"A child's learning is the function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher." James Coleman, 1972

Sunday, November 24, 2013

Massachusetts Halts Common Core - Damaging to Students


Hold on there - wait. There is still intellectual curiosity and common sense in Massachusetts. There are now 15 states pushing back on the Common Core and PARCC. 
For one thing, as Sandra Stotsky—one of the leaders of Massachusetts’s 1993 education reform movement who resigned from the Common Core review committee—argued, the diminished emphasis on literature would actually be damaging to students. Stotsky, now professor of education reform emerita at the University of Arkansas, says:
[Common Core’s] misplaced stress on informational texts reflects the limited expertise of Common Core’s architects and sponsoring organizations in curriculum and in teacher’s training.… A diminished emphasis on literature in secondary grades makes it unlikely that American students will study a meaningful range of culturally and historically significant literary works before graduation.


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