Blaze Media
© 2024 Blaze Media LLC. All rights reserved.
These three answers will get your 3rd grader partial credit under Common Core
Amy Lawson, a fifth-grade teacher at Silver Lake Elementary School in Middletown, Del., helps student Melody Fritz with an English language arts lesson Oct. 1, 2013. Silver Lake has begun implementing the national Common Core State Standards for academics. Remembering the plot of a short story is no longer good enough in Lawson’s fifth-grade classroom. Now, students are being asked to think more critically -- what, for example, might a character say in an email to a friend. "It’s hard. But you can handle this," Lawson tells them. Welcome to a classroom using the Common Core State Standards, one of the most politicized and misunderstood changes in education for students and their teachers in grades kindergarten through high school. (AP Photo/Steve Ruark)\n

These three answers will get your 3rd grader partial credit under Common Core

Are Common Core standards really rigorous?

Many have pointed out the unintelligible questions stemming from Common Core curriculums, and incomprehensible methods being taught to children to solve such questions.

Another issue however is the rigor of what is being taught, and the standards to which students are being held.

Glenn Beck notes in his new book "Conform: Exposing the Truth About Common Core and Public Education," that standards have already fallen thanks to federal intervention, and Common Core will actually compound these errors, making our education system even worse:

Conform

"The lesson most people would take from the No Child Left Behind experiment is that a top-down, heavy-handed approach to improving america’s K–12 system doesn’t work. It also isn’t consistent with the concept of federalism where the states are supposed to be laboratories of experiment. But controllists are so committed to their agenda that they’re willing to ignore history and double down on their approach. The problem, they say, is that state tests are too easily manipulated. Their convenient answer is a nationalized, one-size-fits-all set of learning standards that will keep states from cutting corners and playing games with our kids’ education.

Now these same people are pushing the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSI), a collection of new learning standards that tells schools in virtually every state which concepts to teach kids, grade by grade. The controllists tell us these standards are better and more "rigorous" than the ones states are currently using and will lead to a world-class education for our kids."

But if the below three responses to a third grade math problem -- in which students received partial credit in each case -- from a New York state Common Core Mathematics test are any indication, we might need to question the definitions of "rigorous" and "world-class."

Response #1

New York State Common Core Mathematics test question administered in Spring 2013. New York State Common Core Mathematics test question administered in Spring 2013.

Response #2

New York State Common Core Mathematics test question administered in Spring 2013. New York State Common Core Mathematics test question administered in Spring 2013.

Response #3

New York State Common Core Mathematics test question administered in Spring 2013. New York State Common Core Mathematics test question administered in Spring 2013.

Read "Conform" to understand how and why these standards are changing, and what you can do to stop it.

Want to leave a tip?

We answer to you. Help keep our content free of advertisers and big tech censorship by leaving a tip today.
Want to join the conversation?
Already a subscriber?
Benjamin Weingarten

Benjamin Weingarten

more stories