In my last blog, I told you why I thought Diane Ravitch is wrong on the Common Core State Standards.  She responded by wondering why I am not worried, as she is, that the standards are developmentally inappropriate for the early grades.

I assume that Ravitch's question was prompted by the well-publicized disagreement within the English literacy community on this point, articulated most prominently by Elfrieda Hiebert then a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  Hiebert agrees—rather forcefully—with the contention of the authors of the Common Core State Standards for English literacy that the text difficulty of middle school and high school texts has slipped badly over the past 50 years and need to be raised.  Her challenge to the standards is only to the CCSS panel's decision to propose a fairly steep gradient for vocabulary acquisition and text complexity in the elementary school years.  She suggests that standards for literacy have already been rising in the elementary schools and should not be made more stringent.