Think 5+5+5=15? Under Common Core: You FAIL!

If you want some idea why “Common Core” is so unpopular, just do the math.

Specifically, solve the problem 5×3. And show your work.

If you wrote “5+5+5=15,” you’re wrong.

What about 4×6?

Again, if you wrote “4+4+4+4+4+4=24,” you’re wrong again.

This is the kind of nonsense that parents – including myself – have to put up with when trying to help their kids with their homework. It’s also one reason that schools, districts and entire states across the country are ditching the “Common Core” standard.

The image above was posted to Reddit and shows a teacher marking two math questions incorrectly. When the student tries to solve “5×3” and “6×4” using what’s called the “repeated addition” method, they get it wrong. It should be “five sets of three” and “four sets of six” rather than “three sets of five” and “six sets of four” or some such baloney.

They’re both mathematically correct, but under Common Core, only one answer is graded as correct.

Defenders of Common Core say this method will help when students do more advanced math, like matrices in multivariate calculus in high school.

But when students take this garbage home and parents get the answers wrong trying to help their small children, it’s infuriating.

There are terms – in my son’s homework – that I’ve never seen before in a math class. Terms like “area model,” pictogram” and “rectangular array. They solve math problems by drawing boxes on top of boxes and hashmarks as far as the eye can see.

Common Core was designed to be able to measure achievement across the country, but with more and more schoolsdropping out, Common Core becomes less “common,” and therefore worthless.

It’s more than the stupid homework assignments and quizzes that confound parents.

On the right, Tea Party conservatives have balked at what they view as an Obama-endorsed federal overhaul, even as establishment Republicans like former Gov. Jeb Bush voice their support for standardized testing and accountability.  On the left, unions and others have increasingly questioned it.

Because the Obama Administration is totally tone deaf, Education Secretary Arne Duncan quipped that the opposition was from “white suburban moms who—all of a sudden—their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”