I know that discussions about standards can be fraught, and I completely understand the frustration many families feel about standardized tests, stilted ways of judging learner progress, and trying to cram square pegs in round holes.
A lot of us homeschool because standardized methods didn’t work for our kids, and hearing any discussion of them can be (quite literally and in a clinical sense) triggering. I know that after my own experience with IEPs, 504s, endless meetings, and so much disappointment, I was ready to throw out not only the baby with the bathwater but maybe the whole tub.
That said, with a little space and distance, I was able to creep back up to those standards with a different perspective.
Once they aren’t being wielded as a weapon or used to construct gatekeeping walls, having some frameworks for goal-setting can actually be quite freeing.
If we know where we’re going, we don’t have to worry so much about how we get there. We can take many, many paths that help us visit the same places.
I’ve written about this before, but I’m a huge proponent of embracing standards and rejecting standardization.
With that in mind, I wanted to take a moment to look closely at the Common Core standards.
For this post, I’m specifically examining the College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Reading and Writing.
What are the CCRA Standards?
The Common Core is a set of educational standards in multiple disciplines (primarily math and ELA) that were designed to provide some consistency across different states.
The standards focus on what learners should be able to do at various stages of education, but they do not dictate how learners should get to those goals.
For this reason, they are fairly broad and provide a loose framework that can be used with a variety of methods, materials, and approaches.
The College and Career Readiness Standards were the first to be developed, and they aim to capture what a learner should be able to do upon completion of high school.
In a set of broad, general standards, the CCRA standards are the broadest and most general. They provide a set of goals that can be worked toward throughout the entirety of K-12 education in various forms and with different degrees of complexity and difficulty based on learners’ development.
This post focuses on the CCRA standards for Reading and Writing.
In other words, if you want to make sure that your learner is prepared for college or a career, by the time they finish 12th grade, they should be able to do these 20 things.
10 CCRA Reading Standards
You can read all ten of the Reading standards in their own words right here. The following list is my paraphrased, simplified version.
- Practice close reading to pull out textual evidence and make logical inferences.
- Be able to identify the main idea and summarize what they’ve read.
- Trace the development of ideas, people, and plots over time in a text.
- Make interpretations of unfamiliar words/phrases and figure out figurative language from context.
- Understand and explain how parts of a text relate to its whole.
- Understand and explain how the author’s purpose shaped the text.
- Be able to pull together details from different kinds of media (print, audio, visual, etc.)
- Be able to evaluate the validity and reasoning behind a claim.
- Draw comparisons between two or more texts dealing with similar topics.
- Read and understand complex literary and informational texts.
10 CCRA Writing Standards
You can read all ten of the Writing standards in their own words right here. The following list is my paraphrased, simplified version.
- Write an argument supported with evidence and strong analysis.
- Write an informative text that selects key information and organizes it in a logical way.
- Write real or imagined narratives with details and clear structure.
- Use “clear and coherent writing” that considers the purpose and audience and uses that consideration to make choices about development, structure, and style.
- Develop an effective writing process that includes planning, revision, editing, and experimentation.
- Use technology to publish writing and collaborate with others.
- Write focused research projects.
- Gather, evaluate, and integrate sources into writing.
- Identify and use textual evidence from literary and informational sources.
- Compose writing in both short- and long-term conditions.
Reading and Writing Skills Develop Together
While the standards pull reading and writing skills out into two separate threads, the reality is that the two are not really separate cognitive processes.
Taking in information and making meaning from it (reading) and producing information for an audience to make meaning from (writing) are necessarily and inevitably linked.
Understanding the CCRA standards for both reading and writing can give us some footholds as we design educational opportunities across ages and stages.