Mercedes Schneider often writes analyses of politics in Louisiana and elsewhere and statistical critiques of studies. She has a Ph.D. in statistics and research methodology.
But she has a day job. She teaches English in high school because that is what she loves.
Recently she has been immersed in learning the Common Core standards.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
CCS are not what I signed up for when I became a teacher 35 years ago! This is the worst set of standards ever!
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And of course I have a song for it (I always appreciate reading Mercedes’ writing).
My bandmate Mark Walker from Lincoln, Nebraska wrote the song “Ya told Me,” which I have sung many times. It played through my head reading the link.
“One time you told me you would never let me go, but it’s really too late now, you’re puttin’ on a show. Where are we going or do you even know? You think we’re going somewhere but you’re not too sure: you told me, yeah yeAh yeah you told me. Yeah yeah yeah you told me. Oh yeah yeah you told me.”
(With a ska beat, guitar solo, and typical reggae keyboards). Wish I had a recording, but I don’t.
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I left this message for Mercedes and I am carrying this with me every day to school:
The CCS document states, “The Standards do not mandate such things as a particular writing process or the full range of meta cognitive strategies that students may need to monitor and direct their thinking and learning. Teachers are thus FREE to provide students with whatever tools and knowledge their professional judgment and experience identify as most helpful for meeting the goals set out in the Standards (NGA, CCSSO 2010, pg. 4).
I read that statement and I have been granted the autonomy to figure out how to teach my students as well as craft my own assessments to determine how well they’re learning.
Their portrait of students who meet their standards contain these four aspects (of seven).
They demonstrate independence.
They build strong content knowledge.
They comprehend as well as critique.
They value evidence.
And so should their teachers. We are not robots following orders. We are professionals and should be treated as such.
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Some of us were required to fully implement CCSS last year and are starting PARCC testing this year. Many states now have no seniority or tenure rights and no say over whether their students who deserve to have an Learning Disabilities teacher actually get one. It is RTI forever for some even if their parents want LD services. Test scores count towards evaluations, how we teach counts towards evaluations, but little training has been done on “how to teach”, maybe because it was never piloted so they have no proof that actually MORE standards at a higher level of thinking produces smarter students, or just frustrated parents, students, teachers and administrators who can now be fired at will. Arne may have started that in Chicago. Mr. Emmanuel is closing schools “at will” and states are giving more money to charter schools than to public schools. Is this a mechanism to move everything to a charter school?
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It is going to be an “interesting” year. Kudos, Linda, for finding a reasonable kernel in all the top down stuff.
The “text based writing assignment” is what I, who had an elite college education, as I presume David Coleman did too, grew up on. Not so much in high school. I thought that’s the way it was done everywhere. Apparently its something new to public school teachers.
Mercedes: Can you share the text based assignment your group created to use on the first day?
No matter how GOOD an assignment you produce, if the kids aren’t smart enough to handle it, they won’t be able to do it at the end of the year on the test when your job will depend on how well THEY do.
Pretty unfair. Another hare-brained utopian scheme (like NCLB) to turn sows ears into silk purses by teaching all the tough, hairy, leathery ears the way you’d teach the elite.
Will it work? It’s going to be a VERY interesting year.
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Was David Coleman being honest when he said that students, before the Common Core was adopted, weren’t expected to talk and write about the substance of assigned readings in English class? No, he was either talking through his hat or lying through his teeth. But the Time Magazine editors believed him, and apparently so did a bunch of other people. Was it true that 90% of the writing American students were doing was in the form of personal narrative? No, that was a preposterous claim.
Is it wise pedagogy to insist that students and teachers stay within the “four corners of the text” when considering a piece of literature? No, partly because a text–even a precisely worded legal document–does not have four corners in the first place. And partly because the ability to make connections among other texts and experiences is part and parcel of learning to read well. And it’s bad pedagogy for lots of other good reasons, both practical and theoretical.
These are only a few of the fallacies built into the selling of the Common Core. Did any of them prevent Coleman from gaining influence? No, and the reason is that he is being PAID, and handsomely, for spouting this nonsense, just as the “LDC” consortium is being paid to produce those reductive, overwrought “templates” for teachers to fill in and oppress their students with. When you actually listen to Coleman’s “arguments” (expressed in partial sentences, shaky analogies, and inapt anecdotes), they just don’t hold water. This is interesting, considering how eager he is for children to learn how to build a sound argument starting in kindergarten. Both Coleman and the CCSS are tools of moneyed interests. It’s a shame that kids and teachers have to suffer as a result.
One thing students might learn from the Common Core is that a person who is pretty good with words can justify practically anything. Hopefully teachers will be able help kids learn how to see through the rhetoric and question the hype.
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I’m on an AP English site and in those classes writing is regular and required and mostly text based, so at the upper level it is not the case that students don’t write. But I wouldn’t be too sure about that statistic for the rest of the grades nationally. Certainly the BEST schools are having students write regularly at all grades, as did the public schools that my wife went to in Detroit. Coleman might actually have something true in his justification for what he conceives to be raised standards for the public schools. Likewise he MIGHT be right that 90% of the writing that students do do is personal narrative, and thus “ungradable” as to content. The first class schools for rich kids, e.g. Obama’s kids, probably write almost daily, and thus learn or become comfortable with the essay as a form of persuasion, or summary, or analysis. That’s what separates the sheep from the goats, the truly educated from the uneducated, the ability to write clear, logical prose. I’ll grant you that being good with words without substance, as the president is, may be one of the corrupt conclusions a student may draw from being educated in writing. Sophistic from its beginnings in Greece advertised that ability as part of what it sold, the ability to argue on either side of a question. Socrates (as depicted by Plato, anyway) hated that the most of anything, I think. The GORGIAS is a ringing endorsement of truth as the only valid basis of rhetoric. He didn’t like fancy speeches. He liked question and answer.
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Harlan, let me respond to your question privately. My email is deutsch29@aol.com.
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Sorry, I was trying to reply to the original post, not the reply by Harlan Underhill, who made some good points. I looked at the LCD website. From my perspective, it’s a dreary mess. People are actually getting paid for writing this stuff and for foisting on teachers. It’s sad.
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Common Core is NOT developmentally appropriate and according to the Pearson rep. who trained teachers in my school system on the new Common Core Reading Street Series, the ONLY way our students will be ready for the testing and eventually “College and Career Ready” is if we follow the teacher’s text explicitly. I could tell by watching her that the Associate Superintendent for Curriculum was buying into what the rep. was saying. If my principal tries to hold me to this, I’ll be looking for a new job, even if it means finding a new career. I didn’t exactly learn teach to the text while I was working on my bachelors or master degree.
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This is for Alabama teacher. I agree. The greatest fun of teaching for me was when I had an insight while I was pursuing a planned lesson, but then a kid would ask a question, other kids would join in, and the we took the whole experience to a new level, not of answers, but of questions, improvisationally yet still logically. As close to the experience which Plato dramatizes in his genuine dialoges of the excitement and charm of philosophical discussions.
For a teacher to have to teach strictly from a script will kill the soul of teaching, possibly, unless the script has space for the engagement of the moment and the script is trying to create the experience of genuine friendly dialectic.
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This is more an account of her school’s process and her ruminations on them. It was well-written, but I would have liked to have had the specifics of what text they were using for text-based close reading (something which I assigned with great success until about 8 years ago, when students basically stopped reading for homework), why it was going to be done only in class and not for homework, etc. I would have liked to have read about which existing materials they used as well.
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