Common Core Mathematics Will Damage the Competitive Position of the United States

I was an early supporter of the Common Core, and signed a public statement of support for the standards on behalf of One World Secondary School some time in 2010, if I recall correctly. The basic concept is right: we live in an increasingly mobile society, and my international experience (I taught overseas for seven years, and have visited 23 countries) has made me keenly aware of the differences in educational attainment between Americans and other people. This has motivated my long struggle to start an international secondary school for my son and for as many students who want to be educated like him as I can find.

A consequence of this long (and still ongoing) attempt to start an international school for everyone has been extensive study of the world's educational systems, including their mathematical standards. Really top level standards can be easily accessed through the website of APEC, the awkwardly named Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation, and its human resource development group wiki.

I am sorry to say that I have withdrawn support for the Common Core, largely because of the lack of international competitiveness of its mathematical standards. Common Core mathematics will leave American students roughly three years behind their Chinese, and two years behind the other leading Asian mathematics students, who are increasingly arriving on American shores to take the SAT, a test whose mathematics are laughably easy (they really laugh at them; I have tutored many such students over the years) compared with what they have studied during their secondary school careers. And the problem is getting worse, as an article I've just read today from the Pioneer Institute makes clear; and it will likely lead to the dumbing down of the SAT, a test already terribly inferior to the university entrance examinations most of the rest of the developed world's students study for, with malignant consequences for the future of the U.S. voting public and its engineers, in particular.

A parent I work with who is concerned about her son's future prompted me to write something on this topic. I wish I had something more encouraging to say to her. My only message to her, and to other parents like her who are worried about their children's future, is to find a way, if at all possible, to withdraw your children from their state schools, enter private education to the extent you can afford to (but check out their mathematics curriculum, which may be no better), and press for vouchers to help you afford this better alternative (like One World Secondary College!), at least until the Common Core mathematics standards are withdrawn for revision; and don't listen to any reactionary siren songs favouring a return to some imaginary good old days: those have never existed, in American secondary education, and our children need to be prepared for a competitive future, not for some fantasyland of the past, nor for an unreachable No Child Left Behind national state that at present is cut off from the realities of the other 95 percent of the people who inhabit our planet.

The Common Core Math Standards Have Failed Already

To be more precise, that title should read, "The Common Core Math Standards Developers" have failed, and this will cause difficulties for all who have committed to them and who may be unable to escape those commitments. For example, in my home state of California, the new mission statement printed in "A Blueprint for Great Schools" begins, "California will provide a world-class education for all students, from early childhood to adulthood." But it can't do so if it follows the Common Core, because under the latter, students will not begin algebra until ninth grade, and therefore won't learn any calculus in high school. Even under the "compacted" sequence the core documents discuss in Appendix A to their presentation, advanced students will be "encouraged" (147) to take Calculus, which continues to be deemed a "college" course, in their senior year. Contrast this with the mathematics career of my younger son, who, as his older brother did, will start algebra next year, in seventh grade, and therefore will be on track to repeat his older brother's success in Calculus in the eleventh grade, and thus will be able to have proved he can do advanced mathematics by the time his college applications are read.

This makes it sound like my children are geniuses, but they aren't; they are merely doing what every child entering middle school in Korea is scheduled to do, and they are getting the nearest American equivalent to the mathematics education they would have received in Korea if they had stayed there. And Korea isn't unique; children in China (including Hong Kong), Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore generally follow a similar path, and will remain ahead of American children even after this expensive national experiment in mathematics reform is completed.

This means that this much ballyhooed change isn't much of a change at all -- that calculus is still considered "college" mathematics in the United States, even though it's high school mathematics across east Asia -- and this is a signal that the mathematics establishment in America (I'm thinking first and foremost of our for-profit publishers like Pearson and McGraw-Hill, and also of that non-profit special interest group run like a for-profit, the College Board) were able to infiltrate themselves into the core of the reform process so as to generate results that will mean both gigantic potential contracts (there is enough change here, especially because of the computerized test delivery model, to require a new generation of products) and minimal content revisions to their existing inventory. This is a sweet deal for them, and won't disturb the private school market either, because if American families want a world-class education for their children, they will have to continue to look to private schools to deliver it, especially in California, where state officials appear to have tied their buoy to a sinking cruise ship.