When standards are created with any kind of eye toward how they will be tested, that’s a colossal mistake. The point of standards should be improving education, not improving “accountability” or anything else.

I’m with you, Tom, on your concern over the distinction between E/LA and Literacy standards. Creating one and calling it both is an even larger problem than having the vague E/LA standards we currently have. I mean, c’mon, one of our current standards actually says “enhance subtlety of meaning.” Can we get “necessary aesthetic of the soul” into the new ones somehow? It’s just as good as any other BS phrase.

Sigh.

The only rigorous position is to point that out and refrain from further comment. Politically, I doubt that’s the right approach though.

Well, no.

I meant just to clarify for those like me who were baffled at how general the standards were. These are the general standards to make the specific standards.

(By the way, although I still haven’t finished, I think the mathematics standards are quite good.)

The College and Career Readiness Standards for Mathematics will anchor the next phase of the Common Core State Standards Initiative: development of K—12 Mathematics Standards. Those K—12 Standards are in turn expected to guide the development of a next generation of assessments, developed collaboratively by multiple states.

In other words these are not the standards in terms we normally think, but are a guide for the more exact standards that haven’t been written yet.

Unless, I guess, you’d argue that “literacy” encompasses the entire scope of the K-12 ELA curriculum plus cross-curricular elements, but that’s clearly not what these standards do.

The overall number of standards (in any given set) is less of an issue in ELA than math and science. A lot of the fundamentals in English you work on every year — even if you’re improving, you’re still working on writing good sentences, paragraphs, essays, etc.

What’s scary about the Common Standards is that the short list isn’t even very tight. For example, the first reading standard in England’s list of 14 is “analyse and evaluate information, events and ideas from texts,” and then it moves onto other higher level skills. The Common Standards has, by my count, five standards that are just sub-elements of England’s first one. And we’ve got a couple standards in there that other countries don’t even think necessary to mention in late secondary standards like “determine what is meant by words and phrases in context.” So the range is even narrower than the length would suggest.

Good point about the “more is more” fallacy. In actuality this is the (one?) strength of the draft. There are at least 293 unique ELA state standards and benchmarks currently in existence; the CCSSO has knocked them down to somewhere around 70, and arranged them with some clarity and little overlap in content.

However, I do want to advise caution on one thing, and that is presuming (as Tom’s post seems to imply) that more standards = better. While I don’t know the situation in language arts, in mathematics it has long been recognized that US curriculum is overburdened with topics and judicious cutting is necessary.