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DURHAM – Durham Public Schools administrators are recommending a phase-in of Common Core State Standards high school math courses, school board members were told last week.
The Common Core curriculum was adopted by the state Board of Education in 2010, replacing standards that the state adopted in 2003 and 2009; the latter set was never implemented. Implementation of the national Common Core standards – 45 states and the District of Columbia have so far joined in – is tied heavily to federal Race to the Top funds, of which DPS was awarded about $3.6 million.
Teresa Daye, the school district’s executive director of Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment, said the Common Core standards were presented to adopters as simply that – standards – and were not separated into distinct courses. The Triangle High Five consortium – comprising the Durham, Chapel Hill-Carrboro, Orange, Wake and Johnston school systems – recommended names for the courses to the state Department of Public Instruction.
The state has approved the curriculum for Common Core Mathematics I, but it hasn’t yet determined which standards will be in Common Core Mathematics II and Common Core Mathematics III. Because of the uncertainty of when those curricula will be approved, the district administration is recommending phasing in the courses’ implementation.
The phase-in will also allow for more time in developing each course, one-by-one, Daye said, comparing the development of multiple courses to the creation of multiple types of cakes.
“If you were a master at baking a pound cake, but you wanted to learn to bake a German chocolate cake and a pineapple upside-down cake and a great old coconut cake, it would be real difficult to manage learning all three of those at the same time, to be able to be the perfect cake-baker of all three kinds,” she explained.
Students who are in the current school year taking Algebra I or any courses more advanced than Algebra I will never take a Common Core math course, something that board Vice Chairwoman Heidi Carter said was “comforting.”
Daye said it’s important to know that the switch to the Common Core curricula isn’t simply to be on the same as the rest of the nation, but “for us to do education better.”
The current math curricula is considered to be “mile-wide but only an inch deep,” she said, referencing the notion that the North Carolina Standard Course of Study delves into too broad a range of topics without requiring mastery of any.
One of the biggest differences in the current math curriculum and Common Core is that each of the first three years of high school math will include a blend of algebra, modeling, statistics, geometry, number and quantity and functions. Common Core also shifts teachers’ focus from coverage of topics to their students’ focus and coherence, Daye said.
She said the district hopes to be able to continue offering high school-level math courses to qualified middle schoolers, but she predicted that the demand among middle schoolers may decline with the implementation of the middle school Common Core curriculum, since it is seen as more rigorous than the current curriculum.
Common Core trainings for teachers are under way, and the district is working to determine and procure what new textbooks, technology and other resources will be needed to support the transition.
Carter expressed concerns about sustaining professional development for teachers, which she suggested contributed to the downfall of the integrated math curriculum, which the district abandoned three years ago.
But Grayling Williams, a secondary math specialist, said the district is going strong with its professional development and is prepared to sustain it for the long haul. Unlike the case with integrated math, professional development for Common Core is not grant-dependent, he said.
Carter also expressed concerns about what she saw as similarities between the Common Core courses and integrated math. Her children who took integrated math didn’t do as well in college as those who took more traditional math courses, she said.
Williams said that there are some similarities in that different types of mathematic reasoning are combined in Common Core.
“What’s different is that the Common Core does this in a very insidious way, in that this is the way we do business,” he said. “Mathematicians in Research Triangle Park don’t always sit down and write an equation. But they solve problems daily, and they can tell you how they’re doing that without referring to the index of the textbook.”
Many procedurally driven students can’t solve problems without first determining if they’re algebra problems or geometry problems, he said.
