By Alan Singer | Huffington Post Regular readers of my Huffington Post columns have seen my position on the national Common Core Standards change during the last two years. At first I opposed the standards as mandates but thought they could be useful as guidelines. When the standards were paired with high-stakes assessments, both for students and teachers, my opposition intensified. As a teacher and teacher educator, and as a parent and grandparent, when curriculum was rewritten and instruction became constant test prep, I was angry. In this and my next post I directly challenge the Common Core approach to teaching younger children to read and older students to better comprehend sophisticated written material. The more I look at the Common Core approach to reading, the more it seems to be a shill for publishers like Pearson to sell new "Common Core" aligned textbooks, workbooks, and online packaged learning programs. - Read More |