The second grade student I was working with was doing well in math but he had trouble reading. Now he is no longer at grade level in math. Why, he can't read the problems. Yes the new common core wants students to be able to read. But now students who have trouble reading are feeling more of a failure because they can't do math either.
The New York Times article, "Math Under Common Core Has Even Parents Stumbling" by Motoko Rich, states that parents are finding math too difficult to do. So now students don't just do the formula to arrive at the answer. They must draw and explain their logic about how to solve the problem.
Math used to be like a foreign language. A student just needed to learn the symbols and the formulas and they could be successful even if reading was difficult for them. With the transition to common core happening so quickly, there are not textbooks available, so many teachers are just using workbook pages.
"The new methods (for math) are particularly challenging for student with learning disabilities, or those who struggle orally or with writing." Much of the work is now busy work with students drawing 42 dots to solve the problem...
When I was involved with the common core with the county of Santa Clara, I noticed that special education students might never pass so of the area they were to master each year. So I wondered what will happen to them. Do they deserve to flunk classes?
I think each child will have to take a pretest to determine which skills they learned and remembered over the summer. Then at the end of the year, the teacher can administer a post test and see how each child has improved over the year. This will be a true test to show how much the teacher helped each student learn over the year. Having every student take a 4th grade test at the end of the year doesn't show how the teacher helped a particular student learn 2nd grade and 3 grade material. They may not have mastered 4th grade material but they did learn two years worth of material.
Parents will have to be in touch with their child's teacher and learn the math to help their child success during this transition to the "Common Core".
