Thanks for offering your view. You are indeed on the front lines.
But I thought a major requirement of the common core was to move away from reading so much fiction, and to emphasize nonfiction texts—which in any of the curricula I’ve seen have been Leftist EPA documents or some other such nonsense.
Is that not the case?
They do want us to include more non-fiction, but they don’t mandate what. They recommend essays by the Founding Fathers and gave us an assessment featuring an essay by Frederick Douglass about how learning to read was essential to him, and the little white boys who lived near the docks teaching him to read in exchange for bread. There was nothing in it a conservative would object to. It was awesome, actually. But they don’t mandate or even steer toward PC so far.
There is more non-fiction. A detailed explanation of problems with the English portion is Terrance O. Moore’s The Story-Killers: A Common-Sense Case Against the Common Core.
Moore also has a great explanation of how to teach literature without killing love of story which I enjoyed as a homeschool mom, other things I have read explaining this were not as down to earth.