The Common Core Standards are defined as a set of high-quality academic standards in mathematics and English language arts/literacy (ELA), by the official website of the Common Core State Standards. In 2009 the state school chiefs and governors that compromised CCSSO (The Council of Chief State School Officers) and the NGA (National Governors Association) Center coordinated an effort to develop the Common Core Standards. These standards were created to ensure that all students graduate from high school with the “skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college, career, and life, regardless of where they live” (Common Core State Standards Initiative). Currently forty-two states, the District of Columbia, four territories, and the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) have adopted and are moving forward with the Common Core Standards.
In 2010 the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers released the “Common Core State Standards Initiative”, which is aimed to help teachers, parents, and students to understand what is needed for children to succeed in secondary schools and the workforce. This also allows states and school districts to collaborate on ways to close achievement gaps nationwide. This nationwide collaboration is aimed to increase our country’s academic progress of our nation’s students, since we have lost ground to our international peers in specific areas like mathematics. Many educators believe that the lost ground is due to there being an uneven idea of academic standards that vary from state to state and don’t agree on what students should know and be able to do at specific grade levels.
But, not everyone agrees with this initiative and its ability to help students. The four states of Alaska, Nebraska, Virginia, and Texas have not formally adopted the entire curriculum. These states claim that these standards do not guarantee higher test scores and is not tailored to meet all of the diverse needs of all the nation’s schools. In a video I viewed from a news report on understanding Common Core, an elementary school teacher explains to the news reporter how she teachers her students to solve the problem of nine plus six utilizing Common Core. Most people can recall back to their elementary school experiences, when they were first introduced to addition.
My experiences consisted of first grasping the concept of addition through apples and pennies, or some other tangible objects that would be used to mirror the problems. This allowed me to see that if I had, for example, two apples on my left side and five on my right, that when I pushed them all together I would have a total of seven apples. As I developed a greater understanding for addition and my teachers began increasing the numbers of our math problems, it became more about memorization verses making sure that I felt comfortable with why a number plus a number equalled the answer that it did. In the video the teacher explains the addition problem of nine plus six by first breaking up six into five and one. Next, the teacher circles the nine and the newly drawn one into a circle together. Below the circle of nine and one the teacher drew a ten and brought down the untouched five. She justifies this action by saying that the students are not comfortable with adding the numbers nine and six together, but instead they are able to respond better to a ten and a five being added to one another. I personally remember learning adding number to nine and my teacher taught my peers and I a “special trick.” This trick was to essentially do the same thing, to subtract a number from the other number being added to nine and then to add that to ten. A problem that the teacher from the video took about a minute to complete, took my classmates and I a few seconds. The question here is should the Common Core curriculum continue to be implemented in our schools?
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