The Common Core State Standards for ELA Instruction in Grades 6-12

The common core state standards, it seems, will result in a lot of changes in how teachers will instruct, but there are a number of concerns presented in the text that still worry me. Primarily, the issue of homogenization in education concerns me as both an educator and as a person of color. Due to the rigidity of standards-based teaching, and the often "teacher-proof" curricula that is developed for teachers, there is little opportunity for instructors to develop their instructional methods to allow for a variety of classroom contexts and cultural diversity. In the example the text provides, a new instructor runs into this issue, in which she wants to teach American literature with a strong multicultural emphasis, using authors such as Sherman Alexie, Rudolfo Anaya, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neal Hurston. However, she ends up teaching a "'dead white guy' curriculum," as she calls it.
This homogenization of instruction also results in a failure to acknowledge cultural diversity in assessment methods, which I am fully aware is a prominent issue, particularly in Title I schools. This notion is supported in the statement the author quoted from Stoniauolo, Hull, and Nelson, which notes that "traditional assessments of reading and writing[. . .] continue to reward those children who share the linguistic and cultural backgrounds of the test-makers," which of course, are predominately white, moderate to high income educators. This means students who are low-income, English language learners, non-white, or some combination thereof are heavily biased against in standards-based assessment, and results in low academic performance and harms the self-esteem of these students. As someone who wants to work in a low-income school, this is a really important issue to me, because I want my students to feel like the assessments connect to them on an individual and cultural level.
Ultimately, while I have hope that the common core state standards will improve upon and deal with the issues of homogenization and a failure to acknowledge cultural diversity, I am hesitant. As a future instructor, I plan to teach to all of these standards, but I am hopeful that there will be enough room for me to work in literature and assessment that speaking to all of my students, regardless of socio-economic, cultural, educational, and ethnic background.