One inherent weakness in Common Core is how they tried to avoid controversy at their inception, by not wading into the troubled shoals of  curriculum and content. They discovered that since they were offering standards that were so “new” and “different” they had to show exactly what folks should be doing that was so different. So some examples were thrown up with David Coleman sharing how to teach “Letter from Birmingham Jail” that just left folks scratching (or banging) their heads.

Fortunately for the Common Core movement, Mr. Coleman moved on to a position at College Board. In that time, other exemplars and lesson plans have started to pop up. Most are from New York, which has been very aggressive in implementing Common Core. At this point, we at least have actual teachers and students involved, but here is where the problem occurs with content. If I’m reading the intent of the standards correctly (subject to an email from the president of the College Board), when my kids are doing informational reading and writing, this is not just reading and writing from Language Arts, or during my ELA block with students, but the reading and writing we do in Science and Social Studies using those text and the content standards for those subjects. That’s how I plan it out (here, sorry if it’s headache inducing). I have both state content standards, and reading/writing/speaking standards from Common Core. The problem is, we don’t all have the same standards for those. To whit:

This little gem is making the rounds on social media. It’s primary grade lesson from NYEngage. Apparently, the State of New York pulled in these lessons from Core Knowledge as they state here:

Beginning in Spring 2013, NYSED will be posting the CKLA-NY revised Core Knowledge Curriculum for P-2. The 2010 Core Knowledge version will still be available, but the Common Core aligned and updated version is recommended for use with students beginning in the 2013-2014 school year. There are differences in content, rigor, and pacing, and the updated versions also contain Supplemental Guides for Listening and Learning, and Assessment and Remediation Guides for the Skills Strands

For those of you who don’t know Core Knowledge (and I didn’t until Tom Hoffman clarified this for me), they organize social studies teaching chronologically, rather than developmentally. This means they start with Ancient Civilizations with 6 year olds, and move up through the timeline as students grow older (here).  This is a small bit, and let’s face it most states do their standards developmentally (INCLUDING New York!), and until you get to studying your state (usually around 4th grade) so it shouldn’t be a big problem. The adoption of Next Generation Science standards is supposed to get us all on the same page, but you can see how that is going.

Here are things that I’m either supposed to teach, get to teach, or can get away with teaching that might not work outside California:

1. I’m teaching Ancient Civilization and Early Man with sixth graders. This includes discussions of evolution;
2. Our science standards are old (2000), but I can teach about climate change, and environmental changes brought on by man. The new upcoming standards will make that more explicit;
3. New social studies curriculum will include the contributions of gays and lesbians in history. I started some reference to this in teaching this year when we learned about Alexander the Great and Ancient Greece which had a number of cultural practices (not all of which I shared) that included (but were not limited to) homosexuality, concubinage, etc.

What does this mean? There will be no “national” curriculum, or we’ll all end up with a bunch of swiss cheese curriculum with NO content in it at all. Based on what I’ve seen from the David Coleman examples, I’d bet on the later. This is a shame, because the one thing I’m enjoying about implementing Common Core is planning my content standards with my ELA ones, but I was doing that before Common Core, just not effectively. Common Core did not make me more effective in planning, nor do the standards make it “easier”, I just got used to working with UbD and backward planning, which is now the instrument du jour with CCSS folks. It’s only taken me about 3-5 years to get it down. I think this is a realistic time frame for implementing new standards and instruction, which is not at all the amount of time that has been given for this.
Swiss Cheese by thenoodleator, on Flickr