When You Don’t Do It Right, You Have To Do It Over

A.P. Dillon at American Lens is reporting today that a bill has been proposed in the North Carolina House of Representatives to accept the findings of the Academic Standards Review Commission (ASRC) and get rid of Common Core.

I attended most of the ASRC meetings. I was at the meeting where the findings of the Mathematics and English Language Arts Committees gave their results. What I witnessed was the total perversion of the purpose of the Commission. On December 30, 2015, I posted a letter from a member of the Commission who did not agree with the final actions of the Commission. I have also posted other information and letters about the Commission. You can access those by using the search engine on this website at the top of the page and putting in “ASRC”. It became obvious in the final ASRC meeting that the Commission was set up to maintain the status quo of Common Core.

The article explains:

Representative Larry Pittman has introduced a bill to get rid of Common Core and has aptly named it, “Actually Get Rid of Common Core.” The Primary sponsors joining Pittman are Representatives SpecialeFord and Boswell.

House Bill 417 seeks to replace Common Core with the recommendations that the ASRC had originally proposed and then killed in their last meeting.

…The Academic Standards Review Commission (ASRC), which was created by a bill whose title said the ASRC was being created to REPEAL AND REPLACE COMMON CORE, was actually stacked against fulfilling that purpose. Common Core was not repealed and replaced. It was merely renamed and slightly tweaked.

This bill would correct that by requiring that the proposed math standards offered by the Math Work Group of the ASRC actually be adopted, and that the English Language Arts standards offered by Dr. Sandra Stotsky to the State, free of charge, be adopted.

…The bill passed its first reading on March 22nd and has been referred to the Committee on Education – K-12.

The idea of explaining mathematical principles to students at the elementary level (as Common Core did) is valid, but to demand cumbersome solutions to simple addition problems took all the joy out of learning mathematics for these children. It will be wonderful to see that corrected. This bill is definitely a step in the right direction.