Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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This boy lived in a castle in France and fought mock battles with wooden swords in the nearby forest. This boy sailed across the ocean in 1777 at the age of 19 to help George Washington and the Colonial Army beat the British in the Revolutionary War. This boy became a champion all his life for freedom and equality for everyone. Standards Don't Make the Grade by JOHN HOOD Along with most other states, North Carolina is in the process of adopting new Common Core national standards for reading and mathemat- ics. The good news is that the Common Core is much better than North Carolina's previously reading and math standards. The bad news is that, at least in the area of math, the new stan- dards are inadequate to the task of raising North Carolina's math performance to that of the high- est-performing states and nations. Higher math and science proficiency among our young people would have big payoffs in the modern international economy. You've prob- ably heard politicians, business leaders and educators make this point a million times — okay, well, maybe only a thousand times or so, but who's counting? This proposition may sound like a cliché, but it happens to be empirically demonstra- ble. In my new book Our Best Foot Forward, I discuss recent research on the relation- ship between student performance and economic growth. One study I cite estimated that for every half a standard deviation increase in average math and science scores, a country's subsequent rate of economic growth averaged a full percentage point higher per year. In the current environment of anemic GDP growth rates, this qualifies as a huge effect. THIS Boy is lafayette! ✯ Celebrate His Birthday ✯ and Fayetteville's 250th Birthday Saturday, September 8 Join Kidsville News! and the Lafayette Society for In Cross Creek Park from 10 a.m. - 3 p.m. • Free Admission • Party In The Park Music • Bounce Houses • Face Painting • Pony RIdes www.LafayetteSociety.org 16 UCW AUG. 29 - SEPT. 4, 2012 BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION In Historic Downtown Fayetteville Learn more at Lafayette North Carolina's Annual Right now, the math proficiency of North Carolina's students would rank 18th out of 24 industrialized nations in Western Europe and the Pacific Rim if we were a separate country. If we increased our average math proficiency to that of high-ranking countries such as Korea, Japan, Switzerland, Finland and Canada, that would represent about half a standard deviation, meaning that we could expect a one-point annual rise in our long-term GDP growth rate. That would transform North Carolina's economy from a laggard back into a leader. Increasing the math proficiency of North Carolina students from its current middling rank to a high rank will require significant action across multiple policy fronts. It will require higher-performing teachers paid by performance, not longevity. It will require greater parental choice and competition among educational providers. And it will re- quire the kind of clear, rigorous academic standards that top-performing countries tend to publish and follow. Unfortunately, the Common Core math standards North Carolina is about to imple- ment satisfy neither the "clear" nor the "rigorous" criterion. I admit that they will be an improvement over North Carolina's previous state standards — which earned a D from the Thomas Fordham Foundation's nationwide assessment of math standards back in 2010 — but the Common Core standards nevertheless fail to set the bar high enough. In a recent EducationNext article, several independent reviewers offered candid as- sessments of the new math standards North Carolina and other states are adopting. According to Stanford University mathematician James Milgram, a member of the Common Core committee who declined to endorse its results, the math standards set expectations the equivalent of about a grade-level below those of the highest-perform- ing American states and about two grade-levels below those of the highest-performing countries. Another expert, Jonathan Goodman of New York University, described the Common Core math standards as perhaps comparable to those of competing countries in early grades but as setting "significantly lower expectations with respect to algebra and geometry than the published standards of other countries." In particular, the Common Core's "college readiness" standard doesn't require ma- terial such as trigonometry, the Binomial Theorem, logarithms, exponential functions, and complex numbers that are the indispensable building blocks of any higher-level math work. North Carolina jumped aboard the Common Core train a couple of years ago, in response to large financial incentives from the federal government. Proponents empha- sized that the new standards were national but not federal, in the sense that they were created by associations of state political and education leaders rather than the U.S. Department of Education. So what? The problem lies not in who wrote the standards but in the standards themselves. We can do better. And in the interest of economic competitiveness alone, we need to do better. JOHN HOOD, Columnist. COM- MENTS? Editor@upandcomin- gweekly.com. WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM