First I would like to say the obvious answer to our education problem is of coirse privatization. Having our colleges face the scrutiny of free markets is the reason we rank 1st in college education. Not just rank 1st but dominate the college landscape.
That being said, is common core really that much worse than what we have now? It might be even a little better from what I have seen. If you don't think the department of education federalized the schools along time ago, you are delusional.
Now, I have heard a lot of complaints about common core math. My wife was telling me how they're teaching math a new way and it has kids crying and parents confused. I'm a mechanical engineer with a stronger math background than a fair share of the population, so I had to take a look. There was actually a site dedicated to critisizing specific common core math problems. Besides the few grammatical mistakes that are to be expected from a new text, I like what I saw.
Most people learned addition, subtraction, multiplication, ect. through memorization. This works OK, but has serious limitations. The most obvious is that someone's computational speed will slow down significantly over time. There are other interesting downfalls as well. So everyone knows what 8+8 equals, but does everyone know what 8+8 equals in base 7? No, because you didn't memorize base 7, you only memorized base 10. Common core math tries to train people to solve math problems by breaking the down into simpler concepts. I noticed many of these concepts are ones I employ myself. I developed these skills mostly because I was bad at memorization. This simplification process served me well. I scored a 100% on every differential equation test I had in college.
I think the biggest reason teachers and parents don't like common core math is because they don't understand it, and are reluctant to change their ways. I rember in 5th grade we were given an assignment where everyone had to make up something to teach the class. Most of the kids made up a board game and taught it to the class. I made up a new way to do subtraction. My method went like this:
Suppose you were subtracting 17 from 25. For my method and the original you put 17 under 25. With the original method you take a 1 from 2 so you are subtracting 5 from 17 instead of 7. My way utililized a new method to combat this. Instead of turning 7 into 17, you subtract 5 from 7 and then subtract that from 10. When you did this you had to remember to subtract 1 from the 10s place, same as when you do a carry with the original method.
The idea was that you were replacing one operation with two easier ones. Now I know the original operation wasn't that hard, but this still had some validity to it, and is an impress concept for a 5th grader to come up with in my humble opinion. Anyway, the point of this was that my class literly shit a brick. All I heard was screams of, "You can't change how you do subtraction. Rabble Rabble." I couldn't believe how resistant these people were to change when it came to something like math. They learned it one way, and that was the way they were going to do it. They wouldn't even consider weighing the advantages of one method over the other. I think this is the real problem most people have with common core math.
