The Louisiana Department of Education’s weekly newsletter for September 22, 2015 announced the following:

“The Department has developed blank, customizable templates to accompany the K-12 English Language Arts Guidebook units. These templates will support students in reading, understanding and expressing understanding of complex, grade-level texts. The templates are downloadable and can be modified to meet the needs of the students in the classroom.”

It’s unclear from the newsletter whether or not these exercises from the templates are required, but they do provide a window into the Louisiana ELA curriculum:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-qtI3_gV-avfm1POWgwRHZEdGNmY0hIQVM5V1hUN01XMk1fNXJwUjRBREtFRHd2dHJ1WkE&usp=sharing

I examined the templates for twelfth grade, which support these texts, among other similar ones:

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur

and the exercises mostly consist of short-answer questions.

Another recent newsletter contained a list of resources for parents about the PARCC assessment. The newsletter suggests that parents will receive reports with data about their children’s performance using the following template:

http://www.louisianabelieves.com/docs/default-source/links-for-newsletters/spring-2015-student-report-%28ela%29-draft0indf?sfvrsn=2

Relevant NCTE positions statements may be these:

NCTE Guidelines for a Gender-Balanced Curriculum in English Grades 7-12: https://www2.ncte.org/statement/genderbalanced712/

NCTE Resolution on the Need for Diverse Children’s and Young Adult Books: https://www2.ncte.org/statement/diverse-books/

NCTE Framework for 21st Century Curriculum and Assessment: http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/21stcentframework