This comment was posted to Facebook by Jared Carman and I wanted to make sure it got wider notice so it’s here for your information. Jared serves on the Utah instructional materials committee and so he receives significant amounts of books throughout the year to review.

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How Common Core Is Creating a Generation of
Less-informed Voters

(What I learned reviewing over 500 Common Core books from all the major publishers)

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LEARNING 101: Kids learn what they practice.

In a typical Common Core practice item, children as young as 6 and 7 are given two “opinion” passages to read, usually on a social issue of some kind. The passages are short. The children are directed to read the passages, form “their own” opinion, based on one of the passages (an inherently biased exercise, but that’s a separate issue), then ADVOCATE for their opinion in writing, using information from the opinion pieces as supporting evidence. Net, net: Read little to no actual information, then form your own opinion, supported another person’s opinion.

Consider the following:
– The word “opinion” or “argument” is mentioned 38 times in the 110 Common Core writing standards.
– Under Common Core, opinion-forming practice and testing is required for EVERY student in every grade, even Kindergarten.
– “Opinion writing” testing is a central feature of the SAGE/Common Core tests.

(Source: http://www.corestandards.org/assets/CCSSI_ELA%20Standards.pdf)

What do you get when you combine low-info opinion practice, with messages (from the “informational texts”) to organize, resist, influence, strike, stand up, sit in, and vote, vote, vote…and you do this regularly for thirteen years?

An entire generation of highly-opinionated, less-informed voters.

Alyson Williams, one of the parent reviewers of SAGE tests, made this comment in the same thread:

That is the SAGE writing assessment. I saw no other format… the student must read several excerpts, and argue in writing one point of view or the other citing directly from the provided passages to support her argument. While many parents were concerned about the content (recall the examples last year of books vs. video games) I am concerned that even with neutral content the repetition of this kind of writing practice over and over for years, especially when it is computer graded by a technically limited rubric, is not a very valuable exercise to great writing (or thinking) rather conditioning a test-taking skill at best. Worse, however is that it seems likely to result in a generation of people who are not independently seeking truth and employing classical logic or analytical thinking, but willing to form opinions without in-depth knowledge or greater context but on the carefully edited ideas served up in the digest form of popular media.