Carol Burris, award-winning high school principal in New York, is one of the leading critics of the Common Core standards. She has studied them closely and finds them to be a mess. The problem, she says, is not “implementation,” as their advocates say, but the standards themselves. She notes that teachers’ support for Common Core has rapidly declined. The more teachers use them, the less they like them.

 

In this post, she suggests what must be done to fix them.

 

One possibility is to adopt the Massachusetts standards, which were far superior to the Common Core standards, but Massachusetts dropped them in order to get millions from Arne Duncan. Besides, Arne Duncan, now the czar of American education, might punish states that dare to replace the Common Core standards, even with superior standards like those of Massachusetts.

 

So here is what Burris proposes:

 

1. Insist that the State Education Department rewrite the standards so that they are clear and coherent. She gives examples of standards that are incomprehensible.

 

2. Ask experts on early childhood education to rewrite the standards for pre-K-third grade. They were written without the participation of anyone who understood the developmental needs of young children and need to be completely revised to make sense for young children.

 

3. “Reduce the emphasis on informational text, close reading and Lexile levels.

 

There is no evidence that reading informational text in the early grades will improve reading. Informational text in primary school should be read as a one means of delivering content or included based on student interest. Ratios of 50/50 (informational text/literature) in elementary schools and 70/30 in high school are based on nothing more than breakdowns of text type on National Assessment of Educational Progress tests, not on reading research. The force-feeding of informational texts in the primary years is resulting in the decline of hands on learning in science and projects in social studies, as my teacher’s email attests. At the high school level, literature is being pushed out of English Language Arts to make room for informational text. For example, take a look at the readings of Common Core Engage NY curriculum modules for 9th grade. Literature is minimal, replaced by texts such as “Wizard of Lies,” a biography of Bernie Madoff, and articles that include “Sugar Changed the World,” “Animals in Translation” and “Bangladesh Factory Collapse.”

 

The standards, she writes, overemphasize “close reading,” reading without context, as though young children should be subjected to the ideology of the “New Criticism.” There must be room for teachers to decide whether and when to use literature or informational text. There is no evidence for the standards’ privileging of informational text over literature.

 

In short, the Common Core standards are a mess. They were written in stealth, imposed by the lure of federal dollars, and the resistance to them by the public and by teachers is growing. The only question now is whether the standards can be “fixed” (they are copyrighted and no one is supposed to change them) or whether they will be abandoned altogether.