An Open Letter to the Louisiana Standards Review Committee
Dear Louisiana Standards Review Committee Members:
One of my principal concerns with the Common Core State Standards in English language arts (CCSS ELA) is its divorcing of textual understanding from context. (For an excellent explanation of this CCSS quality of isolating texts from their contexts, see this piece written by New York teacher education professor, Daniel Katz.)
The public survey format for CCSS in Louisiana fosters this divorcing of CCSS from context as any commentary on CCSS must be molded to fit the current structure of CCSS ELA and math, and in line-item-response fashion, at that.
No room to step back and consider CCSS context in the survey. And yet, it is beyond time for Louisiana to consider CCSS within some context.
In May 2009, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and then-State Superintendent Paul Pastorek signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to commit Louisiana to be “state led” and participate in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) Initiative.
On June 02, 2010, CCSS was officially completed and released to the public.
Just under one month later, on July 01, 2010, the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) recorded in its minutes that it had adopted CCSS.
And what would have been sensible– what would have offered context to any consideration of replacing the Louisiana state ELA and math standards with CCSS– never happened:
A deliberate and detailed comparison of the current Louisiana ELA and math standards to CCSS.
It would have been wise for Louisiana to critically weight its adoption of what was An Open Letter to the Louisiana Standards Review Committee | deutsch29: