The Common Core State Standards were “released” this week, but they are bundled inside of pdfs — not readable online.
Click the image at the right to start digging to download them to your computer.
The pdfs are but a minor obstacle between what the standards contain and the kids who are supposed to learn the stuff. State boards will debate the content, curriculum and textbook writers will be paid to include them in upcoming publications, printers and truckers will be paid to manufacture and deliver the paper versions, teachers will be trained to teach the content of the standards, kids will sit through lessons in which their age and grade matches what is taught, tests will be given and taken.
In the meantime, the content of the standards should be put openly and unbundled online. The list in the illustration at the top of this post is from the pdf “Appendix B: Illustrative Texts” downloadable from the Core Standards page. That 195-page pdf should be put online in searchable form today. Every work of literature it lists should be immediately made openly free to be read on mobile devices: laptops, smartphones, and cellphones with internet browsers. The costs of compensating copyright holders would be miniscule compared to printing and delivering hardcopies of these works to America’s school children.
The material for all of the Core Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies and Science should also be made openly available for handschooling.
Why not, then, an open race to the top competition? Perhaps Amazon would award free book downloads to students passing quizzes Amazon would provide for kid readers to take to show they had read standards works. Multiple competitions could be held, with trophies and prizes for winning readers. With that sort of incentive, by the time the standard works get assigned to your kids in class, they can tell the teacher: “I read that.”
You may be thinking that we must be sensitive to kids in failing schools who might not go online to read good books or learn math or history. Yet, what real expectation is there that the announced standards will penetrate to their dysfunctional school experience and cause them to read The Odyssey, The Grapes of Wrath, and the other works in the standards. When these works — plus the math, history, and science — are put into the mobile device in their hand, we will see what they do.
