Can you guess which of these books are more 'difficult' according to Common Core (a teaching initiative adopted by 45 states)?
Arguing that teachers aren't assigning grade-appropriate reading, Common Core recommends that students get matched up with books with the right "Lexile" score. The thing is, Lexiles measure a book's complexity by a painfully literal algorithm of sentence length, word choice, and syntax.
To be fair, it's only meant to be a rough guideline rather than some iron-clad dictum or curriculum. And any teacher knows that a work can have a low Lexile difficulty while being thematically unsuitable for younger readers. But still.
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