Over the last decade, New Jersey students scored among the highest marks in the nation on national assessments. The math curriculum they tested so well on was adopted in 1996 and reviewed and revised every five years. But last time out, the state Department of Education and the NJ Mathematics Coalition work group’s revisions coincided with the Common Core standards. And the Common Core won. Bad move, according to the man who chaired the work group. He’s Rutgers Professor Joseph Rosenstein. He told NJTV News Anchor Mary Alice Williams that Common Core’s focus on calculus prep could do a disservice to students who would be helped more with practical math applications.
Rosenstein said he believes it’s a mistake to focus solely on calculus prep, which typically includes an algebra 2 course. “The problem is that most students don’t need algebra 2 because they’re not going to be taking calculus. For those who are, it is, of course, essential. But for those who are not going on to take calculus, algebra 2 is the wrong direction to go,” he said.
Instead, Rosenstein said math standards for all grades should include statistics, probability and topics referred to as discreet mathematics. “The Common Core standards basically introduces them only in the seventh or the eighth grade whereas kids should have the opportunity, as most kids had in the past, to do statistics preparation activities in the early years,” he said. “These are practical applications of math which all students should know. And if they only start this in high school, they won’t have the experience as children that they should have.”
Common Core was largely adopted to help close the achievement gap between American students and their global peers. Rosenstein said that gap is overstated. “For many, many years, students in other countries have been a year or a year and a half ahead of students in the United States. That has never bothered us before because in fact we provided a much richer curriculum than most other countries. We include the arts, we include social studies and we give children the chance to progress with their creative ideas as well as learning formal and rigorous materials,” he said. “So many countries, which do better than us on these international tests, want to emulate us because we end up with high school graduates who are much more inventive and creative than what they end up with.”
The state Department of Education has decided to review Common Core standards for math. Rosenstein said the state should start with what his group recommended. “Our work group took the standards that we had before — the 2002 standards, which was an improvement of the 1996 standards — and looked at the Common Core standards that were being developed, we looked at to see what they had which was better than what we had, better formulated, things that we may have omitted. And we created a document which sort of took the best of what we had plus whatever the Common Core had to offer. So that’s a good place to start. It would be a mistake to start from scratch,” he said.