The United States Common Core Standards Should Be Repealed

Judge, the common core standards are proven to cause intense frustration among students, parents, and teachers. It is harder to control what children are learning, rendering it inefficient, and they are unrealistic! Why are we sticking with this, It was worth a shot but now that we know it doesn't work, they should be repealed. We are harming our children's education, the opposite of what theses standards were supposed to do! Therefore the common core standards should be repealed. 1) The Common Core Standards cause intense frustration. These common core standards are causing teachers, parents, and students to be frustrated. According to the New York Times, children are frustrated by too many steps when solving problems Our prior methods for solving things such as math problems worked before, why should we change them now? An example posed by the Economist tells the story of a man in Washington. He got a near perfect score in Trigonometry and is working as an engineer, but he couldn't understand his fifth grade son's division homework. According to Forbes, one man posted a similar statement on his Twitter and within 3 days he had over a million responses saying that this was happening to them too. This is a lot of people suffering from these standards. Even supporters of these standards say they are being pushed too hard and too quickly. James Milark, one of the three main writers of these standards, says that he wished they had never been implemented. Rushing to push new curriculum does not make sense if you are planning to get it done in a rational way, he told the Los Angeles Times. It is not working as planned. He said that although it was supposed to be educational guidelines, it has now turned into a quote end quote "massive stress ball that hangs over the entire school." And it's true! Educational experts say that although a new curriculum may do well in a test classroom, those rooms are led by professors. When these concepts are led by teachers who are not well trained, the methods can become a jumbled mess. And this is exactly what is happening! Laci Maniscalco, a fourth grade teacher in Louisiana, says that almost every day her students cry because they cannot understand what they are learning. Some of them used to love math, and now it makes them cry." And they have reason to be frustrated! According to the New York Times, the standards for Kindergarten are things such as being able to count to 100. This is unrealistic, as the average kindergartener can only count to 20. The impact of this, is that nearly every parent of a K-12 child, teacher, and student in the United States is being affected negatively by these standards, and that is over half the population. This has a large impact, and we need to eradicate these standards. 2. This kills children's creativity. According to Forbes, this 'drill and grill' method of teaching has taken the fun, play-based, active learning out of many kindergartens. According to the New York Times, until you are 8 or so, your brain is not wired to functionally handle this kind of learning. These standards give 6 to 8 hour tests, even for 5 and 6 year olds! I'm sure you are aware of the short attention spans people this young have. How can they be expected to learn well in an environment like this? Isn't it United State's goal to create well rounded children prepared for citizenship and life? Now it's just test prep. With all the ELA and Math young students are now doing in school, they have no time to do other things such as playing games and doing craft projects. People are saying that we need children to have this intense education to give them higher thinking skills, and so that they can learn more. I would like to use Google, a popular search engine, as an example. Although we do need the engineers to run Google, and solve its problems, that is only a small part of a big picture. We also need marketers, to design the logo and create advertisements, relations people, to convince others to install Google, and the geniuses behind Google, the creative minds who made this idea up by themselves. As you can see, only a small amount of these jobs actually require intense mathematical critical thinking skills, where the majority rely on creativity and social smarts, which children are having no time to learn due to these new standards. And as I mentioned earlier, your brain stops changing as quickly around age 8, so if your brain is being bombarded with test prep and you never have time to express your creativity before then, chances are you will never really be able to. The impact of this is that if we want our world to succeed, and work like it does today, then we will need creative minds. However, if we kill all our children's creativity before they have a chance to find it, it will be a world of engineers, not thinkers and problem solvers. Think of all the problem solvers in our community today. Police officers, detectives, lawyers, mathematicians (who need not only math skills but thinking out of the box too) entertainers, the list is endless! Judge, as you can see, we need creativity, and the impact of not having it would be huge. Thank you, and this is why the Proposition should win this debate. SOURCES 1) http://www.nytimes.com... 2) http://www.nytimes.com... 3) http://www.nytimes.com... 4) http://www.nytimes.com... 5) http://articles.latimes.com... 6) http://articles.latimes.com... 7) http://www.economist.com... 8) http://www.economist.com... 9) http://www.economist.com... 10) http://www.forbes.com... 11) http://www.forbes.com... Just a note, I apologize if you see any weird characters scattered throughout the argument (ex a"@'&) I wrote this on Word originally and every punctuation mark turned into a group of random symbols. I tried to go around and change them, but I apologize if I missed a few..there were like 150 punctuation marks.