By Robert Kittle
The South Carolina Board of Education voted unanimously Wednesday afternoon to replace the Common Core Standards now being used in math and English, killing Common Core in the state. The board adopted new standards, written by teams of South Carolinians, which teachers will start using this fall.
Common Core has been controversial here and across the country. Critics say the Common Core Standards were a federal takeover of state schools, even though it was state governors who decided to put the standards together. The idea for them was that, with each state having its own standards, it was impossible to tell whether South Carolina students were learning the same things and being held to the same standards as those in Georgia or California. With a set of common standards, students in every state would know they’d be ready for college or jobs.
The “federal takeover” argument popped up when the federal Department of Education used federal grant money to encourage states to adopt Common Core.
Critics also found confusing and difficult math problems from across the country and posted them online as examples of why Common Core was bad. But Nickie Brockman, a retired English teacher who helped write the new English standards for South Carolina, says the Common Core Standards never dictated specific problems, exactly what was being taught, how, or which textbooks were used in class.
“Standards are goals for where we want children to be,” she says. “Now how we get there, the teachers, the administrators, the school districts, they make that decision. They make the decision about the curriculum materials that they use. Standards are just the end of the road, not necessarily the route.”
There are differences, though, between Common Core and the new standards that will be used starting this fall. For example, under the new standards students will go back to learning cursive in grades 2 and 3. And they will be expected to know their multiplication tables in grade 4.
In English, “There’s an opportunity for the classics. That was a huge complaint, but the genre that teachers teach is left up to the teacher,” Brockman says.
Even though critics of the Common Core Standards wanted them gone, many of them don’t like the new standards either, saying they’re too difficult and therefore set children up for failure.
The state Board of Education says the new standards are more rigorous than Common Core.
But Dr. Cindy Doolittle, a math teacher in Spartanburg District 6 who was on the math standards writing committee, says, “We can’t say, ‘This is the way that I was taught.’ Our society, everything is different now.”
And Brockman says every time the state has changed standards there have been complaints that the new ones are too hard. “Every time we have new standards, it needs to be a little harder because the world is different,” she says.
Here’s an example of the changes
1st-grade reading standard
Common Core: requires students to “ask and answer questions about key details in a text.”
New SC standards: requires students to “ask and answer who, what, when, where, why and how questions to demonstrate understanding of a text” and to “use key details to make inferences and draw conclusions in texts heard and read.”
6th-grade math standard
Common Core: “understand the concept of a ratio and use ratio language to describe a ratio relationship between two quantities.”
New SC standards: “interpret the concept of a ratio as the relationship between two quantities, including part-to-part and part-to-whole. Investigate relationships between ratios and rates.”
