When corporations take over your schools

Comedy of errors, unsuitable material (Click on this headline to read more)

by Maisie McAdoo | published November 8, 2013

The ReadyGEN Reader’s and Writer’s Journal, called developmentally inappropriate by many members responding to a question on the UFT Facebook page, is missing page numbers and even has a page upside down.

How many 2nd-graders — 7-year-olds — would understand the instructions to “write compare and contrast sentences about the text structures”?

Common Core curricula that schools across the city have adopted this year at the behest of the Department of Education are not ready for prime time, according to exasperated teachers who have been trying to implement the new programs.

The DOE-recommended ReadyGEN by commercial vendor NCS Pearson Inc. and GO Math! by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which were purchased by some three-quarters of the city’s elementary schools, are untested, unrealistically paced and assume too much background knowledge, teachers report.

Middle school programs are similarly difficult to use, they say. There is evidence that the Pearson curricula were assembled in haste, with numerous typos, grammatical errors and pages out of order. The company has not even finished the later modules.