Wednesday, August 15, 2012

I'm Losing My Patience With This Crap

Me commenting on Kathleen Porter-Magee's post on Shanker Blog:

As usual, Ms. Porter-Magee fails in one of the basic aspects of the Common Core expectations, citing evidence for her argument from the text.

Here’s the typical form of reading standard 10 (it has many, many variations on the theme):

By the end of year, read and comprehend informational texts, including history/social studies, science, and technical texts, in the grades 4–5 text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range.

Let’s apply standard four here (“Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone.”). Why does standard 10 begin by specifying “By the end of…?”

It seems to me that “By the end of…” clearly indicates that the standards do not place any requirements on the complexity of texts used throughout the year. The goal is simply that students should be reading on grade level by the end of the year. Has that ever NOT been the goal of reading standards? Is there an example of state standards that do not call for students to read grade level texts by the end of the year?

If the standard as written means that students should be reading texts at grade level throughout the entire year, how would a standard that only requires students to read grade level at the end of the year be different?

I don’t really have a dog in this hunt ideologically. It just annoys me to see such baldfaced misrepresentations of clearly written standards.

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