Thursday, January 10, 2013

I Leave Comments: Nobody is Interested in Standards

The problem is that most of what Ms. Jago discusses here is peripheral to the standards themselves, and when she points out a specific activity: "students compare the lives of the Joads as they left the Dust Bowl to travel west to California in “Grapes of Wrath” with the lives of those who stayed behind through seven years with no rain in Timothy Egan’s “The Worst Hard Time” (winner of the 2006 National Book Award for Nonfiction)," it is one that is NOT covered by the Common Core standards.

One of the outstanding features of the CC standards is that the omit almost all "intertextual" activities. This is very different than the approach taken in high performing countries and formerly in many states.

In many, many schools in the US today, teachers are expected to document what standard each lesson addresses. And all the materials are expected to be strictly aligned to standards. So yes, you could still teach this lesson, but particularly if you were in a school under pressure to raise test scores, you could get a bad evaluation for doing it.

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