By Quin Hillyer

Alabama Superintendent of Education Tommy Bice this week wisely began a “public review” process for Alabama’s version of the controversial Common Core standards. The public should give the standards an “F.”

Supporters of the Core boast that it promotes an integration of knowledge across subject areas, so the use of word-problems in math instruction helps develop both numerical and linguistic skills, while the promotion of analytic logic in the “language arts” standards draws on types of reasoning now emphasized in math.

Nice concept. Too bad the Core utterly fails at its own aims. The language used for the math standards is bureaucratic gobbledygook. And the examples provided of actual student writings, supposedly models for excellent logic, contain howlingly awful arithmetic. Meanwhile, Common Core’s standards for “literacy in history” have been criticized by leading historians for misunderstanding the very study of history.

via A failing score for Common Core: opinion | AL.com.

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