The Common Core changed this. It requires that students use evidence in texts to argue, speak and write. For instance, if a student is writing a paper on immigration, he must cite news articles, rather than rely on personal feelings. Read more nonfiction texts: The Common Core has a bigger emphasis on nonfiction texts than previous standards. For instance, in grade school, the standards require a split between fiction and nonfiction. Focus on fewer math concepts: Previous state standards often required students to cover many different math concepts, but without a lot of depth.
The Common Core covers fewer math topics. However, the expectation is that students will work more deeply on those topics. Build on previously learned math concepts: In the Common Core, math concepts build on one another. What a student learns in fourth grade must be applied in fifth grade, and so on. Students are expected to have a global view of math, not just understand individual topics.
Show more understanding of math concepts: Many previous state math standards focused on simply knowing the right steps to get the right answer to a math problem. For instance, students had to learn a standard way to do long division. Common Core expands the focus to requiring students to show understanding of the concepts. Common Core can be a controversial topic. Here are some of the reasons why some parents and educators oppose the standards. Keeping local control over schools: Some critics say the Common Core takes away local control over schools.
Because the standards are uniform, they fear states may lose the ability to set standards for schools. However, Common Core is a state-led, not federal, initiative. But they're in the news now because states are beginning to use the Common Core as the basis for state tests. As the standards move from theory to reality, they're becoming better-known and, often, more controversial among parents and legislators. The Common Core standards are more challenging than what most states used to use, and kids aren't doing as well on these tests.
Two nonprofit groups led the effort to write the new standards, and others contributed. The other is the National Governors Association. Achieve , a nonprofit education reform group, also helped.
The groups brought in the two major teachers' unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers , as well as other national organizations that represent teachers of math and English. Writing the standards took about 18 months, beginning with a report from the three main groups involved in late A draft was released for public comment, and a committee of experts also provided comments.
The standards were finalized in June with a report explaining the groups' reasoning. Two big, complex problems. First, American students are middle-of-the-road at best on academic skills when compared to other countries on international tests. Policymakers and business leaders hope that tougher standards will help the US catch up globally.
Second, under the old system, it was hard to compare students in different states. Until now, each state set its own standards for what students should understand at each grade level, and each state had a different definition for what it meant to be "proficient" in math and reading. The US Education Department's statisticians found a lot of variation when they mapped state standards onto scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
That test is called the "Nation's Report Card" — a standardized test students take nationally every few years. They also found that even students who met state goals might not actually be doing all that well, since the national exam set the bar higher than states did.
In the federal government's eyes, all states had standards that were too low, and there was too much variation on how low they were. Most education systems don't work that way, and it makes it difficult for states to collaborate to improve education nationally. The Common Core is supposed to solve this by holding students in the majority of states to the same, higher standards. In the past, "students had this sense that math was some kind of magical black box," says Dan Meyer, a former high school math teacher studying math education at Stanford University.
The Common Core wants to get kids beyond rote memorization of how to do math and towards a deeper understanding of how math actually works. This has led to some problems that have gone viral on the internet as frustrated parents vent over bizarre-looking homework assignments:. The simple example the parent gives above is known as the standard algorithm — and, under Common Core, it will still be taught. But students are also supposed to learn other methods that try to make the underpinnings of the standard method more obvious.
Take the problem above, which uses a number line to show that subtraction is really about calculating the distance between two numbers. Students put the two numbers at opposite ends of the number line.
Then they travel from one number to the next to figure out the distance. It's 4 steps from to , steps from to , 7 steps from to LearnZillion, a company that creates lesson plans for teaching to the Common Core standards, has a 5-minute video explaining this technique.
Here's what it's supposed to look like on another sample problem:. Multiplication, too, is explained visually. Most people learned to multiply two-digit numbers like this:. Much of this is bound to confuse parents — particularly because in many cases their own math backgrounds aren't particularly strong, and so they can't step in and easily find the answers themselves.
But math teachers say parents need to learn to help their kids by asking them more general questions that help them learn the principles behind the problem, rather than stepping in and solving the problem themselves. More on the Common Core's approach to math here. The federal government didn't write the standards, but it has promoted them. States weren't explicitly required to adopt the Common Core in order to compete for the federal money; they could have used their own standards if they proved to the Education Department that those standards prepared students for college.
Nearly all of them adopted Common Core instead, and all of the states who eventually won the grants were Common Core states. Another grant program was created to help develop tests based on Common Core standards.
The federal government has other levers to promote Common Core, too. It waives some requirements of No Child Left Behind, the education reform law, for states that among other things adopt "college and career-ready standards" and assessments based on those standards.
One root cause has been an uneven patchwork of academic standards that vary from state to state and do not agree on what students should know and be able to do at each grade level.
Recognizing the value and need for consistent learning goals across states, in the state school chiefs and governors that comprise CCSSO and the NGA Center coordinated a state-led effort to develop the Common Core State Standards. Save This Word! We could talk until we're blue in the face about this quiz on words for the color "blue," but we think you should take the quiz and find out if you're a whiz at these colorful terms.
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How to use Common Core in a sentence What they found was grass-roots frustration about evolving lessons — frustration that mirrors the furor over Common Core during the Obama administration — that was at times being stoked by national organizations.
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