[9 August 2014. Please go here for an updated version of this post.]

There’s a lot of misinformation going around these days about how the Common Core State Standards were written. It occurred to me that a simple way of learning about the process is through the press releases from the National Governors Association during 2009–2010. If you type Common Core into the search box you will find releases detailing the initial agreement of the Governors, the composition of the work teams, feedback groups, and validation committee, the state and public reviews, and various other pieces of information. It’s not a detailed history by any means, but I would encourage readers to check information they receive against this source.

[19 June] I noticed the search feature at NGA isn’t working today, so here are the main releases for 2009–2010:

• 1 June 2009, Forty-Nine States and Territories Join Common Core Standards Initiative
• 1 September 2009, Fifty-One States And Territories Join Common Core State Standards Initiative
• 21 September 2009, Common Core State Standards Available for Comment
• 24 September 2009, Common Core State Standards Initiative Validation Committee Announced
• 10 November 2009, Common Core State Standards K-12 Work and Feedback Groups Announced
• 10 March 2010, Draft K-12 Common Core State Standards Available for Comment
• 2 June 2010, National Governors Association and State Education Chiefs Launch Common State Academic Standards

Grant Wiggins has a great post about the dangers of breaking the standards down into statements of the finest possible grain size:

This problem of turning everything into “microstandards” is a problem of long standing in education. One might even say it is the original sin in curriculum design. Take a complex whole, divide into the simplest and most reductionist bits, string them together and call it a curriculum. Though well-intentioned, it leads to fractured, boring, and useless learning of superficial bits.

Read also his spirited defense of the standards a couple of days earlier.

Once every few months or so I receive a message about the following standard:

6.G.2. Find the volume of a right rectangular prism with fractional edge lengths by packing it with unit cubes of the appropriate unit fraction edge lengths, and show that the volume is the same as would be found by multiplying the edge lengths of the prism. Apply the formulas $V=lwh$ and $V=bh$ to find volumes of right rectangular prisms with fractional edge lengths in the context of solving real-world and mathematical problems.

See if you can guess what people think the problem is before reading on. Continue reading →