Nine years after Barack Obama forced schools around the country to adopt Common Core, teachers are coming forward with results to prove the controversial teaching method is a failure, and significantly less effective than traditional teaching methods.
Parents and teachers across the nation are now urging schools to dump the toxic Common Core curriculum, arguing that it deliberately dumbs down children and creates unnecessary and complicated methods for working out relatively simple problems.
Students are recording results lower than previously thought possible, and frustrated teachers are warning that “if we do nothing” about Common Core the results “will keep on declining.”
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The newest batch of ACT scores show “dangerous long-term declines in performance,” with students’ math achievement reaching a new 20-year low, according to results released last month.
The average math score for the graduating class of 2018 was 20.5, marking a steady decline from 20.9 five years ago, and virtually no progress since 1998, when it was 20.6. Each of the four sections of the college-entrance exam is graded on a 36-point scale.
“We’re at a very dangerous point. And if we do nothing, it will keep on declining,” ACT’s chief executive officer, Marten Roorda, said in an interview.
Education Weeks reports: The pattern in math scores is particularly worrisome at a time when strong math skills are important for the science, engineering, and technology jobs that play powerful roles in the U.S. economy, he said.
Matt Larson, the immediate past president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, said the math scores “are extremely disappointing, but not entirely unexpected.”
Concerns About College Readiness
While the trends in ACT math were worrisome, the scores in English didn’t offer much cause for celebration, either. The average score for the class of 2018 was 20.2, the same as five years ago, and down half a point from the English-score high in 2007.
On the science section of the ACT, students in the class of 2018 averaged 20.7, down from 21 in 2017, and about the same as five years ago.
The national average composite score for the class of 2018 was 20.8, down from 21 in 2017 and about the same as in 2016.
Math and English scores drew the attention of the ACT by another measure, too: readiness for college-level work. The ACT’s score benchmarks are correlated with the likelihood of earning Bs or Cs in credit-bearing coursework. And increasing numbers of students are falling short.
Only 4 in 10 met the math benchmark, the lowest level since 2004, and down from 46 percent in 2012. Six in 10 met the English benchmark, the lowest level since the benchmarks were introduced in 2002.
It’s going to take a lot more than acknowledging Common Core’s failure to make up for the years of classroom chaos that the Bill Gates/Barack Obama curriculum inflicted on many teachers and students without their consent. A direct apology and a promise to stay away from our kids and their education in the future would be a start.
