Monday, March 15, 2010

What Literacy Standards?

Perhaps the strangest thing about this article in the February Phi Delta Kappan by Vicki Phillips and Carina Wong from Gates is that they seem to think that the two parts of the Common Core Standards are in math and "literacy." They aren't! It is math and "English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies and Science." This confusion is part of the reason they're such a mess! If they were clearly, only "college-ready literacy" standards, odd and ill-conceived as that formulation might be, they'd make some sort of sense. Add the burden of defining the discipline of English and/or Language Arts for a generation of English teachers and students, and the whole thing collapses.

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