The National Pulse: Here’s What States Should Do to Really Get Rid of Common Core

The Florida Stop Common Core Coalition’s list of national expert recommendations for full getting rid of Common Core in Florida are listed in this article at The National Pulse. 

The Florida Stop Common Core Coalition and I are grateful to Dr. Sandra Stotsky, Dr. Mark Bauerlein, and Dr. Duke Pesta for their direct involvement and recommendations in this document, as well as Dr. Louisa Moats for her seminal work on phonics and literacy education. We are also grateful to Ze’ev Wurman, Dr. Ted Rebarber, and J.R. Wilson for their direct work on the math portion of this document, as well as to Dr. James Milgram for his long and seminal work on math standards as a mathematician across the nation. Finally, we wish to acknowledge Emmett McGroarty’s involvement and advice from a policy perspective.

The recommendations common to both subjects are offered first, followed by those specific to math and then to English language arts (ELA). Discussion of each recommendation accompanied by extensive references follows after the recommendations in the full document. Although recommendations and accompanying references in both of these documents are geared toward Florida and Governor DeSantis’ executive order, the recommendations here are generalized for any state.

Recommendations Common to Mathematics and ELA

1.) The best solution would be to review and adopt one of the best pre-Common Core sets of standards for English Language Arts and math as discussed for the subject specific standards. This would stop the academic decline seen across America and for the U.S. in international comparisons.

2.) Any statewide standards review should reject efforts to “tweak” or “fix” the current Common Core-based standards, but instead remove the entire set of these systemically inferior, deficient, and in some cases experimental standards and use the standards of one of the high performing states or countries listed in the subject-specific recommendations below as the basis for a review.

3.) The premises of the Common Core are fundamentally defective. Having the public comment on individual standards implies that the standards need to be tweaked, or adjusted, at specific passages. It will thus likely lead to a repeat of the rebranding that has occurred across the nation. Public comment on individual standards will not fix the systemic sequential flaws of the current math standards nor address needed content that is not present in the standards for either subject. Intentionally or not, constraining comments in this manner limits the ability of parents and other citizens to make broader points about the standards and gives the impression that public input is not really welcome.

4.) Completely reject “social-emotional learning” or “21^st Century” psychosocial skills in the standards, such as “grit/perseverance” or a “growth mindset.” Both the math and the ELA standards are supposed to be and have been portrayed as rigorous academic content standards, and should focus on subject-matter academic content. The research supporting such fuzzy standards is unreliable and some of it borders on fraudulent.

5.) Prominently include, especially for review of the high school standards, content experts (e.g.,professors of mathematics, engineering, and physics as opposed to professors of mathematics education) in the subject matter standards for final review. Some of the experts reviewing the standards for younger students should have strong abilities in child development to make sure that new standards are developmentally appropriate, a glaring problem with Common Core.

The individual recommendations for math and English are available in the full article.