Gates funds the standards, funds reviews of the standards, and now funds reviews of the textbooks.
Photo credit: World Economic Forum (CC-By-SA 2.0)
EdReports.org reviewed five high Common Core-aligned math textbooks in their first round of reviews and found only one textbook was “aligned.”
- College Board – nope.
- Houghton Mifflin Harcourt – nope.
- Pearson – nope.
- Carnegie Learning – partial credit for “focus and rigor,” but nope.
- The CPM Learning Program was the only textbook deemed “Common Core-aligned”
Pearson wasn’t happy with the review because obviously this isn’t good for the bottom line.
Our analysis of the EdReports evaluations of Pearson Integrated High School Mathematics Common Core ©2014 shows that the EdReports evaluations continue to be plagued by inaccuracies, misunderstandings of program instructional models, misinterpretations of the both the intent and the expectation of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and the Publisher’s Criteria, and a lack of understanding of effective curriculum development and pedagogy. Pearson Education and its authors consider the EdReports evaluation an incomplete, invalid, and unreliable reporting of the quality of the program and of its alignment to the expectations of the CCSS-M.
This group recently said all of the K-8 math textbooks reviewed were not “Common Core-aligned.”
Look here is all you need to know about EdReports.org. They received just shy of $1.5 million in 2015 from the Gates Foundation (by way of the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, Inc.) for operating support “to enable them to build their core priorities of publishing reviews of instructional materials, and to grow their operations and capacity to include teacher feedback of such materials.”
See if all the textbooks are bad then they can blame the poor implementation of Common Core on the textbooks, not the standards themselves. They have already started that narrative. See teachers just need better resources, not new standards… Nothing to see here folks, just ignore the clear conflict of interest.
Deborah Guebert says
One can only marvel at the lengths that C.C. supporters will go to to foist their incoherent ideologically driven theories on defenseless school children.
Barry Garelick says
See also: https://traditionalmath.wordpress.com/2016/06/29/dont-get-too-excited-dept/
“The thing to keep in mind is that alignment/conformity with Common Core math standards does not mean that the book is effective. Secondly, books judged to NOT meet the criteria are not necessarily bad. That said, having used CPM’ algebra textbook, I can say that it is confusing, based on discovery, and when I used it as a student teacher, my supervising teacher often had to give a “supplementary lesson” for the students who didn’t pick up what the discovery lesson was supposed to impart. Which was most of the class.”
Mom of Five says
The reason I started homeschooling my kids was because of the College Prep Math (CPM) book. The majority of class, under CPM, takes place as group work. The groups “discover” how to do the problem and then present their information to the class. If they have no clue, then they go to other groups to seek help. Students are discouraged from asking the teacher (which is why they were originally hired) for help. Think of it: the most experienced math person in the room is written out of the lesson plan. As one can imagine, this lends itself to a lot of wasted time with kids off task. Worse, the smarter kids are targets, as everyone uses them for correct answers. My son’s 7th grade class managed to do a few problems a day (1 or 2). These were very easy problems like making equivalent fractions. CPM failed 20 years ago and was taken off the Dept. of Ed’s curriculum list. But, in “Crazy California” it is back on the list and being used to dumb down many, many kids.