California's 1997 math standards were clear, achievable, and internationally benchmarked. The Common Core math standards that replaced them were none of the above. They are as indecipherable as Enigma intercepts and require the codebreakers of Bletchley Park to interpret them.
Here is more on standards:
Standards have failed to raise achievement because they haven't been implemented. And why have standards not been implemented? First, we're asking teachers to become experts in reading and interpreting standards, going out and identifying curriculum materials to align with those standards, and then implementing those materials in the classroom. And almost on its face, this isn't a way that you could get standards to be implemented in any kind of consistent way. You've got 3 million teachers doing this laborious work of trying to interpret the standards, which are oftentimes quite confusing.
Teachers oftentimes get little or no guidance on curriculum materials from either the state or from their district. There's very little expectation that they even use those materials. The goal of the standards movement is really to get consistent implementation. But obviously, that's not going to happen when you've got millions of teachers with relatively little support and relatively little guidance going out and making these decisions independently. It's not a path to consistent implementation of anything.
My district hasn't selected good math curricula since I've been at my current school starting in 2003. They had good texts when I got there, and they've gone downhill with each successive adoption.
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The response on texts is always: "they are only 6% of achievement, it's the teacher." Well, yes and no.
This will probably come across as far more arrogant than I mean it to, but here goes.
Wanna see a rock star? Let me choose my own textbooks.
Would I trust every teacher, or even most teachers, with that responsibility? No. And that's why it can't happen.
And sometimes even with a good standard text, it can go downhill over time. I knew that I was weak in analytical chemistry, so I bought and studied a textbook before placement exams in grad school.(I was over the cut off for remedial anal chem by 1 point)
Years later the book was extremely useful in explaining a problem that we were having in a process that I was designing at work. I copied the appropriate pages, and loaned the book to my boss. never got it back, so I replaced it with the current edition by the same authors. I could not believe the changes. More graphics, and less true content. That is based on comparing the old and new section of what I had copied.
I verified, but not to the same detail the same phenomena in theology and a friend did in history.
Teachers have my sympathies trying to figure out what standards mean. When I first started teaching my science class for homeschoolers, I looked over standards for the subject for my state. It seemed like they found the most convoluted way possible to describe simple concepts - and this is said by somebody who is used to reading primary science papers. They also pick the strangest details to focus on, such as the requirement that students learn to use a triple beam balance. It's easy enough to include, but it's an odd 'essential skill'.
This year my homeschooled high schooler had to take state end-of-course exams because kid participates in public school extracurriculars. We were sent the links to the standards for the tests. There were almost 100 pages of weirdness for the Algebra 2 standards. I ended up asking a mom-friend who teaches public school math for help. She dug around and found a list of 10-12 topics that I could check to make sure that we had covered - things like radicals and quadratics.
I tend to distill information into an outline form, so I don't understand how they can come up with a book-length list of standards. For biology, a list like 'biological macromolecules and chemical properties of water, parts of the cell, metabolism (photosynthesis, glycolysis, cellular respiration)', etc, with perhaps one more level of lists under those topics, and maybe a requirement for lab reports, would be easier to follow. The list of 10 topics for algebra 2 was great, and the 100 page booklet was...a bit much.
I think that can be said of all text or resources online. The material has been dumbed down to make it palatable and filled with entertaining distractions to keep the kiddies engaged.
If not the teachers themselves, who would you trust with the choice of textbooks? Who does make the call? Is it a committee of department members?
Honestly, PeggyU, it has to be Plato's philosopher-king.
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