Those who have pushed back the curtain on Common Core (renamed Arizona’s College and Career Ready Standards by Gov. Brewer) know they are inferior. They know they are also age-inappropriate for young children. Common Core is supposed to be more “rigorous.” However, it won’t prepare students for admission to much of anything except a junior college, and won’t prepare them for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) studies either. This was confirmed by lead math writer, Jason Zimba.
Because Common Core introduces higher level standards at earlier ages, these younger children struggle because the strategies and lessons aren’t understandable to them. It isn’t that the standards simply require more work. It’s that the standards themselves are inappropriate. So, teachers must spend an excessive amount of time trying to teach abstract concepts that children aren’t capable of mastering, thus crowding out grade-level, appropriate materials that would truly advance the child’s progress.
What happens is that teachers are going to see typically developing children as delayed or behind. This will lead to students being held back or tracked into remedial classes that they don’t really need. This also negatively affects teacher evaluations, and unfairly so.
The National Governors Association and Writing Group were warned to suspend the standards for K-3 by over 300 professionals with the Alliance for Childhood after the first public draft was published in March 2010.
Dr. Carla Horwitz of the Yale Child Study Center stated, “The Core Standards will cause suffering, not learning, for many, many young children.” And they have.
Sandi Bartlett