Since math and readling/language arts portions of Common Core have met with disdain (unexpected!), the science portion of the Common Core test has a different name entirely: Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Although they are trying to remain below the radar, it IS the science portion of Common Core.
It is rare for a parent to struggle through a year of elementary school Common Core math lessons and not hate it. I actually yelled at my eight year old son that yes, I oppose it, but it is still his homework, so we have to hate doing it together.
The teacher last year tried to tell me that some parents just don’t get the terminology or concepts, and that it is easy to struggle when it is unfamiliar. I explained to her that as two engineers, with a husband who tutored everything from algebra to Calculus 3, and I tutored elementary math to pay bills in high school and college, any difficulty with an eight year old’s homework is the presentation and structure - NOT the parents.
AKA, her default answer was to politely say parents were dumb.
My eight year old had assignments ranging from algebra (but not structured as X squared = 25 find X) to complex word problems that made you wonder what exactly it was asking to “explain the reasoning” and a failure to say something the teacher deemed reasonable was an F. A math problem with the right answer was WRONG. We resorted a few times to “the calculator said I’m right” or “my mom explained it” or “I thought it out in my head with lots of words” to just get through the section.
And I know many parents who feel the same way, which is why both my oldest’s middle school and younger one’s elementary have left common core.