[lanewalker]

Hello Math Teacher, As a MO HS math teacher, I definitely feel your pain. MO “voted out” CCSS in 2015. When our rewriting committees got together, they found out what a huge project rewriting is. When they started comparing with old MA standards, old MO and others, I’m thinking they figured out the CCSS writers did a lot better job than they realized because they kept most of CCSS, mostly just tweaking wording…except for Algebra 2. MO Algebra 2 is really bad now. I have gotten involved by volunteering on committees, doing a lot of listening and reading to understand from multiple perspectives. It has eased my frustration to find no one who is intentionally messing up students here in MO.

I agree with you that with unlimited talent and funding, the implementation could have been a lot smoother. It was unfortunate how much time, money, and talent was diverted to politics. I might be wrong, but it seems like the more the CCSS writers and supporters try to help from the top, the more people who do not understand the whole picture feel like CCSS are “top down.” So what I’m trying to say is that I think it’s best to work for change on a state level. I’m seeing some cool progress and you seem to have the passion it takes to make a serious difference in MD as well.

You mentioned not being able to cover all the Alg 2 topics. One tool I’m leveraging is a list of topics commonly found in Algebra that should not be there. It’s linked in the third paragraph from the bottom this article: http://achievethecore.org/aligned/the-power-of-strong-assessments-the-danger-of-bad-ones/ I use this list to help wherever I can to keep the Algebra 2 content manageable.

Here’s another piece where you can see my journey to figure out why Algebra 2 is such a mess: http://achievethecore.org/aligned/8-questions-about-high-school-math-and-stem/

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