At the same time that they decided to teach a dozen new concepts, they also did away with the idea of teaching until the students mastered the subject. They began teaching in a spiral design.
So, for a few days kids will be taught about addition, then go on to something else, then go on to a third, fourth, fifth subject. Then they come back around to addition, but the kids who didn't have mastery over the subject were lost. How can you remember something and build on it, if you never understood it in the first place?
So, they reduced the time kids spent becoming proficient with basic calculations, they tossed in a whole bunch of new ideas and mixed it all up so that few of the kids could get a handle on any of it.
“At the same time that they decided to teach a dozen new concepts, they also did away with the idea of teaching until the students mastered the subject. They began teaching in a spiral design.
“So, for a few days kids will be taught about addition, then go on to something else, then go on to a third, fourth, fifth subject. Then they come back around to addition, but the kids who didn’t have mastery over the subject were lost. How can you remember something and build on it, if you never understood it in the first place?
“So, they reduced the time kids spent becoming proficient with basic calculations, they tossed in a whole bunch of new ideas and mixed it all up so that few of the kids could get a handle on any of it.”
That’s an interesting observation but not consistent with my experience in homeschooling. What you describe is definitely the curriculum approach William Bennett’s K-12 curriculum uses and that is what we use.
I can see the spiral in our teaching materials. But in fact, our son does retain enough of the earlier treatment of a particular subject to build on it next time he sees it. To be sure, there have been some times when we just stopped and did the same lesson over and over until he got it (second grade coin counting and conditional probability comes to mind). But we worked until I could tell he understood what was going on. Drill to perfection? No.
On the other hand, some of the material is so easy (because of the earlier exposure) that we blow thru 6-7 lessons in a day.
So maybe the core curriculum is better suited to a homeschool environment where you can selectively stop and concentrate for a while or spend some time straightening out the highway.
But math is far more than arithmetic. No reason kids shouldn’t be exposed to more than arithmetic. While I value competency in math facts, it is far more important to understand the ideas. I make much of my living on my math skills and I still have to stop and figure out 9x6. I do 10x6 and subtract. But I never learned math facts in the 1950’s style curriculum because it bored me. I checked out until high-school, when it got more interesting. Somewhere along the way, I missed multiplication and division facts. It doesn’t hinder me at all. I understand (usually) the problem and how to solve it. The computation is just detail.
I will admit I was worried in 2nd and 3rd grade that my boy wasn’t going to know his math facts because we did not drill them the same way I did when I was in school. Surprisingly (to me), he just finished fourth grade and knows them cold.
So maybe the error in the core curriculum idea is that it does not work in a mass education environment. But, imho, few things do, which is why we homeschool.