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The writing of the standards was one of the most exciting moments in my life and I
think it's an exciting moment in
this nation's history
It was a remarkable coming together of lots of organizations
lots of states
We had a situation where
different states had widely different standards
The curriculum in the United States has often been criticized for being a mile
wide and an inch deep.
We had an opportunity to really write something aspirational, something
that brought states together around the common understanding of what
we want to get
out of our education system and what we wanted for our children
when in the states came together
the goal wasn't simply for them all to begin doing the same thing the
goals was for all of them to raise their game and do math education better.
So our charge wasn't to combine or average or catenade all the standards
together or regress to the mean but to build on what the best states were doing
and producing these standards
the working group was charged with using evidence to an unprecedented degree.
Evidence about what high performing countries do in mathematics
evidence about the true demands of college and careers
and when you look into that evidence what you see at the at the far end is a
problem of remediation that students even students who meet expectations in
high school
go on to the next level and find that they're not really prepared
so there's a mismatch of expectations and when you look into the data you see
that post-secondary instructors are looking for a deeper mastery of the
fundamentals, a greater commander fewer things, the greater ability to
apply those things.
Whereas many K-12 teachers feel they have to cover everything or their students
won't be ready
so it's a there's a conflict between coverage versus focus
and coherence
We had opportunity to really give guidance to teachers about the
mathematical
underpinnings of what they were doing how what they're doing all fit together
we tried to write standards that were coherent and
so by coherent we mean that those standards will be
progressing from one grade to the next so that teachers will understand why they're
teaching what they're teaching at their grade level
What they're preparing for in the next grade level,
what they can expect students come in with when they come into their grade
Teachers a no longer isolated in time in that way, nor are they are isolated
geographically since they're sharing these common standards
the groups that came together were many
we had many individuals who had been prominent in thinking about mathematics
education in this country
mathematicians, educators,
teachers, policymakers
many organizations that have been involved. The Conference Board of
Mathematical Sciences is a umbrella organization that encompasses seventeen
mathematics organizations
including the
organizations more oriented towards teaching them NCTM, NCSM, ASSM and AMTE
also the organizations of mathematicians the
American Mathematical Society and the
Mathematical Association of America
we had a team, a work team of about sixty people that brought together all
these constituencies
and they really worked in an amazing way they cycled back with the
central writing team which consisted of myself, Jason's Zimba, and Phil Darrow
supplied us with a lot of raw material
that really help us build this coherence
the other important principle
that we adopted was the idea of focus.
Focused means spending more time on fewer things at any given grade
principally on number operations in early grades. This is to give teachers more
time to teach those things to mastery and give students a firm foundation on
which to build
and the point is that math is not like a homogeneous fluid that can be ladled
into bowls and served to students
It has a logical structure with lots of connections
some of them intricate at every level there are intricate difficult
and necessary things that are prerequisites for the next level's
intricate difficult and necessary things
The other principle that we designed was the idea of this
progressing across grade levels
that is we wanted teachers to be able to see
how it all fit together how the mathematics fit together what was the
mathematical implications of what they were doing
so that they knew where they were heading a good example of this
is the way the standards deal with number and operations in elementary
school growing into a really unified understanding in middle school of the
number system
you know when kids learn about fractions or about
whole number arithmetic they often think these are very different
beasts
the way you add fractions certainly doesn't look like the way you add whole
numbers
but in the end they are just numbers and at some point kids need to get an
understanding of
how the number system works
so there's that real focus on number and operations in
elementary school
we did not put into the standards a lot of the things that
people have come to expect in state standards in an elementary school because
we wanted to give students a chance to really build that basic foundation so
for example the elementary grades do not pay a huge amount of attention to data that to
work with data although there are standards that prepare for that
they don't pay huge amount of attention to patterns
but there's a real focus on the way the number work prepares you for algebra so
that in middle school students have his rich experience
with
statistics that's when they start really learning about probability and
statistics
they have
good hands-on experience with geometry so that geometry really comes to life for
them
and of course the important principle was to
aim for a situation where around eight or ninth grade students can start
having a serious injuries engagement with Algebra
there's a lot of algebra in the grade eight standards
and
we've really tried to design them so that there's a ramp up to that starting
even in kindergarten with the focus on thinking about the way
operations work
Another change that is something that is a little bit different from the way normal standards are
written is
often state standards that have been broken up into what's called
strands. They'll be four main strands that go all the way from kindergarten
through twelfth grade
number and operations, algebra, geometry,
data or statistics
we tried to
do a slightly more fine-grained arrangement of the standards into what
we call domains
which was another way of getting across this idea that you have to focus on
something for a certain time and then it comes to an end
The Common Core Standards are clear expectations but they're challenging
expectations for higher math performance
the content standards have high cognitive demand, they stress conceptual
understanding
procedural skill and fluency
and problem solving
mathematical practices are the varieties of expertise that we want to develop
in students
and the standards ask us to connect content in skills
So the shift we are talking about is towards greater focus and coherence
with more focus kids have more time to make sense of the mathematics and master it
so they can build on those foundations
A focused and coherent approach to math can help students master the math they need for college
work and life
My mother-in-law is a seventh grade math teacher and as you can imagine we talk a
lot about the common core state standards
and she tells me that she used to always have to decide what to leave out
and she never knew what she was sacrificing for her kids in making those
decisions
and she loves the common core standards because they tell her that it's okay to
focus on what matters.