Dive Brief:

• Marina Ratner, a math professor at the University of California, Berkeley, investigated the Common Core math standards and was disappointed by what she sees as simplicity and lower expectations.  
• According to Ratner, the old California standards were far more rigorous and also pushed students more. With the new standards, topics like calculus, pre-calculus, algebra II, and geometry were either removed, watered down, or pushed back to higher grades. 
• Ratner's grandson attends a public school in Berkeley where the standards are being used, giving her insight on both the standards and how they're being taught. A major issue she saw was the emphasis on drawing "visual models and creating stories."

Dive Insight:

"While model drawing might occasionally be useful, mathematics is not about visual models and 'real world' stories," Ratner writes in the Wall Street Journal regarding the emphasis on drawings that she saw throughout the year in her grandson's assignments. "It became clear to me that the Common Core's 'deeper' and 'more rigorous' standards mean replacing math with some kind of illustrative counting saturated with pictures, diagrams and elaborate word problems. Simple concepts are made artificially intricate and complex with the pretense of being deeper—while the actual content taught was primitive." 

What's interesting about Ratner is that she is a math expert, so she has more of an understanding about what should be expected in standards than some of the other talking heads in the Common Core debate. In fact, Ratner wasn't initially opposed to the standards. When she first read about them, she was intrigued, believing they must be really "special" if the U.S. spent millions of dollars to create something new, versus just using a curriculum and textbook that was already working in another country.