Abolish Common Core State Standards Research Paper

Halley Fritz

Mr. Spanos

Language Arts 8

12 April 2017

Abolish Common Core In 2009, the Common Core Standards were implemented throughout the United States. Although the Common Core only affects how the Math and Language Arts standards are taught, there still have been many flaws pointed out and heavily criticized by many parents and professionals alike. Mostly criticized is the fact the cursive handwriting is not taught anymore, how different the standards are then what they were like before, no creativity is encouraged,

“One of the most widely cited criticisms of the Common Core State Standards is that they don’t require teaching students to write in cursive.” (Heitin). This has been one of its biggest problems from the day Common Core was

Take the math standards for example. When our parents were in school, and for many generations before that, math was very black and white. Math was taught using straightforward algorithms and rote memorization of accepted “facts”. The introduction of Common Core Math Standards brought about a whole new world of accepted instructional techniques and “facts” were thrown out the window. A “problem” was renamed a “math sentence”, and two plus two no longer absolutely equaled four, but was more of a journey than a final destination. Facts were no longer learned by rote memorization, but by exploring with little rainbow-colored bears that looked like erasers. You were supposed to somehow discover the relationship of two blue bears playing with two yellow bears becoming a happy group of four bears as the equivalent of two plus two equals four. Some students found this to be a little too abstract, and never memorized simple math facts, which left them without the necessary building blocks for successful growth in learning

This can be extremely difficult in a situation where the child has missed a day of school. When a student misses a day of school they are required to have all of their work done for the next day. If the student has missed a lesson then more than likely their parent will have to teach them the lesson if their parent does not help them then they will have to teach themselves the lesson that they had missed out on the day before. Majority of the time the parent might not even know how to teach the lesson to their child since the standards are so different compared to what they had learned in school. This can then lead to the parents, also the child, to be very confused with the