If you can put aside the high-stakes testing, which admittedly is not easy to do, and if you put aside the break-up of learning into micro-pieces, which I really cannot forgive, and if you can somehow forget the push for corporate take over and profit from education in the United States, there are some are some decent curriculum ideas imbedded in the national Common Core English Language standards. Unfortunately, even the better ideas, reading carefully, looking for underlying meaning in a passage, editing writing, and supporting arguments with evidence, are often laid-out and taught in ways that just do not make academic sense.
A good example is the New York City high school ELA guidelines created by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and being circulated to schools by the New York City Department of Education High School ELA Scope & Sequence. The package starts off with pretty standard Common Core edu-speak - students will be "literate" and "informed," curriculum will be "rigorous" and "engaging."
"The New York City Department of Education strives to prepare all students to live rich, literate lives and to be active, informed citizens. In order to do so, students need access to rigorous, comprehensive and engaging English Language Arts curricula. Students should have the opportunity to read a variety of texts, make informed judgments that are grounded in evidence and communicate their thinking through oral, written, and artistic expressions."
I did a careful analysis of the 11th grade ELA curriculum because it is the same year most New York City high school students study United States history and must pass a state "Regents" exam in order to graduate. The New York State United States History Framework is organized chronologically with a series of unifying themes. The most themes important in 11th grade are Time, Continuity, and Change; Geography, Humans, and the Environment; Power, Authority, and Governance; Creation, Expansion, and Interaction of Economic Systems; Science, Technology, and Civic Ideals and Practices. Of course none of these themes is specially mentioned in the ELA curriculum, although a creative teacher or student could make connections on his or her own.
In social studies, students start the 180-day school year in 11th grade by studying Colonial (1607- 1763) and Constitutional (1763-1824) Foundations. These units include the European conquest of the Americas and its impact on native people, the British colonial system and African enslavement, the movement toward independence, the creation of a new government, and analysis of the nation's founding documents.
In Social Studies for Secondary Schools (Routledge, 4th edition) I laid-out a sample 11th-grade United States history lesson calendar based on my experience as a high school teacher. It includes over 160 one and two day topics presented as lesson aim questions and it is divided into fourteen units. At most, a teacher has twenty-five school days to cover the first two units in the state history frameworks, which means if classes begin on the Thursday after Labor Day this year, taking into account school holidays, teachers will finish these units the week of October 19th.
It would be great if history and English were aligned so students could read and write about primary source documents in their English classes while learning about historical forces and social movements in social studies. But the 11th grade ELA curriculum for September and October starts with the question "How have immigrants shaped the culture and land of the United States"? It is a great question, but in social studies classes students will not get to the 1840-1880 wave of immigration until November at the earliest and probably will not study about Eastern and Southern European immigrants in an industrializing and urbanizing America until January. Contemporary immigration and current debates won't be touched until May or June.
Meanwhile, in ELA classes, students do not read the founding documents including the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution until November and December when they are already into the Civil War and starting on industrialization. Again the ELA curriculum has a great organizing question, "How did the founders of the United States balance protecting individual rights and creating a strong union in the nation's founding documents?," but it is not aligned with the social studies curriculum where it would support actual student learning.
Slavery in the United States ends with the Civil War in 1865 and in social studies it is a main theme in November. But the ELA curriculum has students read about slavery in mid-February and March, when social studies students are learning about World War I, the Great Depression, New Deal, and World War II. The ELA curriculum has students read Frederick Douglass' "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?," Abraham Lincoln's "Second Inaugural Address," and in the same unit, the Declaration of Sentiments from the Seneca Falls woman's rights convention. These are all excellent selections that students already read in social studies - about five months earlier.
My advice to teachers and school administrators this fall is to ignore the unit sequence in the Common Core aligned ELA curriculum. If someone complains, explain that you think it is more important that the ELA and social studies curriculum be coordinated so they make sense and support student learning. Curriculum should be based on teacher understanding and knowledge rather than conform to the imagined "lexile" complexity of documents established by private for-profit publishers and rigid skill development menus that were churned out somewhere by a magical computer algorithm.