Is Common Core increasing direct instruction?

I don't know the answer to that question. I'm asking.

My new copy of Education Week has a front-page story titled "Will the Common Core Step Up Schools' Focus on Grammar?"

I find that interesting (I have yet to read) because I'd been wondering the same thing about direct instruction after seeing the graphics in Ed Week's story Kindergarten Today: Less Play, More Academics.

By the way, I have no particular position on Kindergarten on way or the other. In my day, Kindergarten was .... well, what was it? I remember sitting at tables with other children, going out to recess, and sitting on the rug to listen to show and tell. We didn't learn to read.

Siegfried Engelmann taught academic skills to pre-school children, which served them well, so I'm certainly not against direct instruction in academic skills at that age.

My point in posting is that this looks to me like a significant change in the direction I definitely want to see for first grade and up, and I wonder how real, and how widespread, this change is. My own district is all constructivism all the time now.