This is a terrific article by Steve Nelson. I wish I could republish it in full but that is not allowed.
He actually says that what is called reform is “a national delusion.”
He writes:
“As I watch the education “debate” in America I wonder if we have simply lost our minds. In the cacophony of reform chatter — online programs, charter schools, vouchers, testing, more testing, accountability, Common Core, value-added assessments, blaming teachers, blaming tenure, blaming unions, blaming parents — one can barely hear the children crying out: “Pay attention to us!”
“None of the things on the partial list above will have the slightest effect on the so-called achievement gap or the supposed decline in America’s international education rankings. Every bit of education reform — every think tank remedy proposed by wet-behind-the-ears MBAs, every piece of legislation, every one of these things — is an excuse to continue the unconscionable neglect of our children.”
Read it!
His conclusion:
“Doing meaningful education with the most advantaged kids and ample resources is challenging enough with classes of 20. Doing meaningful work with children in communities we have decimated through greed and neglect might require classes of 10 or fewer. When will Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Walton Family, Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan and other education reformers recommend that?
“No, that’s not forthcoming. Their solution is more iPads and trying to fatten up little Hansel and Gretel by weighing them more often. Pearson will make the scales.
“Only in contemporary America can a humanitarian crisis be just another way to make a buck.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It has never been about improving the quality of education for all. It has always been about converting universal free public education into a commercial scheme that sucks public funds to the top of a massive corporate pyramid scheme.
Sucks To the Top … that says it all …
Agreed! That is why the “reforms” have puzzled and angered true educators. It has never been about authentic teaching and learning. It is disgusting to be surrounded by the garbage that passes as “reform”.
Agreed! “The field of education is awash in conflicting goals, research “wars,” and profiteers.” D.T. Willingham
Willingham is the wrong side of this battle. He is the corporate “reformers” go to cognitive psychologist and he is a developmentally appropriate practice denier, so he has no problem with Gates’ Common Core, contrary to Early Childhood specialists.
REALLY. I did not know this, but his premise was right on. Smake oil salesman supreme Arne Duncan
Jon,
Completely agree!
Jon, I completely agree with you. In my district, we went through so many programs, like Common Common, Voyager and so many others through the years, each being the cure all until another program took its place each with a guru that promised real reform. No teacher that I knew was ever on any committee to pick these books. They were just given to us until they just fell to the wayside. Some are still with us but they will go too. I (am not necessarily against these programs) , I just see each is the “cure all”, until something new becomes “the new cure”. I remember a good friend that started teaching in about 1960, (she retired about 1998), and she said, in her district,they got some wonderful kindergarten books that really helped the children to read. When they decided to stop these books, she continued using them until her principal came into her room and took them from the children as they were reading them. She told me this just before she retired, so this really bothered her. (I can see why). Now our new guru is Duncan, a man that has never taught, and he will throw us under the bus, but we cannot and will not let him with his anti intellectual meanderings….
ending the institution of education did more than enrich the corporate entities. Hidden forces move forward with plans that have unforeseen repercussions…like the END of democracy which DEPENDS on shared knowledge!
How many times have I linked to this:
Click to access hirsch.pdf
Democracy is over with a citizenry ignorant of the truth that guided mankind through its infancy. SOCIETIES were created to benefit the survival of the PEOPLE, not just the strongest and richest. Critical analysis begins with Prior Knowledge…anyone who studied Bloom’s Taxonomy knows this. You cannot compare what you see and hear, if you are uninformed about the past. Look into a future where the people are so ignorant about history and the humanities, not merely science, that everything old is new again… things that we had abolished in this country once upon a time will be back with a vengeance… like guns and vigilante justice.
Does anyone think it is an accident that the arts and the humanities are taking a hit? Codes of behaviors, rules and regulations, and examination of beneficial and destructive behaviors are GONE when schools can pick and choose the things that children read books chosen from a library that is incomplete in its history of human behavior.
So very true! We are in a “people business” and it’s all about students and teachers. It’s people first and then programs and data.
The states are wasting so much MONEY on these worthless charter schools. Are any bloggers aware that the government is currently trying to take away a college education from the middle class? Even with scholarships, the intelligent middle class kids are having trouble getting the money to go to college. If their parents have had any financial hardships at all, they cannot get ahold of the Parent Plus loan to cover the gap for their children. College tuition is so high that no part time job can cover it. So, in addition to the rich politicians trying to take away our public schools and strip our competent teachers of their professions, they are also taking away a college education from our middle class kids. Even if the parents can qualify for the Parent Plus loan, it is leaving these middle class kids over 100,000 dollars in debt, even before they start their adult lives. The rich and the poor can go to college easily. The middle class kids, along with their families, are dying a slow death. All of this is a war on the middle class! Has anyone else discovered this?
It is precisely government subsidies via programs like student loans that have driven up the cost of college education. When I attended Rice University in the sixties tuition was $1200 per year. Recently my doctor told me me in a casual conversation what the current tuition at Rice is. While I don’t remember the exact number I remember that my reaction was utter astonishment.
Great commentary. But I would not use the work “hoax”, because I think most Americans—including the reformers—believe this is the way to educate children. And that’s because the vast majority of Americans don’t want to accept the reality of what an education really means and the committment we need to educate all of our children and adults.
For over a century we’ve been in a fog brought in by the Progressives that the hard work of intellectual dvelopment could be short-circuited by a pedagogical “science” that would allow “educators” to engineer children into fully-formed adults. That fantasy was quickly married to that other great sham, “scientific management”. Together, they form the twin-headed monster of modern education. The result is that we have a generally mediocre schooling system that is bloated by expensive management and inane, often destructive, policies.
Now, after a centry of this monstrosity we’re reaping the full whirlwind: Education is nothing more than a market to be exploited by the rentier class.
Magic Elixirs…no evidence required, is the result of the ignorance you describe. “The field of education is awash in conflicting goals, research “wars,” and profiteers.” D.T. Willingham
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Magic-Elixir-No-Evidence-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-130312-433.html
“Only in contemporary America can a humanitarian crisis be just another way to make a buck.”
Yes, “ed-reform” is not only a “National Delusion” it is also a “National Disgrace”.
So much truth mixed with so much baloney… it’s sort of the left-wing version of Glenn Beck when he’s attacking Common Core. You find yourself alternating between nodding vigorously and wanting to smack yourself in the head with a brick.
Why don’t you enlighten us with just one example of brick-smacking? Thanks.
Comparing Steve Nelson, a life long educator, to the far right wing self-promoting TV/radio “entertainer/clown,” Glenn Beck, is spurious at best.
Joe,
Agree. Nelson in no way equates to Beck.
Remember a few months ago when many pundits and commentators were trying to equate Ravitch with Rhee ( and some other deformers)? The “two sides of the debate” kinda talk. Both equal in their points, facts, reasonableness.
Neat rhetorical trick, isn’t it.
Um… never compared Nelson to Beck. I’m comparing the fact that both can be so right and so wrong… sometimes in the same thought.
Get the brick and do it!
Wonderful and to the point. cross-posted at Oped
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Education-Reform-A-Nation-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Accountability_Children_Debate_Education-140625-498.html#comment496751
For twenty-seven of the thirty years I taught in public schools, the poverty rates in those same schools was above 70%, and my class loads were usually 34 students or more per class—and there were always gang bangers in every class. Some of them were known killers who had killed their first rival gang banger before turning thirteen.
Only one year out of the thirty years I was a teacher did we get a grant to lower class size in ninth grade English classes to 25 in each class. Teaching 25 students was like heaven compared to 34 or more.
And the rooms had leaky roofs and that is only one of many examples of the poor state of the buildings we taught out of. I remember everything coming to a stop during lessons when we would see the acoustic ceiling tiles flexing as the wild animals that lived in the crawl space above our heads were crossing it. One year when we returned from the winter break, we had to abandon my classroom because of the stench of the animals that had died while we were gone. It took a week for building services to jack hammer through the concrete walls to get into the space where the carcases were, sanitize it and then repair the damage to get rid of the dead animals.
When I retired in 2005, a quarter of the staff was suffering from sick building syndrome and I was one of them. I was so glad to leave. I’d rather go fight in Afghanistan than go back in the classroom.
A few minutes after I walked into my classroom every day, the wheezing would start along with a pounding headache that wouldn’t let up until I left for the day. And even after the school district replaced the leaky roofs a few years before I retired, this condition continued. In addition, I’d come down with sinus infections one or more times a year and was often on medication for that. Since I retired in 2005, I haven’t had one respiratory infection, headache or wheezing attack.
I even kept a gas mask in a cabinet with the highest rated HEPA filters canisters on it and I wore that mask when I was alone in my room before school, at lunch and after school. Only with that mask on would my wheezing and headache go away. In fact, I bought several smaller HEPA filters and ran them every day all day. The noise made it difficult to teach but I had to do all I could so the environment was one where kids who were their to cooperate and learn had a better chance at success.
All I did was write about one year in my memoir, Crazy is Norma, and for that one year there were plenty of examples that reveal what teachers in the U.S. have to put up with in their struggle to teach.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
As if I don’t already know this but then half of American adults don’t even know what Common Core is.
Great writing. Meanwhile the beat goes on with the federal agenda focused on education as a management problem. This in my mailbox is an example, from our “Institute of Education Sciences.”
Human Resource Strategies for Fostering Teacher Effectiveness: Webinar Presented by REL Pacific
Learn how your state or LEA’s human resource practices can promote teacher effectiveness in this new webinar from REL Pacific.
Dr. Herb Heneman, Dickson-Bascom Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will explain how using strategic human resource management can help state and local education agencies recruit the right teachers and improve their professional competencies, such as classroom management, instructional planning, and instructional delivery.
Using practical examples, Dr. Heneman will explain the concept of strategic management of human capital, teach you how to align your human resource policies to teacher competencies, and describe what can help—and hinder—the process.
I have tried several times to question the IES about their webinars and definitions of effective teachers, the latter at the center of federal regulations and based on statistical fictions about gains in test scores as the ultimate measure of “effectiveness.” The replies have been nothing more than an assertion that their programs are designed to forward federal policy. I have concluded that there are no scientists at this agency, and that extends to programs like this one. They are all propagandists whose salaries and programs must follow the current political agenda.
While political agendas have played a role in federal activity from the get-go, I recall an era in the 1960s when federal funds were invested in the work of independent researchers and other scholars (e.g., Cooperative Research Program) and the start-up programs in regional educational labs that were not on the same ideological page, as is true today. USDE’s Race to the Top came with a well-developed PR campaign called the “Reform Support Network” with subcontracts to support the development of strategies to sell the agenda, one of these calling for “swat teams of teachers” to police colleagues who criticized the idiotic requirements being imposed on them.
Reblogged this on Dolphin and commented:
And this from my state: Vouchers cost the state $16M:
http://www.indystar.com/story/news/education/2014/06/20/report-school-voucher-program-cost-state-m/11113499/
Some folks may disagree, but at the heart of the “reform” movement is pedagogy–the attempt to push for “student centered” classrooms (in whatever its permutations) that started with Dewey is now being used to undermine the entire system. Since the system has always been seen as “needing reform” by those wanting to push the “student centered” pedagogy, they now have their chance after many failed attempts by combining forces with the corporatists. The Formula of Evil is: “Student centered” pedagogy + ed tech + Common Core + high stakes testing + VAM = the McDonaldization of education. “Hello! Welcome to my school! How can I facilitate your educational experience today? Have you signed up for our Pearson rewards card yet?”
Steve gets it! His school would never do any of this crap, the parents there would revolt and run him out on a rail. That is one advantage of a private school. And to Jack, Steve is one of the good guys, a friend to education for all, nothing at all like Glenn Beck. I have a brick I’ll send you, use until you pass out, repeat as needed. Lloyd, I had the same building problem you describe. Fortunately, my doctor made careful notes, saw me every Saturday, and then helped file a legal complaint against the district because my school had several brand new classrooms sitting empty while I and my second graders suffered. Several parents joined me in threatening legal action, I have due process rights. I was moved after a month in the old moldy room.
Well again, I never compared Nelson to Beck personally. For one thing, Nelson is no doubt a lot smarter. But smart people can say really dumb things and Nelson does a bang-up job of that in this post. His meshing of lefty conspiracy theory nonsense with criticism of the education “reform” movement is the ideological mirror image of Beck’s own twisted take on the subject.
Rather than a hoax, perhaps “ill-advised”.
Still waiting for just one example.
Thanks for your tap dancing and back pedaling/peddling. You didn’t compare Beck to Nelson personally? But then you continue to compare Beck to Nelson anyhow. Brilliant. Nelson is spot on and I agree 100% with what he stated. I find Jack Talbot’s comments not particularly enlightening.
No backpedaling here, Joe. I said I didn’t compare them personally because I didn’t. I compared their rhetoric, which is quite a different thing. Honestly, I don’t understand the almost pathological need of some to willfully misconstrue.
Sorry, Dienne — I have learned through bitter experience that trying to have a reasoned dialouge with you is well nigh impossible, so I’m not going to waste my time trying again. Have a nice day.
Who said anything about a dialogue? I’m asking for one example of what is so “wrong” about Nelson’s article such that it can be compared with Beck’s rantings. But, hey, if you can’t back up your own arguments, no skin off my back.
I had due process rights too, and I did take the district to court—as did several other teachers in separate cases.
After several years, the district offered me a settlement and I took it because that was the same year I retired—I didn’t want nay thing more to do with that administration.. Maybe they were afraid that after I left the classroom and stopped getting sick that would hurt their defense.
It will be difficult to stand up to those listed. Their influence and money will continue to drive what goes on in education. It is encouraging that many are speaking out and my hope is that their voices be heard.
Thanks for the comments of LLoyd Lofthouse. I can relate to what he said though he had it 1,000 times tougher than I ever did. My first year of teaching I had 38 kids in the classroom with wildly varying reading levels, from 2nd grade to 6th grade in a 4th grade class. It was like being hit by a Mack truck. I didn’t miss a day for my first 3 years but that was because I went to school deathly sick on many days. Later, as I got older, I just had to take my sick days, it was impossible to teach with a severe cold or the flu. One of the buildings I taught at (in the same district) had an infestation of mice one year and they had to use sticky traps to catch them. They could not use poisons with the kids around. Some of the kids would be freaked out seeing a mouse racing behind me or struggling in a sticky trap which I had not noticed until it was too late. Another year there was an invasion of newly hatched termites that broke out in one spring. One fall there was a plague of flies and early in the morning before the kids arrived, you could hear the teachers performing their morning duty, swatting at the flies, killing the hordes of flies with their fly swatters. I was so relieved when I got transferred to a newer building.
I taught in NYC Bronx classrooms with no glass in some window panes, gaping holes in the wall wo vermin came up everyday, and plaster that fell from the ceiling and coated the desks so I had to clean them. I was making 38k at the time in my 14th year of service, and I spent thousands to supply EVERYTHING. They gave me nothing but 35 kids who had all been left back (held-over) None could read. Ten months later, all could read, most went into top third grades and all could write. The principal harassed me, and so I left to teach on the East side of Manhattan. I supplied everything there, too, and wrote the entire 7th grade curriculum for this new magnet school. My work was studied by Harvard as my practice became the cohort in NYC for The National Standards (the real one funded by Pew)… at the end I was awarded the NY State Educator of Excellence award,— and NYC DOE charged me with INCOMPETENCE… so I would sit in a rubber room for years… I retired.
Who would want to teach, if they knew the truth??
Such enlightening comments above. Would that someone would make a collection and write a book. At this point it might not make a difference but way too many people have NO idea of what some teachers go through – and the children they teach. AND of course no idea of what the lives outside of school are like for these children.
Even in the “good” schools the politics of it all are nauseating. The statistics of teachers getting out says it all, but of course the media does not report on that.
Where is the Change.org petition insisting that The Calhoun School’s faculty be granted tenure and the opportunity to unionize, and that the school end its practice of utilizing a sizable number of teachers (often young and low-salaried) who do not hold master’s degrees?
P.S. Steve Nelson, if you’re reading this, your school still hasn’t updated its website’s information regarding the percentage of students who receive financial aid. It says that 80% of the students at Calhoun are paying $42,000+ per student, per year, but in the comments of your HuffPo piece, you claim it is only 75%.
“…Educational gerrymandering” Perfect way to characterize charter schools…
I want to draw attention to a fundamental problem that is not often discussed. Many of the standards and much of the testing in ELA are based on a fundamental kind of error that philosophers call a “category error”–mistaken belief that one kind of thing is like and so belongs in the same category as some completely different kind of thing.
Different kinds of learning differ.
Some learnings are explicit. Some are not. They are acquisitions.
Some learnings are discretely enumerable. Some are not–they can only be acquired as a gestalt.
Some learnings are declarative (they are knowledge of how). Some are procedural (they are knowledge of what).
An ENORMOUS MISTAKE is made when people assume that learning to read and write and speak and listen and think is a like learning the facts and algorithms for elementary arithmetic and geometry. Those facts and algorithms can easily be put into a bullet list of discrete knowledge and skills, and one either knows them or one doesn’t. You either know what 7 times 9 is, or you don’t. And it’s easy to make up a bubble test question to find out whether you do.
But many ELA “skills” are nothing like that. Being able to “identify the main idea” in a given piece of prose or poetry, for example, is another matter altogether. This is NOT a general, universally applicable procedural skill like being able to carry out the algorithm for adding two multi-digit numbers. Neither is it a fact like 7 x 9 = 63.
It is, in fact, DEMONSTRABLE that nothing like a GENERAL “identifying the main idea skill” even exists!!!
And this is so despite the thousands of “finding the main idea” lessons you’ve seen. Bear with me on this, for I am going to demonstrate what I’m saying here.
When you see a list of the skills to be tested for math and the skills to be tested in ELA–that is, when you look at a list of “standards”–it’s important that you understand that there are very, very different KINDS of thing on those lists. These are not only as different as are apples and oranges, they are as different as an apple is from a hope for the future or the pattern of freckles on Socrates’s forehead or the square root of negative one. They are different sorts of thing ALTOGETHER.
Let me illustrate the point about “the main idea.”
What is the main idea of the following?
“The ready to hand is encountered within the world. The Being of this entity, readiness to hand, thus stands in some relationship toward the world and toward worldhood. In anything ready to hand, the world is always there. Whenever we encounter anything, the world has already been previously discovered, though not thematically.”
Now, note that this passage would have a pretty low Lexile level. It doesn’t contain a lot of difficult (long, complicated, low-frequency) words. It doesn’t contain long or syntactically complicated sentences. But the chances are good that unless you are familiar with continental philosophy, you will have NO CLUE WHATSOEVER what this passage is saying. In order for you to understand the main idea of this passage, you would need, at a minimum, an introduction to the philosophical problems that Heidegger is addressing in the passage. Otherwise, the passage will be impenetrable to you.
Now, what is the main idea of the following?
One of the limits of reality
Presents itself in Oley when they hay,
Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is
A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene.
There the distant fails the clairvoyant eye.
Things stop in that direction and since they stop
The direction stops and we accept what is
As good. The utmost must be good and is
And is our fortune and honey hived in the trees
And mingling of colors at a festival.
Again, the language is not that difficult. One can easily define the less frequent words–enigmas, serene, clairvoyant, and utmost. But that’s not going to help you figure out what the “main idea” here is. For that, you will need an introduction to the kinds of concerns that Wallace Stevens took up in his poetry.
Now, notice that what is involved in figuring out the main idea of each of these passages is ENTIRELY DIFFERENT!!! Oh, sure, there are similarities between the passages. Both are passages in English. Both deal with a philosophical idea. Actually, they both deal with the same philosophical idea.
But this is the key point: there is NO ONE PROCEDURE–no one finding the main idea procedure–that I can teach you that will enable to you to determine what each passage means.
In other words, no instruction in some general “finding the main idea” skill is going to help you to find the main idea of either of these passages because THERE IS NO “general finding the main idea skill.” That such a thing exists is AN UTTER FICTION. The “general finding the main idea skill” is as fictional as one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fairies.
And, of course, attempting to test for possession of this mythical general finding the main idea facility is like requiring people to bag and bring home any other sort of mythical entity–a unicorn, Pegasus, or the golden apples from the tree at the edge of the world.
Now, how is it that people have come to believe that there is exists a “general finding the main idea skill”? Well, they have committed a category error. They’ve made the mistake of thinking that figuring out what’s happening in a piece of poetry or prose is a discrete, universally applicable general facility like carrying out the algorithm for adding multidigit numbers.
It’s not.
And, of course, since there exists no “general finding the main idea skill,” there can exist no valid test of general finding the main idea skill.
Now, that there exists no such general skill does not mean, of course, that passages don’t have main ideas. But it does mean that there is no essential characteristic that all main ideas or passages that have main ideas have and that there is no general ability to find main ideas, the possession of which can be tested for reliably across all texts at grade level.
Finding the main idea is context dependent in a way that adding multidigit numbers isn’t. It makes no difference whether you are adding 462 and 23 or 1842 and 748, you are going to follow the same procedure and draw upon the same class of facts. Not so with “finding the main idea.”
So, there treating basic mathematics and ELA as though they were the same sort of thing, with skills that can be similarly enumerated and tested, is a FUNDAMENTAL MISTAKE of the kind that philosophers call a CATEGORY ERROR.
And it’s a fundamental category error on which our lists of standards and our sumamtive standardized tests in ELA are both based!
Correcting this error would mean completely redoing what we are doing in a way that operationalizes our very vague, ill-formulated notions like “finding the mean idea” or “making inferences/drawing conclusions.” Again, there is no single, general, universally applicable inference-making ability or conclusion drawing ability.
These notions could be operationalized for particular, well-defined kinds of texts, and then and only then could they be validly tested for.
If you can’t operationalize it–if you cannot turn it in to a precise, teachable, repeatable procedure–then you cannot VALIDLY test for possession of it, for the fact is that you don’t have a clue, really, what you are testing for. Poke at what you think you are testing for the least bit, and you will find that it disintegrates, that there is no there there, to borrow Gertrude Stein’s phrase.
Now, one of the reasons that people fall into this kind of error–into thinking that there exists a general finding the main idea facility, for example, is that there are kinds of texts that exemplify this thing–this “main idea” quite clearly. There is the standard schoolbook paragraph that consists of a general statement and several statements that relate to that general one.
But that’s not even a very common entity when one goes out and looks at actual writing in the real world. And even when one looks at pieces that folks might reasonably describe as having a main idea, one finds that the term actually covers lots and lots of kinds of thing that differ enormously from one another and, importantly, that are discovered by the reader IN VASTLY DIFFERENT WAYS–ways that differ so much from one another that referring to them as the same thing–putting them into the same class and calling them all “main ideas” is like having a single class that consists of, I don’t know, shoelaces and metaphysics and the gleam in your father’s eye when he met your mother.
A lot of what is done in ELA is based on extraordinarily SHODDY thinking. Or, rather, nonthinking.
If we want to test validly, we should test
a) world knowledge (knowledge of what)
b) specific procedural knowledge (knowledge of how)
not possession of “general recognizing how two themes are related ability,” for THERE IS NO SUCH THING as such a general ability. What actually happens with different texts when people do that are very, very different things, and what happens is highly context dependent. The ability to recognize a theme running through a judge’s decisions is not the same as the ability to recognize a theme in four soliloquies by Hamlet for one would not train a student in the same way to do these different things, and so we are confused when we reify, when we hypostatize “theme recognizing ability” and treat it as though it were a single, discrete, universal ability.
That there is so much sloppy thinking about these matters in ELA can be seen in literature texts, some of which will treat, in one place, the term “theme” as though it referred to a general subject (“courage”) and in another as though it referred to a message or moral or lesson (“seize the day”).
Again, testing for ability in ELA is NOTHING LIKE testing for ability in elementary mathematics, and we make a terrible mistake if we imagine that the two are at all similar.
A list of standards is supposed to be a list of outcomes to be measured. If that list is to be valid as a list of outcomes to be measured, then it needs to be specific enough to be operationalizable. Otherwise, mastery of it cannot be validly tested for.
So, here’s a kind of thing that you CAN do:
You can say, there is a sort of prose paragraph that presents a general idea and several related ideas. And the statement of the general idea is the main idea. And you can say there is a sort of descriptive paragraph that appears from time to time in narratives that presents concrete details that engender an emotional response in the reader, and that emotional effect is the main idea of that type of paragraph.
And you can validly test for each if you have specified the type and how it works and how one goes about identifying the main idea for each type. But notice that “main idea” is being used in very, very different ways in each case.
If you are going to test, validly, using summative standardized instruments, then you need to be this concrete in the specification of the “standard.” You cannot wait for the test question to supply the operational definition of the standard because those questions can and will be ALL OVER THE PLACE.
Often, figuring out what is going on in a particular passage–the general idea, the theme, the main idea, the controlling idea–whatever–is HIGHLY context dependent. Focus on vague, general, universal “finding the main idea” skills we get you precisely NOWHERE. Anyone can pick up Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and get, off the bat, that it’s a powerful, disturbing piece of writing.
“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you was suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.”
But if you want to understand what it’s about, you’re going to have to know something about the theories of Original Sin and of Grace. No amount of “general finding the main idea” or “general finding the theme” training is going to enable you to figure out what the piece is getting at UNLESS YOU HAVE THAT CONTEXT.
Texts exist in context. Many are largely inexplicable outside their context.
And so, simply having a general standard like “the student will be able to identify the theme in a work of literature or an informational text” doesn’t cut it for any random text that happens to be at grade level as measured by word frequency and sentence length (that is, by Lexile level).
And all of this raises an issue with the validity of the formulation of particular “standards” and of the testing of those, doesn’t it?
And this dependence of texts upon context is a HUGE PROBLEM for the theory that one can test general skills applicable to ALL grade-level texts of a particular kind. Again, there are a couple of kinds of knowledge:
1. declarative knowledge (world knowledge, knowledge of what)
2. procedural knowledge (knowledge of how)
The ELA standards as written ALMOST COMPLETELY IGNORE THE FIRST OF THESE. This is a huge problem BECAUSE TEXTS DEPEND UPON CONTEXT, as I illustrated, above, with the excerpt from Edwards’s sermon.
And the ELA standards as written DESCRIBE THE SECOND OF THESE IN EXTREMELY VAGUE WAYS–ways that are too vague to be operationalized sufficiently for valid assessment, as I illustrated in my discussions of “finding the main idea,” above.
These problems are not new with the CCSS. These problems also existed with the state standards and tests that preceded the CCSS.
Again, as a general rule, if you are going to test validly, then you have to specify what is to be demonstrated by the student to such an extent that what, specifically, is to be learned and demonstrated is clear. So, you cannot make a list of vagaries.
The student will be able to add fractions with unlike denominators.
is a very, very different thing from
The student will be able to identify the main idea in a grade-level text.
The former involves a clear, distinct, teachable procedure. The child either knows the relevant algorithms or doesn’t.
The latter is NOTHING LIKE THAT.
And that’s a problem for the validity of both the standard and the tests as conceived.
We must recognize, when we grow up, that these different kinds of learning require altogether different kinds of assessment.
Much of attainment in language facility–in ability to read and write and speak and listen–is a matter of automatic, implicit acquisition rather than of explicit learning. For example, far less than one percent of the vocabulary that you are able to understand (your so-called “passive” vocabulary) was explicitly taught to you.
So, you can teach kids to use context clues. You can teach them Greek and Latin roots. You can teach them that herculean comes from Hercules and titantic comes from Titan. You can teach them about inflected forms and derivative forms. You can teach them about affixes and compounding. And you can give them lists of vocabulary words to memorize.
EVERYONE has had that kind of instruction.
And yet far less than one percent of the vocabulary that people know came to them by those means.
So, if our goal is to increase kids’ vocabularies, why would we concentrate, PRIMARILY, one those means by which people acquire a MINISCULE percentage of the vocabulary that they acquire?
That doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it.
It’s like training someone to build roads by spending 90 percent of our time on how to paint lines on them. It’s like having a drivers’ training class that devotes three weeks, four days, and seven hours to learning how to use the windshield wipers and how windshield wipers work and the history of windshield wipers and windshield wiper theory, and then giving kids a half an hour behind the wheel before the test.
We have to understand WHAT SCIENCE TELLS US ABOUT HOW PEOPLE ACQUIRE THE VOCABULARY OF A LANGUAGE. Then, we have to do that.
Here’s what we know: Almost all vocabulary–all but a tiny, tiny portion of it–is acquired automatically in batches of semantically related items in contexts in which people are significantly engaged (contexts that matter to them) in which that vocabulary is used.
Now, people will say, that’s crazy. I know better. I took Latin. I use that to figure out what words mean ALL THE TIME. But the fact is that most of their vocabulary acquisition is automatic–so automatic that they don’t pay any attention to it–and they happen to remember the few times that they used that Latin to figure out what something means.
So, given what science tells us about how people learn vocabulary, what should our vocabulary instruction look like?
Well, it would look unlike almost anything that appears in the vocabulary lessons of most textbooks.
Here’s how to teach vocabulary: Engage students in a significant knowledge domain in which the vocabulary to be learned is used repeatedly in both speech and in writing. So, do that unit on Rites of Passage (birth, becoming an adult, getting married, etc) or something else really weird and fascinating and applicable to them. Rites of passage is a great one because a) there are lots of weird, interesting cultural variations in this and b) all kids from middle-school age on are fascinated by this question of when they officially “become a man” or “become a woman.” And structure your unit so that those “academic terms” that you want them to learn are embedded throughout–culture, rite, ritual, kinship, stage, status, structure, symbol, transmission, thesis, analysis, evidence–whatever. Make sure that these are used over and over by you and by the students so that they pick them up in passing. Concentrate on the subject–on rites of passage–and use the terms incidentally, and use them A LOT.
Don’t give them a list of “10 academic words” and have them look them up in a dictionary and write out the definition and the meaning and then take a vocab quiz on them at the end of the week because if you do that, they will learn them for the test and then promptly forget them BECAUSE THAT IS NOT HOW THE BRAIN IS STRUCTURED TO ACQUIRE VOCABULARY.
For more on this, see linguist George Miller’s great book The Science of Words from Scientific American press.
Bob, this is slightly off-topic, but I hear roasters are creating some really high-quality brewed decafs these days.