Open up the ceiling on the Common Core State Standards: Preparing students for 21st-century literacy—now

Drew, Sally Valentino (2013). Open up the ceiling on the Common Core State Standards: Preparing students for 21st-century literacy—now. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 56(4), 321-330.


Could it be that the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), which claim to be focused on helping learners become “college and career-ready” by the end of high school, are already behind the times, even before they are fully implemented by most states? Drew seems to suggest this might be the case, because in her view, there is not enough explicit emphasis in the CCSS on online texts and the kinds of literacy skills learners will need in a future when, according to sources she cites in the article, people will be doing the majority of their reading online.

Drew’s article caused me to take another look at the CCSS for English/Language Arts. My state was one of the earliest CCSS adopters, and we are now in a transition process leading to full implementation by 2014-2015. Therefore the “new standards” are a compelling topic in the professional education courses I teach. As I took another look at them in response to reading Drew’s article, I noticed that she was right; there are only a few explicit mentions of the internet or online literacy skills. One might argue that online literacy skills are implicit in a number of the standards; these kinds of outcomes are often written in deliberately generic terms so that they can encompass many kinds of texts. One might also argue that being too explicit about the kinds of texts learners need to be able to work with could be limiting, and could actually lead to the standards becoming obsolete faster than the more generic wording, because with technology advancing at a dizzying pace, we don’t really know about all of the kinds of texts we may be working with in the very near future. If we specify things one way, and then we start to use new things that we name in different ways, the standards documents will need to be revised very soon. I wonder, were the developers of the CCSS being “print-centric” , as Drew contends (p. 324), or were they being prudently generic and leaving options open to account for new kinds of texts that we haven’t even dreamed of yet, but which could be emerging soon? Only a few years ago, working with texts “in the cloud” or communicating instantaneously in short texts (e.g., “tweets”) was something most of us could not imagine. Who knows what is coming, and what skills learners will need?

Even if the CCSS developers were trying to be prudently generic (instead of aging print-centric curmudgeons who cling to print texts as superior, as Drew seems to say), Drew does have a point that if something is not explicitly stated in standards documents, it tends to get less attention and less focus than the things that the standards clearly DO specify. She worries that without sufficient emphasis on online literacy skills, these skills will be neglected, and learners will not be ready for the college and career worlds they will enter after high school.

Drew brings up something I had forgotten about the CCSS: states are allowed to change up to 15% of the standards to make them fit the needs of that state better. She recommends that we all go to our state department of education web sites and look at how our states are implementing the CCSS. Is your state adopting the CCSS verbatim, or is it making changes within the boundaries allowed? I took a look at my state’s web site, and did not really see much alteration. A link on the site that is labeled as our state standards just takes the reader to the official CCSS web site. My state has done extensive “crosswalks” linking the CCSS with our previous state standards, and those documents are helpful, but it looks like my state is going for CCSS as it is. We will be adding standards in the future that go beyond English/Language Arts and Math, but for now, we are on board with the current version of the standards, and on-track for full implementation in a couple of years. Most districts are already putting the standards into their curricula, so they are here to stay. I suspect most of the states which have adopted the CCSS are going to do something similar to what my state is doing. I do not see a lot of changes being made in many states, though they may surprise me. Drew proposes that we use up all of the 15% of change we are allowed make by adding five standards that specify very specific digital literacy skills. The additional standards she proposes seem well thought-out and reasonable. If states were inclined to make changes, they could of course do what Drew suggests, but with so little “wiggle room” allowed, I doubt if states who do want to make tweaks to the standards will want to do it all in this one area. I admire what Drew is trying to do, and the ownership that she wants us all to have for CCSS. I’m afraid it’s not going to happen, though, at least not on a large scale (but maybe it will in Connecticut, where she is from, and where if I remember correctly, people actually dared to defy NCLB at one point.

The article was useful because it made me take a closer look at CCSS and my state’s response to it. The article also provides a helpful sidebar with a few good sites to visit to learn more about “new” literacies and the kinds of skills learners will need for high-level comprehension of online and other digital texts. I recommend an exploration of these sites for a mind-opening learning experience. Once you have visited the sites in the sidebar, put some of the terms you discover into search engines, and learn even more about the world of online texts. Whether or not you agree with everything Drew has to say about CCSS, we clearly live in interesting and changing times, and we need to know as much as we can about the ever-changing texts and literacies in our present and future world.