That Dog Won’t Hunt
by Robert PondiscioAugust 16th, 2012
“How many legs does a dog have if you call its tail a leg?” Abraham Lincoln is famously reported to have asked. Four, said Abe. “Because calling it a leg doesn’t make it one.”
And calling your ELA curriculum Common Core aligned doesn’t mean it really is.
At Fordham’s Common Core Watch blog last week, Kathleen Porter-Magee posted a piece that deserves more attention. It’s an eye-opening look at how literacy guru Lucy Calkins is “rewriting the Common Core” to basically argue for the same old literacy practices that have largely failed our students. A new book by Calkins, Mary Ehrenworth and Christopher Lehman, Pathways to the Common Core “sounds like a useful resource that ELA teachers can use to figure out how to align their instruction to the new standards,” writes Porter-Magee. However…
“Unfortunately, it misses the mark. Part ideological co-opting of the Common Core (CCSS) and part defense of existing—and poorly aligned—