Common Core State Standards

During my last meeting with my mentor teacher, we had some extra time during lunch and his prep period to discuss some logistical things about education. I asked him what he thought of the Common Core standards, and whether he thought they had made an impression on the education system for better or worse. Having spent a good amount of time with him and his class already, his answer did not surprise me, but I wonder if it would surprise some of the personnel in our university education program.
I should clarify that Mr. Archer at Shadle Park High is well-loved by his students and fellow-teachers. He has been teaching for 30 years, but still maintains a passion and excitement that I'm trying to imitate for my own benefit. And he's surprisingly harsh at times with his students, when they are not meeting his expectations after having been given every opportunity to do so. His balance of fun and business fits perfectly within the context of the classroom.
"First," he said to me, "I don't know if they're even going to be around for very much longer." I agreed, mentally noting the then-foundational WASL test of my own high-school experience, which was quickly replaced and re-replaced until it is now ancient history. "Also," he continued, "I have read them, and there's nothing wrong with them, but these are all just things that good teachers already base their teaching on naturally, so I don't know if it's going to impact them at all. Maybe some teachers do need these reminders, but the standards haven't changed much about my classroom."

Having worked with the standards in my previous education classes and read them over quite a bit, I have to agree. There is nothing groundbreaking about these new concepts, in my humble opinion, but they are the typical important things that I was surrounded by in my high-school years, with maybe a few different emphases.
In those early years of the new millennium, we constantly looked in our reading for contextual evidence to support our ideas (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.1), both explicitly and through inference. Both of these aspects are important in the practice, however they are also things that students who read can do quite naturally. Again, perhaps for some teachers it will be useful to segment these and take it one-at-a-time, to have the students think about why something was said explicitly while something else was communicated through inference. However, many teenagers I've known, some who were my peers and some who are now my students, will be too easily bored by a belaboring of such a point, and have greater hope of being engaged through diving into the substance of the story, with all its inferences and explicit statements together.
The intentional manipulation of a timeline is a very important lesson to give students reading and writing narratives (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.5), and, along with many other important elements, is something that cannot be taught in isolation, but is a bridge to be crossed at the best planned opportunity.
Some of these standards do focus on higher-level abilities, such as the treatment that an author gives to another source material (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.9). This is, perhaps, one of the few things that was never a part of my high-school experience, and not because we couldn't handle it, but because it would require so much more reading. The teacher has to be realistic about what the student will accomplish, and in my mind it's important to condense the required reading so that it will be as useful as possible. If the student must read a long piece by Shakespeare and must also read a part of the bible that is referenced in Shakespeare, and I can promise quite confidently that those students will decide to cut corners and condense the reading for themselves. This does not mean that this standard should go by the wayside, but it will need to be addressed in a practical way. Whether it is addressed at all depends on whether the teacher decides that the students are prepared for that kind of analysis, which is an entirely different question. So much of this depends upon the current state of the classroom that, while the standards seem organized in a machine-like progression, a lot of real-life malfunctions will have a tendency to gum up the works.
The judging of validity of arguments is crucial for any student reading informational texts (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.9-10.8). This, again, is something that is acknowledged by effective teachers as important, and something that it will be difficult for any teacher to follow a standard on unless he or she understands preemptively its importance. However, situations may well arise where the teacher and student disagree on what constitutes validity, and this can be either an opportunity for good discussion or a danger of personal conflict. The balance to be struck is the effective teacher's real focus in these situations.

As a person who is eager to disagree where disagreement is feasible, there is hardly anything in the standards that I can object to, which I imagine was the goal of their writers. However, the ability for teachers to think outside the box they've been given has been a freedom that many of my teachers enjoyed who were the best teachers I've known. While, of course, other teachers suffered from an extreme lack of accountability. Whether these standards, should they continue in their current form, solve the problem without hindering the benefit, is something I will have to wait to see.