It all started with former Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, who was the 2006-07 chair of the National Governors Association and now leads the University of California system. The great flaw in all this is that just making things harder does not make kids smarter. You start with what a child can do and work from there. Good teachers assess the child's needs first; they do not force arbitrary lessons on children of varying maturity levels and abilities. Also, they offer a variety of ways to learn something - that's call differentiation, which has been stressed in education courses, and rightly so, but is now being dropped for the Common Core. The reality is schools are suffering because of poverty. Plain and simple, but the politicians don't want to hear that because they don't know how to fix it, or don't care to. When kids arrive at school well-rested, well-fed, when they live in an environment of stability and calm, they will learn. They will fulfill their potential.The Standards mandate that eight principles of mathematical practice be taught:
- Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
- Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
- Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
- Model with mathematics.
- Use appropriate tools strategically.
- Attend to precision.
- Look for and make use of structure.
- Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.
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