Monday, January 21, 2013

Another Peculiar Common Core Example

NPR:

To get students to think deeper about a story, for example, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel with deceptively simple language, is paired with Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece that alleges it is an elitist story.

"So the students find that there's a purpose in the reading that may not have been as apparent before," she says.

That's nice, but it is not supported by the reading literature standards, which are pointedly uninterested in historical context, and especially uninterested in criticism based on race, class and gender.

To be clear, I'm not saying "Don't do that assignment," I'm saying, "Isn't it peculiar that over and over again the examples of new assignments to meet the demands of the Common Core don't reflect the emphasis of the actual standards?"

I'm not even sure what this means.

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