Title: The implications of common core for college and graduate education
Speaker: R. James Milgram (Stanford University)
Abstract: A key part of the federal government’s requirement for any state to apply for Race to the Top (RttT) money in 2010 was that the state agree to “implement policies that exempt from remedial courses and place into credit-bearing college courses students who meet the consortium-adopted achievement standard ... for those assessments,” and to basically agree to adopt the Common Core Standards (CC).
Given the very low level of the mathematics required in CC, this
has profound consequences not only for the first year mathematics
offerings of a public university such as Ohio State, but for the
entire undergraduate curriculum. Indeed, according to the main
writers for the CC mathematics standards, their definition of
college readiness is “a student who has passed Algebra II.”
But their description of Algebra II is a weak one, with critical
topics missing and, overall, significantly below the level that
was expected previously.
On the other hand, CC was advertised by its supporters and the
current administration as more rigorous than any state’s then
current standards, and as the way we will strengthen our Science,
Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) pipeline. We will
show that these claims are simply not true, and were never the
real intent of CC. Then we discuss the long term consequences of
the almost universal adoption of CC by the states.
R. J. Milgram is emeritus professor of mathematics at Stanford
University. He has served on the board of directors for the
National Institute for Education Sciences, the NASA Advisory
Council, and the Achieve Mathematics Advisory Panel. He was the
sole expert in mathematics itself among the original members of
the Common Core Validation Committee. From 2002 to 2005,
Professor Milgram headed a project funded by the U.S. Department
of Education that identified and described the key mathematics
that K-8 teachers need to know. He also helped to direct a
project partially funded by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation that
evaluated state mathematics assessments. He was one of the four
main authors of the 1997 – 2010 California Mathematics
Standards, as well as one of the two main authors of the
California Mathematics Framework. He was also one of the main
advisors for the mathematics standards previous to Common Core in
Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts , Michigan, Minnesota, New
Mexico, and Texas. Among many other honors, he held the Gauss
Professorship at the University of Goettingen, the Regent’s
Professorship at the University of New Mexico, and Distinguished
Visiting Professorships at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in
Beijing and at the University of Lille. R. J. Milgram has
published over 100 research papers in mathematics and four books,
as well as serving as an editor of many others. He currently
works on questions in robotics and protein folding. He received
his undergraduate and master’s degrees in mathematics from the
University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the
University of Minnesota.
Seminar URL: https://people.math.osu.edu/fowler.291/education/
