https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/03/k12_comedy_core.html
Our own Mr. Price publishes today at American Thinker: “We are told that, thanks to Common Core, students will learn to think like mathematicians. This is the central nonsense. Manifestly, there is no need for that in elementary school, even if it could be done. First, children should be taught to do basic arithmetic with confidence. Then, and only then, teachers might begin explaining the depths. That’s the natural sequence. Common Core violates it from the first day.”
Tidewater News and Opinion Forum 
My take: Students who will learn to think like mathematicians think like mathematicians already. In other words, math per se is innate.
I admit the concept is laden with my own ignorant assumptions. But I’ve certainly read enough about language acquisition and childhood development as an amateur linguist to observe that 99% of what passes for teaching consists of pure socialization or social proof that shapes God-given abilities. Common Core apparently takes the remaining 1%.
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Well, I have believed for some time that the American Thinker was something of a joke that exhibits very little in the way of actual thinking. The fact of their publishing an article like this from a pizza-gate “thinker” such as we in Tidewater have seen in action many, many times confirms that view.
Common Core is a private sector response to a serious national problem – we are raising children unable to compete with their peers in other countries. From how it has been demonized by “conservatives” you would think it was all about “political correctness” and the indoctrination of children in “socialist” ideas about protecting the environment. But nope. It is about teaching math (and language skills) in ways that seek to develop real understanding and not just rote skills – which in an age of ubiquitous calculators are not actually needed.
The only actual criticism of its pedagogy amounts to “That’s not the way I learned it” and Mr. Price offers nothing beyond that. There is nothing “natural” about his so-called “natural sequence” of mathematical learning. And frankly, it is laughable when any dilettante sets himself up as an expert who knows more than the consensus of the finest minds in mathematics and education.
Let’s stipulate that the Common Core approach to mathematics is foreign and confusing for adults who learned their rote math to the tune of a hickory stick, but it is not confusing to children raised on it from preschool onward. Before being generally released, this conceptual approach had proven itself in peer-reviewed studies to be more effective in producing mathematically literate children. And is that not the goal?
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RE: “Before being generally released, this conceptual approach had proven itself in peer-reviewed studies to be more effective in producing mathematically literate children. And is that not the goal?”
If that’s the goal, we might hope for better results in implementation. In 2017, HUffpost published an article titled, “Results Are in: Common Core Fails Tests and Kids.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-singer/results-are-in–common-co_b_9819736.html
“After seven years of Common Core curriculum and assessment, the NAEP tests showed:
“The average performance of high school seniors dropped in math and failed to improve in reading from 2013 to 2015. Performance was also down on both tests from 1992, the first year that similar tests were used.
“There was a decline in the percentage of students in both public and private schools that are rated as prepared for college-level work in reading and math. In 2013, 39% of students were considered ready for college math and 38% were prepared for college-level reading. But in 2015, only 37% were prepared for college.
“Worse, while scores improved for students in the highest percentile group in reading, they dropped in reading and math for students in the lower percentiles. The number of students scoring below “basic” in both subjects also increased from 2013. These were the students that Common Core and the high-stakes testing regime were supposedly designed to support the most.”
There’s no shortage of similar reports that a moment’s Googling turns up, some, no doubt, covered by Mr. Price himself in his own extensive publishing on the topic.
It is a shame how you waste our time here with personal attacks and demonstrably incompetent pontifications. If you can do better, you really should try.
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“Common Core is little more than another combination miracle reading program (e.g. Hooked on Phonics, Success for All, Pearson’s Reading Street) and “new math“ fad that companies have been pushing in the American education market since the 1960s. None of these programs radically changes education in the United States because they do not address the fundamental problems that undermine student performance, poverty, parental unemployment or the need to work multiple jobs, substandard housing and ghettoization, school segregation, and a local funding system that channels greater dollars to schools in affluent communities. They are technical excuses not to address social and educational inequality.”
From what I can see, CC is not the problem nor, evidently the solution. Or at least according to the author of your link.
The drops were by a percent or so. No improvement, but certainly no worse than before.
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RE: “None of these programs radically changes education in the United States because they do not address the fundamental problems that undermine student performance, poverty, parental unemployment or the need to work multiple jobs, substandard housing and ghettoization, school segregation, and a local funding system that channels greater dollars to schools in affluent communities.”
Predictably, Huffpost makes Marxian class struggle the animating focus of its concern. The fallacy in their statement is their projection that “radically chang[ing] education” is the objective. Less-than radical changes might well suffice.
Thus does Huffpost also commit a rhetorical fallacy when it describes Hooked on Phonics as a fad. This is partially true, because Hooked on Phonics is the trade name of a particular product. The more significant truth is that phonics-based reading instruction is widely, if not universally, regarded as superior to all other forms of reading instruction. Or so I’m told.
Huffpost was honest it its reporting of the results of the NAEP study. Mr. Price, I think, was justified in his lampoon of Common Core’s mechanical operations.
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This is an oversimplification that is deficient in many respects. It is simply too early to know the actual impact of the adoption of these goals and methods. The program on math, for example, is designed to start in kindergarten. None of the seniors tested were exposed to it until middle school and that was at a time when many if not a majority of teachers did not get it themselves. In addition, the tests administered are based on the old order and not updated to the new, more conceptual, framework.
Here is a more serious analysis . . .
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2332858417691749
As for pointing out that the American Thinker editorial staff chooses to publish someone well-known for spreading truly deranged conspiracy theories, I believe that it is instructive to know. And, I do find it laughable that anyone really thinks the political attacks on this private sector initiative are anything other than another facet of “If Obama is for it, I am against it.” This initiative enjoyed – and deserved – support from both parties when it was promoted by the non-partisan National Governor’s Association and adopted in both red and blue states.
And, although you may not be able to discern it from your perspective in the reality-denying world of Trump enthusiasts, there is almost never anything incompetent or untruthful about anything I post. You may disagree with my opinions and values, but you have NEVER caught me spreading a falsehood.
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RE: “As for pointing out that the American Thinker editorial staff chooses to publish someone well-known for spreading truly deranged conspiracy theories, I believe that it is instructive to know.”
I don’t. Your opinion on a conspiracy theory or what you imagine to exist in someone else’s mind about it is of no material interest or relevance to the topic at hand. None whatsoever.
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The person in question has repeatedly asserted on the V-P forums that Obama is not an American and that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex ring out of a Washington D.C. pizza parlor. And other similar nonsense. I do not have to be a mind reader or have an extra helping of imagination to know what is in this mind – I can read. When someone repeatedly publishes such material it is rational to take anything that they say and any “fact” they offer with a huge grain of salt. And, whether you like it or not, it reflects very badly on any publication that chooses to give valuable space and lend its name to such an author. You embarrass yourself by linking to it.
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“Hillary Clinton ran a child sex ring out of a Washington D.C. pizza parlor.” I never said this, never believed it, never saw any evidence supporting it. I believe this weird cover story was concocted to take the heat off John Podesta. Now he, I do believe, was implicated in criminal activities. I’m hopeful the truth will come out about Hillary and her Chief of Staff.
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RE: “I do not have to be a mind reader or have an extra helping of imagination to know what is in this mind.”
I think you are a mind reader. Your characterizations don’t match anything I’ve ever seen posted at The Pilot. As one who followed Pizzagate closely myself, it is clear to me you are confusing your own assessment of the topic with things other people have actually said about it.
That’s irresponsible, and wrong.
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So, you never spread Pizza-gate, Birtherism and other deranged conspiracy theory nonsense? Who am I gonna believe – You or my lying eyes?
I will go with my eyes especially since your current denial is wrapped in yet another deranged conspiracy theory – that someone concocted Pizza-gate to help John Podesta.
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