The more I read about Common Core, the more I like it. Take, for instance, the way Common Core organizes the teaching of literature*.
Teachers get to choose the works of literature they want students to read. Nobody imposes the reading list on them (there is a suggested list but not an obligatory one). I believe this is perfect because there is hardly a point in every teacher in the country discussing To Kill a Mockingbird at the same point in the year irrespective of whether he even likes it.
Teachers are human, believe it or not, and we don’t teach every book with the same effectiveness. There are indisputable classics that I simply don’t like and shouldn’t be teaching. If I have no enthusiasm for an author, I won’t be able to fake it for my students.
Instead of the prescribed content, Common Core asks that teachers use the readings they prefer to teach students how to approach ANY text. Students learn how to analyze the readings, draw conclusios, and look for textual proof for their opinions. To me this sounds like a dream come true. If students come to college knowing that opinions need to be supported with evidence, what more can I want out of my teaching life?
The objections to this system rest on the belief that teachers are lazy cheats who will teach nothing but newspaper articles if nobody forces a reading list on them. (Here is a hugely popular education blogger who makes precisely this argument.)
Honestly, the bugbear of a lazy, irresponsible teacher who looks for any excuse to do as little work as possible is starting to get on my nerves. I can hardly think of another profession that is viewed with as much suspicion as teaching. Why we can’t just relax already and trust the teachers to come up with a good, solid reading list on their own is an absolute mystery to me.
The teachers I know are really dedicated, insanely hard-working professionals who wouldn’t short-change students by teaching them easy crap. Whether we support or detest the Common Core (and I have no dog in this fight, so I’m open to all arguments), I suggest we do so without demonizing teachers because there’s way too much of that happening already.
* I’m not pedagogically or intellectually equipped to discuss the teaching of mathematics so it’s useless to ask me.
Clarissa's Blog 
My only issue with the Common Core is that it continues and perhaps even intensifies the practice of high stakes standardized (mostly multiple choice) testing. And ETS (the horrible horrible testing company) is a major lobbyist for the promotion of the Common Core– which emphasizes how integral standardized testing will be to the curriculum.
That being said, from what I know, I think the CC is an improvement in many ways. I think it make sense to have some level of standardization across all 50 states. I think it will make it harder to teach things like Creationism in the science classroom. And perhaps the thing that I like best is that CC promotes that high school level students read primary, non-fiction documents when it comes to subjects like history or social studies. I think this is a huge improvement from the boring, reductive textbooks that most students are forced to endure. The boring textbooks aren’t going anywhere of course. But I think it seems quite exciting that students may start engaging with primary documents at the high school level.
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Delurking after discovering your blog quite by accident a few weeks ago (via No More Mister Nice Guy, I was trying to click something else on the blog roll and landed here instead). It was a delightful mistake. I appreciate and am enjoying your forthrightness but I must disagree with you on the Common Core. It is at best a very mixed bag.
One thing I find troublesome is that students are not supposed to be taught any background material before reading a piece. There is a video on the internet (you can google it easily) of the CC’s chief architect, David Coleman, pretending to teach Letter from Birmingham Jail: the underlying assumption is that the students don’t know anything about Martin Luther King. They are supposed to guess for example, that he is a minister from King saying “my fellow clergy.” I have often quipped that the main thing one should learn in college is To Consider The Source, but here the source — and the context — are considered irrelevant.
I could go on in detail about how entangled the CC is with the perfectly awful standardized tests, some of which David’s Coleman’s outfit (the College Board) stand to profit mightily from (a little conflict of interest), or how much of what they expect younger children to do is developmentally inappropriate, and so on, but this is only a comment so I won’t. I will say though that some math teachers report that the math standards are an improvement (Diane Ravitch, who addresses the problems with CC frequently on her blog, recently reprinted a math teacher’s piece on why she liked the math standards).
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Thank you for the comment. I believe we can all agree here that standardized testing is an idiotic and detrimental practice. We really need to trust teachers more and not try to police them with these standardized tests that serve no useful purpose.
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