Conference on Catholic Concerns about Common Core

I appreciate the opportunity to comment on Common Core’s English language arts standards to this audience. I begin with a few remarks on Common Core’s Validation Committee, on which I served from 2009-2010. I then offer general comments on Common Core’s English language arts standards based on my analysis of them and observations of classroom lessons aligned to them. As I talk, I will give examples relating to its vocabulary standards and reading standards for literary and informational texts because these are the most damaging of its ELA standards. I end with suggestions for further discussion. Common Core’s Standards Writers and Validation Committee Common Core’s K-12 standards, it is regularly claimed, emerged from a state-led process in which experts and educators were well represented. But the people who wrote the standards did not represent the relevant stakeholders. Nor were they qualified to draft standards intended to “transform instruction for every child. ” And the Validation Committee that was created to put the seal of approval on the drafters ’ work was useless if not misleading, both in its membership and in the procedures they had to follow. Who were the standards writers and what were their qualifications? In the absence of officia