Common Core Standards Essay

Due to students not being fully prepared for college, the majority of the United States’ education systems have chosen to adopt the Common Core Standards. These new standards are focused on reinventing the English class by reducing the amount of fiction being read and increasing the amount of nonfiction being taught in school. There has been a huge debate on whether or not this is the way to help get students prepared for college and their jobs and occupations afterwards. Making kids read more fiction will not benefit their futures because it creates more problems than it solves. If the education system transitions to the new standards, this will create a struggle in the English classrooms because now the English teachers have to do more

The fact that they are not reading frequently is. As said in Common Core Nonfiction Reading Standards Mark the End of Literature, English Teachers Say,” … too many students are not college or career-ready because they have suffered from years of easy reading and poor training in synthesizing more complex reading materials,”(Page 1). The easy reading and poor training is not teachers’ faults. Due to texts from friends on cellphones being read more than literature in general, students are not comprehending difficult texts as good as they could if they read more. Getting children to read at all in this generation is a blessing. If kids were not still encouraged to read by reading goals, it is safe to say that independent reading or reading for personal enjoyment would not be a part of students lives. In this case, developing background knowledge, which is done by nonfiction, is not what we need to be focused on. Students need to be encouraged to read all types of books to continue to grow as readers. To do this, there needs to be a change in every class to improve the way they comprehend and understand literature. “For example, Book reports will ask students to analyze, not summarize. Presentations will be graded partly on how persuasively students express their ideas. History papers will require reading from multiple sources…,” (Goodwin et. al, Page 3). Changing little things like this can create a big difference in the way students