Local opinion: Common Core math is not helping our students

I am very concerned that the Common Core math being taught in school is not preparing the students for the situations they will need upon graduation.

My college major was a BS in Mathematics and Chemistry, followed by an MBA.

Positions I have had over the years include military mathematician, surveyor, appraiser, Mortgage Broker, Realtor, business owner, programming and construction.

I have been a volunteer math tutor in two school districts, grades 4-12, for nine years.

Common Core is supposed to help prepare students for college, yet 43% of the students don’t start college. Of those that do, 24% drop out the first year, and only 29% continue on to graduation.

Upon graduation, only 11% of the jobs involve work that requires Algebra 2 concepts. Only 6% advanced mathematics. Yet we are trying to train students for problems they will never encounter in adulthood to the detriment of learning to solve problems that they will. How many of us have needed to calculate standard deviations, linear regression or solve for f(x) since graduation?

Common core emphasizes math concepts at the expense of teaching students how to solve problems they will encounter in life.

In my career which has been more technical than most people, 95% of the math I needed could be solved by add, subtract, multiply, divide, fractions, percentages, and how to apply formulas for common shapes and situations.

Reliance on the computer to the detriment of critical thinking is another place where Common Core fails.

Example, the student is shown a picture of a rectangle with dimensions of 8 units by 12 units. Select answer A, B, C D.

They don’t know their multiplication table, so they open their calculator and enter 8 × 12 = 96 and click on the answer “C”. On to the next question… like a video game.

Change that problem to how much paint is needed to paint their classroom walls with dimensions of 30ft × 35ft × 8ft, given that a gallon of paint covers 200sf and many are lost.

They cannot visualize the room as four rectangles, that you calculate the square feet in each, add them together and divide by 200 to get the gallons of paint needed for the job. A very common error is to multiply the three numbers together, the volume, and divide by 200.

I give a test with these type of questions at the end of the school year, and no one has gotten over 50% on it. Yet, most of those taking it have passed their math requirements needed to graduate.

Not learning practical math has been going on for years. When I was working in lending, I would bring up budgeting with a customer. “They didn’t teach us that in school!” “Yes they did. It was called addition and subtraction, total income minus total expenses.” This was a revelation to some.

Most people do not learn from theory, they learn from examples and generalize from there.

You can tell someone the volume of a cylinder is V = Pi × R2 × H, but it doesn’t mean much unless they can relate it to something that interests them. E.g., for a future plumber explain how it would be used to calculate the amount of water flowing through a pipe.

As a tutor, I am not dealing with the top students in the class; they will do well with any teaching method. My concern is the one size fits all that is geared to the top of the class is leaving the majority of our students without the math they need to function as adults.

California found that its students performed significantly better when they abandoned the Common Core standards and implemented their own curriculum. As an Arizonan, I do not agree with many of California’s public policy decisions, however, this is one case where I do.