A word problem about a fictional student named Jack had put Mr. Severt, of Cary, N.C., over the edge. It asked students to look at Jack's "notes, " including a number line with arcs indicating he'd skip-counted backward, and figure out where he went wrong in calculating 427 minus 316. "Write a letter to Jack telling him what he did right and what he should do to fix his mistake, " the problem said.
Mr. Severt's wife snapped a picture of the "common core" math problem and the note to the teacher, and put them on Facebook. The post went viral.
—Image From Facebook
Reactions to the problem ranged from angry aspersions cast at the federal government (the supposed purveyors of the Common Core State Standards) to strong defenses of the teacher and the task.
Many people sympathized with Mr. Severt's frustration that the problem made a simple subtraction task into a complicated, multistep production.
The response from the lead writers of the common standards for math was perhaps the most interesting: The problem wasn't part of the common core, said mathematicians William G. McCallum and Jason Zimba. It was simply the product of a badly written curriculum.
The episode serves to illustrate the complex challenges and competing demands that schools and teachers face as they work toward implementing the new math standards.
As detailed in this report, part of a series of special reports by Education Week that identify and explore high-priority issues in schools, the common standards for math differ from most previous state standards in significant ways. They are fewer in number, connect more broadly across grade levels, and emphasize conceptual understanding along with the procedural skills that schools have traditionally taught.
A recent survey by a research team at the University of Arkansas, in Fayettville, led by education professors Jason Endacott and Chris Goering found that 62 percent of the 191 math teachers who responded said they "agree" or "strongly agree" that the common-core standards are "more rigorous" than their state's previous standards. An additional 19 percent said they "tend to agree." (The survey was not nationally representative, though it drew on responses from teachers in all but one state that adopted the common core.)
