Stephanie Simon of politico.com reports that Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has invited members to debate the Common Core standards at the organization’s convention in Los Angeles.
Until now, Weingarten and the AFT have strongly defended the standards. But she has been reconsidering their value over the past 15 months. In April 2013, she said in a major speech in Néw York City that the standards should be separated from high-stakes testing because there had been inadequate preparation for them—little or no professional development, materials, or other necessary tools. In Néw York state, implementation of Common Core testing was hurried and slipshod. The passing marks were set so high that 70% of students failed–failure by design.
The Common Core standards have recently been in free fall. The Gates Foundation–which paid over $2 billion to write and promote the Common Core–has called for a moratorium on using the results for punishing teachers. The Chicago Teachers Union flatly rejected the Common Core standards. State after state have dropped the standards or the tests or both.
Now Weingarten is inviting members to weigh in.
Simon writes:
“The American Federation of Teachers will open its annual convention Friday morning with a startling announcement: After years of strongly backing the Common Core, the union now plans to give its members grants to critique the academic standards — or to write replacement standards from scratch.
It’s a sign that teachers are frustrated and fed up — and they’re making their anger heard, loud and clear.
“The AFT will also consider a resolution — drafted by its executive council — asserting that the promise of the Common Core has been corrupted by political manipulation, administrative bungling, corporate profiteering and an invalid scoring system designed to ensure huge numbers of kids fail the new math and language arts exams that will be rolled out next spring. An even more pointed resolution flat out opposing the standards will also likely come up for a vote.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What needs to be at the front and center of the debate is that CC is part of a ruse to dupe the public into accepting the current status quo of bashing/blaming teachers and unions, purposely underfunding schools, diverting funds and top of the crop students to charters, and TFA. Unless this is included, its an empty argument.
When we all come together…What a Day! Just wow. Rev. Barber’s remarks at the AFT National Convention today brings the entire auditorium to their feet…It’s a MUST HEAR THIS message…Take the time…LISTEN, then COME TOGETHER!
It is worth noting that AFT leadership is also planning to ask members for two dues increases. From that same article:
“To bolster the union’s coffers for the legal and political battles to come, the AFT leadership is asking members to support a two-stage dues hike that would add $5.40 a year to their bills this year and another $6.60 in 2015.
Most of the increase would go toward the “militancy/defense fund” and state and national “solidarity funds,” which support litigation, political activism and lobbying.
I wonder if members might be more willing to pay more in dues if the union was actually willing to take on Common Core head on. Conversely, If the union is still going to be on the front lines defending Common Core, then they might be able to get that money from the Gates Foundation. But it seems as if they are trying to have it both ways, and that is getting hard to do as people get more and more informed about the real history and likely effects of the Common Core.
Tell Randi to take a pay cut.
From the beginning I have said reform as it was presented is a farce, a distraction, an intent to seize control of 1) what crumbs are left of democracy and the public commons for private control/interest ; 2) the soil in which the crop for the future is grown. The number one threat to tyranny is a well educated, morally grounded population. The number one way to protect tyranny is to indoctrinate and train citizens and future citizens, and sway them to perceive a common, manufactured enemy (tenure, teachers failing schools…)
How long before the “bad teachers” are branded and rounded up for re-indoctrination?
I agree, but we have to be aware of the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” effect here. The forces of deform cannot be thought off as a Hydra, where two heads grow back after one is cut off. Deform is a collection of alliances of convenience, and that is one of their weaknesses. It allows us to weaken the whole by destroying the parts, exactly what they have tried to do to us by their false accusations against us. We on the other hand have no shortage of facts on our side. We can pass any challenge or smell test they throw up, they can’t live up to their own propaganda.
Yes, Anthony, thanks for highlighting the dues increases wanted by Weingarten. It’s also likely these increases will strengthen her role as a player in Hillary’s run for the White House in ’16, more money to spend on promoting Dem Party Prez candidate will make Weingarten a more valued insider at the status quo table. The apparent open debate on CCSS at the AFT Convention may be a way for Weingarten to avoid being “overtaken by events,” as some historians put it, that is, falling behind the curve of ideas whose time has come and thus losing leadership legitimacy.
So, as opposition to CCSS mounts, AFT/NEA/PTA org’s and leaders are on thin ice taking millions from Gates to promote CCSS and now having to face upheaval from the bottom. The Duncan letter of NEA and the debate in AFT will shore up the leadership credibility. As a hedge against losing control of the debate, Weingarten has put a divisive and dishonest res into the mix which will certainly appeal to many res attendees as a “compromise.”
Obviously, pressure is on the opposition to hit a home run. Very impt for Karen Lewis, CTU and other critics of CCSS/PARCC/privatization to stake out a bold, articulate, clear position to pull things further away from the leaders at the top.
Good analysis, Ira.
Hey, Randi, ” You don’t need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows”. Her positions re Common Core are a matter of public record. No matter how fast she dances, or how often she changes partners, she remains, at best, an immoral, crass political opportunist.
Thank you for your beautiful expression. I completely agree with you that AFT President intentionally play a dangerous game on American Public Education, as well as treat all veteran Educators like a bunch of blind, deaf and mute scholars.
Yes, Mrs. Weingarten is quite deceitful on her action, and as you accurately describe her in “No matter how fast she dances, or how often she changes partners, she remains, at best, an immoral, crass political opportunist.”
Dr. Ravitch is very generous in her opinion about Mrs. Weingarten’s character. It is time to ask Dr. Ravitch, or some particular educators in this website to volunteer to run for President of AFT, so that we will be able to preserve American Public Education. Back2basic
This was the last straw: http://www.nhregister.com/government-and-politics/20140617/weingarten-endorses-malloy-says-connecticut-should-not-let-koch-brothers-take-it
What puzzles me is this: why FD it take Randi this long to come to the recognition that almost all veteran teachers recognized from the onset of these “standards”.m? We are not lazy, uninventive, greedy fools! We are not simply stubborn and resistant to change. We are not without understanding of the role schooling plays in formulating the basis of democracy. We are not unaware of changing demographics in our society. The ebb and flow of political pushes has always been part of the living, breathing organism that is public education. However, private ownership of the schools, deprofessionalization of teaching and schools of education, shrugging off teacher input, and demanding nothing of charter school accountability stifle learning and degrade the public education process.
Why Randi didn’t see this puzzles me.
Defending the CCSS blindly is not smart and certainly isn’t using critical thinking skills.
Apparently, now it has been revealed that the Hobby Lobby owner/CEO has been developing the insertion of a Bible based 4-year course of study to present one way of looking at the Bible, creating a theocracy that is completely antithetical to the existence if America. I personally believe that there has been constant movement towards undermining the Civil Rights Act since its inception.
Now that Citizens United has allowed corporations representing the few to buy elections, newspapers, TV news, twisting content to promote whenever possible, they have opened the doors to buy off anything in the public commons, so fearful are they of a society that doesn’t reflect one set of values and a mostly white, male-directed point of view.
I have no problem with anyone’s set of values as long as they aren’t merely opting to control and own money, thought, and lives. Let them live on their own on some island of righteous indignation. Bit by bit they are eroding the Great Experiment that is The United States of America. We have been a nation unique in its combination of varying cultures for all these years only to have the same kinds of people as we fled from to come here to be free from religious demands and oppression.
We need to wake up.
Dear Deb:
There is not any confusion on the part of AFT President. You are very kind to Mrs. Weingarten in expressing that you are puzzled by it takes a mass of the echoes from Educators in North American so that AFT President finally gives in to call for an opened debate about CCSS. This should be done since its inception in 2002, or the least in 2010. It is a bit too late, but still better than never to have an opened debate about the rules and regulation to protect Public Education which 90% of its expense is covered by local tax payers.
To me, all Educators only and only need to focus on the primary cause which is the protection of a respectable due process, then secondary cause which is all materials in CCSS should be publicly known by parents, and welcome the input from all childhood experts, an all veteran / new educators. Finally, the most important cause is the clause for rectification or improvisation in CCSS from respectable local educators and childhood experts in order to adapt with local need and demand from students and parents.
If these causes are not in a debate, please abort the meeting. We always have private schools, local, regional, provincial/state, national, and international tests for century. CCSS is just a game changer to testify our American democracy.
Being as first generation of immigrant, I will stand tall for protection of Public Education at any price including my life. I heartily hope that each district will unite all workers whether you are lawyers, teachers, carpenters, or homemakers who will stand up for your children’s right to have the best Public Education from your hard earning in paying your due or tax.
Public Education should be our conviction. Please remember that all first generation of immigrants come here for Democracy. So, please show crooked corporate what immigrants can do for democracy by legal votes without fear. Back2basic
I disagree that all immigrants come to the U.S. for democracy. Most immigrate because of economic opportunities that come with the willingness to work hard toward financial security and a better quality of life.
Most immigrants do not come from democracies and have no idea what a democracy means or is. But most immigrants have heard of the wealth and the economic opportunities that don’t exist in many third world countries that are ruled by dictators where a few families own most of the land and control all the wealth and everyone else lives in poverty or close to it barely surviving.
“Given the many immigrants, particularly those from Latin American, come to this country for economic opportunities, they typical have not had high levels of SES indicator, and as a result have typically not had high levels of participation (in elections).
Click to access foreignborn.pdf
This is another reason why we must tax the rich more than the middle class and pay a living wage to every legal worker in the U.S.
Hi Mr. Lofthouse:
Since you are educator and VN war veteran, you would agree with me that local power/jungle law will do more damage than national law.
For this sole reason, I agree with you 100% regarding economic driven goal in the majority of first generation of immigrants. However, the deepest and heartfelt need in all sentient beings is the DEMOCRACY, or freedom of expression of our soul that yearns for the inner peace. This is mistakenly interpreted by the young generation as individualism without responsibility toward others beings who are less fortunate in all aspects in needs and wants physically, emotionally and spiritually.
If I cannot do, or write, or speak on behalf of all unfortunate beings, I will volunteer to support whoever stands up, stands tall for North American Public Education. I have been there and done that for 37 years in Canada from Elementary school to Post Secondary.
Please remember that all sentient beings from human (bad or good) to insects, all are fear of punishment, and all want to be able to love and to be loved in return without any pressure from economic survival.
In this website, there are enough of educators who are fear for losing their teaching licence if they want to exercise their knowledge in democracy or their right to speak out . So, please forgive immigrants with language barrier and without teaching degree so that they cannot brave enough to express their understanding, need and want DEMOCRACY for them. May King from Canada. Back2basic
If Gates put all this money into this, what textbooks do his kids look at? Usually the rich like the best stuff, stoves, cars, whatever. So you would think Gates would have a vested interest in getting the best textbooks, so where are they?
It’s nice that Randi has deigned to listen to the little people, after all of these years.
A small suggestion:
Live or via webcast—Diane Ravitch addresses the entire AFT convention explaining her position on the CCSS, to be followed by Q&A.
Does of the owner of this blog know anybody in the AFT leadership who might facilitate that suggestion?
😎
I’m pretty sure that Diane Ravitch knows Randi Weingarten
She knows her well . . . . It’s common knowledge.
Keep chiping away until it crumbles ! Keep picking at it like a festering sore that it is, !
Arne Duncan
@arneduncan
To prepare all our kids for the real future that they’ll face, we need to bring systemic change to public education in America.
Run by appointed boards and public-private partnerships where the “public” part of that is completely captured by the “private” part, and new “governance” models that look a lot like the corporate model.
That’s not the “future” I want to give mine, thanks. Sounds pretty grim.
As midterm elections will be upon us soon, look for Congresspeeps of both parties to dump support for CC. I just received a long letter from mine (Republican) who is Deeply Concerned and Totally Committed to ending federal involvement in education.
Except the part about making New York City public schools roll over, play dead and pay for anything a charter school wants to do…
Eva Moskowitz for president.
A most excellent posting by deutsch29 [the redoubtable Dr. Mercedes Schneider] on this proposed CCSS debate at the AFT convention:
Link: http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2014/07/11/the-problem-with-the-aft-offer-for-teachers-to-rewrite-the-common-core/
This conversation is not new. It echoes something published ten years, i.e., Alfie Kohn’s contribution to a slim book entitled MANY CHILDREN LEFT BEHIND: HOW THE NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT IS DAMAGING OUR CHILDREN AND OUR SCHOOLS (2004).
Kohn’s very short piece is entitled ‘NCLB and the Effort to Privatize Public Education.” A short excerpt (parentheses mine):
[start quote]
(p. 90) Over (p. 91) and over again, accountability and privatization appear as conjoined twins.
To point out this correlation is not to deny that there are exceptions to it. To be sure, some proponents of public schooling have, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, hitched a ride on the Accountability Express. I’ve even heard one or two people argue that testing requirements in general—and NCLB in particular—represents our last chance to save public education, to redeem schools in the public’s mind by insisting that they be held to high standards.
But the idea that we should scramble to feed the accountability beast is based on the rather desperate hope that we can satisfy its appetite by providing sufficient evidence of excellence. This is a fool’s errand. It overlooks the fact that the whole movement is rooted in a top-down, ideologically driven contempt for public institutions, not in a grassroots loss of faith in neighborhood schools. The demand for accountability didn’t start in living rooms; it started in places like the Heritage Foundation. After a time, it’s true, even parents who think their own children’s school is just fine may swallow the rhetoric they’ve been fed about the inadequacy of public education in general. But do we really think that the people who have cultivated this distrust, who bellow for more testing, who brush off structural barriers like poverty and racism as mere “excuses” for failure, will be satisfied once we agree to let them turn our schools into test-prep factories?
[end quote]
I concur with the penultimate paragraph of deutsch29’s blog posting:
“We need to utterly do away with CCSS. It is my hope that one of the celebrated gains from the AFT national convention is the death of CCSS.”
Then we can intone in the words of that old standby:
Ding Dong!
The CC Witch is dead.
Which old Witch?
The CC Witch!
Ding Dong!
The CC Witch is dead.
😎
Democracy in action, because teacher unions are democracies and they are not run like for-profit corporations. The president of a teachers’ union is elected by the membership and must have the majorities blessing to stay in office unlike CEO’s of for-profit Charter schools. Union presidents also can’t pay themselves whatever they want out of tax payer money like the management in Charter schools do, or hire family and friends for hefty salaries.
Has the NEA made such a move? I’m not seeing anything in my in-box.
To all readers:
Here are some essential notes from the above link, from:
“KrazyTA
July 11, 2014 at 4:38 pm
A most excellent posting by deutsch29 [the redoubtable Dr. Mercedes Schneider] on this proposed CCSS debate at the AFT convention:
Link: http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2014/07/11/the-problem-with-the-aft-offer-for-teachers-to-rewrite-the-common-core/
Be Alert:
CCSS is a product owned by the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). Thus, any content labeled “CCSS” belongs to these two organizations that control the CCSS license. Furthermore, any content in CCSS becomes static– one-size-fits-all, inflexible, and
unable to be adjusted– except by permission of the CCSS license owners.
And never forget:
CCSS must be static because it was created to serve as the nucleus for punitive, test-driven “reform.” That was the plan since 2008 and NGA’s early press release on the issue.
Consider Louisa Moats, teacher, research, who was one of the actual “insiders” of CCSS development and who defended CCSS until she realized her work was intended as a rigid vehicle to drive test-based outcomes. What is noteworthy is that Moats was on the “inside” of CCSS development and was still kept in the dark regarding NGA’s and CCSSO’s intent to use her work as a foundation for inflexible, test-driven reform.
Moats spoke about her “naïveté” in a January 2014 interview published in Huffington Post:
Marilyn Adams and I were the team of writers, recruited in 2009 by David Coleman and Sue Pimentel, who drafted the Foundational Reading Skills section of the CCSS and closely reviewed the whole ELA section for K-5. We drafted sections on Language and Writing Foundations that were not incorporated into the document as originally drafted. I am the author of the Reading Foundational Skills section of Appendix A. …
I never imagined when we were drafting standards in 2010 that major financial support would be funneled immediately into the development of standards-related tests. How naïve I was. The CCSS represent lofty aspirational goals for students aiming for four year, highly selective colleges. Realistically, at least half, if not the majority, of students are not going to meet those standards as written, although the students deserve to be well prepared for career and work through meaningful and rigorous education.
In closing, I implore my teacher practitioner colleagues nationwide: Do not allow yourselves to be in the position of Louisa Moats, who years later came to the conclusion, “I was so naive.”
Therefore, all compassionate and passionate educators need to be vigilant on legal aspect of CCSS licence owners. We really and desperately need legal expert to undo the intentional harm to American Public Education from deceitful wordings in CCSS licence owners.
To protect and to preserve American Public Education, all LOCAL educators, childhood expert, politicians, parents, and students need to create LOCAL LAWS to supersede corporate law. That is the only way to maintain our democracy. Back2basic
Randi soliciting teacher input?
Randi raising union dues?
Don’t you love it?
Theatrics putting Chekov to shame . . . . .
She is a brilliant women, but that does not make her necessarily ethical. I wonder what her rabbi partner really thinks of her strategies?
Who gives a tinker’s damn if Ranfi Weingarten is “brilliant”( whatever that means. ). She is a power hungry, manipulative and untrustworthy and she is messing over her own membership.. Her ‘brilliance’ and a token will get her on the subway; it earns her no respect.
I did raise the question of ethics. How can one not when discussing her actions?
Robert, you were absolutely clear and true to the issue of RW and het ethical deficiency. My points were actually icing on your cake (with props to Democracy and Chemtchr), along with Bob Shepherd’s coherent and cogent pedagogic analysis, comprise the core of the progressive resistance discourse on this blog.
Oh. Okay.
One wonders whether this discussion about the Common Core will be carried out at the 35,000-ft level, where most of these discussions take place, or if the merits of particular aspects of the standards and of particular standards will be discussed, which is another matter altogether. The general discussion are ridiculous, for the most part, for the claims made bear little relation either to the actual standards or to the materials actually produced (lesson plans, textbooks, assessments) based upon those standards.
Most of the discussion has been utter nonsense.
Starting with these being “standards” and being somehow “higher” or “more rigorous.” The new standards were hacked together overnight by amateurs based on the lowest-common-denominator groupthink of previously existing state standards. They received almost no scholarly vetting, and almost all the discussions of them take place at very abstract levels with no referencing of the actual standards. One wonders often whether those supporting or opposing them have even read them. They certainly, usually, have not thought about them carefully, line by line.
In other words, ironically, they typically haven’t gotten a close reading.
Our school has been implementing new core standards since 2008 or before. We were never told anything about national common core, yet core for the state of Ohio. We were thinking that they were absurd and inappropriate for 4th graders. We were only given the language arts – reading, writing, spelling, and language skills. This included the lexile levels for 4th graders that were suddenly bumped to 6th – 7th grade level. The topics and choice of materials were inappropriate for 4th grade maturity. We had to plunge in and got slammed at every turn. Our personal purchases were undermined and became useless. We had years of excellent materials that we were no longer allowed to use.
Even so, we weren’t completely aware of the ramifications of all this. We were almost too busy, caught in the whirlwind of change, to resist. And we had to make sure our scores were at the top of the heap. Exhausting. Numbing. Low morale. Fear. Sadness.
“In other words, ironically, they typically haven’t gotten a close reading.”
Ya, just call me when they’re at my local library. Oh wait, they’re not there. What a joke.
I too am searching for a better discussion. I liked Terrence O. Moore’s speach (Hillsdale College), but would like to hear an equally intelligent prooponent of Common Core. I especially want to hear CC defended by classroom teachers who see value in it.
I am at pains to find value in it and the problems and absurdity of CC seem obvious to me.
Unlike most folks who write and talk about the Common Core State Standards all the time, I actually have read them and thought about them very, very carefully, over a couple of years now, and I can report that there is clearly an enormous disconnect between the rhetoric that has accompanied the “standards,” on the one hand, and the actual enumerated standards and their introductions and appendices on the other. The actual CCSS for ELA seem to me to have all the flaws of the state standards that preceded them.
Attainment in ELA involves both world knowledge (knowledge of what) and procedural knowledge (knowledge of how). The standards almost entirely ignore the former and treat the latter so vaguely that one cannot validly assess them. One could drive whole curricula through their lacunae. They often instantiate really hackneyed and even prescientific notions. Particular standards often appear outside any rational progression and seemingly at random. They often entail or even explicitly call for really backward and counterproductive pedagogical approaches and curricula. It’s a simple matter to come up with wiser approaches than are entailed by these standards in almost every domain and for almost every subdomain, skill, or concept. They seem to have been prepared in almost complete ignorance of the past half century of scientific study of language acquisition and thinking and of the past century of study of literary theory.
They are accompanied by a lot of rhetoric about a few “instructional shifts,” most of which aren’t shifts at all and some of which are extremely questionable and/or controversial and yet seem to have been put forward in complete obliviousness of the questions or controversies that they gloss over. They follow an approach to literary analysis that could most charitably be described as New Criticism for Dummies that is of some limited value but that can easily distort and narrow curricula and pedagogy, given that texts exist in context. They put altogether too much weight on readability measures of limited value. They contain quite a few absolute howlers that any competent ELA specialist would recognize as such.
All in all, they appear to me to be what one would get if one asked the members of a small town Rotary club to come up with a list of “stuff to learn in English class.”
And most of what people claim for them demonstrably isn’t so.
And, for the most part, they consist of extraordinarily vaguely formulated statements of “skills” to be obtained.
All that said, as long as one is teaching in a state in which there are adopted standards and high-stakes tests based on those standards, then one must work within the frameworks that those specify. Doing so and remaining an effective teacher often requires considerable ingenuity, and it often requires ignoring the “letter of the law” of particular standards when that letter contradicts general principles articulated in the standards or actual practice in the high-stakes exams.
It’s important that vigorous discussion and debate of the standards and of the curricula and pedagogy that they entail be encouraged. Why? So they can be improved, for they clearly need improvement. Unfortunately, we’ve seen precisely the opposite–a lot of dogmatism.
This is nothing new.
A few years ago, all across the United States, people were attending teacher trainings where they were being told about the extraordinary importance of attending to background knowledge or prior knowledge. Most of this training focused on doing prior knowledge activities to “connect the student to the text.” Rarely did it have to do with establishing a context and supplying prerequisite background knowledge. Now, all across the United States, people are attending teacher trainings where they are being told that they should jump right into the text and do three readings–one to get at the gist of the text, one for close reading, and a final one for asking higher-order questions. In practice, the final one is usually some sort of “performance task”–a piece of writing that deals narrowly with the work as an illustration of some concept from one of the standards. In MANY of these trainings, people are specifically being told to avoid background knowledge or prior knowledge activities so as not to prejudice the close reading. So, what the teacher absolutely MUST DO has shifted 180 degrees. But there was never any discussion of this shift. The old stuff went down the memory hole. No, we were never at war with Eurasia. They were always our allies. LOL.
That kind of idiocy could be avoided if instead of these “trainings,” people got education in hermeneutics, or the theory of interpretation–that is, if these PD sessions actually dealt with matters central to the subject matter of literary studies. If people got such education, they would learn that there are many, many ways in and out of texts and they would be able to come to sound judgments regarding these issues. And they would recognize that most of what people say about these issues in trainings is at best uninformed or ignorant. My own view is that texts exist in context, that interpretation is a process of arriving at a posited intention that certainly involves close reading but that also involves understandings of genre and historical and sociopolitical context. I also think that typically people don’t begin to appreciate or delve deeply into these matters unless they have taken the posited author or speaker’s trip and had an experience that has significance that may or may not accord with an authorial intent that they arrive at via reflection after the fact of the initial experience. Further, I think that that taking of the trip depends a great deal upon the givens of interpretive communities and that it’s empirically demonstrable that this is so. So, a lot goes on in reading, and much of what is said about it by our edupundits is a caricature of real reading.
And, of course, any familiarity with the last half century of critique of New Criticism would provide people with a long list of reasons why approaching texts out of context is both crazy and impossible.
Attainment in ELA involves both world knowledge (knowledge of what) and procedural knowledge (knowledge of how).
Bob,
I appreciate the time and attention that you have put into analyzing the ELA standards. I keep wondering, if you we’re put in charge, how would you write a standard that involves world knowledge for ELA? Could you possibly give an example?
OK, so let’s imagine a survey class in American literature (traditionally, 11th-grade English classes have been such courses). In a unit on the Protestant Reformation and the American Puritans, a standard on world knowledge (knowledge of what) might say that at the end of a unit, the student will understand the meanings of the following concepts and be able to relate these to Puritanism in the United States:
Calvinism
church covenant
Covenant of Grace
Covenant of Works
exegesis
Great Awakening
heresy
indulgence
limited atonement
local governance
Lutheranism
millennialism
Original Sin
perseverance of saints
predestination
primacy of the Word
redemption
Reformation
revelation
sacrament
salvation
scripture
total depravity
unconditional election
vulgate
It would also specify familiarity with the contents and arguments of selections from particular works. These might include, for example, Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, Milton’s “Areopagitica,” Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation,selections from Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World, selections from Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil” and The Scarlet Letter.
In addition, students might be expected to relate Puritan ideas to certain later ideas like the Protestant Ethic and states’ rights.
This is off the top of my head. I would have to think about it carefully, but you get the idea. Students would be expected to come away with knowledge of the world that they did not have before, not simply with a list of skills that they have practiced.
A teacher could cover all of this but there is no guarantee that the kids will remember all or any detailed facts.
Just becasue a teacher covers a subject in depth doesn’t mean any student who was in that class will remember enough material to do well on a bubble test.
Lloyd, this stuff is not a collection of isolated facts. It’s a whole. It’s a system that hangs together into a coherent view of the universe. The unit is about understanding that view of the universe. And it’s important and valuable to understand because a) it’s interesting in its own right and b) much of how people think today is a direct consequence of that worldview.
Why do we have this strong commitment to freedom of the press and freedom of speech? Why do we have debates about the relative powers of local and federal government? To understand where we are on these streams, it’s of enormous value to trace them to their sources, to their springs.
We have this strong committeemen to freedom of the press and expression, because this allows us to debate issues without fear of the government swooping in and throwing us in prison to muzzle our voices.
That said, when a few wealthy and powerful individuals abuse the 1st Amendment and lie through their teeth to achieve agendas that end up threatening the quality of life and the protections that most of us value, then the majority will eventually lose as a few tyrants grab the strings of power.
The only way these tyrants can achieve their Machiavellian goals is to use the 1st Amendment as a shield that allows them to lie and fool people.
In the early 20th century, the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine was an attempt to avoid this trap, but during Reagan’s far right revolution, the Fairness Doctrine that was designed to lean in favor or truth over lies was done away with and since then the traditional corporate media took the darker path in reporting what’s going on that ends up misleading the public that votes, so the majority—fooled as they are—often votes against their own best interests.
But, of course, the roots go further back. It’s no accident that Milton wrote tracts against government licensing of printing. The Protestant Reformation was about the primacy of the Word and of the individual’s unmediated, direct relationship with (and responsibility to) God. The idea of freedom to print and publish and read and think on one’s own grew in that particular soil–among people who thought that these matters were between individuals and God, not between individuals and an intermediary, among people who believed that there were limits on state power because there was a higher moral authority to be read in the individual conscience.
A couple weeks ago, in an essay published on the Thomas B. Fordham Institute site, Chester Finn announced that “a group of foundations” was funding a new organization to review educational materials for compliance with the Common Core. This followed upon an op-ed piece from the Brookings Institution calling for the CCSSO to “start enforcing its copyright” on the new standards. So, in addition to having a national Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth (the CCSSO) telling us what students are to learn and when and what will be assessed, we are also going to have a censor librorum, an Index Librorum Prohibitorum, telling us what educational materials have and do not have the imprimatur of some as-yet-unnamed national entity.
And these developments run counter to very, very deep deeply rooted, fundamental values, ones so deeply rooted that preceded and informed the thinking of the founders of our country, for those founding documents existed not only to convey powers but, importantly, to establish limits upon the exercise of power.
All tyrannies are characterized by their readiness to dictate what people can teach and learn and think and say.
I’ve always thought that one of the reasons why we have a 12th-grade American lit class is that in such a class we acquaint future citizens with the main currents in American thought. I still do.
I very much appreciate your comments here, Lloyd. And, to other readers, if you haven’t read Lloyd Lofthouse’s novels, they were definitely worth having a look at. Great stuff.
I think we all know that, at a certain point, we really have to leave it up to the student and his/her family as to what (if anything) has been learned. That’s the absurdity of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Yes; great teaches can make a difference. But what makes a teacher effective can and does vary from student to student, depending on the kid’s needs.
There will always be those who will not “buy in” to academics. Some will find other avenues towards success and some will not and many will end up somewhere in between. It’s not a “good” or “bad” scenario. Some kids just aren’t cut out for desk work and they certainly won’t be happy doing it as a career.
“Some kids just aren’t cut out for desk work and they certainly won’t be happy doing it as a career.”
I agree, but we can’t allow children to grow up without a high level of literacy and a love of reading. Literacy is vital to understanding the issues and making decisions at the voting booth. Leaving a love or reading in the hands of parents is a mistake. Parents must be pat of the process but when they aren’t, there MUST be an alternative.
What’s missing in the U.S. is a high quality early childhood education program that is designed to foster a lover of reading in children so when they reach age five or six and start school, most of them are on a level playing field.
It doesn’t matter if an adult works out doors or in an office, once that adult grows up with a love of reading, then the democracy is protected against the powerful interests and oligarchs who want to control everything based on what they believe or what will benefits them most at the expense of everyone else.
Therefore, we can’t leave it up to parents to make sure a young child is introduced to books years before school age by starting out reading bedside stories to them before they fall asleep or leaving off the TV and letting the child sit on the parent’s lap while the parent reads a child’s picture book to them that introduces the child to the magic wonders of reading.
For instance, in Finland, it is a cultural habit that most parents introduce books and reading to their children by at least age three—four full years before school age arrives.
Thanks, Bob.
That is actually what our Social Studies standards look like in CA. I’ll say that one advantage of the Common Core not doing this is that I can integrate with Social Studies – but most teachers don’t do this.
Here’s the more general point: There are many, many possible alternatives to what we are currently calling a “standard.” Among these alternatives are ones that would measure not vaguely formulated skills but a) declarative knowledge and b) concrete procedural knowledge (knowledge of how). The new assessments test almost none of the former and test the latter invalidly because the standards are too vague to be validly operationalized.
Suppose, for example, that we say, as the CCSS does, that students will be able to read “grade-level” texts with comprehension but that the sole objective criterion put forth for determining that a text is at grade level and so is appropriate for use on an exam is that it has a particular Lexile score. The sentence
“Time held me green and dying,”
adapted from Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill,” is at a Lexile level of less than Grade 2. But it’s very sophisticated conceptually. Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” is at a graduate level Lexile rating, but it has for many, many decades been a standard selection in fifth-grade literature anthologies, and I memorized part of this poem and enjoyed it immensely before I went to first Grade. In other words, Lexile scores, while useful, are hardly sufficient determinants of text complexity.
Lean on the actual process being employed in the least bit and you begin to discover the truth: the process is invalid. The tests, in ELA, do not measure what they purport to be measuring.
What they purport to be measuring, of course, is ability in reading, writing, language, speaking, listening, thinking, research, vocabulary, etc.–the various “domains” covered by the standards. But the slightest bit of actual thinking about how we are formulating what we are calling “standards,” what we mean by “standard,” and by what we meaning by assessing those standards leads one to recognize, fairly quickly, that there are many alternatives to the processes that we are currently following and that what is passing for “data-driven decision making” is purest pseudoscience.
But it’s a mistake to have a central committee determining standards for all. There are many possible definitions of good speaker, good writer, good reader, good thinker, etc.–as many as there are good speakers, writers, readers, thinkers. And that’s as it should be.
Your example is very much like a unit that was taught in my daughter’s 11th grade English Lit class, Bob. I liked it because it combined history and ethics (or the lack of) with reading and writing skills. It was demanding, as an 11th grade class in a great school should be.
It’s the way we’ve been teaching for decades and it’s effective for students with incentive to do well.
Is a course such as this right for ALL students? No.
Are the CCSSs right for ALL students? No.
The one size fits all/common denominator approach isn’t practical if your true goal is to help all students to reach their full potential. Whether it’s in a career that’s challenging, fulfilling, and meaningful or one that’s just meant to pay the bills, leaving the real entertainment for the weekends and after work.
Bob
I agree that kids knowing these things (for want of a better word) is important if the U.S. is going to survive as a democracy or even a culture/country, but remembering the kind of specific details asked on bubble tests is ridiculous. A general understanding of the importance of the abstract ideas that are the foundation of a democracy are important. Why do children have to remember specific detailes, for instance, the date that the Founding Fathers met and signed the Declaration of Independence? These are the kinds of stupid, ignorant questions often asked on bubble tests.
Is picking the right date on a bubble test more important than being aware of the abstract concept behind freedom and democracy and why we have to fight to keep those protections that are written in the Bill of Rights?
I think most students who engage with what is taught in the classroom will remember the abstract concepts and ideas even if they forget the dates and names of the Founding Fathers who signed the Declaration of Independence.
Well said, Lloyd. Tough nut to crack but definitely worth the effort.
I take exception to the concept that college ready is better than vocation ready, though. Even when that vocation is the most “menial” of jobs. I feel like that’s an elitist philosophy and one of the base problems with society, in general. Better educated does not equal better person.
For me, College Ready mans highly literate regardless of graduating from high school or graduating with a high GPA. I think that once a person is highly literate, they are ready to go to college anytime they feel like it.
I offer me as a for instance. I was a piss-poor student K to 12 but not a disruptive factor to teachers. Why is explained in my memoir and on my Blog in some posts. However, due to the efforts of my mother and a stinging wire coat hanger, I learned to read in first grade. Then because my mother and father were avid readers—-even though they were high school drop outs—I picked up reading and as a teen in middle school and high school, I sometimes read two paperbacks a day while never doing my homework. I think I probably read several thousand books before high school graduation. I even worked in the high school library for three years as a student assistant—my favorite period of the day.
I barely graduated from high school with a 0.9 GPA. When I joined the U.S. Marines a few months before the Vietnam War started, I had no intention of ever going to college.
Then about a year later, I had a change of heart—the same moment a sniper almost took my head off—and decided maybe going to college wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all.
Nothing like a slap in the face to wake you. For me the slap was a sniper round that touched my left ear. Two inches more to the right and I would have lost a good chunk of the left side of my head.
When I applied to college in 1968, the entrance exam indicated I was a highly literate individual who would not need any bonehead English classes, but I did not do most of the work my English teacher taught in their classes. In fact, I didn’t pay attention to much of anything in those classes or any class.
The most difficult thing for me about college was learning how to be a good student who paid attention in class, took notes, did the work and made sure to finish all the homework.
For me literacy was the key and I think this applies to everyone. Even if I had not changed my mind about college, my love of books would have followed me through life.
One of the texts for Grades 11-12 mentioned in Appendix A of the CCSS is Plato’s allegory of the cave from The Republic. (These suggestions are among the few nods to content in the “standards.”)
Now, of course, most high-school kids and, I suspect, most adults, approaching this text without any context, without having a clue, for example, what sorts of questions are being addressed in the text, will have no idea whatsoever what’s going on. And, indeed, what’s going on isn’t SIMPLY IN THE TEXT. It’s also in the context.
It makes a difference whether “Better tie up the loose ends” is being said by a macrame instructor or by Tony Soprano.
And so, those “trainings” going on around the country in which English teachers are being told to jump right into close reading of the text without providing any background, any context, are ridiculous.
The context, BTW, is not a simple matter. For a text as ancient as this one is, from a culture as different from ours as it is, recovering the context is going to be a difficult matter. Our habits of thought and those of ancient Greeks are going to be quite different. For example, when Plato used the word commonly translated as “virtue,” he meant something like “efficiency.” One could speak of a virtuous man, a virtuous state, or OF A VIRTUOUS SHOE. In each case, it served its purpose, and that purpose was a GIVEN, there to be discovered. Hmm. That’s a difficult notion for most of us to get our heads around, but the notion that there is an abstract world of ideal forms of which this world is a mere shadow of a shadow begins to make sense in that light, from that perspective. But that’s just the beginning. This rabbit hole–attempting to recover the intent of this ancient Greek, Plato–goes even deeper. It ends, I think, in the culminating ritual at Eleusis. But I’m not going to go there. Let me just say that I think that this is an extremely alien text to a modern sensibility. The given could be discovered only by an initiate.
@ Lloyd…I think it is relatively absurd to assume that every person “has to” enjoy, appreciate, read, grasp all the “great literature” that is presented to read. I have always wondered who the “deciders” were that came to a consensus that this or that piece is “the one” that is a “must”.
As someone else mentioned, there is a divide between those who prefer vocational education and those who prefer strictly “academic” courses. Why does any one group get to decide which is preferable? The wealthy have always taken the work of artisans and paid them a pittance for their efforts. Then, when the poor sculptor or painter dues, the works are sold for millions to other wealthy people. The cycle continues.
Instead of valuing the individual, we place a value on what he/she does based on arbitrary guidelines. Who do some people think they are?
I am tired of the whole caste system that is being set up in the US yet again. Growing up in WV, I have had my accent and pronunciations knocked, my choice of words and idioms scoffed, and general assumptions made about where I must have lived and comments about coal mining towns (where I never entered except on vacations). The condescension that has taken place in this society towards anyone “different” from some elitist expectation of language, culture, athleticism, etc as if the “deciders” were better simply insults my very being. Who do “they” think they are?
I feel that, as teachers, each of us has the responsibility to expose kids to opportunities to seek to be whatever they wish to become, not what I or some elitist panel tries tobcram into their heads.
I think it’s important for my students to read “For I Have Touched the Sky” from Mike Resnick’s Kirinyaga series of short stories. It’s said to be about women’s rights — and the story does touch on such subjects as gender roles, societal boundaries based on gender, and even female circumcision. But it really serves as a springboard for so much more, such as the dangers of believing that it is possible to build a Utopian community, the lack of a place for “great minds” in societies that believe they have achieved even something close to perfection, and how those who wish to control a society will seek to control information.
However, I doubt that most other teachers would be able to teach the story as passionately as I do. Wait — not to say that they COULDN’T, but they most likely WOULDN’T. They don’t have the same relationship with it that I do.
I’ve had others tell me that the story is “too advanced” for my classes, or that it deals with themes that are “too complex” or “too mature”. Yet year after year, when I give students permission to use any text we have previously read in class to use for their final project, a huge percentage of them choose that one story — and their writing shows that all of them at least THOUGHT a bit after reading.
I don’t know what my point is here, exactly — maybe just that teachers should be allowed to teach their passions when possible. I doubt “For I Have Touched the Sky” will be offered as an exemplar by any CCSS commissariat; no matter to me, I’ll keep on teaching it until I’m fired.
I think that there should be room for teachers to teach books they are passionate about, but I also think teachers should encourage students to read books that will grab them by the throat and hold them spellbound as they read—for that to work, the child must be in charge of what they read as long as they are reading something at their reading level or slightly beyond it to challenge them.
An excellent point, Lloyd. It is much easier to foster a love of reading when the student has some control over what it is that they will read. For what it’s worth, I’m a big believer in self-selected reading.
Are you familiar with the five finger rule? I taught my students that rule before I took them to the library for the first time to select a book to read for the monthly book report.
No argument from me. I haven’t read that much of the great literature unless I had to teach it. Then I read it so I knew what it was about. Most of the books I read were science fiction, fantasy, westerns, mysteries, etc.
However, when I was earning my MFA in writing that degree included covering some of America’s greatest 20th century authors, for instance: Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, etc. Steinbeck, Hemingway and Fitzgerald I enjoyed. Faulkner, not so much. I don’t remember the others I read working toward the MFA.
I’ve read the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit three times. I’ve read most of Ann Rice’s vampire novels—although I lost interest after several. One of my favorite living authors is James Lee Burke. When Burke puts out a new book, all the other books I’m reading have to wait. While still in public school, I was addicted to science fiction and fantasy in addition to reading a lot of historical fiction. I’ve read the Aubrey-Maturin Patrick O’Brian series and still have the books (all twenty-one). I’ve also read C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series twice and still have those books.
As a graduate of Kenyon College (and 17 year veteran high school English teacher) I take issue with your emphasis on “context”. This is a debate I have will several of my colleauges, and I would like your thoughts too as I respect much of what you say.
It’s not just my Kenyon experience, it’s how I learned to read. I pay attention to the text. The meaning is in the words and the text.
Also, I am sorry to say, my students– while they are perfectly intelligent and capable– they are wholly ignorant and typically “disinterested” American (suburban) teenagers. If I introduce a text by “preaching” to them about historical and literary contexts, they tune out before page one.
The Crucible for example. This is an amazing text. It can be read and interpreted. My introduction is about 2 minutes: “It’s 1692, the pilgrims are in a new land, the woods look scary, there is no Constitution (Bill of Rights), and people are ignorant of science (this last one resonates!). But actually Miller himself provides this much “context” in the “Overture”.
One thing I AVOID is going into “McCarthyism”. That’s a great way to bore the hell out of students and reduce Miller’s text to a single (and boring) reading. Same with Animal Farm. In the dozen times I’ve taught that text I have never mentioned Stalin because that takes the interpretive act away from the reader. Obviously a more sophisticated reader can/ should, in the course of a full education, make the connection between Animal Farm and events in, not just Russian history, but world history. But novice readers just need to read the story and think critically about human society. One needs ONLY the text for that.
Similarly I have read The Odyssey (the complete, Fitzgerald translations) with dozens of classes. My introduction and the “context” I provide students is equally spare: It’s 6 or 7 hundred years before the (supposed) birth of Christ, the Greeks know little to nothing about physics and science, but the seem to know A LOT about human life. So they came up with these story and in this book you can find “wisdom” about any and every important aspect of human life– happiness, sadness, loyalty, betrayal, trust, lust, adventure, fear, drugs, friendship, strangers, travel, home, courage, athletics…
Anyway… if you skimmed all of the above… what exactly is wrong with, for example, just picking up The Crucible (or any rich text) and simply reading it critically?
Joseph, clearly, there are many, many ways in and out of the hermeneutic circle.
When I was an undergraduate, most of my professors were of the New Critical school, and so my training was in such an approach. And it was excellent training. Cleanth Brooks’s The Well-Wrought Urn was a key text for me—a great model of what one does when reading. I also benefitted from other great New Critical models—I. A. Richards’s New Critical precursor texts Principles of Literary Criticism and Practical Criticism, William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, William K. Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon, and Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry, in particular.
Prior to the emergence of the New Criticism, literary scholarship had long been dominated by philology, textual studies, historical and biographical studies, and what one might call “affective criticism” that emphasized readers’ reactions. As a result, texts themselves tended to get short shrift. They were buried under mountains of historical and biographical erudition or treated superficially by authors of “appreciations.” At the time, in my youth, I saw New Criticism as a necessary corrective to those approaches.
The principles of the New Criticism, as I understood them, and in which I had complete faith, at the time, were as follows:
1. That understanding a text depended on the text itself, not on extraneous material. To the extent that it depended upon extra-textual material—an author’s intentions or biographical and historical information about the text, the text was a failure.
2. That every text created a little world—that its components interacted complexly with one another to create that little world in particular detail.
3. That reading well was all about attending to that detail—to the evidence that the text alone provided.
4. That each element of the text—each particular feature—was evocative and ramifying but that IN COMBINATION these elements delimited those evocations, particularizing the text to make bring into focus the particular world that the text created.
5. That a good reading was one that accounted for the text, to the extent possible, in its entirety, without reference to extraneous material.
6. That one key element of texts was the assumed speaker—the voice or voices in which the text itself (as opposed to the author) spoke.
However, the more I learned about how language works, the more I saw problems with that approach. Consider the following text, a note left for you on a scrap of paper:
You better tie up the loose ends now.
If you are learning macramé, and this is a note from your macramé instructor, it means one thing. If you are on a mob crew and this is a note from your boss, Tony Soprano, about a job you just completed for him, it means another.
In other words, the context is clearly relevant.
And, as E. D. Hirsch, Jr., argues in his Validity in Interpretation, any given bit of language can have an enormous range of meanings, and so interpretation would be impossible, would be completely indeterminate, if all one had to go on were the text itself.
My own reason for considering authorial intention a key to interpretation is as follows: People produce texts in order to communicate. Our basic ontological situation is that your mind is over there and mine is over here, and there is a gap between our subjectivities. So, we create means for bridging that gap. Among those means are language and works of art. Culture is about such transmission across those gaps. The idea that texts are indeterminate is equivalent to belief that it is impossible to bridge those gaps successfully—to communicate what we intended to communicate—and if we hold such a view, we are dooming ourselves to a radical solipsism. But such a solipsism is not our destiny, for clearly, we are able to communicate via texts, and this can be empirically demonstrated. The communication is imperfect, of course, but it’s possible at least to some extent. There are many, many clues to intent. These include our knowledge of the conventions that the author adopted in creating the text, including knowledge of how literary tropes work and of genres; our knowledge of the author’s life and thought and influences, our knowledge of the period in which he or she worked, and, of course, most importantly, the evidence provided by the text itself.
Consider this statement:
“Lovely weather we’re having!”
If Jane says to Kenneth, the weatherman, on a day when it’s raining and cold, and if she says this in a sarcastic tone, and if it is said on the day after Kenneth predicted a lovely, sunny day, then we know that she is being ironic and critical. Something outside the text—the prediction that Kenneth made on the previous day—is KEY to interpretation of Jane’s intent. And we can get at that intent because we know those extraneous facts and know the extraneous information about how irony works.
Now, recovering an author’s intention isn’t a simple matter. That intention may depend upon matters that we don’t understand. The text might be an ancient one from a person whose habits of thought are extraordinarily alien to us. The text might be ambiguous. The text might be fragmentary. The text might have been produced by someone who did not himself or herself have a clear intention. One could go on and on enumerating these difficulties. But still, the fact remains that we use texts to bridge that ontological gap. Arthur Miller didn’t write The Crucible so that you could get anything from it you happen to want to get from it. He had his reasons.
But intent does not, obviously, exhaust a text. The word meaning has, itself, several distinct meanings. When we ask, “What did you mean by that?” we are referencing your intention. When we say, “That means a lot to me,” we are referencing something else—significance, or mattering. So, meaning as intent and meaning as significance are different, and often they can be at odds with one another. The significance to you of a speech by Joseph Goebbels is going to differ dramatically from its intent (at least, I hope so).
And here, with regard to the significance of texts, we get into a lot of what goes, these days, by the general name of “theory”—deconstruction, sociopolitical interpretation (e.g., Marxist, feminist, critical pedagogy, critical race theory, cultural studies, etc), new historical interpretation, reader response, interpretive communities theory, etc.
And all of these are to be distinguished from various emerging scientific approaches to texts such as empirical genre studies or experimental literary studies, such can serve to help us get at intent or significance.
So, that, in very brief compass, is how I see things. New Criticism is extraordinarily limited, and, frankly, it’s impossible. Those who think that they are “simply attending to the text” are actually acting out of a lot unexamined extratextual assumptions.
With regard to your approach to those texts in the classroom, I can only say that it wouldn’t be mine. I think context extraordinarily important and illuminating, and if a teacher is communicating the context in a way that is dull for students, that is off-putting, then that’s a failure on the part of the teacher. I find that context can make matters vivid and concrete and so fascinating. Look, for example, at how a New Historicist essay typically begins: The critic describes a series of exorcisms that took place between 1585 and 1586 and the punishments of those who conducted them. It’s gripping stuff. Then he goes on to relate the exorcisms to the ideas in King Lear (See Stephen J. Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and the Exorcists”). If the teacher has done his or her job in making the context vivid, it will capture students’ imaginations. Certainly, Stalin is not a dull subject. I have a friend whose grandfather worked for Stalin. He told the story of being among a bunch of party officials at a speech Stalin was giving. The crowd rose and started clapping. But then, they were faced with a problem. No one dared to be the first to stop clapping and sit down. So, the standing ovation went on and on and on. Finally, one old guy, a loyal party member, got tired and sat down. The next day, goons broke down his door and hauled him off to the Gulag.
Bob, thanks for the explanation of New Criticism. It’s been a long, long time since I encountered that stuff, and I went to a simple state school, so even as an English major my exposure was probably limited. Plus, I was lazy and spent a lot of my time chasing girls and playing Dungeons and Dragons.
I do remember thinking that all literary criticism seemed to boil down to Reader Response theory, though. I understood that that was a “cute” way of looking at things, and why some people who held fast to one theory or another might react with disdain to that notion — “I am most certainly NOT in with THAT crowd of hippies!”
But still — it seems to me that whatever flavor of literary criticism a person prefers is just that — their preference, based on their own life experiences, etc. Reader Response.
But, Vincent, I hasten to add that I respect enormously teachers’ rights to approach their instruction in their own ways, and I would not dream of dictating to other teachers how they should go about their jobs. I’ll leave telling everyone what to do to those who know next to nothing. I have a suspicion, based on what you said, that what you are doing works for you and for your students.
As I said, using a phrase from Paul Fry, there are many ways in and out of the hermeneutic circle.
And, Vincent, I did not mean to make light, at all, of your intent not to “bore the hell out of students.” I agree that not doing that is a prime objective. Part of the job is to show students how this stuff is fascinating, to be models for them of what learners are and how cool it is to be one. Furthermore, you concern about limiting, beforehand, the possible interpretations of a text to some single, boring, blithering generalization (“The Crucible is about McCarthyism”) is very well taken.
Bob,
Thank you so much for your thoughtful reply, and especially for adding your clarifying comments regarding my practice at the end. I would say the same… any teaching who successfully engages students by provide historical and other contexts, more power to him/ her! I would certainly applaud that approach IF I saw it working and I’m sure it can/ would work for any talented/ professional teacher whose passion lies in that direction.
But I think you take my point. Sadly there are a lot of teachers who take the “historical”/ contextual approach– not out of passionate/ genuine interest– but simply because this is what the teacher’s edition (or other conventional thinking) points them towards.
I want to emphasize the danger that this approach has because it easily slips into a message about reading that I argue is very discouraging and uninspiring to young readers– that texts contain “hidden” messages or that literature is some kind of elite power play where “experts” have knowledge and “answers”… where the teacher possesses “the reading” so therefore there is no need to Read. If Animal Farm, for example, “is about” Stalin… why Read it? The text “is already Read” (and interpreted) by the teacher.
I have to mention a recent experience reading Crime & Punishment with a group of low-skilled seniors. I had read this book when I was 24 and had never taught or re-read it. So I knew nothing about it (couldn’t even remember most of it). I admit I was too “lazy” (i.e. did not think it worth my precious time) to go research anything about Russian history of politics or Dostoyevski. My introduction was something like… “Okay boys and girls, here we go, the Russian writers were bad-ass! So hold on to your hats”.
My point is the text did NOT disappoint us! It generated so much interest and discussion. It was compelling. The students really were impressed… not with me… but with each other, themselves, and Dostoyevski.
Same with The Odyssey… really what is it that a Reader would need to “know” prior to page one? I just don’t get the Need for context, though I of course understand the richness context CAN add… but I would say that is for the benefit of advanced or sophisticated readers, not my students who are basically Non-readers, certainly not in the habit of critical thinking when they arrive to me (sadly).
Part 1
Sigh. I still don’t get it.
Clearly, Randi Wiengarten is getting an awful lot of blowback from AFT members on the Common Core, and that’s the ONLY reason she is “reconsidering their value” and “inviting members to weigh in” on the Common Core standards.
I don’t grasp why Diane keeps and trying to pretend that Weingarten is somehow “leading” on the controversy over the Common Core. She’s not. Weingarten has been a staunch Common Core advocate.
In a Huffington Post column praising the Common Core, Weingarten concluded with this:
“We can’t reclaim the promise of public education without investing in strong neighborhood public schools that are safe, collaborative and welcome environments for students, parents, educators and the broader community. Schools where teachers and school staff are well-prepared and well-supported, with manageable class sizes and time to collaborate…schools with wraparound services to address our children’s social, emotional and health needs.”
Weingarten implies – in all seriousness – that Common Core is the necessary ingredient to achieve what she outlined in that paragraph. Sadly though, Common Core has little if anything to do with neighborhood schools that are “safe, collaborative, welcome environments.” It has nothing to do with “manageable class sizes” and “wraparound services” that “address…social, emotional and health needs.”
Weingarten wrote a piece last year with Vicki Philips of the Gates Foundation in which they opined that it was critical for American public education to adopt “a new paradigm” and “align teacher development and evaluation to the Common Core state standards.”
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112746/gates-foundation-sponsored-effective-teaching
I’ve noted before that the Sandia Report (1993) – issued in the wake of A Nation at Risk – examined the allegations that public education was “broken” and “in crisis” –– that it needed a “new paradigm” –– and concluded that:
* “..on nearly every measure we found steady or slightly improving trends.”
* “youth today [the 1980s] are choosing natural science and engineering degrees at a higher rate than their peers of the 1960s.”
* “business leaders surveyed are generally satisfied with the skill levels of their employees, and the problems that do exist do not appear to point to the k-12 education system as a root cause.”
* “The student performance data clearly indicate that today’s youth are achieving levels of education at least as high as any previous generation.”
Yes, what particularly strikes me is the word “collaborative”. I keep looking for classroom teachers (that I respect) to advocate for the CC. The only people I find advocating for it are bureaucrats and technocrats. How do the outside-the-classroom proponents of CC propose to “collaborate” with all of the teachers (many of them veteran professionals) who raise these serious objections to the CC?
So far I see real engagement of “our” concerns and questions. Just a lot of blowing smoke.
Part 2
The Common Core is predicated on the notion that “rigorous” standards (and the testing of them) are needed – are imperative – to prepare students (and the nation) “to compete successfully in the global economy.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The U.S already is economically competitive. When it drops in the World Economic Forum competitiveness rankings – as it has done over the last several years – it’s because of really stupid economic policy choices, policies that have been pushed aggressively by many of those who now insist that schools and teachers must be the ones to fix the problem.
Achieve was one of the instigators of Common Core (along with the ACT and the College Board). It just so happens that Achieve is funded by groups like Battelle (which argues for STEM when there is no STEM shortage), the Gates Foundation, Prudential and State Farm and Travelers, Boeing, GE, JPMorgan Chase, Intel, IBM, the Helmsley Foundation, DuPont, Cisco, Chevron, Microsoft….many of these companies pay little or no taxes. You can read about Microsoft, just to pick one, here:
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer
As I’ve noted previously, the ACT and the products of the College Board (the PSAT SAT, and AP) are more hype than useful educational resources. They just don’t do much in predicting college (or workplace) readiness or success. But they are big business. And contrary to what they say, they stack the deck AGAINST opportunity for all students. As Matthew Quirk wrote, “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.”
Randi Weingarten needs to stop playing both ends against the middle. She needs to get off the fence. She is either FOR the Common Core (a stand she’s taken publicly and repeatedly), or she’s OPPOSED to it (and all the testing it requires).
I’m still wondering which it is.
All three comments are right on target democracy. Weingarten has minimal interest in teachers in the trenches. She supports CCCS, PARCC, VAM, TFA and merit pay. She is paid an outrageous amount of money to misrepresent American teachers. I have tired of the charade. Whom should I contact for a fifteen year reimbursement of union dues plus interest? I can do a better job of representing myself.
Time magazine reported this latest AFT turn on Common Core with this title:
“Teachers Union Pulls Full-Throated Support for Common Core.”
The article notes that, indeed, this turn of events is not coming for the top AFT leadership, but from angry teachers, adding that “In some ways, AFT’s announcement seems a long time coming.” That’s a profound understatement.
Also pointed out in the Time article is that “The real danger is not that the Common Core will be thrown out entirely…” It won’t. The standards will still be there, and the Common Core is already tied to the ACT and all of the products made by the College Board (PSAT, SAT, AP).
So the Common Core will likely remain intact. The questions are mostly about the testing. For Common Core advocates – including Randi Weingarten – the testing is the “new paradigm” that will ensure college and workplace readiness and restore American economic competitiveness.
But all of it is sheer myth. Untrue. Bogus.
The facts are these:
• there is no public education “crisis,” and the data from the Sandia Report, NAEP, and TIMSS – among other measures – prove it.
• the most significant problem facing public education is poverty, and related to that is funding inequity…among developed nations, the U.S. is the leader in child poverty.
• many of the policies and programs perceived as important to education “rigor” and “reform” and for getting into college –– the ACT, SAT, Advanced Placement –– are mostly worthless, failing to predict or enhance college success and helping to stack the deck against equal opportunity for low-income students.
• there is no STEM crisis whatsoever…those who promote that charade are interested far more in their bottom lines than they are in improving education.
• genuine improvement in American public education is far more dependent on restoring its central role in nurturing democratic citizenship than it is on trying to tie test scores to “economic competitiveness.”
• many if not most of the corporations and business organizations – like the U.S Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable – that push STEM and the Common Core are bad citizens in that they evade fair taxation, repeatedly commit criminal acts, promote economic policies that undermine the general welfare of the nation while padding their private accounts, and fail to take any responsibility for the economic meltdown their policies produced…instead, they point the finger at schools.
• many of public education’s “leaders” – from the heads of the NEA and AFT, to superintendents and school board members, to professional organizations –– have failed it badly.
The Time article is here:
http://time.com/2976909/common-core-american-federation-teachers/
And then shuts it down.
Randi has blocked the floor vote on Chicago’s resolution in committee. She substituted her same old/same old incoherent support-eventual-imposition-after-something resolution.
“AFT Convention Update: Chicago CC Reso Goes Down Overwhelmingly in Committee.
UPDATE: Heard tonight that suddenly lots more people were added to the committee, apparently to overwhelm Chicago on the reso, according to some sources. When you control the machinery you have many areas where you can manipulate outcomes..”
http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/2014/07/aft-convention-update-chicago-cc-reso.html
The CTU reasserts that the debate will come to the floor Sunday.
OMG.
The first sign of a serious problem, is that the organization that “supposedly” represents teachers, is asking the rank and file to weigh in on the CC.
They (AFT) should have fought to block its inception from day one!
Just another useless, dues collecting outfit hiding in their comfortable offices.
Yes, verily so. Resistance right out of the blocks. That would have required non Quisling leadership.
“The AFT will also consider a resolution — drafted by its executive council — asserting that the promise of the Common Core has been corrupted by political manipulation, administrative bungling, corporate profiteering and an invalid scoring system designed to ensure huge numbers of kids fail the new math and language arts exams that will be rolled out next spring.”
What was “the promise”? “College and career readiness”? Which colleges? Community colleges. Which careers? Rhetoric.
“An even more pointed resolution flat out opposing the standards will also likely come up for a vote.”
That’s more like it. The CCSS is being rammed down our throats. Forget the tests. Start at the source. The rest will make more sense once we really pay attention to who bankrolled and created these standards and why they did it in the first place. Focus more attention on the fact that there was no field testing. That the CCSS is copyrighted.
I hope this is much more than just lip service on the part of the AFT.
Where are the rank & file defenders of the CC? The weasels in each district/ building that love to carry water and talk about how the CC helped them to “examine their practices” etc. I’m calling you out because I really want to understand what you are thinking. As for the rest of everyone… Just say no. Why are you “going along”, are you going along? Don’t implement bad pedagogy in your classroom. Stand up to bullies (by punching them in the nose).
Yeah, exactly… crickets…!?
The real truth is that the moral beliefs of a black southern preacher, a jewish union president, and LBGT’s are morally and philosophically opposed. Rev. Barber speaking in front of a labor union that supports an agenda that is directly contrary to the same bible he quotes… twisted!!!!! Common Core is a farce aimed at the “commoners.” That includes the members of the AFT and the NEA who have blindly supported the agendas of their big labor unions even though they are philosophically opposed to their liberal agendas. In the words of another famous black minister… “It appears your chickens have come home to roost” http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/DemocraticDebate/story?id=4443788
Mark Weaver, I do not see the moral and philosophical opposition. Bayard Rustin was gay and a very close advisor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He also advised labor leader A. Philip Randolph. There was no moral or philosophical conflicts among them.