answer:This is what happens when you design a curriculum around theory and testing instead of practice and pedagogy. Mathematical theory is very interesting, but there’s a reason we don’t teach it until the college level. And even though it can help you understand how math works and why we teach math the way we do (or used to do), that sort of conceptual understanding is not a good place to start. It’s taught to education majors so that they can recognize what sort of problem a particular student is having and figure out alternative ways of explaining concepts to people struggling with the subject. It makes math easier to understand for those who already grasp the basics, but it does little to nothing for those still trying to remember their multiplication tables. The basic idea of the Common Core—a national standard for what students should know by when—is fairly unobjectionable. Its execution, however, has been as bad as any recent attempt at national education reform. Race to the Top is as big a failure as No Child Left Behind, and for exactly the same reason: it doesn’t recognize the difference between performance on a test and proficiency in a skill. We’re never going to keep up with other countries until we stop thinking of education as a numbers game (particularly not if we keep thinking of it as a short-term numbers game).