Reflections on Teaching » Blog Archive » Why other State Governors wanted Common Core (and why Texas probably doesn’t)

Reflections on Teaching » Blog Archive » Why other State Governors wanted Common Core (and why Texas probably doesn’t):

Why other State Governors wanted Common Core (and why Texas probably doesn’t)

In WARNING: THE COMMON CORE STANDARDS MAY BE HARMFUL TO CHILDREN | Education News, a principal from Texas takes a look at the Common Core standards and concludes that they are developmentally inappropriate for K-5. She has some really great examples in primary, but I wanted to share this one for fifth grade:

In most of the Reading/Information standards, the same expectations for describing complex relationships among multiple items appear: (RI.5.5) Compare and contrast the overall structure (e.g., chronology, comparison, cause/effect, problem/solution) of events, ideas, concepts, or information in two or more texts.
For 5th graders, this standard would be even more difficult to meet than the previous one because it asks them to carry out two different operations on two or more texts that almost certainly differ in content, style, and organization.

And here is the “old” California standard (pre-Common Core):

Structural Features of Informational Materials
2.1 Identify structural patterns found in informational text (e.g., compare and contrast, cause
and effect, sequential or chronological order, proposition and support) to strengthen
comprehension.

This is not the fifth grade standard, but a fourth grade one. This is a