The Obama administration’s push for uniform, common-core standards for math could end up conflicting with the president’s call for more college students majoring in STEM: science, technology, engineering and math.

At least that’s the view of an emeritus professor of math at the University of Maryland and of one of the original creators of California’s math standards. At a panel discussion at a math conference in San Francisco last weekend, both criticized the high school graduation standards for college and career readiness that were published last fall by the national organizations leading the common-core initiative.

Jerome Dancis, the emeritus professor, said that college-ready means that students wouldn’t need remediation for a college math course in arithmetic and Algebra. But that doesn’t make the student prepared for a STEM major, which demands fluency in pre-calculus, he said.  Dancis worries that students will arrive on campus thinking they’re ready for STEM, when, having taken only an anemic Algebra II course in line with the common-core standards, they’re not.

Dancis said also that two of the 10 math standards for college and career readiness – probability and statistics – are not necessary for college readiness. Rigorous college courses would do a better job in those areas,  he said. Focusing time on them would divert time that would be better spent on algebra and geometry.

But assume that an understanding of probability and statistics, at a high school level,  would be important for students going on to a two-year degree or a technical job. That points to the question raised by Stanford emeritus Professor Michael Kirst: Where is the evidence that the standards for college and career readiness are the same?

Ze’ev Wurman,  who helped write the state math standards in the ‘90s and served as an education policy adviser in the Bush administration, noted that 40-plus university systems in 23 states have higher admission requirements than would be required under the college and career readiness standards. Key elements of Algebra II have been omitted. If the standards are adopted, state universities will feel pressured to lower their expectations, he said.

William McCallum, a University of Arizona professor who’s overseeing the common-core initiative, said after the discussion that the common-core writers would be revising upward the career and college ready standards, in response to the criticism. And he said that the individual grade standards for high school would make it clear that STEM majors would need to take more advanced math in high school.

By John Fensterwald on January 19th, 2010