Julie DelegalIn July, the Gainesville Chapter of the Tea Party circulated a petition from the conservative Americans for Prosperity asking lawmakers to reject the Common Core-related “PARCC” assessment for Florida.
PARCC stands for the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, a coalition of 19 states and the District of Columbia. PARCC’s test development was funded by President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative — no doubt a burr in the backside for Tea Party members.
Politics makes strange bedfellows, and the Tea Partiers are dismayed to discover that Obama and Jeb Bush both like the idea of national, Common Core standards.
In 2012, Obama was smart to essentially ally himself with Bush on education, in order to short-circuit attacks from the right. Obama went out of his way to praise the former governor in a visit to a Miami school in 2011.
Despite this warm Obama-Bush embrace on education philosophy, the Tea Party folks still view Obama as a danger to schoolchildren. Hence, this strange post on the Gainesville Tea Party’s website, charging that under “Obama-Math,” 3×4=11.
The “Obama-Math” post features part of a Youtube video created by a curriculum coordinator from a Chicago suburb who emphasizes that it’s important to walk through a student’s thought process. In her presentation, she says that’s true even if a student arrives at the wrong answer: 3 X 4 = 11. It’s a clever meme-gone-viral, if taken out of context.
Since the name of this site is Context Florida, though, let me throw some in. It’s pretty hard to imagine that a child learning multiplication concepts could incorrectly draw a grid of three groups of four apples. And I’d join the Tea Party in hoping that she could count the total number of apples in her array.
It’s far more likely, however, that a child studying algebra might get a problem wrong. And when that happens, how will the student know where she messed up? Answer: by learning how to trace back the steps in the work.
The Tea Party’s post is called “Try sending an astronaut to the moon using this twisted logic.”
But, in fact, an example from NASA illustrates how “showing our work” is very important. One Canadian professor walked through the charts related to the failed O-rings in the Challenger disaster, and says that the catastrophe might have been avoided if only NASA had made better graphs.
Call it Obama-Math, Jeb-Math, or Common-Core-Math. Will it lay the right foundation for the 6-year-olds who’ll grow up to work for NASA?
