Katie Osgood, who teaches in Chicago, describes what the Common Core and PARCC have done to her classroom. Whatever the children read is decontextualized, lifeless, bare of interest, skill-based.
They are engaged in “close reading,” following David Coleman’s ideology.
She writes:
My school is drowning under the ridiculous Common Core Standards. Everything I know to do to inspire my students is forbidden. Instead, we are forced to deliver truly horrible curriculum in developmentally inappropriate ways with pacing charts that move so fast all our heads are spinning. My students with special needs are shutting down, acting out, or just giving up entirely. Sometimes I hear them whisper, “I hate school”. And they are right to think that. All the teachers are upset. And every time we ask “Why? Why are you making us do this?” the answer is always the same. PARCC is coming….
For the past two weeks, my co-teacher and I were teaching off the standard that asks our fifth graders to compare and contrast two pieces of literature from the same genre. In my inclusion classroom, that looks like reading two myths without any teaching around what myths are, about Ancient Greece, about how the myths point to our own humanity. No, we are told to have the kids create a Venn diagram of the two texts and then practice writing a constructed response. The kids have no idea who Zeus or Hera are. They know nothing about the way myths were used to explain religion and nature to an ancient people. There is no chance to connect these ancient stories to the kids’ own lives. I hear the kids mutter, “Why are theses such funny names?” But because we are on a strict pacing guide, and because the teaching of Greek Mythology is not in the standard, we simply moved on. This week we’re on to comparing poems. In order to practice more constructed responses. To get ready for PARCC.
I cannot believe how we are warping the experience of reading for these children. Sometimes we are told to do a “close read”of stirring passages about the Underground Railroad for the sole purpose of pulling out the main idea and supporting details. We don’t actually talk about the Underground Railroad-letting the horror of slavery sink in. No, it’s simply about getting the skill, so the kids can demonstrate the same skill on the dreaded test. What a ridiculous disservice. I still remember my fourth grade teacher reading us a novel on Harriet Tubman and how that story was one of my first understandings of true injustice. We were inspired to create art projects, to write poetry, to pull out further texts on slavery from our library. We had class discussions. We wrote letters. We felt the text come alive. Our kids are not getting anything remotely like that experience. Because of PARCC.
And to make things worse, I teach at an all African-American school in a high-poverty neighborhood on Chicago’s southside. Killing the love of reading before it starts for my students is nothing short of criminal. But because of the high-stakes nature of PARCC, knowing that schools just blocks away have been closed for their poor test scores, our school is in a sickening frenzy to raise our test scores by any means necessary. Everything revolves around this test. And my students who so desperately need safe, supportive, relevant, and engaging learning environments, instead are given high-pressured, standardized, test-prep CCRAP.
Will anyone defend these absurd practices? Or must we go along because Arne says so. Because the College Board says so. Because the business community believes that Common Core will prepare our children to be “globally competitive.” Based on what evidence?
Katie,
Great article.
Thanks, Diane for posting it.
I have one word: HORRID, and at our students’, their parents/guardians, and teachers expense in so many ways, makes me weep.
Question: What’s the curriculum at Ms. Osgood’s school? As everyone should know by now, the CCSS are standards, not a curriculum, which the CCSS say is a necessary component of the program.
The propaganda is that CCSS are merely standards rather than curriculum, and technically that is true. The reality, especially for schools and teachers facing stark consequences, is that the curriculum is whatever you think will be covered on the test.
This is excactly true. Our kids are long overdue for new science materials with books now that are falling apart in their hands. Why no new materials? Because the district says we have to wait until the new CC science standards are done to pick the materials that are stamped CC aligned. Of course the standards are the curriculum, and the tests, and the technolgy and all of the rest as well.
That will be a long wait as there will not be any Common Core science standards. The next generation science standards (NGSS) were finalized in April 2013.
http://www.nextgenscience.org/
Although the overall NGSS process was facilitated by Achieve, which may be a cause for concern for some of the regular commenters, the process was inclusive and transparent.
Iowa is supposed to have some for us by next year.
Iowa is at the point in their review cycle for updated science standards. A review committee met in 2013 to consider the NGSS and recommended it for adoption. State action seems to have lagged/stalled.
Not so sure how they think they can pull off the engineering piece in NGSS.
Its a curriculum geared toward test-prep. The Common Core standards are not stand-alone, open sourced, voluntary standards. They are just one component of a four part NCLB waiver deal granted by the Duncan regime. An offer that few states could refuse.
The package deal (quadruplets conjoined at the wallet) required states to use CC standards, CC (PARCC or SBAC) tests, Teacher evaluations bsaed on CC test scores, and a system for harvesting student CC test data. The standards were Duncan’s Trojan Horse. Nice gift, except for the tests-and-punish surprise hidden inside.
So for states or low information educators, or low information reporters to only mention the standards as if the Common Core is just a set of educational goals or targets is either an extraordinarily ignorant claim or a very intentionally misleading and disingenuous one.
Now, one might wonder, why would a CPS push a particular curriculum that amounts to little more than test prep? The answer lies in the rarely discussed fact that schools still must meet AYP, even while under Duncan’s NCLB waiver plan. Pressure to perform is permeating the public school system at every level. Performance measured using an extremely flawed instrument (PARRC tests).
What bothers teachers, like Katie Osgood, the most about all this is that many of us are being forced (micro=managed) to implement a curriculum/pedagogy that simply isn’t working very well. What’s worse is that we are being forced continue using it even though we know it isn’t working very well, maybe finding it counterproductive or even detrimental to what we know is best for our students. And what really, really bothers Katie and the rest of us is that we are being forced by people who know less than us, people who somehow think they know better, to continue teaching in ways that are counter-productive to the growth and development of our students. This idea of a fixed pedagogy or curriculum that is beyond our capacity to fix or replace runs completely against our DNA. Teachers are hardwired to change when an activity or assignment or a lesson doesn’t work. It is professional suicide to continue implementing ideas that students do not benefit from. But that is exactly the position Katie and countless thousands of us find ourselves in. Frustrating beyond imagination.
Professionally intimidating when we know our evaluations hinge on bad ideas and really bad tests.
But a curriculum, to quote Ms. Ravitch, is “a written, taught, and tested” course of study. I’m not a big fan of PARCC or Smarter Balance, but I would bet that if your school had a real curriculum, per the above definition, and aligned with CCSS, the tests would be breeze. I sympathize, but teachers must step up to the plate on this and demand that their school and/or district write and implement a good curriculum.
@pbmeyer2014, you would think tests would be manageable if you simply followed the curriculum. The tests, however, are quite difficult. PARCC has released a single practice test for Algebra II (to simulate the second of two tests each student is to take), and the questions typically — almost universally — demanded a level of understanding that my future AP Calculus students have (NOTE: you obviously don’t need Calculus to solve the Algebra II questions, but I’m referring to the mathematical knowledge/intuition/absorption found in my top students). It’s one thing to have students “college ready.” It’s another thing to demand that everyone be an A-student…or, alternatively, be a failure. The questions leave no middle ground. As a teacher, you certainly have the standards in mind and you certainly have your curriculum guided by those standards, but to prepare your kids, the PARCC test (the little that has been released) is the touchstone. Sympathy rings hollow to those of us who are in the middle of all of this and realize educational leaders are making up the system as they go along…and have little regard for the negative impact their decisions are creating.
Pbmeyer, are you reading the responses? What they are saying is that the testing dictates the curriculum. PARCC student scores determine whether schools & teachers will be closed/ fired. Therefore, time spent by schools/ teachers adapting appropriate curriculum to CCSS is wasted. Only PARCC’s unique interpretation & assessment of CCSS counts. Therefore schools/ teachers buy PARCC test-prep/ rubrics applied to lesson plans, & that’s what they teach. That’s what high-stakes ‘accountability’ is all about on the ground.
I am following this conversation and find it quite invigorating. And I have great sympathy for teachers trying to implement CC and for parents trying to understand what it means. As I said (just below), I’m not a fan of what I’ve seen of the PARCC or Smarter Balanced tests; and I’m a reluctant supporter of CC. I believe in a rich, rigorous, vertically and horizontally aligned curriculum (in the best sense of the meaning of that word). And the sooner a school and district gets that curriculum, the better their kids will be. I advise parents and teachers in my upsate NY district (where I used to be on the Board) to consider the CC a distraction (albeit, a big one) and to stay focused on getting that great curriculum. It’s not an easy task — we have become so frightened of curriculum that most people (including teachers and parents) think of it as some kind of communist (or hedge-funder) plot. But, in fact, the research is clear on the value of content knowledge (I got into this business when I wrote about E.D. Hirsch for Life Magazine in 1991!) and the quicker we can get there, the quicker we get our kids — especially our poor kids the education they need. What is that education? As the famous U of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchens once said, “The best education for the best is the best education for all.” Happy holidays to all. –pbm
You are right to promote the importance of content knowledge. You are sadly mistaken if you think that it will arrive as aresult oc the CC standards. They are noticeably devoid of content. If you doubt this, take a look and report back with some content rich standards.
NYS Teacher
“December 11, 2014 at 12:18 pm
You are right to promote the importance of content knowledge. You are sadly mistaken if you think that it will arrive as a result oc the CC standards. They are noticeably devoid of content. If you doubt this, take a look and report back with some content rich standards.”
Yes, I know that the CC have little content; that’s the problem. And they realize that; that’s why the CC writers said you’ve got to get a curriculum. After nearly two-decades of standards-writers efforts, we still haven’t gotten to curriculum…. We have to move on.
Don’t you find it rather odd the CC founders (Coleman and Co.) neglected to map out the curriculum? Even stranger that as soon as they neglected a mechanism for feedback, revision or improvement.
Snake oil salesmen never stick around for a reason.
Coleman and Duncan are not interested in the numbers that show improvement in what children learn. They are looking at different numbers—-earnings for the private sector. As long as the earnings potential is there, they don’t give a hoot about the children.
Unimpeachable explanation by a charter member of the self-proclaimed “education reform” establishment, Dr. Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute:
[start quote]
In truth, the idea that the Common Core might be a “game-changer” has little to do with the Common Core standards themselves, and everything to do with stuff attached to them, especially the adoption of common tests that make it possible to readily compare schools, programs, districts, and states (of course, the announcement that one state after another is opting out of the two testing consortia is hollowing out this promise).
But the Common Core will only make a dramatic difference if those test results are used to evaluate schools or hire, pay, or fire teachers; or if the effort serves to alter teacher preparation, revamp instructional materials, or compel teachers to change what students read and do. And, of course, advocates have made clear that this is exactly what they have in mind. When they refer to the “Common Core,” they don’t just mean the words on paper–what they really have in mind is this whole complex of changes.
[end quote]
Access the following to go to the original post by Dr. Hess as well as much valuable contextual information—
Link: https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/the-american-enterprise-institute-common-core-and-good-cop/
But what else, are you asking, could possibly be in a posting of deutsch29 that could match the above?
Check this out:
[start quote]
As Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas Fordham Institute and a longtime champion of national standards, observed in 2010, “For these standards to get traction . . . a whole bunch of other things need to happen. Curriculum needs to happen, textbooks need to be aligned with the curriculum, teacher preparation and professional development need to be aligned, tests need to be aligned, [and] the accountability system that is built on those tests needs to make sense.”
[end quote]
Can’t accuse those in mad dog pursuit of $tudent $ucce$$ of not thinking about how all the parts of a system interconnect and influence each other, now can we?
😎
“And be these juggling fiends no more believed, / That palter with us in a double sense.”
–William Shakespeare, Macbeth
The defenders of the CC$$ 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.
Bob, are you aware of any worthwhile histories of the “schoolbook” or “textbook”? I imagine the very idea of using textbooks (as opposed to just using “books”) has been heavily critiqued in the past. Would be interesting to read what the critics of textbook-based instruction were saying in the late 19th century, for example.
The owner of the following website studies Eugenics in 20th-century biology textbooks. Fascinating (and scary) stuff:
http://www.textbookhistory.com/the-day-eugenics-died/#comment-120045
This just reminded me of something else — I’ll paste it in at the bottom of this thread so it’s not too squashed in a vertical column.
Your analysis of the instructional issues associated with the Common Core point out the many flaws with the content, how it is being introduced, and the total lack of support for the teachers that have to implement it. Your reference to gerunds was amusing in that I followed your consternation because I have had many courses in linguistics. For me the larger question is this appropriate instructional material for high school students? My answer is ,”No!” I would rather see instructional time spent on real reading, writing and thinking. To prepare students for college, we don’t need to teach students how to parse and classify gerunds any more than they need to know how to diagram a sentence. They need to know how to use them in a meaningful way.
In the larger scheme of things, maybe the intent is what everyone here knows. They want American students to FAIL so they can justify selling off public education to the charter chains.
“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.”
Which is what make CC ELA “standards” all that more pernicious for the large number of ELL’s typically found in school districts most whacked by low test scores. These requirements are onerous for native English speakers, but they are impossible for those kids working in English as a second language. My district receives large numbers of students entering at various grade levels, many of whom have been unschooled in their home countries for some time due to factors such as civil war. So we want them to parse out the use of verbals to demonstrate competency?
Several years ago, lacking certified ESL teachers, Massachusetts “grandfathered” teachers certified in English language arts to teach second language learners. (They should have grandfathered World Language teachers who have a background in second language acquisition and linguistics.) It was a disaster and resulted in such scenes as this one: having ELL’s diagram sentences.
Yes, that’s just crazy, of course, and anyone who doesn’t know that should not be allowed to plan curricula for English language learners.
It’s very peculiar to me that people would take on face value, with no critical examination, this notion that “standards are not a curriculum. As E. D. Hirsch, Jr., pointed out on this very blog a year ago, the CCSS math standards are, indeed, a curriculum outline. They specify what mathematical ideas and concepts are to be taught and when. And the CCSS for ELA have ENORMOUS curricular entailments in respect to what has to be in the curriculum because it is in the standards, what cannot be in the curriculum because it is contradicted by something in the standards, and what there will no longer be room for because of the opportunity costs of teaching to these particular standards.
Familiarity with late 20th-century criticism would disabuse people of the notion that there can be content-free standards. That’s not an intelligible notion. It’s an oxymoron.
And, BTW, every curriculum developer in the country is now beginning every project by making a spreadsheet with the standards in the first column and the place where those are “covered” in the next column over. So much for standrads not dictating curricula. In the best of worlds, standards have enormous entailments for curricula. In the real world, standards have a way of becoming the curriculum. Alas.
In the case of the CC standards, it will be the PARCC and SBAC tests that become the de-facto curriculum guides. CC standards that are not tested will be ignored. Eventually, the “policy supernova” you predicted many moons ago will brings these tests (and the Core itself) crashing down.
To wit, Dr Shepherd: when a bureaucratically-trained [new] director [of a PreK-K daycare no less!] required me to qualify my World Language program– a mere enrichment; extracurricular lessons cheaply sold direct to PreK-K parents– by “aligning” it to state core curriculum standards, I simply… did so. In spread-sheet format per the state form. (Luckily for me, CCSS had not yet replaced the excellent NJ ‘PreK Expectations’ for World Language, based on the gold standard ACTFL stds).
What put the kibosh on my program at that place was another state standard: NJ decided 6 yrs ago [Christie] that any state-subsidized PreK students [of which there were none at this employee daycare but bean-counter director greedily anticipated & revamped curriculum accordingly] must follow a prescribed 6-hr curriculum [throw away toys, replace w/pre-reading, pre-math circles etc] – any ‘enrichments’ e. g. Music arts world-lang etc to take place post-curriculum hrs– when sage parents would be taking overworked tots home!
My point being simply that the accountability bean-counters, at least in NJ, have been busy crushing ed even at the PreK level since 2009.
Alas, S&F, I was too busy studying when I was younger to get a PhD. LOL! So, I shall probably go to my grave without that particular official imprimatur, though there’s quite an industry, these days, of online diploma mills As many of our ed deformers have shown, one can pick up a PhD in no time at all by writing a check and sitting through a few online trainings.
Of course it is the case that we have an entire nation of classroom practitioners and scholars with ideas about how and what to teach, and it is INSANE to replace all that industry and creativity with top-down mandates. Ecologies are healthier than are monocultures, and in this case, far, far more productive. It horrifies me to hear such stories as yours. I hear hundreds of these every year from teachers whose brilliant work was trashed to make room for skill drill mandated by clueless educrats.
Brutal stuff.
Brutal stuff, imposed by a brutal system, for brutal purposes…
FLERP, I am not familiar with any such study of the history of the textbook, though I would dearly love to read such a thing, if it were deeply researched. A couple years ago, I made an outline for a book on approaches to lesson design (a vast, vast topic) that covers some of that ground, and I have long had a fascination with old textbooks and have a little collection, myself, of 19th-century ELA texts. Alas, I am not familiar with critiques offered in the early days of textbooks of the very idea of the textbook.
Going way back, of course, Socrates, as reported by Plato in his Phaedrus, was troubled by the very idea of communication in writing, as opposed to what happens between a teacher and a student speak with one another, for he worried that writing might undermine people’s memories and, at any rate, doesn’t allow for the give and take that occurs in conversation and that Socrates thought essential to rooting out error and discovering the truth. (This concern didn’t keep Socrates from writing a textbook of his own while in prison just before his death–a retelling of Aesop’s fables in verse form. Alas, that work has not survived.)
Adler, in The ABCs of Reading, called on people to read books twice—once with disbelief suspended and an eye toward understanding and empathizing with the author’s point of view, and a second time critically, in a dialectic spirit, with an eye toward evaluating the work. In the early days of textbooks, they were the products of particular authors from start to finish—Bingham (editor of The Columbian Orator), Alexander Bain (author of various rhetorics and grammars), McGuffy (author of the McGuffy’s Readers), Magruder (author of American Government), for example. Those august eminences were highly respected in a time when few were literate, so I doubt that their work was subjected to the sort of critique that has become second nature to us in our own ironic age in which everyone fancies himself or herself qualified to proffer an opinion on most everything. At any rate, you raise a fascinating question!!!
FLERP, I have also wondered what the parallels were to textbooks and who’s we are seeing now.
History repeats itself? What part of education history are we repeating? Is this really all totally new?
FLERP, Frances Fitzgerald wrote America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century, Little Brown & Co, Boston c.1979. Portions appeared initially in The New Yorker. FF examines the evolution of content and style; notes “the recommendation of a social-studies book by the Texas State Textbook Committee can make a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars to a publisher.” p33
Dr Ravitch may recall this book.
Diane treats some of this same material in her delightful book The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn.
However, to my knowledge, the general purpose scholarly history of the American textbook (as opposed to a book on portrayal of the US in history textbooks) has not been written. I would dearly love to have the time to research and write such a thing. It’s a fascinating topic.
Much is revealed by the textbooks a culture creates. Of course, every culture produces textbooks that serve as propaganda instruments to explain how theirs is the greatest people the world has ever produced, how all its leaders were heroes, why all its wars were just, and how it is the spring from which flows almost all progress in the arts and sciences. Our current textbooks are no exception. The gulf between history and what appears in history textbooks is, therefore, of breathtaking proportions.
A really infamous, very clear example of this is Ludwig Claus’s 1938 Rasse und Seele (Race and Soul), which was universally used by schools in Nazi Germany. This sickening book was a long, effusive ode, in breathlessly purple rhetoric, to the German Volk and its superiority to every other “race,” with lots of pictures to illustrate the supposed degeneracy of all non-Aryans.
But aside from these issues of the hidden text–the sociopolitical subtext of textbooks–there are many pedagogical issues, and a study of old textbooks reveals much about how people conceived of and approached education. Many early textbooks in the colonies and the new nation were written by clergy and contained a lot of moral exhortation. My grandmother remembered well her McGuffey’s Reader, which contained a story about a child who talked back to a teacher and then went outside to play and fell down a well and drowned!!! The first textbook published in the United States, the Puritan New England Primer, contains an alphabet with such gems as this:
F
The idle fool
is whip’t in school
To my knowledge, Anna Letitia Aikin Barbauld was the first author to produce reading textbooks in English that attempted to provide readings of graded levels of difficulty, which she did starting in 1814. For most of the nation’s history, textbooks were not targeted to particular grades (Grade 3, Grade 4, etc), and most language texts hauled off with several hundred pages of tables of conjugations and declensions before kids ever read any but a tiny scrap of the actual language. Check out one of the early Greek or Latin grammars. Horrifying.
Alternate Tweet to copy and paste—the link leads back to this post.
Thanks to David Coleman’s ideology
Whatever children read is lifeless
bare of interest
& skill-based
“The Common Clothes”
Though standard is the Common Core
As everybody knows
Curriculum is nothing more
Than Core dressed up in clothes
The cruel, indeed, vicious irony here is that the tests and their scoring have been designed to fail as many students as possible, in an effort to confirm the “failing schools, failing teachers” trope. No matter the tedium or the forced marches by our students, the modules, the “close (context-free and therefore meaningless) reading, the “failure” of our students is literally baked in.
I teach high school ESL in a 100% immigrant school; virtually none of my students have been in the country for more than three years, yet they are expected to pass these tests.
If teachers don’t rise up in defense of their students and themselves, then they’d better start getting used to the taste of cat food, since that’s what they’ll be subsisting on, come retirement.
Too many teachers are afraid to speak out. Veiled threats and unofficial warnings about possible “consequences” have quelled the teacher push back. The degree to which the threat of actual retribution is real remains in question. I have emailed NYED requesting any official policy, approved by the NY Board of Regents, that prohibits a teacher from speaking out. I have requested a list of actual consequences if we do. I have not received any response from NYSED. This vague, underlying fog of fear is probably without substance. It is imperative that we find out. In writing. Now.
NYSED
This is terrible. Email me, in confidence…. Maybe I can help….
Resistance can take many forms, some of them passive.
During Teacher Detention (erroneously called “Professional Development”) geared towards Common Core and PARCC, openly tune out. When called upon to participate say, “I pass.” I’ve done this numerous times, have never been challenged, and have seen my colleagues become emboldened as a result.
Challenge the mercenaries who usually conduct these affairs by asking them how long they taught in a classroom.
Turn in meaningless, mandated busywork late, completed in the most cursory, haphazard fashion. After all, that which needn’t be done, needn’t be done well.
Refuse to volunteer for anything related to the implementation of what, in effect, is a project to undermine your career and livelihood. If only the suck-ups and opportunists do it, then it loses even more credibility.
Try to be nimble enough to ignore the nonsense while in your class room. Close your door and teach, and only give them the dog-and-pony show when absolutely necessary, if then.
I’m sure readers of this blog could add many more suggestions.
While these recommendations are probably not suitable for new, untenured teachers, the fact remains that you’re only free if you insist on acting as a free person, and do whatever you can to carve out some autonomy for yourself and your students. The more people who do this, the weaker and less intimidating the regime becomes; in fact, despite it’s immense wealth and power, the so-called education reform regime is brittle, and will shatter when faced with principled resistance on the part of teachers, students and parents.
Non-cooperation with Evil works.
Excellent advice. I have continued to push the envelope of passive resistance. All that you describe has worked wonders. Having a very understanding principal who “gets it” is a real help. Unfortunately not every teacher has the luxury of a reasonable and rational administrator.
One other tactic I can add is recommended for all veteran teachers with well established reputations, with lots of currency among colleagues. parents, and students. I am in the process of sabotaging my APPR evaluation. I wrote a SLO that will earn me 0/40. I plan on sabotaging my observation as well; I’ll probably pick up a few points by shear accident. My goal is to make a complete mockery of a system that is a joke to most of us. If they eventually decide to file 3020A, they can bring it on. I will be gone long before the courts can settle it at a considerable cost to my district. Which is why they never will.
@NYS Teacher I am filled with both admiration for your courage and hilarious visions of all the different ways a teacher could intentionally tank his/her observation. Thank you very much for both!.
Peter Greene once wrote that the most powerful person in a relationship (professional or private) is the one who doesn’t care. This sounds like a great way to turn the tables on the threatening nature of APPR.
I have done my little itty bit, as a free-lancer to daycares/ nurseries, by promptly withdrawing my services from daycares who have switched to state-dominated bean-counter/ accountability curricula, which shunts arts enrichment to late pm (after ‘approved’ curriculum, when kids are too tired to learn anyway!)
Michael and NYS Teacher, I’m with you. Thank you for a few new ideas. NYS Teacher, I’ve done the same simply to prove the disparity and lack of uniformity amongst our administrators when they perform observations. I have refused to provide an #%*$& evidence binder (can’t even write it without choking and gagging) for the last 2 years. My SLO has been based on approximately half of my students w/ only IEPs; depending on the year, that is 3 or 4 students. My job is based on the growth, not the achievement (yeah, right), of a couple of my kids with severe to moderate learning disabilities taking the Regents exams in June. Shockingly, I’m highly effective every year so far. Damn right I am. And don’t tell me they’re not fiddling my numbers because it’s “me”. With or without this stupid system, I’m darn good at what I do and I don’t need to prove it with scraps of paper.
@Michael Fiorlillo
This is exactly what I believe. These tests are designed to fail. I am not usually a “conspiracy” theorist, but follow the money! I feel that states and our fed. government has given out too many loans and grants to kids that have failed out of college. This essentially is wasting money. These tests are not designed to create career and college ready students. I fear these tests are designed to keep people out of college so that the government doesn’t have to spend the money on all the loans, grants and other “entitlements” that we have so freely given. They are designed to make teachers seem like failures and give up. Therefore, they retire early and don’t get maximum retirement benefits. Again, follow the money. They are designed to close schools or create a gateway for charter schools to take over…again saving the government money. It is a shame that money truely is the root of this evil.
Cindy, there’s nothing whatsoever conspiratorial about it: they’ve already been making announcements about the cut scores for the exams, which in essence mandate a 60% overall failure rate.
This is not conspiracy, but consensus on their part.
‘Killing the love of reading before it starts…’ is one of the most succinct condemnations of PARCC and Common Core I’ve read. Let’s be proud the report came from Chicago, where we also tried to defeat the AFT’s support for Common Core at last summer’s AFT convention in Los Angeles.
Excellent commentary that all stakeholders should read. those readers who have blogs or websites should reproduce it. it is so important–especially now–that the truth prevails.
Katie Osgood recently tweeted that one of the worst things about the current round of ed reform is that schools with student populations who most need a high quality curriculum instead often receive the very worst of scripted test prep.
https://twitter.com/KatieOsgood_/status/542149008827772928
The is partly due to fear of heavy handed sanctions at the system level and a failure of instructional leadership and judgment at the system level. CPS and other districts could choose to take a different path. Given the overall accountability environment, I recognize why they take the wrong path but they really have abdicated their professional responsibility for selecting curriculum and encouraging instructional environments that promote meaningful and lasting student learning. I am referring to the system leadership, not the teachers.
As NYS teacher notes, the pressure to perform is leading to bureaucratic micromanagement and doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons. System leaders need to look in the mirror and ask themselves if they are doing right by their students.
I visited one of our elementary schools this morning visiting several classrooms classrooms during their balanced literacy block. Most were operating on a Daily 5 model (we have a few suggested organizational models for the literacy block, but Daily 5 is the one our teachers most often choose) with happy, engaged students and no scripted test prep.
Inequality will be exacerbated if suburban districts avoid scripted Common Core implementations and urban districts choose scripted test prep strategies.
If you give tests consisting of random, decontextualized, isolated questions covering random “standards” formulated as vague, content-free descriptions of abstract skills, and if you make these tests high stakes for students, teachers, administrators, and whole schools, then this is what you will get. You get what you measure all right. Garbage in, garbage out.
$&$**$#^$#(**77^(@$*&@$#$!!!!!!!!
All of this was ENTIRELY PREDICTABLE from the design of the standards and testing regimen.
The new national “standards” can most charitably be described as a partial compendium of discredited, presceintific misconceptions, or folk theories, about the teaching of English, hacked together overnight, with no professional vetting, by people with no requisite training or experience, in almost total ignorance of best practices in the teaching of literature and writing and of the sciences of language acquisition and their application to ELA instruction.
What a tragedy for our nation’s kids! Millions of children are having their love of learning and the experiences they might had with literature and writing and the history of ideas STOLEN FROM THEM.
The teaching of English is being thoroughly debased by heedless, ignorant, Philistine usurpers of the profession, and many are the edupudits and educrats who are collaborating, Vichylike, with the usurpers. Remember those people and hold them accountable for the disaster that they are bringing about. It will be clear enough before long what damage has been done.
It’s shameful, of course, that the ELA “standards” and tests are so amateurishly designed, but the people who put those together at least have the excuse that they had no relevant expertise but were simply anointed by a few moguls who wanted, ASAP, a set of national “standards” to key their software packages to.
But what’s even more shameful and shocking and disgusting is that many school administrators and district officials have not long since hooted the ed deformers off the national stage. It is especially shocking when it’s district-level language arts administrators who are enabling the deforms. They should know better but clearly do not. If they had the slightest clue, for example, how people acquire the vocabulary and grammar of a language, they would be appalled by the ignorant “standards” related to those strands. If they had the slightest familiarity with the last century of thought about approaches to literature, they would likewise be appalled by the ignorant “standards” in the literature strand–standards that amount to what one might call “New Criticism for Dummies.” If they had the slightest familiarity with the vast literature on approaches to writing instruction and rhetoric, then the CCSS strands on those would appear to them entirely laughable.
I think of what has happened to ELA curricula as a result of these appallingly ignorant “standards” and tests and am reminded of the concluding lines of Don Marquis’s poem “The Old Trouper,” from Archy and Mehitabel. The old theatre cat is speaking:
mehitabel he says
both our professions
are being ruined
by amateurs
“But what’s even more shameful and shocking and disgusting is that many school administrators and district officials have not long since hooted the ed deformers off the national stage.”
Only a few possible explanations exist for this level of professional neglegence:
ignorance?
apathy?
fear?
ambition?
Take your pick!
My wish would be for the mass media to publish these kinds of responses to the idiocy going on in stifling good, creative education.
The most important thing that can be taught or tried to be taught is the LOVE OF LEARNING. Education is a life long process. To instill wonder, awe, in the world around us should be paramount.
What is being promoted is producing a “worker bee” mentality in our children. They must be prepared for the coming century.
Indeed, but what does that entail?
For me the most basic part of education which is not talked about entails the takeover of society including our educational institutions by a corporate mentality.
THEY write the tests, evaluate the results, hold teachers and schools accountable for promoting THEIR interests.
“TRUTH” as sought by scholarly research is superseded. Children must be indoctrinated by THEIR version of what THEY wish children to know, not by what scholarship, researched, validated by other scholars deem “truth”.
Hitler, Goebels, could not have stated their position better.
MANY thinkers now state we have a plutocracy, not a democracy where people are important. The media now is controlled by 5, maybe 6 corporations which control 80% of the “news” and which gives them access to propagandizing, shaping the minds of the general public.
NOW they wish to indoctrinate our children to complete the mind control.
This aspect is I fear not recognized sufficiently nor its inherent debilitation of a democratic form of government.
My son Sam began opting out of the various so-called “standardized” tests that Chicago Public Schools has foisted on the elementary kids since he was in first grade eight years ago. There have been four different “high stakes” tests utilized, then discarded, during his brief time in elementary school. It is SHEER NONSENSE to say that it’s about the so-called “standards” and not about the testing, since the Board of Education creates matrices that demand certain “benchmarks” on the tests, both for individual kids, for classes, and for entire schools. Since Paul Vallas began “academic probation” against low scoring schools in 1996, this game has been the same — NO MATTER WHAT THE —– TEST! Sam has done quite well despite only taking one test during those years, and reads voraciously nowadays. The day he first opted out (his parents opted him out) we sent him to school with copies of Calvin and Hobbs, which at the time here his favorite books. (He had already moved “up” from the Captain Underpants series by then). This week he’s reading To Kill a Mockingbird.
IMHO, if anyone truly interested in the topics covered by this posting and thread want to pare it down to just two sentences [although, honestly, it pains me to write that] then look at the following by Bob Shepherd in his above comment of 12-10-14, 1:42 PM:
1), “The standards are a list, by domain, of outcomes to be measured in mathematics and in English language arts.”
2), “The whole point of implementing standards is to have them drive curricula and pedagogy, and claims to the contrary are equivocation.”
IMHO, everything else—in some fashion—on this post and thread extends and fleshes that out. *Just take this one small bit: in my comments, I include comments by Frederick Hess and Chester Finn that make it clear they are in complete agreement with Bob.*
Bob Shepherd: many thanks/muchísimas gracias/domo arigatoo gozaimasu/Komapsumnida [Eng/Sp/Jap/Kor].
And in the spirit of what many of y’all have written, howzabout the following:
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
BTW, anybody know if that Albert Einstein fella ever did anything of note? After all, as David Coleman says, nobody gives a…
😎
P.S. I would be remiss if I didn’t give the redoubtable Ms. Katie O the most insanely krazy props for shining her light in the darkness and never letting it go out.
All of your comments were right on the mark. I am in the midst of all of this now. The practice testing for PARCC will also take away many hours of precious teaching time so crucial in preparing our students for their next grade in school. I am very bogged down and depressed. Our students will not learn as much, which I guess is their plan…to completely destroy our public school systems.
Sad Teacher
My advice would be ignore all pressures to test-prep. It doesn’t work for Pearson/PARRC tests. All the hours being wasted on test-prep will still result in the 60% to 70% failure rate that they want. The items themselves are test-prep-proof by design. And if by some miracle an effective test-prep program actually worked (improved scores) for PARRC tests why would any teacher want to use it? The skills being tested have nothing to do with actual reading or writing. Not the kind actually used by humans at least.
Thank you so much for your response. It is so sad what they are putting the kids through. It should be against the law. Thanks again…
Test prep is a complete waste of time for because it doesn’t work for Pearson/PARRC tests which are designed to fail. They are test prep proof. And if you discovered a program that did improve test scores for these deeply flawed instruments, why would you want to use it? The ELA items do not test students in ways that normal humans actually read or write.
I take what’s written on this blog, seriously…..very seriously. But something about what Katie Ogood wrote really hit home. I just re-read it. It’s tragic…it’s ominous…..
Yes, KrazyTA, you said it well.
Damm this is exactly what is happening in my school district. We are told to not focus on content, only “21st Century” skills. I don’t even know what that means. Yet we are told everyone has to not only just teach skills, we are all to have the exact same assessment and scope and sequence. The administration insists research has proven it effective. What can we do to fight this.
It doesn’t mean anything, now does it? The term places us in history. All the rest is just a lax acceptance of an undefined, flat term that is virtually sinking our schools.
“They want Obedient Workers – Obedient Workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.”
-George Carlin
This is far off-topic, but it came to mind in connection with Bob S.’s comment above re: eugenics.
HOLMES, J., Opinion of the Court
Mr. JUSTICE HOLMES delivered the opinion of the Court.
This is a writ of error to review a judgment of the Supreme Court of Appeals of the State of Virginia affirming a judgment of the Circuit Court of Amherst County by which the defendant in error, the superintendent of the State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded, was ordered to perform the operation of salpingectomy upon Carrie Buck, the plaintiff in error, for the purpose of making her sterile. The case comes here upon the contention that the statute authorizing the judgment is void under the Fourteenth Amendment as denying to the plaintiff in error due process of law and the equal protection of the laws.
Carrie Buck is a feeble minded white woman who was committed to the State Colony above mentioned in due form. She is the daughter of a feeble minded mother in the same institution, and the mother of an illegitimate feeble minded child. She was eighteen years old at the time of the trial of her case in the Circuit Court, in the latter part of 1924. An Act of Virginia, approved March 20, 1924, recites that the health of the patient and the welfare of society may be promoted in certain cases by the sterilization of mental defectives, under careful safeguard, &c.; that the sterilization may be effected in males by vasectomy and in females by salpingectomy, without serious pain or substantial danger to life; that the Commonwealth is supporting in various institutions many defective persons who, if now discharged, would become a menace, but, if incapable of procreating, might be discharged with safety and become self-supporting with benefit to themselves and to society, and that experience has shown that heredity plays an important part in the transmission of insanity, imbecility, &c. The statute then enacts that, whenever the superintendent of certain institutions, including the above-named State Colony, shall be of opinion that it is for the best interests of the patients and of society that an inmate under his care should be sexually sterilized, he may have the operation performed upon any patient afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity, imbecility, &c., on complying with the very careful provisions by which the act protects the patients from possible abuse.
* * * *
The attack is not upon the procedure, but upon the substantive law. It seems to be contended that in no circumstances could such an order be justified. It certainly is contended that the order cannot be justified upon the existing grounds. The judgment finds the facts that have been recited, and that Carrie Buck is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health, and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization, and thereupon makes the order. In view of the general declarations of the legislature and the specific findings of the Court, obviously we cannot say as matter of law that the grounds do not exist, and, if they exist, they justify the result. We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
This is one of the most chilling documents in our history. Holmes failed not only in his larger moral duty in this case but even in his minimal duty to get his facts straight, for by all accounts, Carrie Buck was of normal intelligence.
Years ago, I was in Lima, Peru, adopting a child. I walked with my lawyer’s secretary near the “Palace of Justice,” as the Supreme Court of Peru is called. The secretary said to me, “We call it ‘el palacio sin justicia.'”
Without justice.
I thought of that secretary’s comment twice today, once when reading this note about Carrie Buck and once when reading that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the UN Secretary General, and the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Counterterrorism and Human Rights had all called for prosecutions in response to the torture report just released by the US Senate. Will justice be served there? I am not holding my breath.
Holmes later wrote a friend that the decision gave him pleasure, and that he was amused by how uncomfortable his language made the other Justices. Only one dissenter on the opinion, though.
At least one Nazi eugenics policy document quoted from Buck v. Bell, and Nazi medical officers used it in their defense at Nuremberg. The US was hardly the only country that was sterilizing the the feeble-minded and undesirable, but I don’t think anyone else put the policy as bluntly or memorably as Holmes did.
“Justice” Holmes had a way with words. At about the same time as the decision in Buck v. Bell, the Cold Spring Harbor Eugenics Laboratory issued a report that called for euthanizing the bottom 10 percent, by IQ, of the US population. (No, I am not making this up.) The Lab operated with funding from a group of US “philanthropists” and with support from the federal government. The Eugenics Movement and the Ed Deform Movement in the US have followed the same MO: attempted top-down social engineering, conferences attended by plutocrats and bureaucrats, funding by the plutocrats for think tanks and a vast propaganda machine, creation by the think tanks of model legislation and regulations. Hitler, not yet in power, called the US a model for the rest of the world for its restrictive racially based immigration policies and the eugenics statutes calling for mandatory sterilization that were passed in 27 states. In both cases, a few plutocrats decided that they had the solution for the rest of us. We do well to remember this history or to learn it if we don’t know it, for history is repeating itself.
While all of the elaborate comments above are truly wonderful and spot on, I find the need to be reductivist here. What Ms. Katie describes is teachers being coerced into committing both educational malpractice and child abuse all for the sake of the profits and bogus ideologies of the testing industrial complex. It’s Campbell’s Law on steroids. The testing industrial complex makes real the imagined threats described in “A Nation at Risk”.
“…reading two myths without any teaching around what myths are, about Ancient Greece, about how the myths point to our own humanity. No, we are told to have the kids create a Venn diagram of the two texts and then practice writing a constructed response. The kids have no idea who Zeus or Hera are. They know nothing about the way myths were used to explain religion and nature to an ancient people. There is no chance to connect these ancient stories to the kids’ own lives.”
This type of reading or listening in the real world is dangerous. Reading the Bible like this is how we got to Creationism, that is, by a flattening of the textual distance from then to now, from that culture/language/time/place to ours, essentially discarding the original message altogether. Or think of sitting on a jury where no context is given, or deciding on a political candidate with only a “close” listening of one speech or debate. Removal of communication from its full context is nonsense.
Text without context is nonsense. Literally. Not figuratively. Nonsense.
Heck, this idea has been the foundation of math instruction for decades. Numbers without context isn’t working out so well though, is it?
“This type of reading or listening in the real world is dangerous…” unless you represent a ruling class that is trying to produce a generation of barnyard slaves like out of “Animal Farm.” We should all be proud of the teachers who are fighting back.
Recently my 10th grader completed a unit on banned books in her public school. To me the de-contextualizing and close reading is another way to “ban” books as it “removes or restricts access to books.” We’re lucky this year in that her 10th grade ELA teacher totally ignores all this and is teaching English and they’re reading literature.
http://www.ala.org/bbooks/about
Close Reading often becomes test prep: http://atthechalkface.com/2013/11/19/closed-minds-from-close-reading/