The Common Core: A serious threat to libraries and free voluntary reading

Posted on April 28, 2012, as a comment following CCSS and us, by Joyce Valenza

The common core standards and their spawn, national tests, are a serious threat to libraries and in-school free reading: the amount of money to be spent on standards (I estimate about $25 billion just to make sure all students are connected to the internet to take the tests) will bleed funding not only from libraries but from many other places, and the pressure of the tests (summative, interim, and maybe even pretests) will leave little time for anything other than test prep. Ironically there is good evidence that most of the elements of the English language arts standards (phonemic awareness, phonics, spelling, vocabulary, grammar and text structure) emerge as a result of extensive self-selected reading.
http://blog.schoollibraryjournal.com/neverendingsearch/2012/