Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), who is running for president, commented on Common Core state standards at an education summit in New Hampshire hosted by The Seventy Four, an education news website. During a conversation on Common Core with the site’s founder, Campbell Brown, Jindal said he was concerned about the federal government taking over U.S. history classes.
“What if Obama’s administration were proposing American history standards? It would be about victimhood. It would be about America’s shortcomings and failures,” Jindal said.
He also added that he didn’t think the president believed in “American exceptionalism.”
The idea that history classes, and other topics such as sex education, are included in the Common Core is one of the major misconceptions about Common Core. It only focuses on mathematics and English language arts. But fears around how teachers approach U.S. history classes has long been a conservative cause celebre.
The College Board came under fire in 2012 because of a lack of information on the founding fathers and World War II victories and more emphasis on slavery and violence against Native Americans in their A.P. U.S. history guidelines. After years of outcry from conservative groups, such as the Republican National Committee and Republican state legislators across the country, the College Board decided to include the founding fathers in its most recent guidelines. It also was amended to include the term Jindal uses, “American exceptionalism,” which conservatives demanded be mentioned in U.S. history classes.
During the conversation on Common Core, Jindal also took a shot at conceptual math, saying that his son shouldn’t have to take six steps instead of one, which Brown challenged.
“Doing Common Core math with my son, the way they teach math … This isn’t complicated. You and I would have learned through carrying the one, and now you have six steps … My little boy had the answer right, but when they wanted the steps … He wrote ‘just because it is’ for every single question, and the teacher marked it wrong … I couldn’t tell him and say he was wrong. This is not an intuitive way to teach math.”
Brown responded by saying, “My son is pretty good at math … I didn’t understand because that’s not how I was taught, but I was fascinated by how much better he understood that problem than when I did rote memorization. Are you willing to evolve even though that scares you a little?”
Jindal said that most teachers were frustrated with the standards and that parents should have the choice to send their children to schools that teach Common Core standards, but he said that he wants parents to be able to understand the math.
“I don’t mind my kids learning advanced math but I disagree. I want parents to be able to help kids with their homework but third, we either think parents and local communities are smart enough to adopt tough standards for their kids or it will only happen if people in D.C. make the standards because they’re smarter than us.”
According to a report released last week by The Center for American Progress, students better understand basic math concepts that allow them to move onto more complex math problems if teachers use conceptual math. For instance, a student who has a procedural but not conceptual understanding of math may believe 1.15 is bigger than 1.5, since 15 is a greater number than 5.