Friday, November 01, 2013

Common Core guidelines: "Hunger Games" more complex than "Grapes of Wrath"

The New Republic has an article which examines Lexile scores, which have been adopted as part of Common Core to establish reading levels for students.

Under that system, as you can tell from the headline, Hunger Games is more complex than John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

Of the following four books, guess which one is the only one complex enough for a ninth grader:

Huckleberry Finn

Jane Eyre

Sports Illustrated for Kids' Awesome Athletes

To Kill a Mockingbird

My guess is you already know the answer, but the article is well worth reading.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very misleading article. It makes no mention of text complexity, which is a major consideration in selection of texts when it comes to CCSS. Do your homework before you post links to crap like this.

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure I understand, 2:44 - the very first sentence in the linked article references book complexity, as does the main illustration, a bar graph titled "How Complex Are These Books?".