I try to teach my students to balance such complexities. But many of the smartest and best have learned the Lexile model too well. They’ve long been rewarded for getting “the point” of language that makes “a parade of its complexity,” and they’ve not been shown that our capacity to manage ambiguity without reducing it enables us to be thinkers rather than mere ideologues.
Blaine Greteman in The New Republic. Federal Bureaucrats Declare ‘Hunger Games’ More Complex Than ‘The Grapes of Wrath’
The Common Core’s absurd new reading guidelines
(via protoslacker)