I am a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Between 2007 and 2009 I served as a senior policy adviser at the U.S. Department of Education. I served as a commissioner on the California Academic Content Standards Commission that in 2010 evaluated the Common Core’s suitability for California adoption. I have authored multiple academic studies evaluating the Common Core mathematics standards. I am also an executive in a semiconductor start-up company in the Silicon Valley.

In my testimony today I will address the following two points.

• That the Common Core’s reduced rigor in K-8 will directly lead to reduced enrollment particularly of disadvantaged and minority students in advanced mathematics courses in high school, and is bound to harm their chances to pursue challenging and rewarding careers.
• That the Next Generation Science Standards, developed by Achieve and considered for adoption by Ohio, consist of low-level science expectations that do not promote the necessary skills for developing skilled scientists and technologists. They are geared towards making students into technology consumers rather than technology developers.

Rigor of Mathematics in K-8

Since the 1990s, a major thrust in improving our mathematics achievement has been the effort to move an authentic Algebra 1 course from the high school and into grade 8, similar to what high-achieving countries have been doing for a long time. Supporters of this idea include math education reformers, civil right leaders such as Robert Moses, and even President Clinton during his time in office. As the consequence, the nation more than doubled the enrollment of 8th graders in Algebra 1 course since 1990. More recently the Presidential National Mathematics Advisory Panel recommended:

All school districts should ensure that all prepared students have access to an authentic algebra course—and should prepare more students than at present to enroll in such a course by Grade 8.

This call for more prepared students to take early Algebra was echoed in the 2008 clarion call for Common Core, the Benchmarking for Success report written by the three progenitors of the Common Core– National Governors Association, Council of Chief State School Officers and Achieve Inc. It said:

Action I: Upgrade state standards by adopting a common core of internationally benchmarked standards in math and language arts for grades K-12 to ensure that students are equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills to be globally competitive.

Benchmarking for Success has called, then, for what has later became known as the Common Core State Standards. It then goes on to declare:

Research has revealed striking similarities among the math and science standards in top-performing nations, along with stark differences between those world class expectations and the standards adopted by most U.S. states. ... By the eighth grade, students in top performing nations are studying algebra and geometry, while in the U.S., most eighth-grade math courses focus on arithmetic.

Yet when the Common Core standards were published a little more than a year later, in the summer of 2010, they firmly placed the first algebra course in ... the high school!