Making math into art isn’t ‘deeper’

Common Core standards are making math education even worse, writes Marina Ratner, a Berkeley math professor emerita, in the Wall Street Journal.

As a sixth grader at a Berkeley public school, her grandson was required to “draw pictures of everything,” she writes.




Core math requires “convoluted and meaningless manipulations of simple concepts,” Ratner writes.

. .  . the Common Core’s “deeper” and “more rigorous” standards mean replacing math with some kind of illustrative counting saturated with pictures, diagrams and elaborate word problems. Simple concepts are made artificially intricate and complex with the pretense of being deeper—while the actual content taught was primitive.

Common Core’s math standards are lower than the standards of high-achieving countries and lower than California’s old standards, Ratner concludes. “They are lower in the total scope of learned material, in the depth and rigor of the treatment of mathematical subjects, and in the delayed and often inconsistent and incoherent introductions of mathematical concepts and skills.”

Ratner is wrong on the facts, responds Bill McCallum, a math professor who helped write the standards. Here’s his post on drawings in the Common Core.

With 25 minutes and a whiteboard …

Gregory Euclide whiteboard artwork

© Gregory Euclide





Life without math

