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You point out an interesting and promising utility of the CCSS: the literacy standards are easily converted directly into a rubric!

Right.  What’s essential to persuasive writing is strong reasoning.  The idea that “evidence,” as commonly understood (i.e., “facts,” which usually manifest themselves as statistics), is essential to persuasive writing is drilled into students in high school, and they have a tough time moving past that idea in college and beyond.  

Ironically, from a practical perspective, “evidence” is not very persuasive at all, since many if not most readers and listeners zone out when “studies” and statistics are invoked.  This is partly because evidence is boring.  But it’s also because people recognize that statistics are commonly used to buttress weak arguments.  See, e.g., Mark Twain’s various statements on the matter.

There’s still more. I’d say that there’s a third kind of persuasive writing: arguing through conscientious eloquence–that is, language that reflects both experience and passion and casts a question in a new light for the reader. Mill’s colleague and close friend Alexander Bain criticised the reasoning in Mill’s treatise on liberty yet praised it all the same.

So there are at least three kids of persuasive writing: persuasion with evidence (see Seneca’s “On the Shortness of Life” for a wonderful example), persuasion through reasoning (for instance, Augustine’s reasoning about memory in book X of the Confessions, or Socratese on justice in the Republic), and persuasion through conscientious eloquence. There are combinations of these, of course. And then there’s persuasion through trickery, manipulation, and so forth, but those should be taught for recognition, not for emulation.

Since we are placing more emphasis than before on nonfiction, it would be good to recognize its possibilities.

I’d like to suggest that the so-called Common Core Standards henceforth be called by their rightful name, the Gates/Microsoft-Pearson Standards, in honor of the purportedly non-profit entities that are financing their creation.

No one should too worked up or committed to this latest false panacea. First of all, the standards are inseparable from the frequent tests that are to accompany them, the purpose of which is to homogenize instruction and eliminate tenure and seniority. In practice, the tests are the curriculum, and their creators fool themselves if they think otherwise (although since TFAers are disproportionately represented in their production, my guess is that most know full well their ultimate purpose).

Additionally, in the event President Obama is not re-elected, this curriculum will immediately follow into oblivion every other educational fad and forced march of the past twenty years. What will remain, however, is a further destabilized, monetized and anti-democratic public education system.

Thank you for the link, Hilary.

While the “creation” of the Microsoft-Pearson Standards is nominally attributed to The National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), their development and implementation is being financed by Gates/Microsoft, among many other parties with a financial interest in their creation and use.

As Lynne Munson, Executive Director of the Common Core (which revealingly is a trademarked term, suggesting the commercial mindset driving it) has written, “The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s support of the (curriculum) maps was central to their creation” (http://commoncore/maps/about/acknowledgements).

The creation and implementation of these standards is inseparable from the current political economy of education in the country, which is now dominated by the neoliberal model of privatization, monetization of sectors that at one time had a less than total subservience to the market economy (health care, education, other public services and infrastructure) and the fungibility of labor. It should never be forgotten that all the hypocritical and fatuous rhetoric about “the kids,”  ”Children First” “the civil rights movement of our time” and every other focus group-tested slogan is belied by the fact that, in the minds of those pushing these false panaceas, the purpose of education is little more than creating future units of human capital, who are to receive training that will prepare them for their future status as powerless and  interchangeable members of the service proletariat. As I have written elsewhere (http://nyceducator.com/2011/01/false-premises-false-promises-corporate.html), the purported “knowledge economy” of the twenty-first century is a fallacy, to be limited to a tiny slice of the population, for reasons that have everything to do with investment decisions, not “teacher quality.”

While we all can disagree about the details of the standards themselves- personally, as an ESL and English teacher who already uses a great deal of non-fiction, I think they reveal their anti-humanist bias with their subordination of literature – the milieu from which they have emerged is without question one of (so-called) free market fundamentalism. 

One of the terrible ironies of this current Dark Age in education is how, privateers and opportunists aside, smart and otherwise compassionate people have been entranced by the siren song of corporate ed deform. But there is reason for hopefulness: at this very moment, students and teachers in Chile are struggling to throw off the yolk of a privatized, neoliberal educational regime that was imposed at the point of a gun in the aftermath of the fascist coup of 9/11/73, a privatized system that was designed and implemented by the acolytes of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of economics. Here in NYC, new teachers are waking up to the vicious deceptions and policies underpinning corporate ed deform, as they see how they are arbitrarily being denied tenure in ever-increasing numbers. Hopefully, as they join parents and students in resistance, as the hostile takeover of the public schools collapses under the weight of its own corruption, and as this polluted tide withdraws to its next investment opportunities, we can begin to have honest discussions about how to serve the needs (academic and otherwise) of children and the communities in which they live.