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These are peoples' lives they are affecting. "Hope" and "politics" shouldn't be a part of the decision making process.

• hga 13y ago
  They could have at least pretended to do some experiments, maybe even with proper controls (yes, that's a radical concept in education "research", e.g. how phonics were tossed in the middle of the last century, resulting in a massive decline in literacy), that showed the Common Core was good before imposing it on the entire nation.
  • zo1 13y ago
    Being able to apply "common core" to a cross-section of schools, one would have been able to control for a lot of the "unknowns" and common "problems" that is complained about in education. Sadly, they didn't do that and instead pigeon-holed this solution onto all schools. Wonderful opportunity missed, for the sake of politics. I'm not aware of the phonics things, though? Care to elaborate on it?
    • hga 13y ago
      Errr, entire forests have been consumed in the fight over phonics and teaching reading, what in particular would you like to know? Note also this is intensely political, e.g. I just noticed the Whole World article on Wikipedia was purged, apparently without a replacement or significant inclusion of what that was all about. The Whole Language article pretends this all started in the 1960s, instead of 1920s or so. And, absolutely seriously, after poking around some more, it looks like a whole bunch of history has been airbrushed out of Wikipedia, not sure much of anything goes back further than the '50s. For a tl;dr (heh), Progressives in the early-mid part of the century decided rote memorization was bad per se, a new "Whole Word" method was developed but only? tested on children of University of College professors, who would have been in the large cohort of children who'll learn reading pretty much on their own, by the mid-50s it was widely realized that this left behind a larger cohort who can't learn how to read without phonics, and to this day the issue is still a battle to the knife.
• agumonkey 13y ago
  It's a choice, known but flawed vs potentially better or worse. It's already there in many places, the world is complex and everything moves from imperfect state to another imperfect state. To me the value is that it's obviously the right direction. Mechanical learning in mathematics is very very damaging for kids that can't click right away, and even those who get the picture may fail later on by abstracting at the syntactical level instead of the conceptual one.
  • zo1 13y ago
    "To me the value is that it's obviously the right direction." Yes, but if all we're going on is "hope" and "politics", then we have absolutely no way of knowing if it's the right direction as you say. As the other poster mentioned, they could have easily done some studies of common core before throwing it at the wall to see if it sticks. Change is never good if it's for its own sake. It may be intuitive for us to think that "mechanical learning" isn't the right approach to solving literacy in subject X, but we could very well be entirely wrong. The point I was trying to draw upon was the parent's initial comment about "let's do Y, and hope it works". Hoping is absolutely no substitute for hard research with tests and controls.
    • agumonkey 13y ago
      You're 90% right. But we already have data about the shortcoming of mechanical learning, look at how many people have fear of maths.