Common Core Curriculum is not the same as Common Core Standards

I could not have said this better!  These thoughts have been mulling around in my brain for a few weeks but didn’t quite have the right way to say it until I read Fawn Nguyen’s interview over at A Math Babe’s blog.  So I’ll start with her eloquent thoughts:

“I understand that the standards are not meant to be the curriculum, but the two are not mutually exclusive either. They can’t be. Standards inform the curriculum. This might be a terrible analogy, but I love food and cooking, so maybe the standards are the major ingredients, and the curriculum is the entrée that contains those ingredients. In the show Chopped on Food Network, the competing chefs must use all 4 ingredients to make a dish – and the prepared foods that end up on the plates differ widely in taste and presentation. We can’t blame the ingredients when the dish is blandly prepared any more than we can blame the standards when the curriculum is poorly written.”

Don’t criticize the ingredients…criticize the meal you are being served.  Don’t just blindly accept a ‘Common Core Curriculum’ or supplemental material just because the author(s) have stamped COMMON CORE on it.  You need to be an informed consumer of the Common Core products that people and companies are selling.  There are so many people and companies out there creating their versions of materials, all using the Common Core Math Standards as their main ingredients, yet producing vastly different end products.  That end product is what can leave either a bitter or sweet taste in people’s mouths about Common Core because that is what is seen as “Common Core”; the Common Core Curriculum that have been produced instead of the actual Common Core Standards.  They are not the same, yet people think they are.

Here are a few samplings just so you can see how different curriculum materials approach the same standard.  I took these from the first few lessons in each set of materials that said it was to address standard 2.NBT.5: Fluently add and subtract within 100 using strategies based on place value, properties of operations, and/or the relationship between addition and subtraction.

2.NBT.5 from enVisions textbook

2.NBT.5 from MyMath textbook

2.NBT.5 from Bridges textbook

2.NBT.5 from Engage NY modules

One of my biggest issues with the curricular materials that are being produced (and dare I say the assessments as well) is that they are dictating that kids be forced to learn things that are suggested strategies in the standards.  Take standard 2.NBT.5 that I mentioned above.  What curriculum (and assessment) developers take that standard to mean is that every kid has to learn all of those strategies.  The pictures I showed above were just one way that those curriculum materials addressed that standard, each one goes on to show kids different strategies to add and subtract within 100.  When we do that it forces children to now learn 5 different ways to do an addition problem….that is NOT what is best for children.  Those strategies are in there as potential strategies that kids might us to solve addition problems.  Yet the textbooks and assessments have now made it that every child must be able to do all the different ways, or at least be able to explain them.  I want children to know it is okay to solve an addition problem anyway they want, but not be forced to solve one problem 5 different ways.  Take the curriculum materials that have been put out by publishers (see photos above) and then compare that to tasks that have been put out by sites like Illustrative Mathematics (on the Board of Directors of Illustrative Mathematics is Bill McCallum, who was one of the lead writers of Common Core Math Standards) like this one, where they do not specify a particular strategy for kids to use when solving the problem yet it still gets kids working on the same standard:

Common Core is not the curriculum, yet the curriculum dictates how the teachers teach Common Core.  It is time to rethink and reevaluate the curriculum, not the standards.