In a guest post for Jonathan Pelto’s blog, veteran educator Ann Policelli Cronin explains why the Common Core standards are a waste of time. For one thing, they were never tested on real students in real classroom, and no one can honestly say that they will prepare students for college or careers. That is sheer speculation or wishful thinking. What’s more, she writes, there is much in the Common Core ELA standards that is just plain wrong and/or incomprehensible.
The Common Core standards are also neither “high” nor “clear”. The Connecticut State Standards for English Language Arts are much more rigorous than the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts and have a strong and deep research base that is totally lacking with the Common Core. The Common Core standards require a way of teaching students to read and to write that has long been discredited. Not only will the Common Core approach severely restrict students’ development as readers and writers, it will discourage students from even wanting to become readers and writers. The Common Core standards are definitely not rigorous, as teachers who have required rigor of their students know.
Standards that are rigorous encourage students to read and to write. They actively involve students in reading books that engage them and in writing poems, essays, narratives, plays, and speeches about ideas that are theirs alone. The author of the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts, David Coleman, has said over and over at conferences, in interviews and in online presentations that students’ personal responses and interpretations have no place in the classroom nor does discussion of the cultural and historical context in which books are written or in which students live belong in that classroom. Also, as writers, the personal voice of students is not allowed and essays of personal interpretation and evaluation have been replaced with impersonal, formulaic essays that have nothing in common with real writing. Rigorous learning engages students with the big questions that great literature poses, encourages students to connect their own lives to those questions, and requires students to integrate the classroom discussions about those ideas so that they create new knowledge for themselves.
As for the Common Core standards being “clear”, they are not. There are 42 English Language Arts standards crammed with almost 200 different skills to be taught in each academic year. They are a mishmash of skills without a plan of developmental appropriateness and devoid of logic as to why some of them are in one grade and others in another grade. In a recent article in Education Week (September 23, 2014), Mike Schmoker reports that Gerald Graff, the former president of the professional organization of college English professors (Modern Language Association) said that most of the Common Core standards are unnecessary and nonsensical. For curriculum expert Robert Shepherd, the Common Core standards are “just another set of blithering, poorly thought-out abstractions.” Schmoker challenges any of us to make sense out of this 8th grade Common Core standard: “Analyze how the points of view of the characters and audience or reader (e.g. created through the use of dramatic irony) create effects like suspense or humor.”
She adds:
Not only are students receiving a poor education with the Common Core but the dropout rate will also increase. The Common Core aligned tests have the passing rate set at 30%; therefore, about 70% of the students in Connecticut will fail those tests. Since all standardized test scores correlate with family income, many children of poverty will fail. The way to break that correlation is not by testing and punishing students but by addressing the needs of those disadvantaged by poverty and racism. Feed the kids, give them eye exams, lower the class size so that that they get the adult conversation they crave, add personnel for extended learning experiences after school and in the summer. Standardize opportunities for learning.
Insisting upon real rigor for all Connecticut’s children and addressing the needs of children disadvantaged by poverty and racism – that is how Connecticut will be a state where people want to live, work, and invest in their future.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This morning NPR had a “report” on the Common Core. It was pure advertisement.
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What more should we expect from National Prestitute Radio?
Did they mention that NPR is underwritten by the Gates Foundation?
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NPR has become a propaganda ministry for the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat. Think PRAVDA in the old days of the Soviet oligarchy.
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And when the powers that be want war (see Irag, etc. . . ) NPR becomes the National Propaganda Radio and/or National Pentagon Radio.
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We’re in a “PAARC state” so I was curious about the CEO of PARCC. The Twitter feed is all “reform thought leaders”, Joel Klein, etc.
It reads like Arne Duncan, where he promotes the same 25 “reform” people over and over again.
It’s a little disappointing in someone who is the CEO of a testing effort that will be run on tens of millions of public school kids all over the country. You’d hope there would be some diversity of thought, some other voices apart from the same “national reformers” we’re always told to treat as experts.
https://twitter.com/lmcgslover
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Today, there was a long report on “Common Core Reading” on NPR, which claims to be a news vehicle. The report claimed that before the Common Core, students only did low-level skill drills. Then, later, it claimed that before the Common Core, students only listened to lectures and took notes. Utterly false on both counts. But there was absolutely NO vetting of this press release from the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat that was passed off as a news report. A lot of money is being spent, right now, on such stories.
Lots and lots of money.
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“that before the Common Core, blah, blah blah. . . ”
How the hell did anyone become edumacated prior to the Common Crap Standardized Shit, oops I mean the CCSS???
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Bob Shepherd: I must have been subjected to that weird alien machine I’ve seen on the tv program MARVEL’S AGENTS OF SHIELD.
You know, the one that implants false memories…
I realize now that my remembrance of two classes in a public HS in Detroit, 50 years ago, where my mother had to sign permission slips because we were going to read, let’s see—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Adam Smith, Rene Descartes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell, Ayn Rand—
Why go on? It’s all false memories. Including such things as the paper I ‘thought’ I wrote about Ayn Rand and the virtues of selfishness…
And those classroom discussions where the “teachers” [now I know such didn’t exist during the days of the dinosaurs] insisted WE students talk and discuss and debate—again, all just figments of my imagination.
I am so glad that NPR has set me straight.
Whew!
😎
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Yes, an I imagined spending thirty years writing widely used literature and writing textbooks that stressed backing up one’s opinions about the literature with evidence from the texts. And I imagined the Socratic seminars that I participated in when I went to my PUBLIC high school. And I imagined reading, there, Homer and Plato, Freud, Orwell and Huxley, Sartre and Camus, Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats and Byron and Browning and Tennyson. The thesis I wrote on Robert Frost in my senior year–another hallucination. I imagined those units I studied in high school on the Puritans, the Transcendentalists, Greek Theatre, Modern European Drama, Beowulf. One could go on and on.
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Must have been a trick of the light. Fortunately, we have that pedagogical theorist ex nihilo Lord Colman to lead us out of the wasteland of U.S. education and save us from ourselves.
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I must have completely imagined learning about and debating the merits of various political and economic systems as we read Orwell’s 1984 in my English class. I must have imagined the long-haired hippie drama teacher who had us reading Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and debating various instantiations of Existentialist ideas.
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As a great philosopher (whose name escapes me) once said
“I think, therefore no one gives a s**t”
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SomeDAM Poet: TAGO!
😎
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If one started delineating the problems with the CCSS in ELA, one would, as a wag pointed out on this blog a year ago, be here “from dawn to doomsday.” These standards are prescientific, discredited, amateurish claptrap. But a single set of national standards is needed by the folks pushing the next business plan for U.S. education–a business plan that involves replacing teachers with low-level aides and teaching machines. And we have both major teachers’ unions pushing this crap. The irony is profound.
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“. . .a business plan that involves replacing teachers with low-level aides and teaching machines.”
I’m sitting here looking at a photo copy of an article by M. H. Jackson from the December, 1931 issue of the Wisconsin Journal of Education titled “Can the Radio Supplant the Classroom Teacher?”. It has a lead picture of a classroom with a radio set at the front of the room with a caption “Is this the teacher of 1950?”
And although, for me, history doesn’t repeat itself, it sure has a tendency to spiral through time to get to very eerily similar points, perhaps, because we Homo Sapiens really don’t change that much in such short time spans.
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lol!
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On Developing Curricula in the Age of the Thought Police
“The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873)
One of the nasty, generally unremarked features of the new national “standards” in ELA, and of the state “standards” that preceded them, is that they draw boundaries within the vast design space of possible curricula and pedagogy and say, “What is within these boundaries you may teach, and what is outside you may not.” And in so doing, they rule out almost all the good stuff–great existing material, or curricula, and approaches, or pedagogy, incompatible with Lord Coleman’s list. And, more importantly, they preclude all material and approaches that might be developed in the future that happen to be incompatible with that list.
I will give a single example to illustrate the general principle, but one could do the same for most of the other “standards” on the bullet list.
At several grade levels in the CCC$$ for ELA, there is a literature standard that reads, in part, that the student is to be able to explain “how figurative language affects mood and tone.”
Now, given a topic as rich as figurative language is, doesn’t that “standard” strike you as oddly constricted, or narrow, and even immature? It does me. Why effects of figurative language “on mood and tone” in particular? Why should we be having students think and write about effects of figurative language on the mood and tone of selection after selection in lesson after interminable lesson, year after year? Why not treat any of the thousands of other topics we might consider under the general heading of figurative language?
As an alternative to that “standard,” let’s consider just one topic related to one variety of figurative language. The variety we shall consider is metaphor, and the topic is conceptual framing. Thinkers as diverse as Emerson, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Borges, Sapir, Whorf, Burke, Hirsch, Derrida, Lakoff, and Kovecses (one could list many others) have all written, to various ends, about how metaphor is one of the fundamental means by which we understand the world. Our ways of conceptualizing the world are to a large extent metaphorical.
Language is absolutely shot through with metaphor. And most of the metaphors we use we use unconsciously. They are sometimes called “dead” metaphors.
If you think carefully about the preceding paragraph, you will discover that it is heavily (that’s a metaphor)
dependent (that’s another) upon metaphorical conceptual framing. The word Let’s depends upon a conceptual frame of a coming together of you, the reader, and me, the writer–a frame that equates consideration of a topic with physical meeting. Topic, of course, comes from the Greek topos, or “place.” Another metaphor. The word ends employs a conceptual frame in which a process of thought is treated as a journey or as a physical object with a beginning part, a middle part, and an end part. The word figurative belongs to a large class of metaphors that describe statements and thoughts as shapes (e.g., “The argument centered on Eliot’s last poems”). The words fundamental and understand relate to a conceptual framing of ideas as parts of structures–ground on which to stand or overarching shelter. The metaphorical frame of shot through is clear enough: ideas are projectiles. And conceptual framing and dead metaphor are, of course, examples of themselves. The phrases are self-describing. They apply to themselves. In the argot of analytical philosophers, they are autological terms.
Emerson, in the essay “Language,” Chapter 4 of his book Nature (1836), makes the claim that all abstract thinking has its roots in the concrete, is at root metaphorical. He gives the examples of the word right, as in “the right way,” having the literal meaning of being on a straight path, of spirit being derived from wind, and transgression being derived from crossing a line. So common is such metaphorical conceptual framing that Nietzsche, in his influential, in-your-face early essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873), speaks disparagingly of such unexamined use of such inherited, “prefab” metaphorical concept frames as the essential, or defining, human activity! Heidegger, in the essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” (1951) derives I am from dwelling on Earth, making our expression of our very existence metaphorical in origin:
“Bauen originally means to dwell. Where the word bauen still speaks in its original sense it also says how far the essence of dwelling reaches. That is, bauen, buan, bhu, beo are our word bin in the versions: ich bin, I am, du bist, you are, the imperative form bis, be. What then does ich bin mean? The old word bauen, to which the bin belongs, answers: ich bin, du bist mean I dwell, you dwell. The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is buan, dwelling. To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell.”
Heidegger’s etymologies are much disputed, but the wisdom of his general approach is indisputable.
Lakoff and Kovecses have created extensive but by no means exhaustive catalogs of metaphorical conceptual frames.
Example: debate = war:
He won the argument.
Your claims are indefensible.
He shot down all my arguments. Her criticisms were right on target.
If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out. Example: achievement = harvesting:
She reaped her rewards. What a plum job!
By your fruits you will be known.
That market is ripe for the picking.
In short, metaphor does a lot of heavy lifting in our language and thought, and limiting ourselves, as teachers, to having students explain, year after year, for selection after selection, how the use of figurative language affects mood and tone is like reducing the study of the Civil War to consideration of the relative sizes of Union and Rebel cannonballs.
Suppose that a curriculum developer were to suggest to an educational publisher, today, that there should be, in a tenth-grade literature program, a unit or a part of a unit dealing with
common metaphorical frames in literature (cycles of seasons = the life cycle; a journey = learning, personal change);
how metaphors work, structurally (their parts and their mapping to the world);
how they shape thought, and the extent to which they do (note: we must reject any contention that metaphor renders certain perceptions or conceptions necessary or impossible–any strong version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis; but a weak version certainly holds, often with dramatic effect–consider the egregious metaphor of “the little woman” used by U.S. husbands in the 1950s to refer to their wives);
how most metaphors are dead ones–are unconsciously employed, unexamined, common linguistic inheritances; and
how dead metaphors that constrain thought within preconceived patterns often have to be unlearned if progress in thinking is to be made (consider, for example, how the bad metaphor of “using up energy and becoming tired during work” shaped Aristotelian mechanics and had to unlearned by Galileo and Newton).
Such a unit on metaphor as conceptual framing–often inherited, unexamined, culture-shaping conceptual framing–could be extraordinarily valuable and interesting. It could give kids tools of ENORMOUS POWER that even many professional writers and critics don’t have. And those tools would have applicability far, far beyond the classroom. Critique of conceptual framing (itself a metaphor, remember) is a powerful (another metaphor) lever (yet another) for thinking generally. Dan Dennett has suggested that use of such heuristics, such levers, such intuition pumps, as he calls them, likely accounts for the Flynn Effect–the remarkable average continuous increase in IQ over the past century. Dennett’s casual observation should be taken very seriously, I think, by educators–such is the fertility of his mind.
Suppose that I suggested to a K-12 educational publisher, today, that we do a unit on metaphor as conceptual framing, or even a single lesson or “special feature” (in the argot of the educational publishing trade), on the topic. Here’s what the publisher would tell me: “No. You can’t do that. The ‘standards’ [sic] say that you must concentrate on how figurative language affects mood or tone in literary works.”
In comparison, of course, the “higher standard” is, well, not higher (note the metaphor: correct is up/false is down). The “higher standard” is hackneyed and obvious and something teachers have done pretty much unthinkingly for eons, and it’s a LOT LESS interesting and powerful and important than is the alternative (or addition) that I’ve recommended. What we are told to concentrate on in the standards reads, to me, like what might be suggested by an amateur who really doesn’t know much about figurative language and how it works.
And so it is with standard after standard. We find in these “higher standards,” again and again, received, hackneyed notions. Even worse, the mediocre, the common, pushes out the uncommon and valuable: exciting
alternatives are, a priori, ruled out. They are not important. They will not be on the test.
Obviously, the alternative that I outlined above is just one of many possible approaches that one could take to this one topic from this one “standard”–one of many ruled out because we have been told that we must do what the “standard” says and not any of a thousand other things that never occurred to Lord Coleman.
Of course, a unit on metaphor as conceptual framing would be in line with the state of the art of research into the cognitive science of thinking and language. Such conceptual framing is fundamental to the thinking via natural prototypes (as opposed to Aristotelian natural kinds) that we actually do. And being aware of what we do, there, is extremely powerful and enriching, to one’s reading, one’s writing, and one’s thinking generally. Knowing about conceptual frames facilitates unlearning, which is the most powerful kind of learning there is.
But no. As an author of curricula for K-12 students, I am not allowed to think about such matters now. Lord Coleman has done my thinking for me and for all of us, and we shall have new thinking when the CCSSO reconvenes its Politburo in five years or so to issue its next bullet list. If we want changes in these “standards,” we shall have to await future orders from the Commoners’ Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth, appointed (by divine right?) the “deciders” for the rest of us.
And so it is by such means as I have described above that these “standards” typically limit the possibilities for pedagogical and curricular innovation. We are to limit ourselves to the backward, received, unimaginative, uninformed, often prescientific ideas of the Philistines who put together these “standards” based on the lowest- common-denominator groupthink of the previously existing state “standards.”
I’m not happy about that. Could you tell? How did my use of figurative language in this piece affect my tone and your mood?
And who cares? Wouldn’t you much rather engage what I had to say? to agree or disagree and tell me why? I thought so.
P.S. If you wish to respond to this piece, please make sure that your response is a five-paragraph theme on how my use of figurative language in the piece affects its tone or mood, and please give at least three pieces of evidence from the piece to substantiate your claims. Do not under any circumstances address what I had to say. That would be outside the parameters for response that I have set here.
See what I mean? The Coleman approach leads to completely unnatural, inauthentic Instawriting, InstaReading, and InstaThinking instead of actual, normal engagement with texts–with what writers actually have to say. But precisely the sort of directions I just gave for your response are being repeated in text after text after text, on test after test after test, because of the CC$$ in ELA. And if that’s not completely wacko, I don’t know what is.
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What Happens When Amateurs Write “Standards”
I am having a lot of fun identifying the howlers in the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] for English Language Arts. Here’s one for your amusement:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.8. Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.
Amusingly, the “literature standards” tell us, over and over, that this anchor “standard” is “not applicable to literature,” that it applies only to “informative text.”
That would be news to the speaker of Milton’s Paradise Lost, who invokes the Holy Spirit, at the beginning of the poem, and asks this Christian Muse to help him, in the poem, present an argument to “justify the ways of God to men.”
Maybe it’s been a while since you read or thought about Paradise Lost. Go have a look at Book I. You will find, at the beginning of it, something the author actually calls “The Argument.” It’s a brief preface that serves as an abstract of the claims, reasoning, and evidence to be presented in the book.
Did the folks who put together these amateurish “standards” actually think that literary works never present arguments, make claims, use reasoning of varying degrees of validity, nor present evidence of varying degrees of relevance and sufficiency?
Do they actually think that Ambrose Bierce‘s “Chickamauga,” Thomas Hardy’s “Channel Firing” or “The Man He Killed,” Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” do not present implicit and explicit arguments against war, do not advance specific claims, and do not employ reasoning and evidence in support of those claims? And what on earth would they imagine such poems as Hesiod’s Works and Days, Lucretius’s De rerum natura, Pope’s “An Essay on Man” and “An Essay on Criticism,” Wordsworth’s The Excursion, and Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature to be if not, primarily, arguments?
And do they really think that arguments are not put forward in, say, Rumi’s “Like This,” Donne’s “The Sun Rising,” Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” “Gray’s “Stanza’s Wrote in a Country Church-Yard,” Burns’s “Song Composed in August,” Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died,” FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Yeats’s “Adam’s Curse,” Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” Wallace Stevens’s “Credences of Summer,” MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica,” Frost’s “Directive,” Levertov’s “A Tree Telling of Orpheus,” Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day,” and Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry”?
Really? Seriously? I know, it’s almost unimaginable that they do.
But let’s do a little CLOSE READING of the “standards” to see what EVIDENCE we can find to help us answer those questions. Inquiring minds want to know.
If you turn to the writing “standards,” the suspicion will grow in you that the authors of these “standards” were, indeed, that naïve. The breathtakingly puerile Common [sic] Core [sic] writing “standards” neatly divide up all writing into three “modes”–narrative, informative, and argumentative–and encourage teachers and students to think of these as DISTINCT classes, or categories, into which pieces of writing can be sorted.
Imagine, for a moment, that you are reading an exposé on this blog or Mercedes Schneider’s or Diane Ravitch’s that tells the story of how some people got together in a backroom and cooked up a bullet list of “standards” and foisted these on the entire country with no learned critique or vetting.
Perhaps such a piece would only SEEM to be an informative narrative told to advance an argument. Perhaps writing consists entirely of five-paragraph themes written in distinct modes and we’ve been hallucinating JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING ELSE EVER WRITTEN, which doesn’t fit neatly into the categories advanced in the “standards.”
LOL
And, standard after standard, one encounters the same sort of simple-mindedness about literary types and taxonomy. One gets the impression, reading these “standards,” that a group of nonliterary noneducators–some small-town insurance executives perhaps–got together and made up a bullet list of “stuff to learn in English class” based on their vague memories of what they studied in English back in the day. (I don’t intend, here, BTW, to disparage the literary sophistication of all insurance executives; Wallace Stevens was one, after all, and he may well have been the greatest American poet of the twentieth century.)
Of course, what the folks behind these “standards” really did was hire an amateur who hadn’t taught and who knew very little about the domains he was going to work in to hack together a bullet list based on a review of the lowest-common-denominator groupthink in the previously existing state “standards.” In effect, a few plutocrats appointed this person (by divine right?) absolute monarch of instruction in the English language arts in the United States. My feeling is that similar results would have been obtained if a group of plutocrats had handed David Coleman a copy of the 1858 edition of Gray’s Anatomy and sent him to a cabin in Vermont to write new standards for the practice of medicine.
And, of course, the plutocrats hired this guy to do this because they wanted ONE set of standards for the entire
country to which to correlate the products that they planned to sell “at scale.” In other words, the single bullet list was a necessary part of an ed tech business plan. One ring to rule them all!
And that ought to be obvious enough, for surely no one who thought even a bit about these matters would conclude that
a) this CC$$ ELA bullet list is the best we could come up with or that
b) one list is appropriate for all students and for all purposes or that
c) these matters should be set in stone instead of being continually rethought and revisited in light of the discoveries and innovations made by the millions of classroom practitioners, scholars, researchers, and curriculum developers working in the domains that the “standards” cover.
Obviously.
Of course, it’s typical of a certain kind of philistine to divide the world neatly up into the objective (informative works) and the subjective (literary works) and so to think that simple-minded categorizations like the ones to be found in the Common [sic] Core [sic] make sense. The same sort of person thinks that one can reduce learning to a bullet list in a stack of Powerpoint slides.
And, it’s typical of such people to have a rage for order and an inclination toward authoritarianism. Such people admire regimentation and expect others–all those teachers, and curriculum coordinators and curriculum developers out there–simply to obey. In his Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce defines arrayed as “drawn up and given an orderly disposition, as a rioter hanged from a lamppost.” I suspect that the people behind these “standards”–the folks who claim that standardization, centralization, and regimentation will lead to innovation, as Bill Gates just did in a speech to the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards–would approve of Bierce’s definition. And they would probably like to see folks like me so arrayed. LOL.
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I don’t know much about this stuff, but your arguments make a lot of sense and your image of David Coleman having holed up in a cabin in Vermont for some time and then emerging with “The Common Core” is just hilarious — and, I suspect, probably not too far from the truth.
Thanks.
“The Common Anatomy” (also known as Dave’s Anatomy — coming to a hospital near you)
The toe bone’s connected to the skull bone,
The skull bone’s connected to the ankle bone,
The ankle bone’s connected to the hip bone,
And that’s how the body works
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Is “The Common Anatomy” a description of Coleman’s head up his arse while singing the praises of the CCSS????
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This doesn’t do your “Coleman in a Vermont cabin” (writing by Coleman lantern?) image justice, but here’s a lame attempt in a similar vein (or is it vain?)
“Night on Coleman’s Mountain”
Dave came down from the mountain
With Common Core in tow
He’d drunk from the magic fountain
Which made the juices flow
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Duane
“Colemanatomy” tells you best
How Common Core connects to test
“Colemanoscopy” lets you see
The underlying harm-many
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Compared to other industry standards, W3C, IEEE, ANSI, the CCSS are a rambling, incoherent hodgepodge of opinions. If we are to have national standards, the top level should be brief and broad. That is passed to the state level which adds to the national standard, but only a well defined incremental improvement. This then goes to the district level which finishes the standards based on real teacher teams, not pretend teachers as with CCSS. All of this and future revisions are controlled by a meta standard.
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And one could go on and on, for standard after standard, pointing out these problems. However, there is a whole set of problems with these so-called “standards” that don’t have to do with specific standards:
A Brief Analysis of Two Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] in ELA
“And be these juggling fiends no more believed, / That palter with us in a double sense.”
–William Shakespeare, Macbeth
The defenders of the CC$$ often make the claim that “the standards do not tell you what to teach.” That’s purest equivocation.
The standards are a list, by domain, of outcomes to be measured in mathematics and in English language arts. If a standard says that a student will be able to x, then that means that the student will be taught to x. It also assumes that x should be taught, implies that x is to be taught explicitly, and, importantly, takes time from
teaching y, where y is something not in the standards. The whole point of implementing standards is to have them drive curricula and pedagogy, and claims to the contrary are equivocation.
The equivocation from deformers on this issue means one of two things: a) they don’t know what they are talking about or b) they are dissembling. So, let’s look at a couple of specific “standards” taken at random from the CC$$ and do the sort of work that would have been done if the CC$$ in ELA had been subjected to any real critique.
Bear in mind that the same sort of process that I’m going to carry out below could be carried out for almost any “standard” on the CC$$ bullet list.
Analysis of a Sample CC$$ Language “Standard”
CC$$.ELA-Literacy.L.8.1a. Explain the function of verbals (gerunds, participles, infinitives) in general and their function in particular sentences.
This standard tells us students are to be assessed on their ability a) to explain the function of verbals (gerunds, participles, infinitives) in general and b) their function in particular sentences. In order for students to do this, they will have to be taught, duh, how to identify gerunds, participles, and infinitives and how to explain their functions generally and in
particular sentences. That’s several curriculum items. So much for the Common Core not specifying curricula.
Furthermore, in order for the standard to be met, these bits of grammatical taxonomy will have to be explicitly taught and explicitly learned, for the standard requires students to be able to make explicit explanations. Now, there is a difference between having learned an explicit grammatical taxonomy and having acquired competence in using the grammatical forms listed in that taxonomy. The authors of the standard seem not to have understood this. Instead, the standard requires a particular pedagogical approach that involves explicit instruction in grammatical taxonomy. So much for the standards not requiring particular pedagogy.
So, to recap: the standard requires particular curricula and a particular pedagogical approach.
Let’s think about the kind of activity that this standard envisions our having students do. Identifying the functions of verbals in sentences would require that students be able to do, among other things, something like this:
Underline the gerund phrases in the following sentences and tell whether each is functioning as a subject, direct object, indirect object, object of a preposition, predicate nominative, retained object, subjective complement, objective complement, or appositive of any of these.
That’s what’s entailed by PART of the standard. And since the standard just mentions verbals generally and not any of the many forms that these can take, one doesn’t know whether it covers, for example, infinitives used without the infinitive marker “to,” so-called “bare infinitives,” as in “Let there be peace.” (Compare “John wanted there to be peace.”) Would one of you like to explain to your students how the infinitive functions in that sentence and to do the months and months of prerequisite work in syntax necessary for them to understand the explanation? Have fun. Then tell me whether you think it a good idea to waste precious class time getting kids to the point where they can parse that sentence and explain the function of the verbal in it.
Shouldn’t there have been SOME discussion and debate about this, at the very least? Do the authors of these “standards” have any notion how much curricula and what kinds of pedagogical approaches would be necessary in order for 8th-grade students to be able to do this?
And so it goes for the rest of the long, long list of specific, grade-level standards. All have enormous entailments, and none of these, it seems, were thought through, and certainly, none of them were subjected to critique, and no mechanism was created for revision in light of scholarly critique.
Given what contemporary syntacticians now know about how gerunds, participles, and infinitives function in general and in particular sentences, I seriously doubt that that the authors of this “standard” understood what they were calling for or that students can be taught to explain these at all accurately, at this level (Grade 8) without that teaching being embedded in an overall explicit grammar curriculum. Furthermore, the authors of the standard doubtless had in mind a prescientific folk theory of grammar that doesn’t remotely resemble contemporary, research-based models of syntax–so they are doing the equivalent, here, of, say, telling teachers of physics to explain to kids that empty space is filled with an invisible ether or telling teachers of biology to explain that living things differ from nonliving ones because of their élan vital.
Of course, people do not acquire competence in using syntactic forms via explicit instruction in those forms and the rules for using them. Anyone with any training whatsoever in language acquisition would know that. For example, you know, if you are a speaker of English, that
*the green, great dragon
is ungrammatical and that
the great, green dragon
is not. But you don’t know this because you were taught the explicit rules for order of precedence of adjectives in English.
While there are, arguably, some reasons for learning an explicit grammar (for example, one might want to do so in the process of training for work as a professional linguist), what we are (or should be) interested in as teachers of English is assisting students in developing grammatical competence, which, again, is done by means other than via explicit instruction in taxonomy and rules (e.g., through oral language activities involving language that uses the forms properly, through committing to memory sentences containing novel constructions, through exposure to these constructions in writing, through modeling of corrections of deviations from standard grammatical rules). The science on this is overwhelming, but the authors of these standards clearly weren’t familiar with it. Their “standard” requires particular curricula and pedagogical approaches if it is to be met, and these aren’t supported by what we know, scientifically, about language acquisition–about how the grammar of a language is acquired by its speakers. Many of the new “standards” assume and/or instantiate such backward, hackneyed, prescientific notions about what we should teach and how.
And, of course, again, these “standards” were foisted on the country with no professional vetting or critique, and no mechanism was created for ongoing improvement of them based on such critique.
Imagine, if you will, the whole design space of possible curricula and pedagogical approaches in the English language arts, a sort of Borges library of curricula and pedagogy. Standards such as these draw rather severe boundaries within that space and say, “What is within these boundaries is required, and what is outside these boundaries is not permitted.” In other words, the new “standards,” as written, preclude some curricula and pedagogical approaches and require others. Basically, they apply a severe prior constraint on curricular and pedagogical innovation based on current knowledge and emerging practice and research
I happen to believe, BTW, that there is a role to be played in the language and writing and literary interpretation portions of our curricula for explicit instruction in some aspects of current scientific models of syntax. However, that’s another discussion entirely, and it’s one that none of us will be having because the decisions about what we are to consider important in instruction have been made for us by Lord Coleman, and ours is but to obey.
That seems, sadly, to be OK with the defenders of the amateurishly prepared CC$$ in ELA.
Let’s turn to the place of this “standard” in the overall learning progression laid out by the Common Core.
Why verbals at this particular level? Why not case assignment or the complement/adjunct distinction or explicit versus null determiners or theta roles or X-bars or varieties of complement phrases or any of a long list of other equally important syntactic categories and concepts? And why are all those left out of the learning progression as a whole, across all the grades, given that they are key to understanding explicit models of syntax, which, evidently, the authors of these “standards” think important for some reason or another? Answer: this “standard” appears at this grade level pretty much AT RANDOM, not as part of a coherent, overall progression, the purpose of which was clearly thought out based on current best practices and scientific understanding of language acquisition. It’s as though one opened a text on syntax, laid one’s finger down randomly on a topic, plopped it into the middle of the Grade 8 standards with no consideration of the prerequisites for tackling the topic.
Let’s move on to how the existence of the “standard” precludes development of alternative curricula and pedagogical approaches—to how it stifles innovation in both areas. Suppose I had an argument to make that it’s useful for kids to learn construction of basic syntax trees for coordination as part of a section of a writing program in which students are learning how to create more various, more robust sentences. Now, you can agree or disagree with this proposal, but the point is that you should have the right to do so–to look at the specific proposal and accept it, reject it, or accept it with modifications. The answer to the question, “Should we do that?” should NOT BE, “Well, it’s not in the standards.” And your answer to that question should not be, “We can’t do this because we have to be concentrating on the functions of verbals at these grade levels.” Instead, educators should consider the relative merits of these proposals.
But now, because of the CC$$ in ELA, and previously, because of the state “standards,” those are the standard answers to most suggestions for innovation in curricula and pedagogy.
That’s not how you get continuous improvement. Continuous improvement comes about when people put forward their suggestions for curricula and pedagogy, without such prior constraint, and those are evaluated critically.
Why has there not been more critique, like this one, of the “standards” themselves? Now, THERE’S A PROBLEM. In order REALLY to be able to counter claims about the new “standards” made by the education deformers promoting them, one has to do fairly detailed analysis of particular “standards” and what they entail. That’s a big job. And the moment one starts to talk about those matters, people’s eyes glaze over. This stuff can’t be done in pithy soundbites of the kind that are the stock in trade of organizations like Achieve, the Chiefs for Change, Students First, and the Thoms B. Fordham Institute.
There are some nasty devils in the materials ancillary to the Common Core–the ones that present the educational philosophy of that renowned pedagogical theorist ex nihilo, Lord Coleman. But there are many, many devils in the details. Many of them. And there are NO MEANS WHATSOEVER built into the CC$$ implementations for exorcising those.
Analysis of a Sample CC$$ Literature “Standard”
CC$$.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.5. Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure specific parts of a text (e.g., the choice of where to begin or end a story, the choice to provide a comedic or tragic resolution) contribute to its overall structure and meaning as well as its aesthetic impact.
One of the problems with the CC$$ is that they are full of unexamined assumptions (one can also drive whole curricula through their lacunae, but that’s another issue). In this case, the standard [sic] assumes a particular hermeneutics, or theory of interpretation–that an author’s choices are a proper object of study. This is an extremely controversial position, and one that I hold, with reservations,
but it is taken for granted in the standard [sic] as though there were no learned disagreement regarding it. The authors of these “standards” seem to be oblivious of the fact that E. D. Hirsch stood almost alone, throughout much of the past century, in his heroic defense of the author’s choices, or intentions, as proper objects of scholarly attention. During that time, many scholars and critics, perhaps most professional literary people, contended that the author’s choices, or intentions, were irrelevant or irrecoverable or both and that we must attend, instead,
• to the text itself (Ransom, Tate, Empson, Brooks, Warren, Wimsatt, Beardsley, and others of the New Critical school) or to formal or structural features or relations within the text (Propp, Jakobson, Stith Thompson,
Levi-Strauss, and other Formalists and Structuralists);
• to the reader’s construction of the text, individually or in the context of interpretive communities (in their various ways, Barthes, Fish, Rosenblatt, Derrida, and other Reader Response, Postmodernist, and Deconstructionist critics); or
• to historically determined responses to the text and differences in these over time (Heidegger, Gademer, Foucault, Greenblatt, and other Historicist and New Historicist critics).
It’s fairly typical of these standards [sic] to be worded in complete obliviousness of the fact that people have thought pretty seriously about literature over the past hundred and fifty years and have, in the course of all that, learned a few things and in complete obliviousness of the fact that there are many possible approaches to literary study that the authors of the “standards” seem to have been clueless about. The controversial notion that we should focus on authors’ intentions was CENTRAL to the raging debates over approaches to literary interpretation, or hermeneutics, in the twentieth century. Who decided that David Coleman and Susan Pimentel had the right to overrule every scholar, every teacher, every curriculum designer, every curriculum coordinator, who belongs to a different camp, who champions a different approach? Are we to have a central committee deciding what IDEAS are acceptable? And isn’t the New Critical approach of these “standards,” generally, incompatible with this emphasis, in this one standard, on this one example, of an author exercising intention?
Now, let me hasten to add that I understand and share the concern that led Hirsch to his defense of the author’s intention. Hirsch recognized that our basic ontological position is that your mind is over there, and mine is over here, and that cultural products are created to bridge that ontological gap. If we throw out the idea of the author’s intention, we undermine that faith in the notion that an idea can be conceived and communicated–faith in the very possibility of faithful cultural transmission. The Ancient Mariner wants you to hear HIS story, not your deconstruction of it, and he fairly clearly insists upon that. So, the reports of the death of the author have been greatly exaggerated. However, all that said, it’s valuable for us, as readers, to poke at that author and intentions that we’ve posited in our reading when we are doing our rereading. The best reading is often such rereading and, importantly, living with a work, in the process of which understandings of meaning as intention deepen and, when the work works, blossom into understanding as significance.
Often, for example, in rereading my own work, I’m surprised at the one or ones I glimpse there, behind it all. And as I sit down to write, who is the “author” there? We are all of many parts and roles and conditionings, layers upon layers, worlds within worlds. At times when we write it seems that we are simply transcribing (that’s almost always when the writing is best, of course), and at others we are very much aware of consciously assembling an experience for the reader–laying a trap, casting a spell, tossing the reader off a cliff into something dark and disturbing–whatever. And at times the autoclitic or peformative aspect of the speech is definitely foregrounded, both when we are writing and in a text we are reading. Intention is complex.
I read Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, for example, and it seems to me that I am reading someone intent, foremost, on my having an authentic encounter with someone like him, encountering a mad genius of many parts content, often, with simply displaying those parts in all their dazzling self-contradiction. God or gnat? Well, both, in superimposition, like Schrodinger’s cat, and much more besides, and he’s aware of that and having a good laugh at us and himself whenever we presume to attain a bourgeois clarity, though he has experienced that other clarity, the Eleusinian one, atop the mountain, and shares some of what that is like, too, or claims to–even that he laughs at, as a model to us of what is, finally, it seems to me, a stance he wants to show us how to take or a dance to dance. The author I posit, there, is one who demands that I be him reading him but in his irreducibly suggestive, pregnant, generative entirety, not at all in the way of the narrow propagandist, not at all at all.
So, as writers, we cannot know, ourselves, all that went into the work we have produced and clearly sort out what was intentional and what was not (for a great many reasons and in a great many ways) in what we have produced. How much more removed are we then, in our vantage as readers, given all our complexities, all our unexamined interpellations of everything, our often great distance in time and place from that author we think we are conversing with? For example, when I was a lot younger, Plato seemed, to me, clear as Bach cantata, but now that I am older, much of what is there seems to me extremely alien and perhaps irrecoverable, and that may be true of the Bach, too. I have my theories about Plato. I think, for example, that he had a transformative experience when he participated in the mysteries at Eleusis that is key to understanding him, but that’s an informed speculation, not a fact, about Plato. My notion, there, is a valuable lens through which to read him, I think, but I cannot claim more for it, though without the presupposition that there was a Plato with an intent that it is my work to discover, I cannot believe that the critical enterprise makes any sense.
So, I thought of myself in Hirsch’s camp on this stuff long before I met the man and came to admire him close up, but I also read critics of other schools to my great instruction and delight. We don’t even know ourselves, so it’s some presumption to think that we can have an easy grasp on the intentions of an Other–often a very distant Other–who is, after all, not some specimen of Lepidoptera labeled, pinned to a card, archived, and
cataloged. There are many, many ways in and out of poems and tales, and it’s possible to read by many lights. A deconstruction of a text may run afoul of sense about cultural transmission and common understanding, and it may confuse significance for what Hirsch calls “verbal meaning,” but even if it’s a mistake in interpretation, as Hirsch contends in his valuable Validity in Interpretation, one can learn a lot from it.
The ed deformers, bless their simple, walnut-like hearts, don’t seem to understand that–that one can read by many lights.
This essay is not the place for me to lay out a hermeneutics of my own–the theory that informs my own teaching of literature (I will post more on this in time). Suffice it to say that there are complex issues involved that were not understood or ignored by the framers of these “standards.” There are many ways in and out of literary texts, and attempted positing of intent is only part of that, though an extremely important part. I believe that Hirsch is right that to the extent that we deny the determinacy of meaning, we deny the very possibility of faithful communication, but it is also true that we read because doing so matters to us, and it matters because of the significance of the text as vicariously and potentially lived experience, which will vary. There are many meanings of meaning, and one of these, the one that matters in the end, is “mattering” itself. Imagine Heidegger, in his mysticism about the German Volk, writing in the early days of Nazism, in praise of folk festivals. Then think of him rereading his own words in 1948. Words with the same meaning as intended model (Bild) will have a different meaning as mattering and so meaning in possible use. He might be able to re-cognize his intent, but he will find living in that building uncomfortable enough to drive him quite insane for a time. Enowning can be difficult.
Let’s proceed with analysis of the rest of this “standard.” Why, at this level (Grades 11 and 12) are students are being asked to concentrate, in particular, on the structures of specific parts of a text? Would it make more sense, instead, to address overall structure at these grade levels, building upon analyses of structures of specific parts of texts done at earlier grade levels? Was this possibility considered? Might this not be the time, at the end of the K-12 program, to sum up what has been learned in earlier grades about specific literary structures, to draw some broad conclusions about common overall literary structures and their determinative influence on the making of literary works? Do we want to make sure, before they graduate, that students understand the basics of conventional plot structure? Shouldn’t we review that because it is so fundamental and because this is our last chance to do so before we ship kids off into their post-secondary colleges and careers? Shouldn’t a school system or a planner of an instructional sequence be free to decide that such an approach would be more preferable in grades 11 and 12? Did someone make Coleman and Pimentel the “deciders” (to use George Bush’s unfortunate phrase) for everyone else in this regard? Were such questions considered by the authors of these standards [sic]? I doubt it.
Another issue: aren’t the relations of specific structure to a) overall structure, b) meaning, and c) aesthetic impact quite distinct topics of study? Why are they lumped together in this standard [sic]? Don’t these require quite a lot of unpacking? This is a common fault of the standards [sic]. They often combine apples and oranges and shoelaces and are ALL OVER THE PLACE with regard to their level of generality or specificity. Often, there seems to be no rationale for why a given standard is extremely specific or extremely broad or, like this one, both, in parts.
Yet another: does it make sense, at all, to work in this direction, from general notions about literary works as expressed in a standard [sic] like this, rather than from specific case studies? Wouldn’t real standards be encouraging empirical, inductive thinking, beginning with specific works, with study of patterns of relationship in those works, and then and only then asking students to make generalizations or exposing them to generalizations made by knowledgeable scholars who have thought systematically about those patterns of relationship? Wouldn’t that be a LOT more effective pedagogically? Isn’t that what the Publishers’ Criteria say? Isn’t the overall approach taken in these standards [sic] antithetical to the very “close reading” that they purport to encourage? Isn’t it true that by handing teachers and students nationwide a bunch of implicit generalizations like those in this standard [sic], the makers of the standards [sic] are encouraging uncritical acceptance of those generalizations about texts rather than an empirical approach that proceeds inductively, based on real analysis, to build understanding?
And another: what is meant by this word structure in the standard [sic]? The examples given (where the piece begins, comedic or tragic resolution) suggest that students are to analyze narrative structures, but there are many other kinds of structures in literary works. Are teachers to ignore those and concentrate on narrative structures? Was that among the “choices” that the authors of the standards made for the rest of us? Certainly, there is much that we know about structure in texts that is quite important to the interpretation of works of all kinds, literary and otherwise, that is never addressed anywhere in the standards [sic]. Unfortunately, the standards [sic] do not build in students, over time, familiarity with many extremely common structural patterns–episodic structure, cyclical structure, choral structure, the five-act play, the monomyth, the three unities–one could make a long list. What about rhetorical structures? metrical structures? logical structures? imitative or derivative structures based on forms in other media (e.g., John Dos Passos’s “Newsreels”)? Are teachers to ignore those? Is it unimportant for 11th- and 12th-grade students to learn about the reductio (Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan or Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King); the thesis, antithesis, synthesis structure, or dialectic (Rebecca Goldstein’s Mazel); choral structure (The Book of Job, Antigone); or metrical structures like the ghazal or formulaic oral composition (the Sundiata, the Iliad)? Again, one could pilot whole curricula, whole learning progressions, through the lacunae in these standards [sic].
And doesn’t all this attention, based on the “standards” to identification of tropes and forms skip right over, render unimportant, authentic engagement with what the author intended to communicate–what he or she is saying to us? Shouldn’t THAT be what we are emphasizing, not why the author chose to use this or that structural element? Aren’t we concentrating on making sure the brightwork is all nice and shiny and ignoring the gaping hole in the hull?
One asks oneself, again and again, when reading these putative “standards,” why are students studying this, in particular, and not that? Why at this grade level? Why is this and this and this and this left out? And the answer seems to be that the authors of these standards [sic] didn’t think to ask such questions. Or, in short, that they didn’t think.
One could do the same as I have done here for most of the other CCSS ELA literature standards [sic]. My more general point is that these standards promote some approaches and preclude others and so enforce dramatic prior restraint on possible curricula and pedagogy.
Another significant issue is that the authors of these “standards” did not bother to think about differences in what might be meant by standard in each of the domains covered. In other words, they did not revisit the notion of a “standard” at its most fundamental level, that of its categorical conceptualization. Did anyone involved in drafting these standards stop to think for one moment about the fact that with very, very few exceptions, they are descriptions of abstract formal analysis skills? Did that not strike them as BIZARRE? It does me. The writing “standards” are almost identical from grade level to grade level and encourage the writing of five-paragraph themes in one of three spurious “modes” and contain no mention of any of the thousands and thousands of concrete techniques from the toolkits of writers, and so they will inevitably lead, are already leading, to non-operationalized instruction in vagueries, to writing instruction that is worse than useless because of its opportunity costs. One gets the impression, reading the writing “standards,” that Coleman and Pimentel simply ran out of time or energy and decided to copy over a few puerile generalizations at each grade, with slight rewording from year to year. These are amateurish in the extreme and will have dire consequences for writing instruction. Really, Coleman and Pimentel could have bothered to learn even a tiny bit from the vast and fruitful literature on instruction rhetoric and composition before foisting their embarrassing writing “standards” onto the entire country. And the language standards–well, I have given you a taste of those above–these are backward, unscientific, and seem to be placed at particular grade levels almost entirely AT RANDOM. In general, no thought was given by the authors of these “standards” to the differences among different kinds of learning and acquisition and thus to what should be measured, if at all, and how. I read these “standards” and think of the line spoken to Mehitabel, that cat of ill repute, by the elderly theater cat in Don Marquis’s “The Old Trouper”:
mehitabel he says
both our professions
are being ruined
by amateurs
And here’s another general point: Why weren’t these standards [sic] subjected to nationwide critique of the kind that I have given here, for these two standards [sic]? And why should we not be continuously subjecting proposals for standards, frameworks, pedagogical approaches, etc., to revision and critique? Why shouldn’t there be MANY voices as opposed to these two, the voices of a couple people chosen by Achieve to dictate to the rest of the country?
As I mentioned above, I happen to be one of those literature teachers who thinks that the reports of the “death of the author” (the phrase comes from Roland Barthes) were exaggerated, but it is not for me (or for Lord Coleman or for anyone else) to make that decision FOR EVERY OTHER LITERATURE TEACHER IN THE COUNTRY. The critique of the idea of authorial intention was fundamental to many schools of literary criticism developed in the twentieth century, and the authors of the standards betray, in their reference to analyzing the author’s choices, what has to be either complete ignorance of that or complete disregard of the opinions of thousands and thousands of scholars and critics and teachers of literature.
But who are we mere mortals to argue? After all, the masters at Achieve have appointed David Coleman and Susan Pimentel, by divine right, absolute monarchs of English language arts instruction in the United States, and surely, as Hobbes argued in the Leviathan, monarchy is best. Surely, in Hobbes’s words, we all need to live under “a common power to keep [us] all in awe,” for as Queen Elizabeth I wrote in 1601, “The Royal Prerogative [is] not to be canvassed, nor disputed, nor examined, and [does] not even admit of any limitation.”
In other words, forget about thinking for yourself about outcomes to be measured and learning progressions in the English language arts. Lord Coleman will do that for you. What a relief! All that thinking was so hard.
An Alternative to the CC$$
Education deformers love asking, “What’s your alternative?” But they expect stone-cold silence in response. Sorry to disappoint. Here’s an alternative to top-down, invariant, inflexible, mandatory, amateurish “standards” like those foisted on the country with no vetting whatsoever:
in place of the grade-by-grade bullet list, a few general guidelines (a very broad framework– perhaps four or five principles), continually revisited and critiqued, that provide the degrees of freedom within which real curricular and pedagogical innovation can occur
and
open-source crowd sourcing of alternative, innovative ideas. In other words, we could have
Competing, voluntary standards, frameworks, learning progressions, curriculum outlines, reading lists, pedagogical approaches, lesson templates, etc.,
for particular domains,
posted by scholars, researcher, curriculum developers, and teachers to an open national portal or wiki, and subjected to ongoing, vigorous, public debate and refinement
based on results in the classroom and ongoing research and development, freely adopted by autonomous local schools and districts
and subjected to continual critique by teacher-led schools–teachers who are given the time in their schedules to subject those, and their own practice, to ongoing critique via something like Japanese Lesson Study.
General Objections to Standardization
“I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.”
— Albert Einstein, Saturday Evening Post interview, 10/26/1929 “There’s no bullet list like Stalin’s bullet list.”
—Edward Tufte, “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint”
I’ve shared, above, some objections to a couple specific ELA Common Core “standards.” Again, one could do the same for the rest of the CC$$ bullet list. But let me emphasize that the comments above reflect my own views, and no individual’s views of these matters should be transmogrified into mandates for the
entire country. I’ve spent a lifetime thinking about K-12 ELA curricula, but I would not presume to tell everyone else in the country how he or she must teach English. Beyond the level of basic decoding skills, there are many, many possible paths that can lead to desirable outcomes. There are many, many possible ways in which to develop superb readers, writers, speakers, listeners, and thinkers, and the best of these have yet to be conceived. What strikes me most, reading through the CC$$ in ELA, is how mind-numbingly unimaginative, hackneyed, received, and pedestrian they are. They are Common in the sense of being base and vulgar. The last thing we need is a forced march along a path of mediocrity.
Let me conclude with the following list of general objections to the whole idea of a single, invariant, top-down set of national standards and summative tests. Each could itself be a suitable topic for a book-length work. NB: If you haven’t the patience to read through this entire list, please skip to the last two, which summarize extremely important objections to the general approach taken in the CCSS for ELA.
1. The CC$$ in ELA seem to have been written by amateurs with no knowledge of the sciences of language acquisition and little familiarity with best practices in the various domains that the standards cover. Achieve would have got similar results if it had handed David Coleman copies of Galen and of the 1858 edition of Gray’s Anatomy and sent him to a cabin in Vermont to write new “standards” for the medical profession.
2. The CC$$ in Math barely tweak a long-existing consensus about the progression and approach to mathematics education, one that leaves most adult products of that education, a few years after they’ve happily put it behind them, basically innumerate and fine with that. (The preceding state standards were almost all based on the NCTM standards and so were remarkably similar.)
3. Having national standards creates economies of scale that educational materials monopolists can exploit, enabling them to crowd out/keep out smaller competitors. This is a HUGE issue with the new national “standards” that has received almost no attention. There’s a reason why the education materials monopolists kicked in a lot of money to create these “standards.”
4. Kids differ. Standards do not.
5. Standards are treated by publishers AS the curriculum and imply particular pedagogical approaches, and so they result in DRAMATIC distortions of curricula and pedagogy. Every publisher in the country–God help us–is now beginning every project in ELA by making a spreadsheet with the amateurish CC$$ in one column and the places in their program where these are “covered” in the next. So much for curricular coherence.
6. Innovation in educational approaches comes about from the implementation of competing ideas; creating one set of standards ossifies; it PRECLUDES potentially extraordinarily valuable innovation.
7. Ten years of doing this standards-and-testing stuff under NCLB hasn’t worked. It’s idiotic to do more of what hasn’t worked and to expect real change/improvement.
8. In a free society, no unelected group (the CCSSO) has the right to overrule every teacher, curriculum coordinator, and curriculum developer with regard to what the outcomes of educational processes should be. High-stakes tests lead to teaching to the test–for example, to having kids do lots and lots of practice using the test formats–and all this test prep has significant opportunity costs; it crowds out important learning.
9. A complex, diverse, pluralistic society needs kids to be variously trained, not identically milled.
10. The folks who prepared these standards did their work heedlessly; they did not stop to question what a standard should look like in a particular domain but simply made unwarranted but extremely consequential decisions about that based on current practice in state standards that were themselves the product of lowest- common-denominator educratic groupthink.
11. The tests and test prep create enormous test anxiety and undermine the development of love of learning. Real learning tends to be unique and unpredictable. It can’t be summarized in a bullet list. The last thing that we need is this Powerpointing of U.S. K-12 education.
12. We are living in times of enormous change; kids being born today are going to experience more change in their lifetimes than has occurred in all of human history up to this point, so they need to be intrinsically, not extrinsically, motivated to learn; high-stakes tests belong to a nineteenth-century and older extrinsic punishment/reward school of educational theory and fly in the face of the prime directives of the educator: to identify the unique gifts of unique kids, to build upon those, and so to assist in the creation of intrinsically motivated, independent, life-long learners.
13. If we create a centralized Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth, that is a first step on a VERY slippery slope. Have we come to the point in the United States where we are comfortable with legislating ideas?
14. The standards-and-testing regime usurps local teacher and administrator autonomy, and no one works well, at all well, under conditions of low autonomy.
15. The standards and the new tests have not been tested.
16. The standards and the new test formats, though extremely consequential in their effects on every aspect of K-12 schooling, were never subjected to national debate, nor were they subjected to the equivalent of failure modes and effects analysis.
17. The legislation that created the Department of Education specifically forbade it from getting involved in curricula, but as E. D. Hirsch, Jr., pointed out on this blog a few weeks ago, the new math standards clearly ARE a curriculum outline, and the USDE has forced this curriculum outline on the country.
18. No mechanism exists for ongoing critique and revision of these standards by scholars, researchers, and practitioners.
19. The new tests—PARCC (spell that backward) and not-Smart imBalanced (collectively, the Common Core College and Career Ready Assessment Program, or C.C.R.A.P.) are just awful. There’s going to be a policy supernova when these hit nationwide.
20. The ELA standards are a bullet list of abstractly formulated skills that barely touches upon knowledge of what (world knowledge) and that treats procedural knowledge (knowledge of how) so vaguely–without operationalization–that valid assessment based on the standards as written is impossible. I heartily approve of some of the general guidelines that surround these standards–read substantive, related texts closely–but I disapprove of the narrow New Critical emphasis of the standards generally (texts exist in context) and of the general formulation of the CCSSO bullet list as descriptions of abstract skills.
21. The creators of these standards did not seem to understand that much learning in ELA is acquisition–is not acquired by explicit means. ALMOST NONE of the vocabulary and grammar that a person commands was learned via explicit teaching of that vocabulary and grammar. It’s extremely important that English teachers understand this and understand how, in fact, grammar and vocabulary are acquired so that they can create the circumstances wherein this acquisition can happen, and they are not going to begin to do that based on this bullet list, which, in its treatment of acquisition of linguistic competence, can most charitably be described as prescientific–as instantiating discredited mythologies or folk theories on which it is counterproductive to build curricula and pedagogy.
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The claim that the standards are not meant to dictate curriculum is simply false.
As Hamlet said “The ,video’s the thing wherein we’ll catch the conscience of the King”
“When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well—and that will unleash powerful market forces in the service of better teaching [sic]” — Lord Gates, speaking at the National Conference of State Legislators in 2009
The claim that it is in service of teachers is dubious, to say the least, given that teachers are now being fired based on random VAMsense, but there is no reason to doubt the other part about aligning everything to the test.
Of course, as you have made clear, the very reason the Common Core is in the form of a list of tasks to be accomplished is that such lists are easy to test. And to have a single test, you need a single master list.
Gates gave away the game plan before the game had even started, but that does not stop him from now making claims that are not true.
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lol
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I would be interested in your take on a story I heard this morning on NPR about the Common Core.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2014/11/13/356358135/common-core-reading-the-high-achievers
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Paid for by the Gates Foundation. Need I say more?
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iboliver, I found the article “Common Core Reading: The High Achievers” part 2, an indictment of teachers’ prior pedagogy – either poor teacher preparation or a lack of initiative to improve their teaching via research to improving their teaching skills.
Linnea Wolters stated “…after leading her class through a Core-aligned lesson- a close reading of Emma Lazarus’ sonnet “The Colossus” – she was intrigued, especially by the way different students reacted to the process.”
The teacher, Linnea Wolters was not doing close reading. Prior to having the students read the sonnet, she activated their background. This is not permitted with the David Coleman’s concept of closed reading. It is not closed reading if background knowledge is developed or even activated.
Other Washoe County teachers stated that “High–achieving readers were used to reading very quickly through a text, answering a series of comprehension questions, done.” She says. They weren’t used to being challenged.”
That is the result of poor teaching and a misconstrued understanding of what teaching is all about. Regurgitation isn’t the goal of reading literature. Developing higher order thinking skills needs to be part of the objective.
The CC develops higher order thinking skills through comparing and analyzing concepts only with the text- insufficient. It must go beyond the text to self, other texts, and their environment.
Comparing and analyzing of information and knowledge are only two higher order thinking skills of many others. Information and knowledge are on the lower range of Bloom’s taxonomy. John Dewey maintained that the imagination is the greatest. “Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.”
CC has its goal set on amassing great mounds of facts/ information and making text more challenging. CC does not spend time on applying the information. The pursuit of information is only one higher order thinking skill and it is stressed over all others including application and imagination. The goal of education should not be to turn our students into a walking encyclopedias; we have the Internet for instant information.
Dewey maintained, “Information severed from thoughtful action is dead, a mind-crushing load.”
Students need to have their imagination developed via applying the knowledge acquired from the literature to themselves. Good teaching requires students to relate to the text, relate the text to other writings, and relate it to their environment. It calls for comparing and analyzing various aspects of the piece be it with other genre, with the characters, and/or their problems.
CC, “Ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of a text, referring explicitly to the text as the basis for the answers.”
CC: Believes that the answers are to be found in the text itself so they concentrate on the text instead of starting with the student and what the student knows.
The Common Core’s strict interpretation of “close reading of a text” dismisses the importance of students’ own thoughts and experiences, and how they connect to a text. We need to encourage students to question, predict, visualize/imagine, and make connections while reading. The more students can related to the topic the more they can predict and in turn can comprehend/construct meaning.
Basic for John Dewey was developing critical thinkers by starting with the student in relationship to the curriculum and ending with the student – applying information to the student and to his/her environment. The child comes with experiences and interacts with the environment. Through interaction adjustments are made and learning takes place. Learning isn’t the mind taking a picture and then reproducing it. It’s not a mechanical process e.g. when children memorize – give right answers.
Basic aspects for John Goodlad was that of promoting: successful problem solving; sensitive human relations; self-understanding; and the integration of one’s total life experience. Teachers need to be proficient in these literacies but should also know how to teach them. He argues that we should develop concepts through every possible means. Not just by reading and writing, but by dancing, drawing, constructing, touching, thinking talking, shaping and planning.
Brien Karlin, history teacher, also developed background knowledge before he assigned the reading of “Ban the Gerrymander.”
Again, that is a no no with CC clozed reading but it is good teaching. He stated that only a brief time was spent on “review.”
Other educators would call this activating prior knowledge. Depending upon the class and the subject matter, developing background knowledge is crucial and may need more than one lesson to prepare for a reading.
The higher order thinking skill was relegated to developing only one higher order thinking skill – that of analyzing. Once again the objective was being able to retrieve information – implied and otherwise. He didn’t value practices of the past such as summarizing and asking opinion- two higher order thinking skills ranking higher than analyzing.
Karlin states that one of the best things about CC is that it’s given other- and with teachers around the country- sharing lessons with each other. Before CC there was the district’s curriculum that had to be followed – the same curriculum as other teachers.
What stopped him from discussing objective and procedures with other teachers prior to CC? Go to the Internet and you are bound to find teachers around the country who will gladly share their ideas about a specific genre and piece of literature; you don’t need CC for that.
Ania Cavillo-Mason says that she remembers standard-level classes, lectures, and note-taking.
Even in college the lecture approach to teaching is poor pedagogy.
Linnea Wolters believes CC is improving education… they are more engaged in school now.
That doesn’t say much about the teaching of the past. Prior to CC, teachers were free to use various tools develop their objectives. One of the greatest tools is that of drama/role playing- never mentioned in the CC. John Dewey was evidently not part of their readings in their teacher preparation classes – learn by doing, getting involved via role playing, debating, illustrating…
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Out of the quiet, beautiful community of Hudson, Wis. rises another great defender of our democracy in education, Dr. Duke Pesta, a professor of English at the University of Wis. -Oshkosh. He gives
“The chilling truth behind these new national educational “standards” will terrify you. Common Core represents the latest and most comprehensive step in the drive toward complete government control of our children’s education.”
Brilliant anti-Common Core Speech by Dr. Duke Pesta
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si-kx5-MKSE
e.g. Homework assignment for third graders: Write how the state is just like the family but better.
Published on Apr 24, 2014
http://www.FightTheCore.com/
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Part of the garden path.
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marked by Gates. ha ha
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“Standards that are rigorous encourage students to read and to write. They actively involve students in reading books that engage them and in writing poems, essays, narratives, plays, and speeches about ideas that are theirs alone.”
DAAMMN, whar kan I git sume of them thar “standards”. They be amighty powurrfulll, that theys can “actively involve students in reading books. . . “
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I have run afoul of the standards! My 4th graders won’t read them! We had a great time discussing Charlotte’s web and Stone Fox. We spoke of the idea of friendship and helping friends. They enjoyed the books and want to read more books like them. I hope they read because they enjoy them. I guess I will show them these powerful standards and get out of the way.
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It must be noted that Cronin is writing in response to an editorial Jennifer Alexander that was published in the New Haven (CT) Register. Alexander, a cheerleader for the Common Core, works for ConnCAN, the lobbying group for charter management firm Achievement First. In her editorial, Alexander trumpeted the virtues of Achievement First and Teach for America. That right there destroys any appearance of an ethical persona.
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When those in power make it their priority to press their heavy thumbs on the less fortunate masses, something stinks in America, and the stench is sickening.
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From the title of the post: “The Common Core Standards Are Gobbledy Gook.”
Considering that the CCSS have all the inherent epistemological and ontological errors identified by Noel Wilson in his never rebutted nor refuted (still waiting to hear from you, Socrates in NY, on that) 1997 dissertation it’s no wonder that they are “Gobbledy Gook”.
To learn about all those inherent errors that render the educational standards and standardized testing ILLOGICAL, INVALID AND UNETHICAL see “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
By Duane E. Swacker
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