Marc Tucker says I am wrong for saying I cannot support the Common Core.

Unlike me, he says they need no field testing, no trial.

He doesn’t worry–as I do–that they are developmentally inappropriate for the early grades.

He doesn’t worry–as I do–that the rigor-rigor-rigor that is so widely hailed might widen the achievement gap and discourage struggling students.

He doesn’t worry that reactionary groups and entrepreneurs are excited about the prospect that Common Core will cause test scores to plummet. In every state.

How can he be so sure that the Common Core will do no harm?

I don’t know.

A comment from a teacher.

She writes:

I work with gifted students in an affluent district and I’m quite concerned with Common Core. Diane’s article points out some very serious flaws in how this is being foisted on states and thus, schools, teachers and the children in them. The students I work with will likely do well regardless, but I sense CC is created specifically to destroy public education by creating an environment where many are guaranteed to fail, much to the delight of non-educators behind this movement. Even gifted students, I fear, will find little in CC to inspire, motivate and guide them to find their areas of greatest passion and achievement and explore that area in all its depth and complexity. It will, however, develop in them a loathing of school drudgery by its heavy-handed sameness. Already our students have lost the freedom to accelerate, compact and skip previously mastered curriculum because of CC.

Gifted students who are just learning English, come from diverse cultures, live in poverty or have specific disabilities will be hog-tied by their “deficits” to the point where their giftedness is neither acknowledged nor addressed.

I have thought, ever since NCLB, that there is a determination to drive out of public education the difficult students, i.e. those who are cognitively, ethnically, culturally, or linguistically diverse or disabled. This is just the latest step in that direction.

Initially, we were told that it would be possible at some point for all students to be successful. Assessment was designed to create a culture where all students would, in a few years, be “Proficient and Above.” The Bell Curve was out. The reality is that the finish line (the level at which one must achieve to be designated proficient/successful) has constantly and continuously been moving. The reason is to ensure that we would *never* reach that point and that there would always be failures. CC is the next step in ensuring failure – the real, although largely unspoken, goal.

Kay McSpadden, a high school English teacher in York, S.C., was told by school officials that English classes would have to stop teaching literature due to the new Common Core standards. She knows that isn’t true, and David Coleman (“the architect of the Common Core standards”) has said it isn’t true. But the word reaching the field is that informational text is supposed to replace literature.

For no good reason, the Common Core standards decree that the balance between literature and informational text in elementary school should be 50-50, and in the upper grades it should be 70% informational text and 30% literature.

This is nutty on its face. First of all, the ratios have no rhyme or reason (oops, forget the reference to rhyme, that’s literary!). Since the National Assessment of Educational Progress uses these ratios as instruction to test developers, that is somehow holy writ. But it is not. The ratios were never intended to dictate what is taught.

Second, if you add up all the reading that students encounter across science, mathematics, history, and other subjects, English teachers could teach no informational text at all, and the student would still get at least 70% informational text. (Heaven forbid that a history class should read The Grapes of Wrath to learn about the Depression!). In short, there is no reason, NO REASON, for any English teacher to stop teaching literature.

But what David Coleman meant and what is being told to schools across America are not the same thing. Teachers and textbook publishers are not hearing what he said.

David, I think you need to revise the Common Core standards and loudly proclaim that you are personally canceling out the 50-50, 70-30 ratios. It was all a terrible misunderstanding.