Title: The implications of common core for college and graduate education
Speaker: R. James Milgram (Stanford University)
Abstract: A key part of the federal government’s requirement for any state to apply for Race to the Top (RttT) money in 2010 was that the state agree to “implement policies that exempt from remedial courses and place into credit-bearing college courses students who meet the consortium-adopted achievement standard ... for those assessments,” and to basically agree to adopt the Common Core Standards (CC).
Given the very low level of the mathematics required in CC, this has profound consequences not only for the first year mathematics offerings of a public university such as Ohio State, but for the entire undergraduate curriculum. Indeed, according to the main
writers for the CC mathematics standards, their definition of college readiness is “a student who has passed Algebra II.” But their description of Algebra II is a weak one, with critical topics missing and, overall, significantly below the level that was expected previously.
On the other hand, CC was advertised by its supporters and the current administration as more rigorous than any state’s then current standards, and as the way we will strengthen our Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) pipeline. We will show that these claims are simply not true, and were never the the almost universal adoption of CC by the states.
Visit the Department of Mathematics website for more information.
