Berkeley mathematicians defend Common Core State Standards in a WSJ op-ed

By Steven T. Corneliussen

"The Common Core State Standards Initiative," says its website, "is a state-led effort that established a single set of clear educational standards for kindergarten through 12th grade in English language arts and mathematics that states voluntarily adopt."

"The Common Core State Standards," say two University of California, Berkeley, math professors in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, are "the culmination of a meticulous, 20-year process initiated by the states and involving teachers, educators, business leaders and policy makers from across the country and both sides of the aisle."

The "Common Core State Standards," said a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, "are a thinly veiled, unconstitutional effort to implement a national curriculum...written by left-leaning educational experts."

And as the two Berkeley professors, Edward Frenkel and Hung-Hsi Wu, point out in their WSJ op-ed, the Republican National Committee called the standards a "nationwide straitjacket on academic freedom and achievement."

That committee opposes the standards on grounds of state and local curriculum prerogative. "But this argument," the two mathematicians object, "ignores the fact that mathematics represents objective, timeless and necessary truths. These truths apply uniformly and equally to any citizen, regardless of geographic location. Fractions mean the same thing in Iowa and Alabama as they do in California and Texas."

The standards have been adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia. Frenkel and Wu condemn efforts to repeal them, arguing that US math education "is in deep crisis," with the World Economic Forum ranking US math and science education "a dismal 48th." They add, "This is one of the reasons the 2010 report 'Rising Above the Gathering Storm' by the National Academies warned that America's ability to compete effectively with other nations is fading."

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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.