In yesterday’s Washington Post CC board member and NCTE past president Carol Jago swiftly fell the unfounded claim that the CCSS will strip high school English classes of literature. Jago was a member of the NAEP Reading Framework committee which in 2009 recommended, as she explains, “that 70% of what students would be asked to read for the 12th grade NAEP reading assessment would be informational.” This “did not mean,” Jago explains, “that 70% of what students read in senior English should be informational text,” but rather that the reading of high-quality informational text should be an expectation in ALL classes—including history and science. The same guidance appears in the CCSS. It is a contortion of logic and of any fair reading of the CCSS to suggest that the standards will reduce the amount of literature to which students are exposed—at any grade. Just read the list of 333 exemplar texts in Appendix B of the CCSS. Want students to read Hawthorne, Thurber, Wright, or Harper Lee? Just look in the CCSS. They are all there.
Lynne Munson