Carol Jago is an experienced English teacher, author, and former president of the National Council of Teachers of English.
Jago writes here about what high school English classes should look like in the Common a core era.
She served on the NAEP assessment committee that set the ratio of 70-30 for test developers.
Here is the key point:
“What seems to be causing confusion are the comparative recommended percentages for informational and literary text cited in the Common Core’s introduction. These percentages reflect the 2009 NAEP Reading Framework http://www.nagb.org/content/nagb/assets/documents/publications/frameworks/reading09.pdf . I served on that framework committee and can assure you that when we determined that 70% of what students would be asked to read for the 12th grade NAEP reading assessment would be informational, we did not mean that 70% of what students read in senior English should be informational text. The National Assessment for Educational Progress does not measure performance in English class. It measures performance in reading, reading across the disciplines and throughout the school day.”
I would clarify further to say that NAEP was not designed to tell teachers what to teach or how to teach. That ratio of 70-30 is an instruction to test developers, not to teachers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I remember a Lucy Calkins, the Teacher’s College guru, preface saying basically the same thing (ala let teachers modify and adjust according to needs), but when it came time to put the curriculum into practice, it was shoved mercilessly down teachers’ throats with a blunt and ineffective force. There is a massive chasm between what is said and prescribed and what is demanded. Shenanigans
Can someone PLEASE tell the “designers” of PARCC this? This collision course the our current education system is on is not going to end well. Einstein said “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” I’m tired of trying to fill someone else’s quotas. My kids are starving for some REAL learning.
Exactly!
A key point in Carol Jago’s excellent piece is that English classes (and other classes) should be places for lively discussion of texts that students have read carefully at home. These classes “need to be spaces where anyone who didn’t do the homework reading feels left out.” Similar things should happen in other classes; students should read history books and write research papers for history class.
For this to happen, students must be reading attentively and widely. But they say they have no time. Jago points to the 2010 Kaiser Family Media study: young people are spending hours every day on entertainment media. If they can devote a few of those hours to reading instead, then things can turn around.
I agree that it is possible to have lively class discussions of literature and history. It is possible to help students build their practice of reading challenging books (though many will resist). But do standards lead the way in this, or is curriculum the more important guide? I respond with some thoughts here:
Here’s the problem. Small minds leading school districts will — and now do — misread and misinterpret this 70% recommendation. I know of English/ELA/Commuications curriculum being rewritten RIGHT NOW to “meet” the 70% “goal” as if it WERE for English classes. So how do we turn this around in this era of rush-to-make-things-impossible for our students (and teachers)?
This. In spades.
The sad thing is that my district, along with a neighboring district we’ve partnered up with, have ALREADY mapped out a new ELA 6-12 curriculum framework and it’s a 70/30 for high school ENGLISH classes. I mentioned that this isn’t supposed to be and it falls on deaf ears.
I talk with my history, science, and math buddies and they say, “Hey, I’m too busy teaching content. I don’t have time to assign reading.”
And this at the core, the common core, of the problem. Instead of a district leadership putting a foot down and telling math, science, history, arts teachers that they will integrate reading into what they teach, the leadership will just throw it on us English teachers. They’ll tell us, “Hey, we got to et those test scores up.”
And this new curriculum is being done by “master teachers” from both districts. To paraphrase George Carlin, half of the people you meet are dumber than you.
The same thing is happening in my district. It is breaking my heart.
No one wants to hear that in my district either. They’ve hired a pricey consulting company to “help” us design a K-12 curriculum, LOTS of subs have been paid for, LOTS of committees have been formed. Typical bureaucratic busywork–hire someone from the outside to tell everyone on the inside what they’ve been doing wrong for years. How about we tell the public about how much money has been spent on these “experts,” HIGHLY PAID “experts”?
I know what I’m doing after I leave teaching.
Could the Common Core architects please communicate the correct information to state and local district leaders? While we as teachers share what we know to be the correct information regarding literature and informational Common Core requirements, our local instructional leaders are asking all teachers to go with 30%/70% criteria. I feel that our instructional leaders are highly concerned about the impending PARRC assessments and the anticipated heavy emphasis on information text on these measures.
Oops … PARCC assessments
Exactly!
I guess they should not have put that information into the footnote of an appendix, eh?
Well said! And this is a BIG, NATIONAL problem. Our children, our society, need(s) MORE literature (and art and music), not less. Reading MORE Shakespeare, August Wilson, Victor Hugo, Maya Angelou, etc, etc. NEEDED!!!
I appreciate Carol Jago’s credentials, but literature has vanished from senior English at my former high school. Only two books, one science fiction, one autobiographical(formerly read in sophomore English) are included and the research paper is on one topic: bullying. They school is lock step with the ERWC curriculum. Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2013 13:20:38 +0000 To: rke25@hotmail.com
Once the test scores become more important than learning and investigating your passions, the common core will be pointless. If the idea was to raise standards and have high expectations, but the test scores trump all, then this is a waste of time and money.
Survival of the fittest kicks in. Kids are props, teachers are robots and we are doomed.
Hey, Coleman, I know you don’t give a $hit, but that’s what I think.
So they instructed test makers that 70% of the test should be on “informational writing,” and then schools ended up making 70% of the assigned reading “informational”?
Gee, couldn’t have seen that coming!
It kind of proves the point of everyone complaining about how idiotic the people in educational bureaucracy really are, doesn’t it? It didn’t take me more than a couple of months as a teacher over a decade ago to realize that the:
State Boards of Education,
Many Colleges of Education,
Many big-city school upper level admin,
Educational coaches,
and too many principals were lucky to have jobs, let alone jobs that paid way more than me. Was it so hard to imagine that when left in control, they destroy whatever system that they were running.
In urban areas, if the police can’t or aren’t controlling crime, the commissioner is fired and someone else is brought in. Same with the fire departement, Streets and Sanitation, and most other departments. Yet in education, Arne Duncan has been continually employed and promoted even though he has overseen spectacular failures. Start throwing out the people at the top and we’ll get much more improvement than working up from the bottom.
Good points, Wilbert. And we, at the classroom level, are left to sort out all the trickle down idiocy as we sit through one professional development session after another. If we could just teach, all would be well.
I enjoyed reading this article explaining the rationale behind the percentages of material recommended in CCSS. Although I knew very little about CCSS at this time last year, and as a middle school administrator I did NOT want one more thing to prove my urban students were not competent, I agreed to become a trained facilitator for ELA. I LOVE teaching. I LOVE an integrated approach. And I LOVE project based learning for students. CCSS gives good teachers tremendous flexibility. I consider it the first attempt to professionalize teaching since NCLB started tearing it down. One aspect that has been left out of this particular discussion is the deliberate teaching ELA standards in social studies, science, and technical subject area. When you take that into consideration, the 30/70 split at the high school level is no different from previous secondary ed expectations. The new wrinkle is the expectation for all of the teachers to take part in ELA standards. Something as simple as having common expectations for student products when writing is required makes a huge difference in student performance. We changed our focus as teachers last year, and the students became better writers. I hope others also see the potential for stronger readers and writers across all domains as a result of this change. Now having said that, I think the death of a good idea will be the test used to assess student progress in the future…
Perhaps CC is being implemented in different ways across the country but in my district the ELA CC does not equate with “flexibility”. It means quite the opposite. It is a top-down rigid mandate.
Nor does it in mine. It’s become a “my way or the highway” culture in my district. I have Co-Directed our local chapter of the National Writing Project since 2004, have published curriculum, and was chosen as Teacher of the Year for my state in 2011, and I was told last week that my students papers were “too good” for both the first semester’s quarterly “assessments” (which were 8 and 12 days each), and that TEACHING my students to write is “insubordination.” I’m being put on an “improvement plan” as a result. This is beyond insanity now.
Jamie Highfill, I am responding to your comment below. Teaching students to write is now “insubordination”? This is truly insane. What happened to “academic freedom”? I will be thinking of you … stay strong.
Sorry, I am respond to the comment ABOVE.
Even if it were true that the 70/30 % mandate were only for test developers and not for teachers, the effect will be that teachers will teach to the test if they want students to score competitively; there will be no motive for anyone to teach properly, but only to teach what Common Core lays out.
Our district’s test scores have always been number one in our state. This is why our instructional leaders are asking all content areas to go with the 70%/30% shift. They are determined that we stay at the top. It doesn’t matter that the national leaders are now back peddling on their original statements about literature and informational text. Everyone is worried about the PARCC assessments.
So correct me if I’m reading this incorrectly, but it appears that in a rush to “implement,” many school districts around the country are cutting back even on the meager amount of literature our students are currently allowed to explore. Instead of adding to the joy and magic of reading from masters who engross, lift spirits, show us human connections, make us feel what humanity and life are and can be . . . we switch in ENGLISH classes to manuals and lists. We prepare our children even less for being full human beings with a love of learning, and more for being widgets. In the name of Common Core. So Common Core becomes yet another excuse for “education reformers” to murder the soul of education. And buy and sell scripts and tests. Even though, many say, it was not so intended. This is what is happening. So what do we do?
I think we have to scream, and scream, and scream some more. Eventually, someone has to pay attention, right? Tell the parents, tell the media, but the teachers have to join together on this or we’re doomed.
Jamie, I was just reading about you and the recognitions you’ve received, and now you’re on an improvement plan? I agree, your situation shows how far the insanity has gone. Thank you for the courage you show with your students, and by sharing bits of your own story here. Chicago and Seattle teachers are showing us how careful organizing, how reaching out to parents and communities, how building coalitions of thoughtful, self-educating teachers/students/parents/community activists in which each and every member is a leader — how we can begin to make changes. I hope you and many, many others will come to Chicago in July to meet others who are willing to join together to turn things around.
kippdawson,
I would LOVE to come there. At least you all are doing something about this mess.
I’ve never received anything buy glowing evaluations either, one of them THE DAY BEFORE I was put on the “improvement plan.” Walk-thrus? I’m always in the “upper quadrants.” It seems I work in a “Stepford” school now. I talk and talk and talk, and I see their eyes moving, and nothing registers. It’s scary. I’ve taken to recording every meeting I have to go to now, and I will not meet with my principal alone again. When she asked me for my feedback on the “plan,” and I tried to respond several times only to be cut off each time, I asked if I could finish my sentence, and she bared her teeth and lunged toward me across her desk.
And through all of this, I STILL think that 20+ days of “assessment” in one semester is excessive, and I’ve said so. I think they’re just trying to shut me up by sabotaging my career.
Yep, they’re trying to shut you up!
Been through it myself. Make sure you don’t do as I did and use the term “mental masturbation” to describe the shit you are experiencing as then they’ll attempt to get someone to file “sexual harassment” charges against you.