Choking on the Common Core Standards

[proud2BlibKansan]

Many things that are commonplace activities for adults — driving, voting, and paying taxes, for example — are not appropriate for children. I count the Common Core State Standards, proposed for all our country’s public schools, among them.

Over my more than 50 years in public education I’ve come to know young children pretty well, and I am sure that 8-9 years olds are not ready to “describe the relationship between a series of historical events, scientific ideas or concepts, or steps in technical procedures in a text, using language that pertains to time, sequence, and cause/effect,” as decreed by one of the standards for third-grade readers of informational text.

In addition to the English Language Arts (ELA) standard quoted above, here are two others from the same category, the first for 6-7 year olds and the second for 10-11 year olds:

Gr. 1: Know and use various text features (e.g., headings, tables of

contents, glossaries, electronic menus, icons) to locate key facts or

information in a text.

Gr. 5: Analyze multiple accounts of the same event or topic, noting

important similarities and differences in the point of view they

represent


Reading through the whole list of ELA standards several times, I marked 18 others in reading, writing, speaking or language that I consider inappropriate for elementary level students because of the emphasis on skills or knowledge that children have not yet developed. I will not quote any of them here, but I urge interested readers to read the Standards and see how many they think are beyond the range of elementary level students.

more . . . http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/choking-on-the-common-core-standards/2011/12/02/gIQAG6cpPO_blog.html#pagebreak