victoria waddle's List: Common Core Standards

• And, as noted in the standard’s criteria for publishers, scientific and historical texts should receive the “same time and weight as literary text.” By the 2014–2015 academic year, the initiative calls for 50% informational text (including textbooks, essays, speeches, newspaper articles, and nonfiction trade books) in elementary school and 70% in high school—on average, across all curricula. “The 50–50 split is not for English class,” says David Coleman, a lead writer of the Core’s English language arts plan and the incoming president of the College Board (which administers the SAT and AP exams). “The celebration of nonfiction’s role is not meant to be at the expense of fiction.” The nonfiction-to-fiction ratio currently being taught in schools nationwide is unknown, but Coleman says the new split is based on the ratio found in the National Assessment of Educational Progress test. Critics say no studies show that those percentages are best or that the NAEP exam creators wanted them to be those used in school. The exam creators did not intend to be “dictating what should be taught in a classroom,” says Sandra Stotsky, a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas who sat on the NAEP committee. She remains skeptical of the Common Core State Standards. “David Coleman has never taught English. He’s never been in k–12,” Stotsky says, and Susan Pimentel, the other lead writer of the language arts standards, only briefly taught Head Start, not English. “[And] there’s no research that shows informational reading will make kids ready for college.”
• What’s more, critics say, no one has tested the initiative to see whether it works. “My problem with the Common Core standards is they have never been implemented anywhere,” says Diane Ravitch, author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System and a research professor at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. “If you haven’t ever tried them anywhere, how do you know they’re good?” Perhaps, she adds, Core advocates didn’t want the feedback from a test. “They wanted to get this thing moving so far down the track that it couldn’t be stopped.”

• As you grow up in this world  you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what  you think. --David Coleman at NY State Department of Education presentation, April 2011
• Together with a team of educators, David then founded the Grow  Network, an organization committed to making assessment results truly  useful for teachers, parents, and students. The Grow Network delivered  breakthrough quality reports for parents and teachers as well as  individualized learning guides for students. Based on the success of  Grow, McGraw-Hill acquired the organization in 2005. 
   
   David left McGraw-Hill in 2007 and co-founded Student Achievement  Partners, a nonprofit that assembles educators and researchers to design  actions based on evidence to improve student outcomes.
• Why, if fiction is no more vital than leftover turnips, is there a  Nobel Prize in Literature and not in lawyers’ briefs or material from  the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s Web site (listed as a Common  Core exemplary text)?...

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