The Common Core Costs Billions and Hurts Students

>What mattered is the parents of the poor school worked 2 jobs and had no time for the kids. The parents of the rich kids had stay at home moms and tutors.

Or single-parent vs. two-parent households. Controlling for everything else, that fact seems to be the biggest culprit in the future success of a child. Working two jobs is a symptom of a single-parent household

> Likely spending $1.59m per cruise missile is part of it, and the other part what we seem to value in society....locking people up vs. fixing the core issues

Cruise missles have nothing to do with it. We spend more on education per capita than any other developed country besides Switzerland. And our best performing school districts often spend a fraction of what our worst school districts spend per student.

We don't have an educational problem in the US. We have social problems we're trying (and failing) to fix by throwing money at schools. Our urban and poor-rural teachers are trying to teach kids in places where the bottom has fallen out of the social order. Changing how we do testing, etc., is rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.

> Well, what we got were concepts. In kindergarten, my son learned things that I recognized as basic number theory...almost as if it came straight out of Andrew's book of the same title. Nothing advanced, but the concepts were covered quite well. What he missed though was the ability to calculate quickly...this I had to get him to do at home, and it came in time.

Did you look ahead to see if that was covered later? Common Core covers much of the same computational arithmetic stuff that was usually covered before, but often covers it at a later grade.

Descriptions of what is covered at what grade level are here: http://www.corestandards.org/Math/

No Child Left Behind started when I was in 6th or 7th grade.

On a day where we all had to do one of those standard tests, all of the students would get a small breakfast for free, usually juice and granola bars. That part of the test I liked. Whenever I'd get one of the tests, though, the material that they tested me on was always a couple of years behind where I was currently at, so for me it was mostly a waste of time.

The only classes that were worthwhile in high school where the ones that were taught at a college level. In the US there's one program called "AP" where you take a class, then at the end of the semester you can pay something like $70 to take a comprehensive exam on the material. If you get a high enough score on the exam, most universities will allow you to transfer the AP course in as credit. This program allowed me to rack up some college credits while I was still in high school, and by the time I reached college I was able to jump right into math classes at the second year level (not that big of a jump, but still saved some time).

There are some problems with the AP system, for example after you've taken an exam you aren't allowed to discuss the exam with anyone until a few days have passed (which, if you've ever taken a hard exam, is agony), however I think programs like these are where the real effort ought to be applied.

"Common Core" as a curriculum may or may not be good or bad, I don't know. But so long as schools build their entire year around high-stakes standardized testing, the students in our public schools are suffering. It's bizarre to me that many (most?) states in the US require their teachers to get graduate degrees, yet give them little if any control over the curriculum they use. Are they highly trained professionals or just robots?

Today's standardized tests, given on computers, require typing skills the students aren't taught. The computer systems fail or links are wrong, and schools have so few computers that the testing process can take days, during which time the entire school is disrupted. Spending a day or two a year on a standardized test used for statistical purposes is a reasonable investment of time and money. But spending weeks multiple times a year on tests that determine the fate of teachers and schools is a massive failure.

It was obvious when NCLB was proposed that it was an end-run attempt to gut support for struggling schools. That's played out as was easily predictable, but now we seem to be doubling down. At some point, we have to learn as a society that just because someone puts data into a computer and a number pops out doesn't mean that number _actually_ has meaning.