A correction to an earlier version of this article has been appended to the end of the article.
When Veera Sinha wasa little girl in India, her father asked his kids to solve math puzzles in their heads during dinner. That fond memory is one reason she grew to love numbers and got an MBA in finance. Yet when Sinha sits down to help her seven-year-old daughter Nevya with homework, she’s often stumped.
“My math background is entirely useless when trying to help my first grader with her homework,” says the Fremont mother of two, her voice thick with frustration. “I have to Google all of it.”
Eight years after California adopted new standards designed to boost students’ critical thinking and analytical skills, it’s become clear that a critical group was left behind in the push to implement Common Core: parents.
The good old days of memorizing math formulas or multiplication tables are gone. Instead, Common Core math requires students to show how they reason their way to the right answer. As a result, many parents say homework is far more complicated than it used to be. For example, the right answer to 3×5 isn’t just 15 anymore, as one popular social media post noted. It’s 3+3+3+3+3. And it’s 5+5+5. The new methods leave many parents baffled.
“I despise common core math,” says Katie O’Donnell, a pediatric respiratory therapist who lives in San Jose and often uses math at work. Though she loves volunteering in her son Nima’s class, she admits she sometimes ducks out early because she’s embarrassed that she has no explanations for students who ask for help.
“Nima knows that 23 minus 13 equals 10 and so do I, but neither of us understand the darn steps we are supposed to use to show how we got to that conclusion,” says O’Donnell. “The diagrams are absolutely insane.”
Her husband, an electrical engineer, doesn’t understand the diagrams either, she says. “We need a Common Core support group.”
Indeed, Common Core has spawned a cottage industry of guide books, YouTube tutorials and Facebook memes that feed off parental frustration. From the dad in “Incredibles 2” to the legions of parents venting on social media, Common Core math has been driving parents crazy since its inception. One popular meme makes fun of the complexity of solving 568 minus 293 under the new methods.
Common Core, a national set of educational standards adopted in 2010, established reading and math benchmarks that children must reach from kindergarten through 12th grade. Proponents — which include teachers’ unions and the PTA, as well as many education experts and policy makers — say Common Core will increase the rigor and quality of American education. That’s because the curriculum pushes students to understand math on a deeper level, digging into the reasoning behind an equation instead of just getting the answer, they say. That mental dexterity is key to success at college and in today’s workplaces.
“The idea is to promote critical thinking,” says Arun Ramanathan, a former teacher who now runs Pivot Learning, an Oakland-based nonprofit providing training and support to California schools. “It’s not as straightforward as it used to be. The idea is to have a conversation about how to solve the problem.”
Buteven Ramanathan, who has a doctorate from Harvard and a background in teaching, admits to struggling with his daughter’s seventh grade assignments.
Under the new standards, simple math often requires multiple methods of solving. Instead of two or three steps to figure out an equation, there might be eight or ten required to show your thinking. There have also been changes made to reading instruction, which is now called English Language Arts, but they have generated less controversy among parents.
The results of the switch to Common Corehave been mixed. California, which has historically placed near the bottom of national education rankings, made some gains in 2017. But statewide student results on the Smarter Balanced assessment, a standardized test that measures knowledge of the Common Core standards in grades 3 to 8 and grade 11, were essentially flat in 2016-17 from the previous year.
While Common Core makes a lot of sense as a theory, some say, there is much that can go awry in practice, from the quality of materials to teacher training. Because Common Core provides only a set of goals for students to reach, much is left to interpretation.
“There’s a lot of gray area and that can be dangerous,” says Stephanie Lathrop, a Walnut Creek mother of three. “Sometimes there’s so much gray area that even I can’t understand it and I have a master’s degree.”
For instance, Common Core emphasizes skills such as “making an inference” and “drawing conclusions.” But abstractions are hard to explain to younger students who are still sounding out words.
Natalie Wexler, an education writer for Forbes, recalls visiting a first-grade class where a young girl had been given a passage to read about Brazil. When the worksheet instructions asked the girl to “draw conclusions,” she thought that meant draw clowns, which she did. Happily.
“In a case like that, you’re not going to get anything out of it,” says Wexler.
Some parents cope by doing their own homework, digging into YouTube tutorials or poring over guides such as “Common Core Math For Parents For Dummies” and the “Parents’ Guide to Common Core Arithmetic: How to Help Your Child.”
Lindsay Schroedter has plowed through many videos and books to help her eight-year-old son Aidan with his third-grade math homework. On most school nights, she works with him for 90 minutes to two hours. Then her husband, Jeff, an engineer, solves the questions and reverse engineers Common Core answers so they can show their work.
“It’s exhausting. The whole family shouldn’t have to spend so much time figuring out the homework,” says Schroedter, as her one-year-old Avery romps about their Dublin home. “Every night, we have a full-on stare down at the kitchen table because he can get the answer but he doesn’t get the diagrams and the sequencing. It drives us crazy.”
Even children who are nimble with numbers bristle at the plethora of diagrams and steps that Common Core requires, parents say.
“Some kids can do the math in their head,” says Sinha. “They get frustrated when they are marked down for not showing their work the Common Core way.”
In the end, Schroedter had a talk with her son:“I told him that I know it doesn’t make any sense. I know it sucks,” she recalls. “We feel you but there is nothing we can do about it. It is what it is. This is what the school wants.”
Certainly there is a huge gap to be bridged if parents are supposed to be part of the learning process.
“Parents should be able to help,” says Ramanathan, “and there’s not been enough attention paid to how we can help support them do that.”
“When parents don’t feel empowered, no matter how smart they are, then we have a problem,” agrees Sherry Griffith, executive director of the California PTA. She advises parents to suggest that their school hold “Math Nights” for parents to bone up on the new methods.
O’Donnell says she gave up on helping her son because she just “screws it up.” Her son can go it alone, but she worries about those who can’t and turn to their parents in vain.
“They get forgotten,” says O’Donnell.
While it’s easy for parents to blame teachers for their frustrations, experts say that teachers are often in the same boat as parents. They too are straining to adjust to the new methods.
“Teachers are struggling to adapt the curriculum to their classrooms,” says Dean Ballard, a former teacher and director of Mathematics for CORE, an Oakland-based organization that works with teachers on how to implement the standards. “It’s sink-or-swim with 30 kids staring at you.”
Sinha fears that Common Core will cause American students to fall even further behind other countries. The U.S. ranked 38th out of 71 countries in math in 2015, according to the most recent results of an international student assessment that measures reading and math ability.
“If we want our kids to compete against people from China and India,” says Sinha, who works in pricing strategy in the high-tech industry, “we need to stick to the traditional mental math shortcuts.”
Ramanthan says that’s precisely what Common Core is trying to get away from. “This is not about rote learning,” he says. “It’s about creating a deeper conceptual framework you can build on.”
But as Griffiths points out, children are not the only ones who need to be periodically assessed.
“It’s eight years out and we’re due for an analysis of how this is working,” says Griffiths. “I’m a big believer in policy reflection and revision. It’s time for a review. How are we doing?”
Correction: June 18, 2018
An earlier version of this story contained an error in the fourth illustration in the gallery at the top of the story. In the long division problem used as an example under the heading “area model,” the right column showed 7 minus 0 equals 0. It should have read 7 minus 7 equals 0.
