The Common Core: Devils and Details
I have the honor of speaking on a panel with other education bloggers at the Network for Public Education Conference in Austin, TX this weekend. Here is some of what I will say.
When I began my journey addressing the Common Core State Standards in my blog one year ago, I was quite naïve. I assumed that the Common Core, for better or worse, was a fait accompli and so I focused on ways to help teachers address the standards without sacrificing what I knew to be exemplary practice in literacy education. As I dug more deeply into the Common Core itself and as I heard statements about close reading, ignoring the role of background knowledge and David Coleman’s famous decree that “nobody gives a shit” about how you think and feel when reading, I began to see how fundamentally flawed the Common Core was.
I investigated the people who wrote the Common Core and the process they followed for implementation and my blog turned from criticism of the standards themselves to concern that people who knew nothing about literacy were telling professionals how to do their job. Finally, with the invaluable help of my fellow bloggers, and after reading books like Reign of Error, by Diane Ravitch and Test and Punish by John Kuhn, I came to the realization that the