From: Oak Norton
To: Rep. McKell, M.,
Subject: Utah needs to adopt CA's math standards
Date: 2014-10-12T01:12:47Z
Body:

Dear Representative,

 

The tragic story below was posted to Facebook this week (a minority family) and illustrates the insane phenomenon of educators getting caught up in strategies and putting them above the needs of students. I hope you can see how damaging this is to children and their families. It doesn’t have to be this way.

 

I invite you to look at the incredible success that California’s math standards were producing before they lowered their standards to adopt Common Core all in an effort to get some Race to the Top money.

 

Imagine having minorities and lower socioeconomic students grow to be rated proficient in algebra by 8th grade at 6 times their normal rate. By adopting Common Core in the “integrated path,” Utah pushed completion of algebra 1 to 9th grade for most Utah students, the opposite direction of where top standards would take us.

 

Please read this article and consider adopting California’s excellent pre-Common Core math standards in Utah. They were specifically written to benchmark 6 months behind the high achieving nations of Singapore and Japan. Common Core is 2 years behind these nations by 8th grade according to Dr. Milgram at Stanford, and fall further behind in higher grades. Please use your influence to get Utah to adopt California’s math standards. It would change everything and put a portion of this Common Core fight behind us.

 

http://www.utahnsagainstcommoncore.com/solution-utah-should-adopt-californias-math-standards/

 

Sincerely,

 

Oak Norton

 

Name removed

9:39am Oct 8

what to do? Yesterday my son came home and just before get out of the car he said " mom, can we talk private?" I said "sure, what is going on?" son: we did box multiplication today mom: ok, son: and I did it the efficient way, the way you taught me,and the teacher came to my table and told me not to do it that way. son: But Mrs. xxxx this way is faster and efficient, my mom told me not to do the box multiplication because is not the efficient way. Teacher: you have to do it this way and you need to know it just in case somebody asked you about it. son: who is going to ask me about this way, this is so much slower and complicated. The teacher took my son out of the class and told him "do it my way or I send you to the principal office". My son was very scare and he thought, (going to the principal office means I did something very bad and I don't want to be in trouble) and then he told her, "I will do it your way" When he told me this he was almost crying, I was so upset! and today we have parent teacher conference. This happen in Hidden Hollow Elementary. (Eagle Mountain)