David Brooks Hearts Common Core
If you haven’t heard already, New York Times columnist, David Brooks, the liberals' favorite conservative, wrote a column yesterday supporting the Common Core and characterizing critics on the right and left as members of a “circus.”
My blogger colleagues Mercedes Schneider (deutsch29) and Aaron Barlow (Academe blog) have already done a wonderful job of critiquing Brooks’ peculiar journey into Common Core Wonderland, so I encourage you to visit their blogs for a full discussion of Brooksian misinformation.
There is one statement in Brooks’ column, however, that really frosts my literacy teaching pumpkin. So, I feel compelled to address that one statement here.
In a discussion of how superior the Common Core is to prior standards, champion of the Core Brooks says:
The [Common Core] English standards encourage reading comprehension. Whereas the old standards frequently encouraged students to read a book and then go off and write a response to it, the new standards encourage them to go back to the text and pick out specific passages for study and as evidence.
That’s right folks in the old bad days BCC (Before Common Core), we teachers did not encourage reading comprehension, we just sent our little cherubs off to respond to what they read willy nilly. This claim is so far out of bounds as to be ludicrous. But it is typical of Core advocates, who seem to think the Russ on Reading: David Brooks Hearts Common Core: