One of the People Behind Common Core Admits There Are Issues With the Program

Many Americans are familiar with the controversy surrounding the Common Core educational standards, which some say are convoluted, political and prevent parents from being involved in their children’s education.

But fewer know that at least one of the three men who wrote the mathematics portion of Common Core, William McCallum, William McCallum, admits there are problems with the standards ( William McCallum is, by his own description, a man who was “born in Australia and came to the United States to pursue a Ph. D. in mathematics at Harvard University, a professor at the University of Arizona, working in number theory and mathematics education.” He is also the chair of the Common Core mathematics standards writing committee?) 

. Phil Daro (Phil Daro served on the writing team of the mathematics Common Core State Standards. He continues to work on implementation and policy issues related to the Common Core. He is the lead designer, mathematics, for the pad based Common Core System of Courses developed by Pearson Education. He also works in a partnership of the University of California, Stanford and others with the Oakland and San Francisco Unified School Districts for the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP), with a focus on mathematics and science learning.

Previously, Daro was a Senior Fellow for Mathematics for America's Choice, the executive director of the Public Forum on School Accountability, directed the New Standards Project, and managed research and development for the National Center on Education and the Economy. Daro has directed large-scale teacher professional development programs for the University of California, including the California Mathematics Project and the American Mathematics Project.)

and Jason Zimba — McCallum’s co-writers — see ways they could be improved, too.

Jason Zimba Professor of Physics and Mathematics, Bennington College 1 College Drive, Bennington, VT 05201

Jason Zimba was a lead writer of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and is a Founding Partner of Student Achievement Partners. He holds a B.A. from Williams College with a double major in mathematics and astrophysics; an M.Sc. by research in mathematics from the University of Oxford; and a Ph.D. in mathematical physics from the University of California at Berkeley. As a researcher, Dr. Zimba’s work spanned a range of fields, including astronomy, astrophysics theoretical physics, philosophy of science, and pure mathematics. His academic awards include a Rhodes scholarship and a Majorana Prize for theoretical physics. Jason is also the author of Force and Motion: An Illustrated Guide to Newton’s Laws. As an educator, he has taught physics, mathematics, and other subjects to college students, university physics and engineering majors, adult prison inmates, children of non-English speaking immigrants, and disadvantaged high school students.

Via NPR:

“When I see some of those problems posted on Facebook, I think I would have been mad, too,” McCallum says. Daro tells a story about his grandson, who brought home a math worksheet labeled “Common Core,” with a copyright date of 1999.

They argue there’s actually very little fuzziness to the math in the Common Core. Students have to memorize their times tables by third grade and be able to do the kind of meat-and-potatoes problems Zimba asks of his daughter during their Saturday tutoring sessions, requirements he believes the so-called Common Core curriculum at her school essentially ignored.

Hung-Hsi Wu, a mathematics professor at Berkeley and one of the expert advisers in the Common Core process, blames the Common Core’s problems on bad — and ubiquitous — textbooks that the publishing industry is reluctant to change. “Publishers don’t want to bother with writing anything because they’ve gone through too many sets of standards,” he says.

But unlike many parents, educators and students, the Common Core authors seemingly believe the issue is that they don’t have enough control over what America’s children learn.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/12/30/one-of-the-people-behind-common-core-admits-there-are-issues-with-the-program/