I think you meant to write "easier to test", not "easier to teach"? The English Language Arts standard you pointed to, at p.35 of http://www.corestandards.org/

I think you meant to write "easier to test", not "easier to teach"? The English Language Arts standard you pointed to, at p.35 of http://www.corestandards.org/wp-content/uploads/ELA_Standards1.pdf http://www.corestandards.org/wp-content/uploads/ELA_Standard... , emphasizes close reading. Close reading is an example of something which is much cheaper to test at a mass scale. See http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2014/01/close-reading-20.html http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2014/01/close-reading-20.... for a longer description of what that means. My short version is that close reading, as meant by the Common Core Standard means that a student is given a short piece of difficult text and asked questions about it, without giving any context about what it means. This is certainly easy to test. But mostly worthless as a skill since most works are much longer and contain much more context. As that Curmuducation link points out, "Twilight may be a work of light fluff, but a close reading of it unpacks how many truly indefensible and odious subtexts are lurking in its gooey pages". That sort of close reading is much more important in teaching how to really read, but it's not easy to test, so not emphasized in Common Core. You pointed me to the Common Core definition. However, a close reading ;) of Common Core is not enough to tell you how it's meant to be used or interpreted. That's why you have to look at, say, how people are being trained to teach in a Common Core system, like http://k12newsnetwork.com/blog/2014/01/14/a-closer-look-at-common-cores-close-reading-strategy-reveals-deep-flaws/ http://k12newsnetwork.com/blog/2014/01/14/a-closer-look-at-c... . Quoting from the Curmuducation link: "Close Reading 2.0 is proof (piece of evidence #2,098,387) that CCSS was built to feed the testing beast."