Common Core has now become a line in the sand with some folks, and is causing more in-fighting among anti-corporate ed reform folks than is healthy for a movement that is under as much pressure, and fire as we are. Let’s see where most of us agree: Common Core was created by and for corporate […]

I’ve been doing a lot with short constructed writing response. Part of this is due to trainings I’m going to on Common Core for my district. The standards emphasize a written response that sites cites the information from the text the question is based on. I’m not in love with the standards, but feel I can live […]

  Fellow Sacramento teacher (and friend), Larry Ferlazzo, asked me to help him out by contributing to an article at EdWeek on “implementing Common Core”. Little did I know the minefield I was stepping into. The article has morphed into a fight between the “agnostics” (Common Core skeptics like myself and Larry), and the atheists […]

A few weeks ago, a post about an exemplar lesson from Common Core led to my writing a series of posts on the standards. This led to a whole series of posts about how the exemplars suck, with the only variation being on whether this was endemic to the standards, or that it was just […]

One of the problems with having “newbies” involved in creating these new standards, especially folks who like to take a “de-contextualized” approach to novel and new situations, is that they don’t know where the land-mines are buried. Most of the discussions around Common Core ELA standards and the exemplars that are starting to show up […]