Education Commons^™

Rebranding Mediocrity: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Common Core Textbooks For College-Bound Writers, E. Suzanne Ehst

Dissertations

This project analyzes the quality of high school writing textbooks from major publishers, textbooks purported to align with The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for writing. I measure the textbooks against the promise of CCSS’s tagline, “college and career readiness,” focusing specifically on the former goal to discern how “college-ready writing” is constructed and to analyze the degree to which the textbooks align with relevant research and theory in the fields of English Education and Rhetoric and Writing Studies. I begin the project by situating this study in current U.S. educational policy and rhetoric. Specifically, I describe the politicized rhetoric …