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A parent whose child goes to a high school in the Wake County Public School System has been sued after criticizing the math curriculum used in the district.
Utah-based "Mathematics Vision Project" or "MVP," filed a lawsuit against Blain Dillard, whose son attends Green Hope High in Cary.
Dillard has been vocal about his opposition to the MVP curriculum, which is student-driven and focuses on group work, posting on his website, blog and social media.
The lawsuit obtained by ABC11 said, "In or around March 2019, Dillard commenced a crusade against MVP, claiming that MVP is ineffective and has harmed many students."
It alleges that some of Dillard's statements were false and defamatory and harmed the company financially.
https://abc11.com/education/wake-schools-parent-sued-after-criticizing-math-curriculum/5430840/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @02:16PM (1 child)
Those aren't the result of common core curriculum standards, they're the result of incompetent people being allowed to produce materials.
The answer would be 10+4=14, but this is a really bad example to use and the article is right in indicating that developmentally the kids aren't ready for that. This is something that you would do if you're dealing with larger numbers and wanting to add or multiply them quickly in your head.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday August 10 2019, @04:13PM
I'm not an expert in primary education, but I disagree that this is necessarily developmentally inappropriate. I agree it's a poorly written question, though context could matter. Grouping into 10s, to my knowledge, is commonly taught around 1st grade age as a prelude to concepts that will be necessary to learn addition and "carrying" as well as some subtraction algorithms (where you need to regroup into 10s when you need to "borrow" from the next higher digit), stuff that commonly comes up in 2nd or 3rd grade. Kids who are educated well in preschool math often encounter grouping concepts of 10s and 100s even that early, and any kindergarten of 1st grade teacher who isn't at least hinting at the concept of the importance of grouping into 10s is not helping kids with basic concepts they will need.
I'm not defending the Common Core entirely (which does have some weirdness), nor am I defending a teacher who would mark this problem "wrong" for the wrong reasoning (e.g., you choose D because it's the one with the correct final sum). But I've found a lot of people who object to Common Core exercises don't realize that some exercises are setting up an important pedagogical point to create the steps that will make later learning easier because kids have practice with an underlying concept. Maybe kids don't NEED the underlying concept to solve that particular problem, but they might benefit from it in another circumstance, as here.
Well, that and other complaints about Common Core come from incompetent teachers or poorly written materials who miss the point. A teacher who marks a child wrong in this problem because the child has simply memorized an addition fact is missing the point of math education (and many primary school teachers are afraid of math and don't understand it). You want kids to get the right answer to a question. If you want to assess whether a child understands grouping into 10s, you could write a better question to assess that.