Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy piece on Common Core reading from NPR

Interesting to see it laid out! I am actually one of the few posters on this forum who does not believe that the Common Core standards are particularly bad or singularly blame-worthy or the primary source of their children's ills. The bigger problem appears to be the latitude accorded individual districts in implementing the Common Core standards as well as the previous standards and practices in place.

I witnessed the transition to Common Core ELA in DS/DD's 5th grade classroom last year. It was at times chaotic because the district was literally still creating new curriculum for 2nd quarter during 1st quarter. They did away with literature textbooks from the big publishing houses. By the way, the curriculum choices were actually quite good. The previous stand-alone pseudo GT classroom was better for my high ability kids, but I believe that our transition will on balance probably be an improvement for a majority of the other students. DS/DD's GT classroom was dismantled and funneled into 3 of the 6 5th grade classrooms. Implementation in those three classroom was bumpy because teachers had to teach to the whole class and then alternately work with each of the three ability groups. For my kids, it was eye-opening and slow-moving when the class work together as a unit. At least in our district, there is a portion of the curriculum in common for each grade as well as distinct curriculum based on ability.

In middle school, the pseudo-GT ELA classrooms use different curriculum from the regular ELA classrooms. My 6th graders are reading full-text Twain and Shakespeare, etc.

I think the transition to Common Core was less painful in our district partly because our standards were already relatively high and the different subjects areas were already integrated and the writing expectations had already been in place for many years. Nevertheless, non-fiction definitely assumed an even larger presence and evidence citing even more prominent.

I am not sure how you would leveled that poem but it looks far less difficult than poems that my oldest read throughout regular ELA classes in high school and that my 6th graders are reading in GT 6th grade. It actually looks like stuff they read in GT 4th, which used a 5th grade text.