I know the states want money but how can they agree to adopt the controversial 1989 NCTM standards as our new national policy?

Designers of curricula, assessments and prof devt are to first and foremost adopt to those process standards. Math content is not even a secondary concern to this document.

Makes you wonder how many adults involved in all of this have trouble reading carefully and analytically.

What a frightening national vision for economic suicide.

Using borrowed money to boot.

The funny part though is the document says up front clearly that they are not telling the states how to teach math.

No but if you read on they do say expressly that they are specifying how US students are to engage with the math content.

Yeah-that avoids the issue of pedagogy.

I was expecting something a lot better.

Their final version is an embarrassment.

Wait until the 11th grade to teach The Cask of Amontillado? How sad. The suggested years for presenting a lot of the material seems widely off.

Ben, I like your post except for your call to return to old-fashioned grammar.

If this is the final version of the core standards, then they dropped the ball.

They also need to do a better job of proofreading.

I wanted to ask how these standards wouldn’t do the same thing that NCLB has done in many areas – rid the school of science and history – since the focus is only on English and math, but I had to leave before I got a chance.

As an ELA teacher, I LOVED teaching the Declaration of Independence (“He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.” Now THAT’S angry!) But let’s be clear here: it is a list of complaints more than a great work of rhetiric. It is a political document for a particular political time and place.

The preamble to the Constitution is actually another favorite of mine, but not to teach. Those are political and philosphical ideas, not necesarily masterful writing from a literary persective.

Character? Plot? Theme? Allegory? Teaching students about themselves and universal aspects and concerns of being human? I believe very strongly — I taught ELA, right? — in the power and importance of literature. And I care a ton about understanding government, politics and philosphy. But I understand that these are not the same thing.

If that’s the common required read list there are issues. Where is the great American novel? Perhaps it is Huck Finn, or perhaps it is Gatsby. But not even a stab at it? Not even “one of the following 5″? We can’t acknowledge the importance of Whitman, as part of our common core?

Ha!

It seems to me that the discipline of English is in a wretched state in this country. How about going back to old-fashioned grammar and the reading of classic literature? I have a feeling that this would be much more mentally nutritious.

Some years ago I took the grades which the Education Trust and the Fordham Institute gave to individual US States for their standards, converted these grades into numbers on a 0-4 point scale, and applied the EXCEL correlation function to these numbers and State-level NAEP scores. The correlation was negative.