LANSING -- An analysis of how language arts teachers are implementing the Common Core State Standards, conducted by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, shows that most educators are still emphasizing reading skills over teaching grade level-appropriate texts.
The study, released Wednesday, found that 73 percent of elementary teachers and 56 percent of middle school teachers are still focusing on skills rather than texts, despite the Common Core's emphasis on challenging students with increasingly complex works.
Researchers surveyed teachers in all 46 states which have adopted the language arts standards, asking about classroom reading assignments and how teachers decide on what works students will read.
Books commonly assigned to students, according to the study, include "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl" for middle school students, "To Kill a Mockingbird" for high school freshmen and sophomores and "Because of Winn-Dixie" for upper elementary children.
Students are also reading non-fiction works, the study indicates, a key component of the Common Core guidelines.
"Informational text clearly does not dominate today’s English classes but neither is it altogether absent from them, an inconvenient fact for some critics of the Common Core. Elementary reading teachers indicate that coverage of informational texts comprises about 32 percent of their time in class; while in high school English classes such texts comprise 20 percent of class time," the study states.
However, study results indicate that there is little consensus over what informational works students read across the country, with a majority of teachers at all grade levels indicating they used none of the recommended texts included in an appendix to the standards.
The study also showed teachers are more likely to assign reading based on student reading levels rather than based on grade levels, as intended in the Common Core standards.
"These results reveal that many teachers have not yet confronted the new text complexity demands of the Common Core. Elementary teachers were particularly wary of assigning books that exceeded their students’ current reading levels. Though this wariness seems to diminish as grade levels rise, even in high school relatively large proportions of students were assigned texts based mainly on their current reading levels," the study reports.