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Ze’ev Wurman is a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution. From 2007 to 2009, Wurman served as a Senior Adviser in the U.S. Department of Education. In the summer of 2010 he served on the California Academic Content Standards Commission that reviewed the adoption of Common Core for California. In his non-educational life Wurman is an executive with Monolithic 3D, a Silicon Valley semiconductor start-up.

April 18, 2014|Common Core

Lowering the Bar

by Ze'ev Wurman|9 Comments

US Capitol building and flag at sunrise - Washington DC (photo by Orhan Cam - shutterstock.com)

Editor’s Note: Another installation in a series of posts evaluating the question: Has Indiana departed from the Common Core State Standards and its attempt to nationalize education in America?

Having been the first state to leave the Common Core, the final draft of Indiana’s new K-12 content standards has been published and it will be brought to the State Board of Education on April 28 – ten days from now – for the final vote. Some reviews of this draft have been already published (e.g., here, here and here) but they focused mostly on the English and Language Arts (ELA) piece. I will focus on its mathematics and I will start with some general observations.

The drafting was done under a serious time pressure. There were only 12 weeks allocated for the standards-writing process that typically takes many months or even years. The writing panels should be commended for significant improvement of its early drafts, yet – as we shall see shortly — the final result is far from satisfying for Indiana, whose prior (pre Common Core) standards were highly praised as the best in the nation.

April 9, 2014|Common Core, James Milgram, Parliamentary System, Sandra Stotsky

Indiana’s Current Dilemma: College Readiness versus STEM Readiness

by Ze'ev Wurman|6 Comments

US Capitol building and flag at sunrise - Washington DC (photo by Orhan Cam - shutterstock.com)

In my previous post, I discussed the true meaning of Common Core’s “College Readiness” and I showed—using the words of Common Core’s own authors—the low level of its college-readiness definition and of its high school content in mathematics.

But what about the plus (“+”) standards? As already mentioned, those “+” standards go beyond what every student is supposed to study. Perhaps, if students take all those, too, they will be prepared to study calculus in college and have a reasonable chance of success in STEM? No such luck, says Jason Zimba, the Bennington professor and lead writer of the math standards.

April 1, 2014|Benchmarking for Success, Common Core, Gates Foundation, Higher Education

Common Core Invasion: How It Will Alter Higher Education

by Ze'ev Wurman|Leave a Comment

Supporters of the Common Core repeatedly claim that Common Core was a state-sponsored initiative, that the nation’s governors originated in 2007-8 this wonderful idea, and that the federal government had really – but really – nothing to do with these wonderful career- and college-ready standards that will propel many more of our students to be competitive in the global marketplace.

I will ignore for a moment what those supporters “forget” to mention – that the standards were produced in a secretive non-public process, that they were funded largely by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and private DC-based lobbying organizations, and that they had little input from their actual stakeholders: teachers and the public.

Instead, I will focus on how well Common Core standards match their own claims and aspirations.

March 27, 2014|Common Core

The Common Core’s Pedagogical Tomfoolery

by Ze'ev Wurman|17 Comments

One frequently hears that the Common Core standards are merely standards and expectations that do not dictate curriculum or pedagogy. Common Core proponents argue that those national standards do not interfere with the ability of teachers to use their preferred pedagogical approaches, and do not further interfere with local autonomy over the curriculum.

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