Following is a post (fourth in a series on breaking down the Common Core ) from guest blogger Susan Weston, a Kentucky education consultant who often works
with the Prichard Committee:
Here’s the tenth and last of the Common Core Anchor Standards for Reading.
10. Read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently.
Standard 10 sums up the three “key ideas and details” Standards, the three “craft and structure” Standards, and the three “integration of knowledge and
ideas” Standards I blogged
earlier
. It adds that students need to be able to handle the complexity of documents they will have to use on the job and in higher education.
Standard 10 also carries two additional points central to Common Core.
First, “complex texts” are what students must master. Appendix A to the Common Core lays
out the key reasons, giving evidence that students who can handle simple readings may not be ready for the reading that matters for adult success, and
plenty of evidence that the reading needed for adult success is getting more demanding as technology and global competition expand.
Second, reading literary texts--both fiction and eloquent non-fiction--is part of what students should be able to do, but not all of what
they need. They also must be able to read about community, national, and global issues, political challenges, scientific discoveries, and technical
applications of those discoveries. Recently, there’s been an odd worry that English teachers will have to teach the informational texts and end up dropping
most poems and plays, but that’s simply a mistake. Common Core is quite clear that informational reading should happen most of all in science and history
and career/technical classes, so that students are reading to learn those important fields. [That point is made most clearly on page 5 of the published
document, available here.
To be clear, I don’t think Common Core is a magic wand that solves all problems. On the contrary, our teachers have plenty of further work to do, designing
how they’ll teach each day, check what students have learned, and make ongoing adjustments to move each student to these Standards. But setting clear,
brief, very high, very smart Standards, Common Core lays the right cornerstone so that teachers have solid place to start on the rest of the building. I
think we’ve done this step right, and I’m proud that Kentucky is leading the nation on the steps that come next.
I’ve blogged all ten Reading Anchor Standards here to demonstrate that the actual text is accessible and explicable in some brief and helpful ways--and I’ll
move on to writing soon.
You can
download the complete Common Core State Standards here
. They were developed by organizations of governors and chief state school officers like Kentucky’s Commissioner of Education, and they’ve been adopted
by 47 states (46 for the mathematics Standards).