As we have seen in mainstream media coverage of the Common Core, there is a common–but fake–narrative about the Common Core. Secretary Duncan has repeatedly said that opposition to the Common Core comes from the far right, especially the Tea Party. We are also told that teachers like the Common Core. The underlying goal is to stigmatize critics and to belittle those who do speak up.
A good place to start with the Common Core is to look honestly at the source of the criticism and see whether there are legitimate concerns. Unfortunately, this is not happening, and states have been told that they can add content, but they can change nothing. This is bizarre, as no standards are ever perfect; all must have a process to redress grievances if they be just.
It is true that the two national teachers’ unions support the Common Core, and it is also true that both unions have accepted millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation to advocate on behalf of CCSS.
But teachers are increasingly resistant to the standardization that the CCSS requires, as well as to the tight linkage among the standards, the online federal tests, and the inevitable value-added-metrics that will be used to evaluate teachers. A very neat trap has been set that will use CCSS as the linchpin for test-based accountability. Unfortunately, the national media reports this reaction as teachers who are fearful of accountability,
Thus, don’t believe the oft-repeated tale that only the far right opposes CCSS. Anthony Cody reminded me that the Chicago Teachers Union was not alone in voting against CCSS. That vote, to my knowledge, has not been reported in the New York Times or other mainstream media. The Chicago Teachers Union, after long deliberation, voted unanimously in opposition to the CCSS.
On May 3, the delegate assembly of the Connecticut Education Association opposed high-stakes testing, VAM, and data mining of children and voted for reconsideration and review of CCSS.
On May 9-10, members of the Massachusetts Teachers Association elected Barbara Madeloni–an outspoken opponent of high-stakes testing–as their new president and passed resolutions opposing Corporate control of schools, including school takeovers and turnarounds. It passed a resolution seeking a moratorium on implementation of CCSS and PARCC.
So, yes, there is growing opposition and controversy swirling around Common Core. No, it is not a cause limited to the far right. In fact, some of the strongest supporters of CCSS are on the right, like Jeb Bush, Michelle Rhee, former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
CCSS is one of the most divisive issues in American politics today. Many myths swirl around it, coming from all directions. A nation as big and diverse as ours does not lightly adopt national standards and federally funded online tests without careful deliberation. It is time for the fear-mongering to end and for the careful deliberation to begin.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I find it strange that the strongest argument against Common Core is never mentioned. Common Core presupposes that students are already at grade level. And therefore if they do not succeed in any individual grade-level, it is assumed that this is the teacher’s fault.
The reality is quite different. Students arrive at school already years behind their peer group and are subsequently socially promoted through grade after grade without mastery of these grade level standards.
To subsequently give these students a high stakes test that is objectively far beyond what is and has been their objective level is disingenuous to say the least. It is also a way of finding teachers who are in no way responsible for this culpable.
This is the mechanism to justify getting rid of experience/expensive teachers to further the corporate agenda to privatize public education for profit- think credit default swaps and sub prime for comparable scams- and the further dumbing down of Americans to the point where they can no longer fulfill their constitutionally mandated responsibility of being the final arbiters of power.
This has gone on for so long already that you shouldn’t be surprised if the principal of your school can’t tell you when WWII was.
Lenny@perdaily.com
That argument has been mentioned many times on this blog. Are you new around here?
Lenny is far from being new, Dienne. He is the publisher of PerDaily and has much insight into all of our problems…and he is one the highly wounded teachers at LAUSD…but has the smarts and fortitude to fight back.
Important points, Leonard!
Oh my….you are SO CORRECT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
Even ostensibly ‘progressive’ media, which often isn’t so progressive, parrots the meme that opposition to Common Core is only and exclusively from the right …. even when confronted with progressive opposition to the standards….
…and by ostensible progressive media, i mean MSNBC….
alas, yes!
From what I’ve seen from many who call themselves progressive in the last 6 years – political cowering, political naifism, selling out to sell outs who call sell outs compromises – I no longer consider myself a progressive. We need some new branding.
rmm.
Agree…
To put it as frankly as I possibly can….
I get sick and tired of these analytical bunch of mumbo jumbos pitting the right against the left..the conservatives against the liberals……These giant MSNBCer’S are churning out nothing but decorated words trying to cover-up their lack of knowledge of how this Educational Coreless Chaos has spun OUT OF CONTROL!!!!!!!!!!!
Reblogged this on TN BATs BlOG.
As far as I am concerned, the opposition cannot grow fast enough. Throw the bastards and their standards and accountability schemes out wherever they are hiding! It’s time for an end to the paternalistic claptrap. It’s time for teachers to take control of their profession and stop ceding their livelihoods to gremlins who have no interest in anything but the money they can make off the backs of others. Look around you at the proliferation of corporate managers who have insinuated their way into public education. What value do they honestly add to the educational process when they go misty eyed over their data drivel? And yet, I still long for the days when I believed that I could hide behind my classroom door. But they took that away from me.
CCSS certainly does make the States who have it ripe for poaching.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Thank you for telling it like it is, 2OldToTeach. Your directness is refreshing.
It’s time for teachers to take control of their profession
yes yes yes yes yes!!!!!!
And parents have to support teachers as they take back the profession. One of the primary reasons for all the anti-teacher rhetoric is to keep parents on the side of “reform.” Divided, parents and teachers have been conquered.
Once parents and teachers unite, there will be no stopping us, for a very simple reason: we own the “accountability” argument. What politician will stand before his constituents and say teachers must be held accountable to him and not to the children they are educating? If parents demand en masse that teachers be in charge of what’s happening in their children’s schools, what possible reason can be given for denying them?
Superb, Jeff! Yes!
and YES AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I am glad I read this ….even a week after you wrote it…PERFECT!!!!!!
At the California Teachers’ Association state council meeting in March, there was a forum on Common Core. Nineteen teachers spoke; of these 4 had positive things to say; 13 had skeptical or negative things to say. The forum exposed starkly different visions on the likely impact of the new standards. The optimists envision a new era wherein teachers are free to use their judgment about the best way to develop the mental capacities that the ambitious standards enumerate. The pessimists see a future where the standards are likely to be irrelevant. What will matter will be the tests, which are a different ball of wax despite their nominal linkage to the standards. In this grim vision, Common Core becomes NCLB 2.0 as principals and teachers revert to the mode of teaching they know best –ruthless test prep –in an entirely rational expectation that the tests will one day have high-stakes attached to them. Teacher autonomy will be radically curtailed. The situation will be worsened by the dubious quality and validity of the tests –at least the ELA tests. And even supposing this test mania gets curbed and schools do end up paying attention to the standards themselves, some worry that the standards themselves are not good. Untested, their impact is not guaranteed to be good. In fact the way they’re written promotes what may be a fruitless effort to build mental capacities through mental exercise in lieu of the time-honored practice of using school to systematically transmit the core knowledge that is essential for expanding the scope of kids’ reading, writing and thinking powers.
Great analysis Ponderosa!
The ELA standards do not align well to ESL instruction.
On another note, the teachers unions accepted money from Bill Gates to promote the standards. Is this not a problem folks?
It’s amazing the lack of attention given to the 500 some educators who, in 2010, signed a joint statement criticizing, among other things, the common core standards for elementary children for being developmentally inappropriate. It’s an impressive list of signatories, including people from Harvard and other revered institutions of higher learning, among many others. Every time Secretary Duncan opens his mouth on Common Core, a reporter should be asking him about this letter.
I have been trying to show and explain to family and friends outside the education profession close reading and placing percentages on fiction versus nonfiction, as a few examples to help them understand why my own concerns go well beyond mere clumsy implementation, and have moved me to retire at least a few years earlier than originally planned.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I’m with you, David Taylor. The biggest, most immediate pushback should be against the 3rd-8th gr CCSS.
I cannot speak for math. I gather from that the loudest complaints could have been made any time in the last 20yrs about Chicago’s Everyday Math. Although I’ve heard something that might be substantive: that elem. CCSS-math pushes algebraic/ abstract thinking down into ages where concrete thinking is age-appropriate.
But everything I read in the CCSS-ELA for primary looks a pushdown of 11th-12th-gr desired output into ludicrously age-inappropriate early grades & even K where we find kids who are just learning to hold a pencil required to produce evidence-based essays…?!
Explain this to family and friends outside the profession:
Common Core standards CANNOT be FIXED
Common Core standards CANNOT be IMPROVED
Common Core standards CANNOT be CHANGED
EVER.
CC = Cast in Concrete
NY TEACHER!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“Cast in Concrete”…but I do have a Sledge Hammer and one of those Concrete Breaker Electric Drill that work just fine!
Parents and Teachers United
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Let me guess: the optimists are all from states that have not yet been beset with the PARCC/SMART tests.
Cognitive psychologists make a distinction between
knowledge of the world (declarative knowledge, or knowledge of what, which includes both semantic memory and episodic or narrative memory) and
knowledge of procedures (procedural knowledge, or knowledge of how).
We actually have distinct but interrelated memory systems for these two types, though the details of those systems are hotly debated and the subject of current research.
Attainment in any field involves a lot of both: world knowledge and procedural knowledge.
The CCSS in ELA almost entirely ignores the former and treats the latter so abstractly and so vaguely that one cannot validly test attainment of that knowledge, which is BIZARRE because the CCSS purports to be a list of outcomes to be measured by assessments.
What an utter crock the CCSS is!
Wrong on both counts.
Wrong at the most fundamental levels–at the levels of what is covered in the standards and at the level of how that which is covered has been formulated and conceptualized.
Of course, I am using “knowledge” there VERY, VERY loosely and broadly.
“What an utter crock the CCSS is!
(That deserves to be repeated…..a lot !!!)
🙂
world knowledge and procedural knowledge.
entirely ignores the former and treats the latter so abstractly and so vaguely
I can hear Forest Gump saying…..
This “Common Core just don’t make No Common Sense”
I’m leaning toward replacing SBAC/PARCC with human-graded essay content-area exams like they have in Finland.
Won’t happen, at least not in my state. It’s too expensive. The essays right now in my state (the 8th graders had to write three this year) are graded by computer.
Very wise, but we should avoid invariant, one-size-fits-all assessments. People differ, and we need to have ways of assessing that honor those differences.
Contact FAIRTEST and the Mew York consortium For alternative ideas for reluBle gos of assessment that many schools in NYS are using!!’
Sent from my iPhone
>
I just posted to the links to these two great sources.
http://performanceassessment.org/
http://www.fairtest.org/
EXACTLY !!!
Honor those Differences………… RESPECT EACH CHILD FOR THE INDIVIDUAL THEY ARE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We need to remind ourselves often of the victories. Thanks, Diane. It’s also possible union will see something different from LA due to the change in union leadership there. We need to keep each other posted on every little victory–school boards, town councils, union elections, etc. We also need to tackle the other unions who are less focused on education issues and can sometimes therefor be our opponents.
@Deborah Meier.. I read your words, “We also need to tackle the other unions who are less focused on education issues and can sometimes therefor be our opponents…” … and SO AGREE!!! I would say these unions/associations are focused more on implementing “corporate ed reforms” by board of eds and making it appear like they are serving their constituents – the teachers. Some of the associations are bad enough that they don’t even pretend to represent teachers… they just claim they are powerless to argue against whatever is told by the board of eds because “of the contract” which they of course secretly negotiated. Your point is such an overlooked danger as there are probably more unions or associations around the country combined that serve corporate interests. People often say, “Well then their teachers need to vote the leadership out of office”… but it is not at all as easy as that as layers of corruption and apathy run so so deep.
Note: I’m thinking about all those unions that have members who have kids in schools and should therefore be knowledgeable about education–but aren’t. Including SEIU, UAW, public employees of all sorts.
And private employees who care about education and unions.
Deb
Artseagal, you’re absolutely right but please look up. The populist surge is still building. Union drives to organize the unorganized are moving members of established unions to greater activism, especially the ones Deb listed.
As far as taking control of our teachers unions, everybody try it now that Reign of Error is out there. The moral arc bends toward justice because we bend it, and now is one of those moments in history to get bending.
Thanks Deb for the plug for the new “Progressive” union team at LAUSD. Despite skeptics, I hold out hope that they will do better than past UTLA leadership.
🙂
I’m so pleased to see your comments on this, Deb. Considering what just happened to the WFP, I’m afraid some of the “other unions” are in the same situations as teacher unions, in that the executive boards and staffers have economic interests of their own, which can stand in opposition to their union’s members.
Unions are “under attack”, and staffers want to build up reserves to pay their own salaries in the event of industry shrinkage or layoffs. “Leaders” ally with politicians, and take grant money or campaign cash from the financial predators who want to divert our pension funds. Then they argue they have to endorse the attacks to get a place at the table and prevent the Tea Party from destroying us. Union members everywhere have to get vigilant, follow the money, and make sure it’s being used to unionize their industry and defend their rights as workers.
The MTA had dues increases for 3 years in a row, and has built up a reserve of over $26 million. Sellout lame-duck president Paul Toner is meanwhile sitting on an additional $970,000 public relations slush fund, listed as “expensed but not spent”. In response to a question from the floor, he said it was for “behind the scenes political work”.
I ran into the president of a citizens group at the Elizabeth Warren-Piketty event in Boston Saturday. Things have gotten so twisted up, she said the group couldn’t oppose the Common Core or VAM, because they get money from both unions! That’s what treacherous leaders can do for us.
By the way, colleagues in California have written me that Toner is running around their state trying to round up votes for his drive to get elected to the NEA executive board. Has anybody else seen him around?
Spot on! Follow the $$$$$.
“There is no bullet list like Stalin’s bullet list” –Edward Tufte, “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint:
Defenders of the new national bullet list of “standards” NEVER talk about the bullet list itself. Instead, they trot out some blithering generalities about “higher standards,” and what they are referring to there, I suppose, are what they believe to be the “instructional shifts” represented by the Common Core. In ELA, those are that students will read texts that are substantive and complex and read those texts closely, make written arguments based on evidence from texts (and, in general, favor having students construct arguments rather than persuasive pieces), do less narrative writing, read more informational texts and fewer narratives, learn general academic vocabulary, and do more literacy work in non-ELA classes like history and science.
Now, the first thing to say about these is that, for the most part, they are not shifts. They are what we’ve always done. Where these do represent shifts (i.e., from persuasion to argument, from literary to informational texts, from texts vetted by teachers and curriculum developers to be grade-level appropriate based upon human judgment to vetting of those texts based on Lexile level), the arguments for the shifts are weak and the ways in which the shifts are being implemented in actual curricula are distorting curricula and pedagogical approaches). See my separate notes on narrative and on readability scores, below.
It’s breathtaking presumption on the part of that noneducator Lord Coleman to presume to claim that these are revelations of some kind and horrifying that union leaders and nationally known professors of education would not call him out for the arrogance of such a presumption. To the extent that it makes sense to do so, we have always taught students to use evidence, we have always favored having them engage with texts that were substantive, we have always taught general academic vocabulary, and we have always had them attend to texts closely, and we have always done writing and reading in the non-ELA content areas. If someone presumed to issue new “standards” for the medical profession and those “standards” said that doctors should start basing their diagnoses on evidence and start using sterile procedures for a change, what do you think the AMA would say to that? If new national standards telling healthcare practitioners that they must follow sterile procedures were being taken to such extremes that healthcare was no longer being provided because of fear that provision of any services might involve possible contamination, providers would be in an uproar. Doctors and other healthcare providers would be furious about and appalled at the arrogance and ignorance and presumption of the “standards” and at the damage they were doing.
The second thing to say is that the defenders of these “standards” NEVER talk about the actual items on the actual 1,600-item bullet list, and there is a reason for that: The specific, enumerated bullet list is indefensible.
The actual items on the bullet list–the actual “standards”–are backward, hackneyed, unimaginative, often prescientific, and terribly distorting of curricula and pedagogy. I call the incredibly retrograde, long discredited approach to literature that is ossified in these “standards” “New Criticism for Dummies” or “New Criticism Lite.” The new “standards” for vocabulary and language are based in folk mythologies about how people acquire the vocabularies and grammars of their native tongues. As such, they are completely PRESCIENTIFIC. The writing standards are a joke. They are practically Xeroxed from level to level, they are based on an empirically indefensible division of writing into three hackneyed “modes,” and they address nothing having to do with acquisition by students of some part of the enormous toolkit of specific techniques for good writing that skilled writers have mastered, and so they lead to a lot of terrible writing of formulaic pieces–to the teaching of InstaWriting for the Test instead of to the teaching of writing.
For the most part, the “standards” in ELA neither cover world knowledge (knowledge of what) nor formulate procedural knowledge (knowledge of how) in ways sufficiently operationalized to allow for valid testing,
and they describe much of ELA that does not involve, primarily, explicit learning processes as involving such processes and so, again, misconceive, at a very basic level, much of what would be measured if we were following scientifically informed, rational assessment procedures.
And though these “standards” cover vastly different types of learning and acquisition in vastly different domains, they are pretty much formulated as though there were no differences in these. In other words, the “standards” were misconceived at their most fundamental level, at the level of the categorical formulation of a “standard” for a particular KIND of learning or acquisition in a particular domain.
Again and again, specific “standards” are just ludicrous. We are told, for example, at level after level, that a standard dealing with argument “does not apply to literature,” as though no one ever presented an argument in a work of literature or wrote a work of literature primarily to present an argument. Think of that when you read Milton’s opening note on the “Argument” of Paradise Lost.
We are told that the “standards” do not tell teachers what and how to teach, but they do precisely that again and again. So, those who promulgate these “standards” are either lying about that or are so clueless that they don’t understand the entailments of their own mandates. (See my analysis of one language “standard,” below.)
But perhaps most importantly, these putative “standards” draw a boundary in the vast design space of possible curricula and pedagogy and say, in effect, that what is within these boundaries people can consider teaching, and what is outside them they may not. What makes this so terrible is a) that almost everything within those boundaries in the CCSS is a cliche and that b) there are many better ways to approach most of this stuff, many of which have not yet been conceived. The CCSS in ELA is a string of cliches and halftruths and outright misconceptions. It ossifies the most unimaginative possible teaching. Consider this example: of all the thousands of topics related to figurative language that one could treat with students–some of them really interesting, profound, important topics–why one Earth would we want to concentrate, year after year, on “how the author’s use of figurative language affects the tone and mood” of a selection? But that’s just what these “standards” tell teachers they must do. And publishers are taking them as their roadmap for creating curricula. In other words, the standards (and the formats used in the tests on the standards) are BECOMING THE CURRICULUM, which was ENTIRELY PREDICTABLE and is, in fact, just what BILL GATES, who paid for the standards, said they would do: they would make the curriculum, in his words “fall in line.”
So, why the dumb standard on figurative language? Well, what other answer to that question can there be but that David Coleman knew so little about the vast literature dealing with figurative language that that’s all that occurred to him?
And so every textbook will follow his puerile mandate, and that will be what the figurative language instruction will come to.
And the same can be said for standard after standard after standard.
It is completely APPALLING to me that supposed LEADERS in education would consider mandating David Coleman’s puerile list, would think it acceptable to put this guy in charge of telling every teacher, curriculum coordinator, and curriculum coordinator in the country, “I have done your thinking for you. Your job is not to have ideas. Your job is to implement and obey.”
That seems, to me, INSANE, when we could, instead, issue a few general guidelines that would allow the degrees of freedom within which innovative new curricula and pedagogy could be produced based on ongoing contributions from the entire body of scholars, researchers, curriculum developers, and classroom practitioners in the country.
Oh, no, forget anything that any of those people have to say.
David knows best.
And who are we mere mortals to argue? After all, the masters at the CCSSO and Achieve have appointed David Coleman and Susan Pimentel, by divine right, absolute monarchs of English language arts instruction in the United States, and surely, as Hobbes argued in the Leviathan, monarchy is best. Surely, in Hobbes’s words, we all need to live under “a common power to keep [us] all in awe,” for as Queen Elizabeth I wrote in 1601, “The Royal Prerogative [is] not to be canvassed, nor disputed, nor examined, and [does] not even admit of any limitation.”
That seems, to me, just STUPID.
And unacceptable in a free country.
And incredibly backward in a time when technology has given us an opportunity to have open-sourced, crowd-sourced ALTERNATIVES of a richness and variety and depth never before dreamed of.
No, instead, we get Coleman’s insipid, invariant, mandatory Powerpoint bullet list for U.S. education.
Appalling.
The field–like Math, science, et al–is full of healthy arguments about what is most important, how best to help students grasp its most critical aspects, and what they are! To decide on one response over all others is counter-productive–and surely won’t lead to more inventors, creators, etc not to mention what it does to the intellectual spirit of teachers which, in turn, impacts kids. The U of Chicago (at least in my time) offered Hidtory as a Humanities subject or a Social Science subject. They didn’t say one way was right and one way was wrong. But there were different requirements depending on which you chose. C’mon folks, “one right answer” is a formula for ending America’s reliance on being a nation of inventors and pioneers–besides being incompatible with the democratic idea. .
Amen, Dr. Meier! Spoken like the profound scholar that you are.
Nothing freaks the Thought Police out as much as when people start talking about teaching Herstory. That, alone, is reason enough to do so often. But there are, of course, far deeper reasons.
For those of you who are not familiar with Deborah Meier’s work (there may be a few), treat yourself and learn about it. She has always been one of our clearest thinkers about education, and one whose thinking is motivated by compassion and care. And she hasn’t just talked the talk. She has walked the walk. She is rare in that respect among public intellectuals in the education “space,” as it’s referred to in the Rheeformish tongue.
One more thing about Ms. Meier, for the benefit of visitors to this blog: The now widespread misconception that small schools don’t work better than large ones do is an excellent example of people drawing false conclusions based on studies that do not isolate or consider relevant determinative variables (third factors) and based on invalid measurement devices. These are complex matters. One cannot remove complex human factors and human judgment from considerations of them. But that is the modus operandi of the Education Deformer–to practice a variety of numerology called “data-driven decision making” and to make extreme policy decisions based upon this moonshine.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx @ Bob: as if we needed those studies to prove small schools are better than big ones;) Spoken as a graduate of a 1-room schoolhouse (K-3) built in 1923 in rural upstate-NY, who went on to do well in an Ivy League college. I will never forget the day Ms Mitchell kept me (a new 1st-grader) after school to run me thro a bunch of primers. She gave me a piece of candy & said, ‘go home & ask your Mom if you can be in 2nd-gr tomorrow; you already know what we’re doing in 1st;)
Analysis of a Sample CC$$ Language “Standard”
CC$$.ELA-Literacy.L.8.1a. Explain the function of verbals (gerunds, participles, infinitives) in general and their function in particular sentences.
This standard tells us students are to be assessed on their ability a) to explain the function of verbals (gerunds, participles, infinitives) in general and b) their function in particular sentences. In order for students to do this, they will have to be taught, duh, how to identify gerunds, participles, and infinitives and how to explain their functions generally and in particular sentences. That’s several curriculum items. So much for the Common Core not specifying curricula.
Furthermore, in order for the standard to be met, these bits of grammatical taxonomy will have to be explicitly taught and explicitly learned, for the standard requires students to be able to make explicit explanations. Now, there is a difference between having learned an explicit grammatical taxonomy and having acquired competence in using the grammatical forms listed in that taxonomy. The authors of the standard seem not to have understood this. Instead, the standard requires a particular pedagogical approach that involves explicit instruction in grammatical taxonomy. So much for the standards not requiring particular pedagogy.
So, to recap: the standard requires particular curricula and a particular pedagogical approach.
Let’s think about the kind of activity that this standard envisions our having students do. Identifying the functions of verbals in sentences would require that students be able to do, among other things, something like this:
Underline the gerund phrases in the following sentences and tell whether each is functioning as a subject, direct object, indirect object, object of a preposition, predicate nominative, retained object, subjective complement, objective complement, or appositive of any of these.
That’s what’s entailed by PART of the standard. And since the standard just mentions verbals generally and not any of the many forms that these can take, one doesn’t know whether it covers, for example, infinitives used without the infinitive marker “to,” so-called “bare infinitives,” as in “Let there be peace.” (Compare “John wanted there to be peace.”) Would one of you like to explain to your students how the infinitive functions in that sentence and to do the months and months of prerequisite work in syntax necessary for them to understand the explanation? Have fun. Then tell me whether you think it a good idea to waste precious class time getting kids to the point where they can parse that sentence and explain the function of the verbal in it.
Shouldn’t there have been SOME discussion and debate about this, at the very least? Do the authors of these “standards” have any notion how much curricula and what kinds of pedagogical approaches would be necessary in order for 8th-grade students to be able to do this?
And so it goes for the rest of the long, long list of specific, grade-level standards. All have enormous entailments, and none of these, it seems, were thought through, and certainly, none of them were subjected to critique, and no mechanism was created for revision in light of scholarly critique.
Given what contemporary syntacticians now know about how gerunds, participles, and infinitives function in general and in particular sentences, I seriously doubt that that the authors of this “standard” understood what they were calling for or that students can be taught to explain these at all accurately, at this level (Grade 8) without that teaching being embedded in an overall explicit grammar curriculum. Furthermore, the authors of the standard doubtless had in mind a prescientific folk theory of grammar that doesn’t remotely resemble contemporary, research-based models of syntax–so they are doing the equivalent, here, of, say, telling teachers of physics to explain to kids that empty space is filled with an invisible ether or telling teachers of biology to explain that living things differ from nonliving ones because of their élan vital.
Of course, people do not acquire competence in using syntactic forms via explicit instruction in those forms and the rules for using them. Anyone with any training whatsoever in language acquisition would know that. For example, you know, if you are a speaker of English, that
*the green, great dragon
is ungrammatical and that
the great, green dragon
is not.
But you don’t know this because you were taught the explicit rules for order of precedence of adjectives in English.
While there are, arguably, some reasons for learning an explicit grammar (for example, one might want to do so in the process of training for work as a professional linguist), what we are (or should be) interested in as teachers of English is assisting students in developing grammatical competence, which, again, is done by means other than via explicit instruction in taxonomy and rules (e.g., through oral language activities involving language that uses the forms properly, through committing to memory sentences containing novel constructions, through exposure to these constructions in writing, through modeling of corrections of deviations from standard grammatical rules). The science on this is overwhelming, but the authors of these standards clearly weren’t familiar with it. Their “standard” requires particular curricula and pedagogical approaches if it is to be met, and these aren’t supported by what we know, scientifically, about language acquisition–about how the grammar of a language is acquired by its speakers. Many of the new “standards” assume and/or instantiate such backward, hackneyed, prescientific notions about what we should teach and how.
And, of course, again, these “standards” were foisted on the country with no professional vetting or critique, and no mechanism was created for ongoing improvement of them based on such critique.
Imagine, if you will, the whole design space of possible curricula and pedagogical approaches in the English language arts, a sort of Borges library of curricula and pedagogy. Standards such as these draw rather severe boundaries within that space and say, “What is within these boundaries is required, and what is outside these boundaries is not permitted.” In other words, the new “standards,” as written, preclude some curricula and pedagogical approaches and require others. Basically, they apply a severe prior constraint on curricular and pedagogical innovation based on current knowledge and emerging practice and research
I happen to believe, BTW, that there is a role to be played in the language and writing and literary interpretation portions of our curricula for explicit instruction in some aspects of current scientific models of syntax. However, that’s another discussion entirely, and it’s one that none of us will be having because the decisions about what we are to consider important in instruction have been made for us by Lord Coleman, and ours is but to obey.
That seems, sadly, to be OK with the defenders of the amateurishly prepared CC$$ in ELA.
Let’s turn to the place of this “standard” in the overall learning progression laid out by the Common Core.
Why verbals at this particular level? Why not case assignment or the complement/adjunct distinction or explicit versus null determiners or theta roles or X-bars or varieties of complement phrases or any of a long list of other equally important syntactic categories and concepts? And why are all those left out of the learning progression as a whole, across all the grades, given that they are key to understanding explicit models of syntax, which, evidently, the authors of these “standards” think important for some reason or another? Answer: this “standard” appears at this grade level pretty much AT RANDOM, not as part of a coherent, overall progression, the purpose of which was clearly thought out based on current best practices and scientific understanding of language acquisition. It’s as though one opened a text on syntax, laid one’s finger down randomly on a topic, plopped it into the middle of the Grade 8 standards with no consideration of the prerequisites for tackling the topic.
Let’s move on to how the existence of the “standard” precludes development of alternative curricula and approaches—to how it stifles innovation in both areas. Suppose I had an argument to make that it’s useful for kids to learn construction of basic syntax trees for coordination as part of a section of a writing program in which students are learning how to create more various, more robust sentences. Now, you can agree or disagree with this proposal, but the point is that you should have the right to do so–to look at the specific proposal and accept it, reject it, or accept it with modifications. The answer to the question, “Should we do that?” should NOT BE, “Well, it’s not in the standards.” And your answer to that question should not be, “We can’t do this because we have to be concentrating on the functions of verbals at these grade levels.” Instead, educators should consider the relative merits of these proposals.
But now, because of the CC$$ in ELA, and previously, because of the state “standards,” those are the standard answers to most suggestions for innovation in curricula and pedagogy.
That’s not how you get continuous improvement. Continuous improvement comes about when people put forward their suggestions for curricula and pedagogy, without such prior constraint, and those are evaluated critically.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Oh, Bob I do love it when you get specific. You had me at “While there are, arguably, some reasons for learning an explicit grammar…”
…and I might even go a round or two with you on the usefulness of diagramming sentences (because it was oh-so-helpful later in reading Henry James…
…or tell you how I think 2 yrs of Latin & a year of German might substitute nicely for ‘learning an explicit [English] grammar….
the only point to be made here, & the one that converts me immediately to the anti-CCSS side, is that the learning and the speaking/ writing of English is an ever-evolving process. To try to capture it like a fly in amber results in precisely what we have in CCSS-ELA– an already-obsolete exemplar of how English was taught once upon a time.
Without a continual feedback loop for tweaking & updating standards to conform with (a)a locality’s starting level of accomplishment & (b)today’s understanding & knowledge, the moniker “National Standards” is hooey.
Spanish and French: I think that there are LOTS of reasons for learning an explicit grammar (but a real one, not the folk variety taught in U.S. school texts), and for that reason I have devoted a lot of my life to studying explicit grammars. I bet we would have great discussions of this, you and I, and that’s what teachers should be doing ALL THE TIME, as opposed to following the mandates made by that profound learning theorist Lord David Coleman. I very much believe in “teaching grammar,” but it’s important to understand the many things that that can legitimately mean, NONE OF WHICH ARE REFLECTED IN THE PRESCIENTIFIC grammar material in the CCSS for ELA.
Once upon a time. LOL. The CCSS fairytale.
I’m one who never learned about grammar formally. But it may be a loss—so I’m not arguing for or against here. But I am arguing that this shouldn’t be a decision laid down by the government. I can’t stop colleges from using test that focus on it–and they don’t–but otherwise let different views explore what seems best. We were told Latin improves other forms of learning, for example. Maybe yes for some folks, no for others and who knows for the vast majority.
What a wonderful story, S&F! Thanks for sharing it!
If we are going to teach an explicit grammar, then it should be a contemporary one, not the prescientific folk grammar touched upon pretty much AT RANDOM throughout the CCSS, and we would need to have informed discussion and debate about what we plan to do there and what the science tells us about what kids will get out of it. This is an area about which many high-powered EduPundits are completely and utterly misinformed. They really need to go back and take some basic linguistics courses or to read any contemporary treatment of child language acquisition and syntax. Having learned even the basics about these, they will then be completely APPALLED by the treatment of grammar instruction in the prescientific CCSS, which perpetuates a lot of mythologies. If we had standards for science like the CCSS language standards, then those standards would be telling people to teach about phlogiston and the aether and elan vital and how objects use up their inherent energy as they move until its all gone and they come to rest. The language stuff in the CCSS is prescientific nonsense.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxl Bob: perhaps you’ll share w/me sometime the ‘real – not folk’ grammar, I’m intrigued! As a foreign-language teacher– & an OK I’ll admit it, a student of Chomsky & follower of forums on descriptive (as opposed to prescriptive) grammar– my basic slant on the grammar Q is: there’s a delicate balance between speaking ability and knowledge of underlying grammatical structure. The human mind grasps the structure underlying speech & written form intuitively. If the goal is to speak & write authentically, it’s best to do a lot of speaking & writing before examining the underlay. If one teaches ‘grammar’ separately, & especially if done prematurely, the result is a student who speaks/ writes haltingly [worried about ‘correctness’] & who also can pass tests on ‘grammar’.
Well said, S&F!
“Without a continual feedback loop for tweaking & updating standards to conform with (a)a locality’s starting level of accomplishment & (b)today’s understanding & knowledge, the moniker ‘National Standards’ is hooey.”
So, so important, both!!! The lack of such in the CCSS should be enough, alone, to sink this destroyer.
On the Shift from Study and Creation of Narrative Text to Increased Emphasis on Informative Text
To His Honor, Lord Coleman, Appointed (by Divine Right?) Absolute Monarch of Education in the English Language Arts in the United States
Narrative is one of the fundamental ways in which we humans are built to make sense of the world. About 80 percent OF ALL writing is narrative. Narrative is found absolutely everywhere. Scientific reports have Methods sections that are primarily narrative.
Our brains make sense of the world by putting bits and pieces together to form coherent narratives. When you dream, neural pathways that have been recently activated are revisited pretty much at random, and the part of your brain that narrativizes attempts to weave those random firings into a coherent story because that’s what brains do. So, for example, I once had a dream that I was on a small prop plane flying into Cuba. Cuba was a white layer cake floating below the plane in an emerald sea. Next to me on the plane was a big, red orangutan smoking a cigar. Well, in the days before this dream, I had flown in a small prop plane, read a story about Castro’s ill health, been to a wedding where there was a cake, and played golf with some hefty guys who were smoking cigars.
The historiographer Hayden White long ago pointed out that we tell ourselves that we have understood historical events when we have imposed particular narrative frames on them.
There is a school of clinical practice in psychology called Cognitive Narrative Therapy that is all about teaching people to tell themselves more life-enhancing narratives about themselves and others–ones, for example, in which they are not continually playing the victim role or the role of the caretaker of an abuser.
A great many studies in cognitive psychology (see the work of Elizabeth Loftus on this) have shown that when people remember, they do so in narrative form, and that much of memory is confabulation–it’s made up; it’s “just so” stories. The extent to which this is so is one of the most shocking and surprising findings of 20th-century science.
Our very idea of Self–out personal identities–who we are–is a story that we tell ourselves. Who is Bob Shepherd? Well, he is that boy in the Doctor Dentons in the creaky old farmhouse reading “The White Snake” with a flashlight under the quilt at night with the rain pounding on the tin roof. We are our stories.
Given the absolutely FUNDAMENTAL nature of narrative and giving its ubiquity, and given the absolutely FUNDAMENTAL nature of personal narrative, it would behoove us to know something about it.
Or, we could spend our time having our students do close reading of paragraphs 23-26 of that report on the production of pig iron and pork bellies to find what evidence the author uses to support the argument that pig iron and pork belly production are suffering because workers aren’t gritful enough.
Narrative goes back to the fundamentals of the human story. Next we’ll turn literacy’s meaning so that it applies only to mathematical literacy!
Nothing would surprise me from these folks. What they call data-driven decision making is purest numerology.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Right here is where the pundits who write standards falter. Narrative is key, & must precede all else. A piece of non-fiction which lacks a narrative thread does not grip the reader, & may result in a piece unread after the first two paragraphs. A piece of non-fiction which reads like a math treatise [all logic & equations] asks to be torn apart.
On Developing Curricula in the Age of the Thought Police
“The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873)
One of the nasty, generally unremarked features of the new national “standards” in ELA, and of the state “standards” that preceded them, is that they draw boundaries within the vast design space of possible curricula and pedagogy and say, “What is within these boundaries you may teach, and what is outside you may not.” And in so doing, they rule out almost all the good stuff–great existing material, or curricula, and approaches, or pedagogy, incompatible with Lord Coleman’s list. And, more importantly, they preclude all material and approaches that might be developed in the future that happen to be incompatible with that list.
I will give a single example to illustrate the general principle, but one could do the same for most of the other “standards” on the bullet list.
At several grade levels in the CCC$$ for ELA, there is a literature standard that reads, in part, that the student is to be able to explain “how figurative language affects mood and tone.”
Now, given a topic as rich as figurative language is, doesn’t that “standard” strike you as oddly constricted, or narrow, and even immature? It does me. Why effects of figurative language “on mood and tone” in particular? Why should we be having students think and write about effects of figurative language on the mood and tone of selection after selection in lesson after interminable lesson, year after year? Why not treat any of the thousands of other topics we might consider under the general heading of figurative language?
As an alternative to that “standard,” let’s consider just one topic related to one variety of figurative language. The variety we shall consider is metaphor, and the topic is conceptual framing. Thinkers as diverse as Emerson, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Borges, Sapir, Whorf, Burke, Hirsch, Derrida, Lakoff, and Kovecses (one could list many others) have all written, to various ends, about how metaphor is one of the fundamental means by which we understand the world. Our ways of conceptualizing the world are to a large extent metaphorical. Language is absolutely shot through with metaphor. And most of the metaphors we use we use unconsciously. They are sometimes called “dead” metaphors.
If you think carefully about the preceding paragraph, you will discover that it is heavily (that’s a metaphor) dependent (that’s another) upon metaphorical conceptual framing. The word Let’s depends upon a conceptual frame of a coming together of you, the reader, and me, the writer–a frame that equates consideration of a topic with physical meeting. Topic, of course, comes from the Greek topos, or “place.” Another metaphor. The word ends employs a conceptual frame in which a process of thought is treated as a journey or as a physical object with a beginning part, a middle part, and an end part. The word figurative belongs to a large class of metaphors that describe statements and thoughts as shapes (e.g., “The argument centered on Eliot’s last poems”). The words fundamental and understand relate to a conceptual framing of ideas as parts of structures–ground on which to stand or overarching shelter. The metaphorical frame of shot through is clear enough: ideas are projectiles. And conceptual framing and dead metaphor are, of course, examples of themselves. The phrases are self-describing. They apply to themselves. In the argot of analytical philosophers, they are autological terms.
Emerson, in the essay “Language,” Chapter 4 of his book Nature (1836), makes the claim that all abstract thinking has its roots in the concrete, is at root metaphorical. He gives the examples of the word right, as in “the right way,” having the literal meaning of being on a straight path, of spirit being derived from wind, and transgression being derived from crossing a line. So common is such metaphorical conceptual framing that Nietzsche, in his influential, in-your-face early essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873), speaks disparagingly of such unexamined use of such inherited, “prefab” metaphorical concept frames as the essential, or defining, human activity! Heidegger, in the essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” (1951) derives I am from dwelling on Earth, making our expression of our very existence metaphorical in origin:
“Bauen originally means to dwell. Where the word bauen still speaks in its original sense it also says how far the essence of dwelling reaches. That is, bauen, buan, bhu, beo are our word bin in the versions: ich bin, I am, du bist, you are, the imperative form bis, be. What then does ich bin mean? The old word bauen, to which the bin belongs, answers: ich bin, du bist mean I dwell, you dwell. The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is buan, dwelling. To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell.”
Heidegger’s etymologies are much disputed, but the wisdom of his general approach is indisputable.
Lakoff and Kovecses have created extensive but by no means exhaustive catalogs of metaphorical conceptual frames.
Example: debate = war:
He won the argument.
Your claims are indefensible.
He shot down all my arguments. Her criticisms were right on target.
If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out. Example: achievement = harvesting:
She reaped her rewards. What a plum job!
By your fruits you will be known.
That market is ripe for the picking.
In short, metaphor does a lot of heavy lifting in our language and thought, and limiting ourselves, as teachers, to having students explain, year after year, for selection after selection, how the use of figurative language affects mood and tone is like reducing the study of the Civil War to consideration of the relative sizes of Union and Rebel cannonballs.
Suppose that a curriculum developer were to suggest to an educational publisher, today, that there should be, in a tenth-grade literature program, a unit or a part of a unit dealing with
–common metaphorical frames in literature (cycles of seasons = the life cycle; a journey = learning, personal change);
–how metaphors work, structurally (their parts and their mapping to the world);
–how they shape thought, and the extent to which they do (note: we must reject any contention that metaphor renders certain perceptions or conceptions necessary or impossible–any strong version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis; but a weak version certainly holds, often with dramatic effect–consider the egregious metaphor of “the little woman” used by U.S. husbands in the 1950s to refer to their wives);
–how most metaphors are dead ones–are unconsciously employed, unexamined, common linguistic inheritances; and
–how dead metaphors that constrain thought within preconceived patterns often have to be unlearned if progress in thinking is to be made (consider, for example, how the bad metaphor of “using up energy and becoming tired during work” shaped Aristotelian mechanics and had to unlearned by Galileo and Newton).
Such a unit on metaphor as conceptual framing–often inherited, unexamined, culture-shaping conceptual framing–could be extraordinarily valuable and interesting. It could give kids tools of ENORMOUS POWER that even many professional writers and critics don’t have. And those tools would have applicability far, far beyond the classroom. Critique of conceptual framing (itself a metaphor, remember) is a powerful (another metaphor) lever (yet another) for thinking generally. Dan Dennett has suggested that use of such heuristics, such levers, such intuition pumps, as he calls them, likely accounts for the Flynn Effect–the remarkable average continuous increase in IQ over the past century. Dennett’s casual observation should be taken very seriously, I think, by educators–such is the fertility of his mind.
Suppose that I suggested to a K-12 educational publisher, today, that we do a unit on metaphor as conceptual framing, or even a single lesson or “special feature” (in the argot of the educational publishing trade), on the topic. Here’s what the publisher would tell me: “No. You can’t do that. The ‘standards’ [sic] say that you must concentrate on how figurative language affects mood or tone in literary works.”
In comparison, of course, the “higher standard” is, well, not higher (note the metaphor: correct is up/false is down). The “higher standard” is hackneyed and obvious and something teachers have done pretty much unthinkingly for eons, and it’s a LOT LESS interesting and powerful and important than is the alternative (or addition) that I’ve recommended. What we are told to concentrate on in the standards reads, to me, like what might be suggested by an amateur who really doesn’t know much about figurative language and how it works.
And so it is with standard after standard. We find in these “higher standards,” again and again, received, hackneyed notions. Even worse, the mediocre, the common, pushes out the uncommon and valuable: exciting alternatives are, a priori, ruled out. They are not important. They will not be on the test.
Obviously, the alternative that I outlined above is just one of many possible approaches that one could take to this one topic from this one “standard”–one of many ruled out because we have been told that we must do what the “standard” says and not any of a thousand other things that never occurred to Lord Coleman.
Of course, a unit on metaphor as conceptual framing would be in line with the state of the art of research into the cognitive science of thinking and language. Such conceptual framing is fundamental to the thinking via natural prototypes (as opposed to Aristotelian natural kinds) that we actually do. And being aware of what we do, there, is extremely powerful and enriching, to one’s reading, one’s writing, and one’s thinking generally. Knowing about conceptual frames facilitates unlearning, which is the most powerful kind of learning there is.
But no. As an author of curricula for K-12 students, I am not allowed to think about such matters now. Lord Coleman has done my thinking for me and for all of us, and we shall have new thinking when the CCSSO reconvenes its Politburo in five years or so to issue its next bullet list. If we want changes in these “standards,” we shall have to await future orders from the Commoners’ Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth, appointed (by divine right?) the “deciders” for the rest of us.
And so it is by such means as I have described above that these “standards” typically limit the possibilities for pedagogical and curricular innovation. We are to limit ourselves to the backward, received, unimaginative, uninformed, often prescientific ideas of the Philistines who put together these “standards” based on the lowest- common-denominator groupthink of the previously existing state “standards.”
I’m not happy about that. Could you tell? How did my use of figurative language in this piece affect my tone and your mood?
And who cares? Wouldn’t you much rather engage what I had to say? to agree or disagree and tell me why? I thought so.
P.S. If you wish to respond to this piece, please make sure that your response is a five-paragraph theme on how my use of figurative language in the piece affects its tone or mood, and please give at least three pieces of evidence from the piece to substantiate your claims. Do not under any circumstances address what I had to say. That would be outside the parameters for response that I have set here.
See what I mean? The Coleman approach leads to completely unnatural, inauthentic Instawriting, InstaReading, and InstaThinking instead of actual, normal engagement with texts–with what writers actually have to say. But precisely the sort of directions I just gave for your response are being repeated in text after text after text, on test after test after test, because of the CC$$ in ELA. And if that’s not completely wacko, I don’t know what is.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx A beautiful essay, Robert. On the wings of metaphor we fly. It is the foundation of poetry and prose alike. How sad I am to learn from your study of CCSS-ELA that metaphor is not a major (nor even minor) unit of study. As we advance into CCSS-ELA, our thoughts are impoverished by this lack. Your post could serve as an important feedback/ update to CCSS-ELA– were we allowed to make such improvements…
Thanks, S&F. That means a lot to me.
I have a LOT more, but I’ll stop there.
It’s time for a national vetting of the puerile new “standards” in ELA and for a revisiting of the very idea of foisting a single, invariant, one-size-fits-all list on the entire country.
How do you propose conducting a national vetting with all the billionaires money promoting massive propaganda?
” It is time for the fear-mongering to end and for the careful deliberation to begin.”
Questions:
How can careful deliberation begin when Pearson will not allow the contents of STAAR in Texas to be examined or discussed. Teachers and parents are not allowed to view the contents of the tests after the administration is completed, which is in violation of TEA policy. Teachers who administer the tests are “threatened” by loss of their credentials if they divulge any questions that were on the test they administered.
How can the validity of tests be examined when the contents are “top secret”? Why are the contents kept concealed from educators and parents who have a right to know what their children are being exposed to, especially since it impacts their life so dramatically?
Why is CCSS a sinister operation with covert activities that appear more like CIA than DOE?
My opinion is that Pearson has designed tests that will not pass inspection by authentic educational standards and the secrecy is a cover up for their hidden agenda. How many millions are being spent on CCSS propaganda and purchasing fake teachers? Texas teachers who have seen the contents of STAAR and discussed it discretely, say that it is age inappropriate, and designed to confuse, frustrate, and intimidate children. Many use the psychological term “crazy making” when describing the ambivalence of STAAR questions. It is obviously designed for children to fail so their failure data can be used as proof the public schools are failing, and therefore reason to privatize schools. There is no recognition by policy makers of the impact of their behavior on children. (No offense to those with ASD, but failure to recognize the social and emotional impact of your behavior on others is a typical Aspergers trait.)
Having spent a lot of years working with children who were victimized by adult predators of every shape and circumstance, the “sinisterness” of this “wolf in sheep’s clothing” (CCSS) causes me to associate it with adults grooming children by showing them pornography, and getting pleasure from their shock response, as well as breaking down their barriers to resistance. The secrecy/darkness of CCSS and it’s promotion, cover up, and twisted leadership, causes me to associate it with the Jerry Sandusky case at Penn State. What was presented by authorities at Penn State as “horsing around in the showers” was not true, and they knew it. Just as Pearson says STAAR material is
a valid measurement of children’s performance, they know it is not true, and they know that we as educators know that it’s not true. What they fail to understand is that no amount of money is going to convince honest professional educators that it is true, since we recognize it to be garage and punishment, and we are going to keep on “whistle blowing” until it is stopped.
Institutions, whether it is Penn State, DOE, teacher unions, government, etc, can be drawn into dysfunction just as easily as Wall St when greed and lust for power are involved, as well as loyalty out of fear of exposure, and repressed shame and guilt. Proximity to power is power, and when integrity and honesty are compromised by self interests, what can be expected? CCSS is being promoted by leaders with classic symptoms of Narcissistic PD. (some have sociopathic behaviors). NPD can be contagious in institutions and systems that depend on a few people in power. Every human is on the spectrum for narcissistic behaviors, which is not abnormal; however, it becomes unbalanced when people become too envious of others who are perceived to have more money and power, thus increasing feelings of jealousy and inferiority in insecure people who lack a strong identity, and are socially and emotionally immature.
It is my opinion that this epidemic has become more pervasive after decades of a punitive authoritarian school environment that has increasingly focused more on performance and reward/punishment (behaviorism), with neglect to children’s healthy social and emotional development. The lack of outrage to CCSS, and the blind obedience from teachers and parents who allow children to be harmed in this environment, illustrates that we are becoming victims of “the products we have produced”.
I agree it is time to confront DOE, expose the invalidity of Pearson designed tests, and educate the public about the damage it is causing children.
Question: How can this “careful deliberation” be done without transparency?
The testing companies and the consortia do not dare release their questions for professionals to see because the questions and the formats are indefensible.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Joyce: I am really listening & paying attention to what you say here. It may sound ‘out there’ to others, but to those who have been victimized by predators, we totally get it. It’s all about power & control. When the prevailing culture & government exert the present degree of control on public schooling, one cannot help but think back to the day, not so many decades ago, when a paternalistic culture prescribed certain behaviors by children and women, all the while using their power behind closed doors for whatever lust & power moved them to do. When the government backs nothing but “results”– “high test scores”, by any means, by any type of schools, while exerting zero oversight on finances, curriculum, pedagogy– in other words anything goes– we have set the stage for abuse.
well said!
Spanish & French Freelancer,
Good on you…..I do think you totally get it !
It is difficult to recognize the covert abuse that goes on in seemingly “normal” families that are actually covert Narcissistic Families. It is just as difficult to recognize in other dysfunctional systems such as schools, churches, government, etc. when everyone in the system thinks it is “normal” . Usually, the victims are too traumatized or desensitized to understand it and make an outcry, and the perpetrators are often dissociated without full awareness of the impact of their behavior.
If the billionaire reformers and CCSS supporters were genuinely interested in children’s future success, rather than being obsessed with “control” and data, they might focus more on the 16 million children who live in poverty in the US (22% of all children). They might focus on the growing epidemic of child abuse in the US, which has one of the worst records among industrialized nations. Surely, poverty and child abuse will impact children’s future success more than test scores.
Apparently, those statistics serve no purpose for their self interests.
Since I have no fear of expressing my opinion honestly, especially about mistreatment to children, I don’t mind if there are some who think this is “out there”. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, and some of us are not afraid to use our own identity when expressing it. 🙂
Powerful, Joyce! Wow!
On Judging Text Complexity by Lexile Level
Lexiles are an extraordinarily useful tool. But today, every educational publisher in the US is abusing that tool by requiring, because of the CCSS, that every scrap of writing put in front of students be at a particular “grade-appropriate” Lexile level. I’ll keep this short.
“Paul Revere’s Ride,” by Longfellow, is a standard of 5th-grade textbooks. I memorized large portions of it before I went to grade school. I recently ran a Lexile on it: Graduate school level.
Dylan Thomas’s “Time held me green and dying” scores at below the second-grade level, though the idea is conceptually very, very sophisticated.
QED
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Yes, I get it: back in ‘halcyon days’ (’50’s-’60’s), Paul Revere’s ride showed up in 5th grade, & ‘Time held me green & dying’ in maybe 11th.
Are you saying that today, because of the lexile measure, we can expect to see Dylan Thomas in primary school?
No, but what is happening is that text selection is being distorted, dramatically. EVERY educational publisher is not requiring that every piece of every text be Lexiled. This is particularly a problem in the early grades where it is ESSENTIAL to children’s development of robust grammars of their language that they be exposed, in their ambient linguistic environments, to the full range of syntactic and morphological forms in the language. Without that exposure–with exposure only to language INTENTIONALLY IMPOVERISHED syntactically and morphologically–the internal device in the kid’s head for forming a model of the language doesn’t have the material with which it needs to work. This is a really damaging, backward, stupid practice based on a lack of understanding of how language acquisition actually works.
But it’s the CCSS way.
correction: I meant to say, of course, that EVERY educational publishers is NOW requiring that every piece of text be Lexiled.
On the “Instructional Shift” from Persuasion to Argument
One way in which the Common Core differs from previous textbooks and many previously existing state standards is in its promotion of Argument over Persuasion. In the past, most basal composition texts in the United States had separate units on each of three modes: narrative writing, informational or expository writing, and persuasive writing. The authors of the Common Core opted, instead, to label these modes narrative writing, informative writing, and argument because they wanted to de-emphasize appeals to emotion and appeals to authority. There are very good reasons, which I won’t go into here, for taking the notion of three distinct “modes” with a HUGE grain of salt, but I won’t go into those here. I want to discuss, instead, this “shift” from Persuasion to Argument.
I suspect that what’s behind that shiftt, ultimately, is authoritarian presumption. It’s as though the authors of these “standards” said to themselves, “These poor fools–these teachers and students–do not understand, as we do, the difference between reason and emotion. It’s time we gave them some rules to follow there. “
I believe that the traditional title for the third “mode” made more sense because persuasion involves making a case that is BOTH appealing and reasonable, and often reasonable BECAUSE it is appealing. Many matters about which people argue–arguably, all the really important ones–deal with topics for which what matters to people—what they care about/what has emotional meaning to them—is precisely what is at issue, and it is those matters—people’s emotional responses–that are relevant as evidence. The authors of the Common Core make the case that the switch from persuasion to argument is important because “college is an argument culture” (Appendix A). They therefore show themselves entirely ignorant of (or on the troglodyte side of) a debate that has raged in the humanities departments of our universities over the past half century over precisely this issue—whether we can and should treat the curriculum in isolation from its human meaning as mattering and the extent to which those facts that we attend to and how we frame them are power plays with meaning as mattering.
When Coleman stands before a crowd and tells the assembled people that “No one gives a $#&*&*$#*&#$!!! what you feel” and then goes on to explain that people are looking, instead, for evidence, he fails to recognize that how people feel is, quite frequently, THE VERY EVIDENCE THAT IS RELEVANT. It’s peculiar that he doesn’t recognize this, for he studied philosophy, and philosophers have almost all long rejected logical positivism, verificationism, and behaviorism on logical, empirical, and ethical grounds, and as a student of philosophy, he should know this, and he should be familiar with the powerful and compelling objections to those discredited positions. Instead, he spouts antiquated, simple-minded nonsense as current REVELATION. I would even go so far as to say that one can, in fact, derive Ought from Is because what matters to people—people’s “oughts”—are themselves observable, demonstrable facts about the world. In fact, one can apply to those “oughts” the same sort of inductive reasoning that one applies to scientific questions. I find that I don’t like to have sticks poked into my eye and that I feel that people shouldn’t do that to me. I make a generalization: People don’t like to have sticks poked into their eyes, and people shouldn’t do that to one another. And the former part of the generalization proves to be repeatedly verified, and the latter part of it follows logically from the first by a simple consistency criterion. Perhaps David should go back and take an introductory ethics class before he spouts such hoary, discredited nonsense. Of course people give a $@#*$*(*@$!! how you feel and how they feel, and almost no human interaction is free from such concern, including, ironically, his attempt to make his case, which is highly emotion-laden.
And, of course, appeals to authority are not bad in and of themselves. Looking a word up in a dictionary is an appeal to authority. What matters is not that it’s an appeal to authority but whether the authority can be trusted. But, again and again, one finds this sort of simple mindedness in the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic]. Appeals to authority are appeals to emotion and therefore bad. Well, no. Looking up the proper pitch of a ¼-inch bolt in a United Fine standards table is an appeal to authority– not one to which a lot of emotion is attached, certainly, though there is some—people feel good about going to what they know is a trustworthy source, and they feel good about getting the measurement right, and that’s why they seek such a source, and we cannot, as Coleman tries to do, drive a wedge down the middle of ourselves and divorce our rational being from our emotional being, for these are inseparable. Even the conclusion of a deductive proof that could be arrived at by a machine comes to us because we have chosen to use the deductive method because it has been proven to yield results that satisfy, that matter, that we can depend upon, that we care about.
That’s what it is to be human. That’s what Heidegger said our kind of being, in essence, is. It’s caring. It’s giving a $#&$&*#&*!!!.
So, I would suggest to David Coleman that he go read some Heidegger.
Ironically, Coleman studied philosophy, so he should know that verification often fails as a criterion for truth. Almost no professional philosophers these days consider themselves verificationists like the A. J. Ayer of Language, Truth, and Logic. At its most extreme, verificationism treats all statements are neither well-formed formulas in a purely formal system (e.g., arithmetic or logic) nor declarative descriptions of that which is immediately present, including the statements that matter in aesthetics, ethics, politics, and metaphysics, into nonsense. For example, a verificationist would be forced to say that a statement like “We should not commit genocide” is neither true nor false but meaningless. Debate has always dealt with appeals based on logic (formal reasoning), empirical evidence (reasoning from facts), and rhetorical appeal (reasoning from what matters). Removing the last of these removes from debate WHAT MATTERS!!!
Coleman puts forward a discredited, narrow, simple-to-the-point-of-simple-minded view of the difference between argument and persuasion. One expects more of someone who was a Rhodes Scholar and who studied philosophy.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx That argument has displaced persuasion in CCSS-ELA seems to me a reflection of current pop-culture news media: rather than present a persuasive viewpoint based on presented facts (a la Dan Rather or Mike Wallace), CCSS-ELA parrots the politically-correct format one can view daily on CNN’s ‘Crossfire’, where two viewpoints [ostensibly] are presented for viewers to digest, thus supposedly eliminating ‘slant’.
National standards should not be making a choice between ‘argument’ and ‘persuasion’ – both are viable means of discussion & both should be taught.
Just another example of CCSS-ELA narrowing the curriculum.
I see in it a typical macho billionaire boys club certainty. We have the facts, the evidence, the data. And what that really means is. Do what we tell you to do or else.
I think there is another HUGE argument that creates a smokescreen around common core. It is being said that teachers and administrators do not oppose common core but THEY OPPOSE THE POOR ROLL OUT OF COMMON CORE. This serves to deflect the truth – that teachers do indeed oppose common core (for many reasons). Do we really believe that teachers will suddenly support common core once a system for implementing it is in place (aka standardized)? I think not.
YUP. That’s absolutely NONSENSE. I oppose the CCSS in ELA because the IDEAS THERE are indefensible. They are backward, hackneyed, prescientific, and write in stone a lot of misconceptions about learning in particular domains.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I agree wholeheartedly. If teachers and parents were not sideswiped by the huge distractions of high-stakes-student-testing & VAM tied into Common Core, they might have peaceful time to analyze, tweak, update Common Core… but oh, well, they’re not allowed to do that
I apologize for the length of my posts, above.
But one of the HUGE problems with the CCSS is that people almost never talk about the specifics. Does what this “standard” say make sense? Is it a good idea to base our pedagogy and curricula and assessment on this? And the answer is often, “No,” it’s a terrible idea, and it’s important that we attend to these details and learn why.
But there was no national vetting of this crap because Gates and Pearson wanted a national list to tag their assessments and software to, and they wanted it now, so they hired some amateurs to hack something together overnight based upon a cursory review of the lowest-common-denominator group think of the state “standards” that preceded the CCSS.
And the result–the puerile document that is the CCSS in ELA–is entirely predictable based on the process that was followed.
Bob, I appreciate that you analyze the specifics. More people need to do so. have you analyzed a particular standard as it progresses from kindergarten or grade six to grade 12? There is not vertical continuity, and in many cases, no rationale as to how the standards change from grade to grade. As you’ve said, it’s particularly problematic in ELA. And new York’s modules teach Shakespeare through excerpts and what they call “the arc of the story.” How is that “college ready”. how will that help students compete in the global marketplace our dear leaders tout?
You raise an important issue, Nimbus. People need to understand that one thing these standards are is bunch of learning progressions for various domains. In some cases–in the language domain, for example–much that is in these “standards” is in no sensible progression at all but is plopped down pretty much AT RANDOM. The other tweaks made from band to band in the “progression” in ELA are almost all ridiculous. At this level the student will analyze a selection to show how a theme is developed across it. At the next level the student will do the same with two themes. What a joke. I think it was Peter Greene who said that these standards look like what you would get if you got some folks from some small-town Rotary club to come up with a list of “stuff to do in English class” based on what they vaguely remembered from back in the day. What I am envisioning for my book on these “standards” is to present for each strand a number of alternate progressions that actually are progressions that will illustrate clearly just how amateurish is the attempt in these “standards” to define learning progressions.
The amateurs who hacked these together include foundational works in American literature and history in the standards for 11-12. They were evidently completely unaware of the fact that in most high schools in the US, people do either Brit Lit or World Lit in Grade 12. But, I guess we are supposed to stop in the middle of our treatment of the Anglo Saxons to do a romp through the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. LOL.
Yes, and if these standards are so progressive, why are they the same for grades 9/10 and 11/12?
Even worse, in New York there is a state exam for U.S. History in grade 11. It is a graduation requirement for all students. Guess lord David did not know that? And I agree? Many of my colleagues have no idea what he standards actually say. Maybe your book could inform teachers and parents. Many younger teachers are too overwhelmed to understand what the standards actually say or don’t say. Another question:how will Coleman align his standards with the AP English courses, once of which is called AP English literature? If all students must follow the common core, few will be prepared to take AP literature.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I wish you would follow some of the ground-level commentary on CCSS news articles (I am thinking LI Newsday & NY Daily News & Post, but there must be many others)- & post some of your trenchant, specific critiques. A typical comment is that no one ever explains ‘what’s wrong with’ CCSS.
It’s particularly infuriating that people say this because
a) They have created a climate in which people are AFRAID to voice their critiques and
b) The moment you start to talk about the specifics, their eyes glaze over and
c) They are members of a cult–the Rheeformish faith–and cannot be wrong (and they the “data” to “prove” it).
The CCSS was foisted on the country as a fait accompli. The document is COPYRIGHTED and cannot be changed by its users, it was not vetted to begin with, and NO MECHANISM WHATSOEVER was created for critiquing and “fixing” it, much less for questioning the very wisdom of having such a list.
No, the Common Core is not a request. It’s not a suggestion. Its a set of orders. Ours is TO OBEY.
When someone is issuing orders, try “explaining what’s wrong with those.” See how far that gets you.
Bob Shepherd & everyone else [above and below]: a terrific thread. And no, Bob, your posts are just the right size given the points you are trying to make.
😉
Several points.
1), Look at the third sentence of this posting: “We are also told that teachers like the Common Core.” Amazing—isn’t it!?!?!—that when the self-styled leaders of “education reform” and their edubully enforcers and eduapparatchik enablers want to muddy the waters, they suddenly turn from contempt for teachers and and teacher bashing to ‘listen to the teachers; they want CCSS!’
This is a shamelessly cynical business plan, spinning reality like a crazy top in perpetual motion, that is masquerading as an education model.
😡
2), A reminder again that the casual, incidental, slipshod CCSS was never meant to be a quality product. It’s a club to be used against public education, or so an eminent and extremely knowledgeable insider of the education status quo is convinced, to wit, Dr. Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute:
[start quote]
In truth, the idea that the Common Core might be a “game-changer” has little to do with the Common Core standards themselves, and everything to do with stuff attached to them, especially the adoption of common tests that make it possible to readily compare schools, programs, districts, and states (of course, the announcement that one state after another is opting out of the two testing consortia is hollowing out this promise).
But the Common Core will only make a dramatic difference if those test results are used to evaluate schools or hire, pay, or fire teachers; or if the effort serves to alter teacher preparation, revamp instructional materials, or compel teachers to change what students read and do. And, of course, advocates have made clear that this is exactly what they have in mind. When they refer to the “Common Core,” they don’t just mean the words on paper–what they really have in mind is this whole complex of changes.
[end quote]
Link: http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/the-american-enterprise-institute-common-core-and-good-cop/
3), I remind people of something by you the other day [5-29-14] on this blog that sums up CCSS: “Think: Literature instruction that SKIPS OVER THE LITERATURE; instruction in the reading of nonfiction texts that SKIPS OVER THE CONTENT.”
Shepherd vs. Coleman, scheduled 12 rounds, Shepherd by KO in the first 15 seconds.
Bob: keep posting. I’ll keep reading. And always keep in mind what an old dead French guy said:
“No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.” [Voltaire]
😎
What Happens When Amateurs Write ‘Standards'”
I am having a lot of fun identifying the howlers in the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] for English Language Arts. Here’s one for your consideration:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.8. Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.
Amusingly, the “literature standards” tell us, over and over, that this anchor “standard” is “not applicable to literature,” that it applies only to “informative text.”
That would be news to the speaker of Milton’s Paradise Lost, who invokes the Holy Spirit, at the beginning of the poem, and asks this Christian Muse to help him, in the poem, present an argument to “justify the ways of God to men.”
Maybe it’s been a while since you read or thought about Paradise Lost. Go have a look at Book I. You will find, at the beginning of it, something the author actually calls “The Argument.” It’s a brief preface that serves as an abstract of the claims, reasoning, and evidence to be presented in the book.
Did the folks who put together these amateurish “standards” actually think that literary works never present arguments, make claims, use reasoning of varying degrees of validity, nor present evidence of varying degrees of relevance and sufficiency?
Do they actually think that Ambrose Bierce‘s “Chickamauga,” Thomas Hardy’s “Channel Firing” or “The Man He Killed,” Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” do not present implicit and explicit arguments against war, do not advance specific claims, and do not employ reasoning and evidence in support of those claims? And what on earth would they imagine such poems as Hesiod’s Works and Days, Lucretius’s De rerum natura, Pope’s “An Essay on Man” and “An Essay on Criticism,” Wordsworth’s The Excursion, and Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature to be if not, primarily, arguments?
And do they really think that arguments are not put forward in, say, Rumi’s “Like This,” Donne’s “The Sun Rising,” Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” “Gray’s “Stanza’s Wrote in a Country Church-Yard,” Burns’s “Song Composed in August,” Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died,” FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Yeats’s “Adam’s Curse,” Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” Wallace Stevens’s “Credences of Summer,” MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica,” Frost’s “Directive,” Levertov’s “A Tree Telling of Orpheus,” Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day,” and Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry”?
Really? Seriously? I know, it’s almost unimaginable that they do.
But let’s do a little CLOSE READING of the “standards” to see what EVIDENCE we can find to help us answer those questions. Inquiring minds want to know.
If you turn to the writing “standards,” the suspicion will grow in you that the authors of these “standards” were, indeed, that naïve. The breathtakingly puerile Common [sic] Core [sic] writing “standards” neatly divide up all writing into three “modes”–narrative, informative, and argumentative–and encourage teachers and students to think of these as DISTINCT classes, or categories, into which pieces of writing can be sorted.
Imagine, for a moment, that you are reading an exposé on this blog or Mercedes Schneider’s or Diane Ravitch’s that tells the story of how some people got together in a backroom and cooked up a bullet list of “standards” and foisted these on the entire country with no learned critique or vetting.
Perhaps such a piece would only SEEM to be an informative narrative told to advance an argument. Perhaps writing consists entirely of five-paragraph themes written in distinct modes and we’ve been hallucinating JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING ELSE EVER WRITTEN, which doesn’t fit neatly into the categories advanced in the “standards.”
LOL
And, standard after standard, one encounters the same sort of simple-mindedness about literary types and taxonomy. One gets the impression, reading these “standards,” that a group of nonliterary noneducators–some small-town insurance executives perhaps–got together and made up a bullet list of “stuff to learn in English class” based on their vague memories of what they studied in English back in the day. (I don’t intend, here, BTW, to disparage the literary sophistication of all insurance executives; Wallace Stevens was one, after all, and he may well have been the greatest American poet of the twentieth century.)
Of course, what the folks behind these “standards” really did was hire an amateur who hadn’t taught and who knew very little about the domains he was going to work in to hack together a bullet list based on a review of the lowest-common-denominator groupthink in the previously existing state “standards.” In effect, a few plutocrats appointed this person (by divine right?) absolute monarch of instruction in the English language arts in the United States. My feeling is that similar results would have been obtained if a group of plutocrats had handed David Coleman a copy of the 1858 edition of Gray’s Anatomy and sent him to a cabin in Vermont to write new standards for the practice of medicine.
And, of course, the plutocrats hired this guy to do this because they wanted ONE set of standards for the entire country to which to correlate the products that they planned to sell “at scale.” In other words, the single bullet list was a necessary part of an ed tech business plan. One ring to rule them all!
And that ought to be obvious enough, for surely no one who thought even a bit about these matters would conclude that
a) this CC$$ ELA bullet list is the best we could come up with or that
b) one list is appropriate for all students and for all purposes or that
c) these matters should be set in stone instead of being continually rethought and revisited in light of the discoveries and innovations made by the millions of classroom practitioners, scholars, researchers, and curriculum developers working in the domains that the “standards” cover.
Obviously.
Of course, it’s typical of a certain kind of philistine to divide the world neatly up into the objective (informative works) and the subjective (literary works) and so to think that simple-minded categorizations like the ones to be found in the Common [sic] Core [sic] make sense. The same sort of person thinks that one can reduce learning to a bullet list in a stack of Powerpoint slides.
And, it’s typical of such people to have a rage for order and an inclination toward authoritarianism. Such people admire regimentation and expect others–all those teachers, and curriculum coordinators and curriculum developers out there–simply to obey. In his Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce defines arrayed as “drawn up and given an orderly disposition, as a rioter hanged from a lamppost.” I suspect that the people behind these “standards”–the folks who claim that standardization, centralization, and regimentation will lead to innovation, as Bill Gates just did in a speech to the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards–would approve of Bierce’s definition. And they would probably like to see folks like me so arrayed. LOL.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx >sigh< you are so right. Makes you wonder whether Coleman et al had any kind of literary background when they set out to tell kids how to state a position. Why not start w/the masters at position-stating?
The common core is a failed product like the Atari E.T. game. Bury it in a dump in New Mexico. Like the E.T. game, maybe in twenty years somebody will dig it up for fun, or maybe not.
LOL. Well said. I agree entirely. The CCSS in ELA belong in a landfill next to Atari’s “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” “Centipedes,” “Warlords” and “Asteroids.”
Copies of the CCSS for ELA are also good for catching bird droppings, though birds no more belong in cages than you and I do.
Bob, please don’t apologize for your long posts. I have been an avid reader of this blog for over a year, although I don’t often reply. (I am “Reg” on my ipad, from back when I was afraid to use my full name.) I have often used the essence of your posts to defend my stance on a variety of issues in my role as department coordinator at my school. Your posts help me think more concretely and specifically about some of my “gut” reactions against these standards. Even today, I defended my department’s use of portfolios to “assess” student writing and collect “data,” and in that defense I cited much of what I have learned here and in Diane’s books about standardized testing. Last year we had to use some online benchmark tests from Discovery Ed, which hogged the computer labs plus class time and told us zero information that we did not already know about our students. We already knew who the low/high readers were, and we prefer to use narrative to describe our students’ progress. ( I know that at the beginning of the year, the student could do this, but NOW he can do this.) I successfully argued against using Discovery Ed testing this year, but the fight is starting anew because they want NUMBERS, not portfolios. The high school ELA standards are enormously restrictive, and I so miss my old curriculum for world literature, in which I used themes in the first semester, then in the second, took the kids on an intellectual tour through western civilization, so the students could both DO something and KNOW something. It was amazing because my seniors brought in their OWN knowledge from other disciplines such as psychology and history, and it was an invigorating experience for both me and them. Now, I have to “get around” the CCSS by mainly putting in the last standard into my lessons every day, the one about students reading college-level tests independently. I have taught college as an adjunct instructor. I am aware of what kind of reading and writing my students need to practice before they graduate.(One standard I find hilarious is a random one about hyphens. Really, I need a lesson in senior year to focus on hyphens?) I also teach AP Language. One thing I heard as my district was implementing CCSS was that “what they want is for all kids to learn what we do in AP!” Well, no. As you have pointed out, our king of the College Board has given us ridiculous standards that leave out the best parts of AP Lang where by golly, the kids DO have to use and analyze all three of the main appeals, including pathos, and where they learn to appreciate the complexity of arguments. (A major text for AP Lang, but the way, is one called “Everything’s an Argument.”) Our discussion of argument includes how “appeal to authority” can help them develop ethos (if you’re not an expert, but you’re writing a research paper on a subject, the quality of your sources helps you obtain more credibility) and can also be a fallacy (an appeal to an authority that is not really an authority at all but a celebrity or someone with authority in an unrelated field. Remind us of anyone?) Anyway, I am not being nearly as cogent and eloquent as you, but Bob, I am learning something every day from your posts. Please don’t stop!
Awesome! I post this stuff out of concern for kids and in hope for the future, but I often wonder who, if anyone, is reading the posts. So it’s great to hear from those who care about these matters enough to take the time. Thank you for taking the time, thanks for your thoughtful reply, and warm wishes you and your lucky students. –Bob.
We are living now with a reign of terror as well as a reign of error.
If people DO dare to speak up, to point out the problems with these putative “standards,” the risk a lot of negative sanctions such as not getting that contract or not getting hired or losing their jobs or getting a lousy evaluation and lower pay.
This kind of thing happened in the Soviet Union during the Lysenko era.
It happened in China during the “Great Leap Forward” and the “Cultural Revolution.”
And now the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth is making the same sort of thing happen in the Land of the Formerly Free.
And that’s unacceptable.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Had to look up Lysenko — oh–seems to be an agrarian scientist who may have contributed to the failure of crops under Stalin but regardless his theories were deemed by the govt to be criticism-free for decades.
Meanwhile today heard an interview w/Plokhy (The Last Empire): surprise, surprise! The Soviet Union was not in fact a federation of states (similar to the US), taken down by Reagan/ GHW Bush’s smooth moves– but simply the last of those colonial empires whose time had finally come! Who would’ve thunk. Never occurred [NOT] to your average layman who noted that whenever some rapscallion region didn’t tow the line, the Soviet tanks moved in.
While I appreciate the reminder of where we’re heading, let us all raise our voices and our votes in what is ostensibly still a democratic federation of states to put down any attempt at autocracy by the feds!!!!
The Soviet Union was the victim of a huge drop in oil prices.
And of idiots who thought that top-down monocultures were healthier than are ecologies–you know, like our Education Deformers.
Lysenko put Soviet science back for decades. That’s what happens when you start mandating ideas. Every totalitarian state has its invariant national “standards”–it’s centralized committee making all the education decisions. And central committees tend to be backward, venal, and stupid, of course. Our new Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth is all of these right out of the box.
And, S&F, very well said!
I have put Plokhy on my reading list. Looks fascinating!
Reign of Terror is an accurate description for my school district !
“History” has been removed from our elementary school curriculum in Texas and replaced with STAAR tutoring.
We certainly can’t risk allowing children to learn about the “past’. It could incite a peasant rebellion!
There are other costs to the common core that not everyone may know about. For instance, every teacher in large urban district where I teach is required to take 2 full days of training. The district has to cover for the substitutes. Imagine the cost. Also, every other educational professional (OT, SLP, school psychologist, PT) had to miss days of serving their caseloads to undergo the training. There are no substitutes provided for them.
I attended a K-2 common core training last week, and the special education one a few months ago. What I have observed from other teachers is that there is not a lot of questioning about whether or not these are appropriate, or knowledge about how these standards emerged. Our trainer claimed that the common core came into being because high percentage of kids were taking remedial courses in college. We were constantly barraged with the college and career readiness that we as teachers needed to instill on these little kids (many of whom are probably still wearing their night time pull-ups).
A WEA representative came into my room to try to convince me to gather signatures for a class size reduction initiative, and he didn’t know a thing about the common core either way. Nor did he have any strong opinion about high stakes testing.
Sorrel,
I attended training for Expeditionary Learning in the fall. When I inquired about differentiation, I was informed about chunking and rereading. Well, that’s a big help!
My union is giving Professional Development in Common Core. They imply because the class filled up fast – teachers support this junk. It could be it filled up because we are all freaked out about tenure being busted, teachers being laid off 100 at a time, and 50% of our evaluation being student scores. I wish we would fight.
https://ccea-nv.org/2014/04/30/summer-learning-academy/
Excellent point, Angie Sullivan.
The unions have received big grants from Gates and Hemsley to serve as propaganda ministries for the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth.
Vichy collaborators.
Angie, wasn’t that pro common core video they sent us through interact bizarre? You are in CCSD, I am assuming?
New Criticism Lite: The CCSS Literature Instruction That Isn’t
I am blessed with friends who read good books and then call me to discuss them. Interestingly, none of our conversations about these books run like this:
So, Bob, what are two themes that the author developed over the course of the text and how are those themes related?
So, Anna, tell me, what method of exposition did the author use in paragraph 27 of Chapter 3? Please give evidence from the text to support your answer.
But, Tom, what I’m really wondering about is how the author’s use of figurative language affected her tone.
Sometimes, the folks who write Common [sic] Core [sic] lessons and assessments should just stop for a moment and listen to themselves. They sound ridiculous.
What they ask students to do completely skips over any authentic interaction with a text–anything remotely resembling what people actually do when they actually read in the real world as though the experience of the work and what the author was writing about or conveying WAS OF NO IMPORTANCE WHATSOEVER.
Think: Literature instruction that SKIPS OVER THE LITERATURE; instruction in the reading of nonfiction texts that SKIPS OVER THE CONTENT.
What the Common Coring of instruction in reading literature and other texts does is reduce that instruction to a series of exercises of about as much meaning and value as say, this:
Do a close reading of Chapter 12 of Madame Bovary and count the number of each of the following that are used: colons, semi-colons, parentheses, and dashes.
Nothing that is done on either of the two new national assessments of reading and writing EVEN REMOTELY resembles what people do when they actually read and write in the real world.
And so those assessments, ipso facto, are not assessments of authentic reading and writing.
And they encourage encourage curricula and pedagogical approaches that completely skip over actual, normal, authentic engagement with texts.
One looks at one of these Common Core lessons (and at this point, I have looked at thousands of them) and says, what on Earth does this have to do with what Emerson was saying in this poem, “Brahma?” about the nature of divinity? And the answer is
almost nothing.
CCSS-style New Criticism Lite treats both literary and informational texts (these aren’t distinct genres, btw) as merely occasions for the exercise of some skill and so devalue texts and distort reading of them. Curriculum developers start not with the text, because it says something important or says it well but, rather, with some skill to be exercised, and then they treat the text as if it were little more than a vehicle for that. The resulting lessons and assessments are grotesque. People look at those lessons and they seem completely unnatural and that’s because they are.
Approaching literary works in this way is a “blasphemy down the stations of the breath,” as Dylan Thomas put it: a grotesque distortion of the essential human activity of communication–writer to reader.
This is what happens when technocratic philistines start dictating how to teach reading and writing. Breathtaking narrowing and distortion that misses the whole point of both.
Reading and writing are a means of cultural transmission. Someone speaks to you across that ontological gap between subjectivities–your mind, your experience over there–my mind, my experience, over here. These things are done for a reason: because people have something to say.
And that is what we should MOST be attending to when reading and writing with students. All this other crap–most of the junk on the CCSS bullet list–is completely incidental, pales in significance. And not to understand that is not to understand, at all, what reading and writing are about.
sorry: I screwed up the boldfacing in that post.
Have you tried putting a cool cloth on your forehead?
I will do that when I have put a stake into Education Deform–VAM, the CCSS, school letter grades, summative standardized testing, union-busting, the war on due process.
Giggle.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Cold cloth on forehead or not, you said a mouthful right here: “Curriculum developers start not with the text, because it says something important or says it well but, rather, with some skill to be exercised, and then they treat the text as if it were little more than a vehicle for that.”
You clinched it. Right here you have explained your oft-repeated complaint that CCSS-ELA is ‘skills-based’, & explained why that is a problem.
Has there been any comparison of the Common Core standards with the curriculum used in the finest private schools? My reading of the standards as shown on the Tennessee Department of Education website shows that only one Shakespearean play, Macbeth, is included in reading and language arts for high school. That’s just an example of what appear to be very specific directives that don’t allow a teacher or English department to develop curricula to meet their students’ needs.
Going back to my first sentence — what standards are the good private schools using? If Common Core is the gold standard, are private schools adopting them? Are the children of Michelle Rhee and the Gates and Waltons using them?
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz I once worked for a ‘good private school.’ Granted, this was a long time ago, but it is my experience that prestigious day schools do not change their ways precipitously. I was hired as the main h.s. French teacher solely on the basis that I’d done well at the nearby Ivy League U [& of course interviews]. I taught French I-IV plus AP.
There were no ‘standards.’ I was expected to develop my own syllabus for Fr IV & AP; I devised a series of novels which were purchased by my students. The school provided Fr I-III with ALM texts & corresponding language-lab tapes, but I was free to use them &/or supplement as I saw fit. I had a supervisor, a classics scholar, who reviewed my choices.
This is how things were done in private schools decades ago, & from what I have gleaned since, nothing has changed. ‘Standard’ is not in the lexicon. The term might perhaps be ‘trust’: trust that one’s teachers have been trained in the Western-Civ syllabus, as taught in the nation’s best colleges.
Evidence-based? My AP students got their college credits. But the best feedback I got was from a pair of brothers whose family spent months in France soon after their sophomore year: they sent word back that they’d done just fine communicating with les francais.
Krazy TA can give you the specific link. A huge defender of the Common Core was recently appointed headmaster of one of the nation’s preeminent private schools. The first thing she did was to draft a letter to parents telling them that the school would not be using the Common Core and that teachers would be able to continue developing lessons and choosing materials that were appropriate for their students.
The Commoners’ Core: “Training” for other people’s children
Here’s a link:
http://nashvillepublicradio.org/blog/2014/02/10/lipscomb-academy-chief-advocates-for-common-core-but-not-at-her-school/
And here’s Diane’s post about it:
What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades,
By MARIA KONNIKOVAJUNE 2, 2014
Does handwriting matter?
Not very much, according to many educators. The Common Core standards, which have been adopted in most states, call for teaching legible writing, but only in kindergarten and first grade. After that, the emphasis quickly shifts to proficiency on the keyboard.
But psychologists and neuroscientists say it is far too soon to declare handwriting a relic of the past. New evidence suggests that the links between handwriting and broader educational development run deep.
Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information. In other words, it’s not just what we write that matters — but how.
“When we write, a unique neural circuit is automatically activated,” said Stanislas Dehaene, a psychologist at the Collège de France in Paris. “There is a core recognition of the gesture in the written word, a sort of recognition by mental simulation in your brain.
“And it seems that this circuit is contributing in unique ways we didn’t realize,” he continued. “Learning is made easier.”
As a special education teacher, I used handwriting as another tool in that multi-sensory box of tricks. Keyboarding just does not provide the same access although it has its place as well. For some kids, it slows them down enough to slow them to think about what they are writing (while they feel it and see it as well). I used to study by rewriting my notes several times winnowing them down until I could recall the whole content from single words and phrases. This was during the days of essay and short answer tests where we were supposed to provide the answer rather than just identifying the correct choice. I’m glad you posted this research.
No harm in mentioning a point more than once. This has been the strategy by the CCSS and testing people from the start and they continue to repeat wherever they can that CCSS and more rigorous testing is the only answer to our Educational Crisis and we are losing the economic war as a result! I mean how often do they have to Reform Accountability for teachers before they get it right. On June 11, Stanford University will once Again look at Reforming the last two Reforms on Teacher Accountabity when SCOPE holds another world class conference with people like the Great Educator Mark Tucker, who by the way is probably going to be the next California Secretary of Education after getting millions from the Destroy Public Education group in California. All the same group will be there. Achieve CEO and the Governors Represetative for Education and all the other Education Experts who have spent less time cumulatively in the classroom than someone like myself. I wonder how many of them combined have spent 43 years in a real public school classroom? Well I am tired now and have Real summer school students to teach tomorrow morning. Good Night.
Reblogged this on seldurio.
Common Core algebra and ELA tests being administered for the first time ever as graduation requirements here in NY. Ask ant NY algebra teacher or English teacher what they think of the CCSS after today. Hopefully they’ll be daring enough to LOOK at the TESTS.
Better yet, ask a special ed teacher what they think about CC after today’s roll out of Pearson algebra (9th grade) and ELA (11th grade) exams.
The thrust of this post about teacher backlash to the Common Core is twofold:
1. Diane says that “It is true that the two national teachers’ unions support the Common Core, and it is also true that both unions have accepted millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation to advocate on behalf of CCSS.”
Neither the AFT for the NEA has revoked its endorsement of Common Core. In effect, they sold teachers down the river.
2. Diane points out that “teachers are increasingly resistant to the standardization that the CCSS requires, as well as to the tight linkage among the standards, the online federal tests, and the inevitable value-added-metrics that will be used to evaluate teachers. A very neat trap has been set…”
True enough. But the more insidious chicanery is that both the ACT and College Board were instrumental in developing the Common Core, and both have “aligned” the multitude of their products to it. That means tests like the ACT, PSAT, SAT, and the AP program, will all become more “important” even though research shows they’re mostly worthless.
Too, As Matthew Quirk wrote in ‘The Best Class Money Can Buy (The Atlantic, Nov. 2005), “The ACT and the College Board don’t just sell hundreds of thousands of student profiles to schools; they also offer software and consulting services that can be used to set crude wealth and test-score cutoffs, to target or eliminate students before they apply…That students are rejected on the basis of income is one of the most closely held secrets in admissions; enrollment managers say the practice is far more prevalent than most schools let on.”
As important, the Common Core has been tied tightly to the push for more STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education, which often means more charter or ‘magnet’ schools. The STEM “shortage, or “crisis” is a myth.
And it is not simply a matter of coercing other union members into become more learned about public education.
What’s disturbing is the number of “educators” who buy into the the Bill Gates/Common Core malarkey. Randi Wiengarten says the Common Core is a “foundation for better schools” that will prepare kids “success in college, life and careers.” Lily Eskelsen, vice-president of the NEA, says “”We believe that this initiative is a critical first step in our nation’s effort to provide every student with a comprehensive, content-rich and complete education.” Byron V. Garrett says the “National PTA enthusiastically supports the adoption and implementation by all states of the Common Core State Standards, which were recently released in final form.”
The National School Boards Association, the National Association of Elementary School Principals, the National Association of Secondary School Principles, and the American Association of School Administrators issued a joint statement on the Common Core standards that makes clear that public education in the United States is in deeper trouble than many thought. These “leadership” groups’ statement said Common Core “tests are necessary” for “use in teacher and principal evaluation,” though they’d prefer some delays and the inclusion of other “timely data.”
The Common Core is a “reform” based on a set of assumptions and programs and practices that are best faulty, and and worst downright fraudulent. Public education’s top bananas have not served it well.
Public education’s top bananas have not served it well.
this
I get the impression that many of our education “leaders” have the notion that what the Common Core says specifically, in specific standards, doesn’t matter, that they think that what matters is there is, generally, a call by the Common Core for more rigor, for higher standards, for getting kids college and career ready.
I ask them to do some close reading of the Common Core State Standards. I have tried to give, in my posts above, some examples of what such reading looks like.
Repeating the mantra that with the CCSS comes more rigor, higher standards, getting kids college and career ready buys into the Education Deform narrative that our schools have not been rigorous enough, have not held kids to standards, have not prepared kids for college and for careers, and none of that is true. It also allows for a lot to be done in the name of more rigor, higher standards, and preparing kids for college and careers that is really damaging to a system that has been serving us, for the most part, very, very well.
And if one dares point out that we’ve been doing well, one is accused of being complacent and against improvement and of sticking one’s head in the sand. I am none of those things. I want to see dramatic change in U.S. education.
But here’s the difference between me and other CCSS opponents and those on the CCSS pom pon squad: we believe that innovation comes about as a result of interaction among components of a richly diverse system, not via standardization and regimentation and centralization of command and control.
And we in the CounterRheeformation believe that if you are going to centralize command and control, if you are going to regiment and standardize, then you had better look at the details of what’s being called for.
And with the CCSS, when one does start doing the vetting that was never done, one finds that the details, in ELA, are appalling. The specific “standards” don’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny.
But a lot of money is being spent by those who will benefit financially from the CCSS to PREVENT just such scrutiny. By tying the CCSS to evaluations of teachers, administrators, and whole schools, by making buy in mandatory, the pushers of CCSS have created a Lysenkoist climate of fear. One dares not speak against the Core. The teacher who does speak against some aspect of the Core soon learns that he or she has become, because of that, a target for reeducation and negative sanctions, often dramatic ones.
And that’s the sort of thing that happens when one starts LEGISLATING IDEAS.
It is not just that states have been told…The edicts connected to the CCSS are set forth I federal Race to theTop legislation.
Why the One Size Fits All Approach of the CCSS in ELA Will Not Address the Achievement Gap
Education has more than its fair share of charlatans. One way to spot these people is that they are just fine with applying gross generalities to all children, to treat differing children as though they were the same. They did this with NCLB when they decided that EVERY child was going to reach proficiency by the 2014-15 school year. (That would be by this coming August, btw.) They did this with CSS, aka Son of NCLB, when they did this working backward business to EVERYTHING and decided that text appropriateness at each grade level should be decided based on working back from the average Lexile of a college-level text.)
A seven year old is NOT just a younger version of an adult. In some ways, a seven-year-old brain is like an adult brain. In many ways it is not. In some ways, a seven year old is actually more capable than an adult is. For example, a seven-year-old brain is quicker, much quicker, at forming an internal, unconscious model of the grammar of a new language than is a thirty-five-year-old brain. Babies can be shown to be doing types of complex inductive and abductive reasoning. But there are whole regions of the brain that govern some kinds of abstract thinking that do not for most people even begin to develop until kids are around 16 years old and are not in most people fully in place until people are in their mid twenties. Further, individual brains differ. The innate language acquisition device that automatically intuits the syntax and morphology of a language breaks down at around the age of 14, making attaining fluency in a new language a far more difficult task for an adult than for a child, but there are some people to whom this doesn’t happen—who retain the child’s ease, there, and those are generally ones who have the facility exercised in the tween years.
When amateurs write standards, they understand none of this. And standards are, well, standard, but kids are not. Kids vary enormously. Low-SES and high-SES kids come into school with a 30-million-word gap in the amount of language they have heard and with a corresponding gap in vocabulary and in the complexity of their internalized models for syntax, morphology, semantic structures. These differences require very different pedagogy and curricula in the early grades, not a one-size-fits-all approach. Those children who have been in low-SES environments in their early years desperately need interaction with engaging, nurturing, sophisticated SPOKEN linguistic environments that are rich in vocabulary and that contain the full range of syntactic and morphological forms of the language so that their innate structures for intuiting those forms and creating a robust internalized model of the language have the necessary material from which to work. If they don’t get that compensating early school environment, such kids will never be able to catch up—the low-SES/high-SES gap that is the REAL ISSUE in U.S. education will remain in placebecause its root cause has not been addressed.
In addition, kids from low-SES environments do not learn in their home environments the fundamental background knowledge that is assumed by texts, and this presents an enormous barrier to their comprehension of texts going forward. Again, educational programs for such students have to address this. An excellent approach would be to impart such background knowledge via a syntactically rich spoken language interaction. Again, one size does not fit all.
The CCSS in ELA show no indication that the authors of the document understood either point I have made here and so will do nothing effective to address the achievement gap in ELA. The authors the the CCSS grabbed a hammer and went about treating everything as if it were a nail. Kids are not nails requiring identical millling.
The brain is extraordinarily plastic, and beyond the early grades, as people grow, they exhibit differing interests and proclivities, and a complex, diverse, pluralistic society needs those differences recognized, celebrated, and built upon. It does not need to have children identically milled as though they so many rivets coming off a rivet-production assembly line, all needing to meet the specifications of ISO 1051:1999 or CCSS. Literacy.ELA.11-12.4a.
cx: Education has more than its fair share of charlatans. One way to spot these people is that they are just fine with applying gross generalities to all children, with treating differing children as though they were the same.
and…..therefore robbing the children of their success in life.. which is tied directly to the innate talents and passions of EACH INDIVIDUAL HUMAN CHILD….The CCRAPISTS are not in the business of educating individuals, they are in the business of Producing Faux Products only….for one purpose… only……..To Fatten their own pocket$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
cx: The authors the the CCSS grabbed a hammer and went about treating everything as if it were a nail. Kids are not nails to be pounded.
Have you published yet Bob? I would love to see you take on THE
Hammer of INJUSTICE!!!!
Bell of EduDeform…and
The song about a Wasted Generation…and all for the sake of $$$$
“Kids vary enormously”…….and that Bob is completely left out of the equation for these Money Hungry Vipers that are intent on Robotizing the kids…..I have seen Teachers who no longer care about any child who does not score well on a test. .. This CCSS Fiasco is resulting in apathetic teachers and a group of the most uneducated, unskilled, and most confused generation in the History of this country.
It is sad.
NEA meets this July in Denver. I am new to this local “leadership” stuff. I come from one of the unimportant states, and don’t know much about how things work. I’ve been told there will be NO discussion of common core on the floor of the assembly. I don’t understand why we teachers continue to support these groups ( NEA, AFT) that sold us to the Gates Foundation a long time ago. We have to stop being scared and stand up. Our problem is most of the education leaders we got Used to speaking for us have sold out or been dazzled by the Gates Foundation. There’s something so dispiriting about being betrayed by those you once trusted.