“I want my kids to be able to open a primary document and be able to pull the meaning, read the graphs, ask questions about the procedures being done, the conclusions being drawn,” she said. “These are the literacy skills you need in science. And there is a lot of reading to get to the joy of it.”

That's NYC high school teacher Stephanie Lane, describing her sense of urgency about building science-specific literacy skills. This EdWeek article describes pilot work by Lane and her colleagues taking on the new "complex text" requirements that are central to the new Common Core State Standards.

The details of their "inquiry-based" approach to digging in are helpful, and so is the central point about Common Core: our teachers will be investing a lot of hard, important work to understand and deliver on these new, demanding expectations.