Wednesday, March 19, 2014

How You Can Tell Common Core ELA/Literacy Advocates Actually Hate the Damn Things

Following Kathleen Porter-Magee's advice, as I always do, I checked out Louisiana's new Instructional Materials Evaluation Tool for Alignment in ELA Grades 3 -12 (IMET). What's bizarre about it is that there is essentially nothing requiring alignment to specific enumerated standards, eg:

  • Does the text illustrate and require "strong and thorough textual evidence" at the 9th grade level?

I'm pretty sure every major Common Core advocate I've run into would scoff at the very idea of such a thing and mock it as an example of how not to use the standards. So narrow and pedantic! Can't you see the big shifts? That's where the action is!

Yeah, ok, but... that's the way the standards are written, and I thought standards were important?

So the rubric is mostly about whether you have the right kinds of texts in the right percentages and right difficulty and the right kind of questions, scaffolding, assessment, etc. They like that stuff. Not those tedious old standards, which are for losers.

Bear that in mind when you read about what is and is not "aligned" to the Common Core.

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