FAIRtest released the following statement, endorsed by some of the nation’s leading writers;
Public Letter about Standardized Testing by 120+ Children’s Authors & Illustrators
Submitted by fairtest on October 21, 2013 –
Dr. Monty Neill (617) 477-9792
Bob Schaeffer (239) 395-6773
for immediate release — Tuesday, October 22, 2013
120+ CHILDREN’S BOOK AUTHORS AND ILLUSTRATORS TELL PRES. OBAMA,
“WE ARE ALARMED AT NEGATIVE IMPACTS OF EXCESSIVE SCHOOL TESTING”
SIGNERS INCLUDE MAYA ANGELOU, JUDY BLUME, JULES FEIFFER, DONALD CREWS
SAY POLICIES UNDERMINE “CHILDREN’S LOVE OF READING AND LITERATURE”
More than 120 leading authors and illustrators of books for children, including several national award winners, are calling on President Obama to “change the way we assess learning so that schools nurture creativity, exploration, and a love of literature.”
Their letter delivered to the White House today stated, “Our public schools spend far too much time preparing for reading tests and too little time curling up with books that fire their imaginations.”
“All children must have the freedom to grow, to evolve, to develop,” explained acclaimed poet Maya Angelou, who spoke at President Obama’s inauguration. “We parents, authors, illustrators are standing up for our children. We desperately need you and your administration to stand with us.”
The authors’ and illustrators’ letter continued, “We are alarmed at the negative impact of excessive school testing mandates, including your administration’s own initiatives, on children’s love of reading and literature. Recent policy changes by your Administration have not lowered the stakes. On the contrary, requirements to evaluate teachers on student test scores impose more standardized exams and crowd out exploration.”
Signers of a “Public Letter on Standardized Testing from Authors and Illustrators of Books for Children and Youth” include such other notables as Alma Flor Ada, Judy Blume, Jules Feiffer, and Donald Crews, as well as National Book Award winners Kathryn Erskine and Phillip Hoose.
The National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest) coordinated signature gathering for the letter. The assessment reform organization’s executive director, Dr. Monty Neill, explained, “The authors and illustrators recognize the damage done to young children by testing overkill. The new Common Core assessments will not reverse the damage. In fact, they will mandate more standardized exams in more grades. It is time for an indefinite moratorium on high-stakes exams.”
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– The letter to President Obama with a complete signers’ list of children’s authors and illustrators is online at: http://www.fairtest.org/public-letter-on-standardized-testing-by-childrens-authors
– A fact sheet on Common Core assessments is at: http://fairtest.org/common-core-assessments-factsheet
How very true this is. In school after school, students no longer read novels. Instead, they do canned Common Core lessons in which they read “selections” chosen for the sole purpose of illustrating and/or exercising one or more “skills” from the amateurish, backward list of skills that is the CCSS in ELA. The CCSS drives curricula and pedagogy, and the real reasons for reading are forgotten. We might as well be having students read in order to count the number of commas in Chapter 5 of The Scarlet Letter or to underline all the words containing the letter “o” in On the Beach. The “standards” and tests are grossly distorting the teaching of English.
But it’s worse than that. Not only are canned CCSS lesson pushing out the reading of novels, they are also pushing out coherent curricula generally. Every curriculum developer in the country, just about, begins every project, these days, by making a spreadsheet that contains a list of CCSS “skills” in one column and a list of the lessons where these are “covered” in another. In the past, a curriculum developer would assemble a set of texts so that a student might read them to a) gain knowledge in some area of study, b) have a related set of vicarious experiences, c) develop familiarity with and understanding of a set of related formal structures, etc. No more. Kids read text A to practice CCSS skill RI.4.2, then text B to practice CCSS skills RI.4.3. Some bother to related the various texts thematically, but the study that the student is to do is focused on the skill rather than on what the texts have to say and, incidentally, how this is done. I doubt that it was the INTENTION of the amateurs who put together the CCSS in ELA to render curricula in English incoherent, but that’s what, in fact, is happening because of CCSS-driven instruction.
What we are seeing as a result of the CCSS is the emergence of what I call “Monty Python-style” curricula: With every selection, it’s “and now for something completely different.” The whole idea of a coherent learning progression is out the window because the only thing that matters is that all the CCSS “skills” are “covered.”
Of course, this sort of idiocy has been with us ever since NCLB created the standards-and-testing regimen. The CCSS in ELA have simply made matters worse.
Perhaps the word IMAGINATION needs to be defined for the deformers.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/imagination
imag·i·na·tion noun \i-ˌma-jə-ˈnā-shən\
: the ability to imagine things that are not real : the ability to form a picture in your mind of something that you have not seen or experienced
: the ability to think of new things
: something that only exists or happens in your mind
Full Definition of IMAGINATION
1
: the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality
2
a : creative ability
b : ability to confront and deal with a problem : resourcefulness
c : the thinking or active mind : interest
3
a : a creation of the mind; especially : an idealized or poetic creation
b : fanciful or empty assumption
See imagination defined for English-language learners »
See imagination defined for kids »
Examples of IMAGINATION
You can find a solution if you use a little imagination.
The author does not tell us what happens to the characters. We have to use our imagination.
He’s a competent writer, but he lacks imagination.
Is it just my imagination, or is it getting warm in here?
Origin of IMAGINATION
Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin imagination-, imaginatio, from imaginari
First Known Use: 14th century
Related to IMAGINATION
Synonyms
contrivance, creativity, fancy, fantasy (also phantasy), ideation, imaginativeness, invention, inventiveness, originality
Related Words
brainstorm, brainstorming, inspiration; fecundity, fertility; ingenuity, resourcefulness; versatility; chimera, daydream, delusion, dream, figment, hallucination, illusion, mind’s eye, mirage, phantasm (also fantasm), pipe dream; envisaging, visualization
Near Antonyms
literality, literalness
When people read a literary work, they enter into the world of that work and have experiences, and it is those experiences that are then meaningful. That isn’t understood by those who take the standards-driven approach, who turn every lesson into a hunt for where, in the text, standard CCSS.RI.7.3b is exemplified.
Thanks to these wonderful authors for writing this letter to President Obama and for copying it to Arne Duncan. I couldn’t agree more with their sentiments. It is heart-breaking for me, as a teacher, to be told there is not enough time to read and deeply discuss a novel with my students. The reason? Gotta cover all those standards!!!
Years ago, I was working on a grammar and composition program. My group was just about to send the program to press when we got a call from the publisher. We were told that we had to go through the entire program and take out every instance of the word imagine and its derivative and inflected forms (imagining, imagination, etc.). Why? Because some fundamentalist nutcases in Texas had decided that the root of the word imagine was magi and that if we were talking about imagination, we must be inculcating students in the dark arts of sorcery and magic.
This is the danger of Texas – they are the ones that drive the textbook content. How silly that one person can decide what all our children can or cannot learn.
Good Afternoon– I absolutely loved reading that 120+ authors have written to President Obama regarding the negative effect excessive testing in having on our students. I would love it if artists, and musicians would do the same!!!
Marge
It’s a terrible mistake to start from a list of abstract skills to be mastered at each grade level and then to try to retrofit a curriculum to it. The curriculum, the pedagogical approaches, and the skills addressed must be developed together. If one starts with the list of skills, one ends up make curricular and pedagogical choices that are not optimal. Publishers, today, are chosing texts for students to read not because they are great texts or because they fit together with a body of other texts in a coherent sequence but, rather, because a) they exemplify the CCSS for a particular grade level, b) they have the Lexile level dictated by the Common Core, and c) they are short enough to fit a lesson of x length in a sequence of lessons that has to cover all the CCSS in ELA in the course of a school year. And it gets worse. The CCSS in ELA do not simply say that, at this grade level, one must “cover” particular forms or structures or elements or whatever (e.g., conflict or setting or theme in narratives). They specify particular aspects of those that have to be covered at the grade level: “Determine a theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text, including how characters in a story or drama respond to challenges or how the speaker in a poem reflects upon a topic; summarize the text.” So, the curriculum developer chooses a selection not based on whether it makes optimal sense in the learning progression of a particular unit but based on whether it meets the specific requirements of the “standard” (Does the theme of this story emerge from characters responding to a challenge?) In these ways, and in many others, the “standards” distort our curricula and our pedagogy.
No one listens to teachers. I hope these authors have more credibility than we teachers do! I would like to thank them from the bottom of my heart for speaking out!
My love of learning came from my love of reading. As a child, I related to Ramon Quimby and aspired to be like Jupiter Jones. Anne Shirley became my first crush and how dearly did I wished to see the universe using a tesseract. Imagination is the root of all creativity. For me the uniqueness of the human species is defined by both our creative AND critical thinking abilities. One without the other leads to a world not worth living in.
But the bottom line should be that no one died and appointed David Coleman and Susan Pimentel king and queen of English language arts instruction in the United States. Their amateurish list of “standards” is one of many, many possible such lists, and what constitutes a standard in the various domains covered by the CCSS in ELA can be VERY differently conceived than they have been by Coleman and Pimentel. Certainly, anyone who had the slightest familiarity with the sciences of language acquisition would have written VERY different standards for vocabulary, grammar, usage, mechanics, and writing than those we find in the CCSS, which are extraordinarily crude, extraordinarily backward, as if the authors of these putative standards had no familiarity whatsoever with what we have learned in the past fifty years about how people actually acquire language skills.
There is an alternative to these amateurish national “standards”: We could have voluntarily adopted, competing standards that are continually debated and refined. In that direction lies innovation.
The alternative is to wait until Coleman, Pimentel, and the rest of the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat meet again in five years to make these decisions for everyone else. The presumption!!!! We haven’t seen the like since Stalin instituted his five-year plans.
Robert Shepherd – with all you have posted and seem to understand about this, I am very suprised that you said you doubt that it was the INTENTION of the amateurs who put this together, you don’t think it was exactly their intention?
Incidentally, there is a campaign in public libraries now called “Geek the Library” I am not sure if it is everywhere, but it is in my state, and it is a campaign to emphasize non-fiction interest topics in libraries. I noticed the posters all over at my local libraries and thought Gee doesn’t that kind of mesh well with the CCSSI how they want more non-fiction read in school. I asked the librarian about it and come to find out Geek The Library is a campaign funded by a grant from the Gates Foundation.
I am glad Authors are speaking up.
Just turned off the TV after watching an old episode of The Twilight Zone. It was the story of a little boy who kept his great grandfather alive by telling him the middle of a story every day. Great-grandpa would wake up the next day because he wanted to hear the end of the story. The little boy told him, and started another story to hook him into living for one more day. Sweet and brilliant and so true. It is magic sharing stories with children. Bravo to these authors!
Delightful!
There was a deep strain of humanism in Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone scripts, precisely what’s missing from the robotic, compliance-based, prep-the-proles-for-the-factory/ office essence of the Common Corporate Standards.
AWESOME!
Finally our great children’s authors and illustrators have spoken out! Now where are our reading experts and well known Constructivists philosophers? Dr. Snow, who served on the Validation Committee, disappointed me when she signed the Common Core document.
To add to the discussion, district belt tightening has resulted in reduced or eliminated library services. The CC has numerous skills best taught by a specialist – the librarian. Of course, free reading drives the development of readers far more than any curriculum.
I must also point out, that the list of recommended books in CC are inappropriate in content as well as lexile (reading level) for the assigned grade. I know this because I have been a school librarian for over forty years and this is my specialty. Obviously librarians were not consulted in this aspect of the program. Sound familiar?
Thanks to the authors and artists for lobbying for our children. We are all vested in a positive outcome.