Ann Policelli Cronin, an experienced teacher in Connecticut, says that the Common Core should be considered a first draft. Here are her comments:
The Common Core State Standards: A First Draft
Much of what is written about the Common Care State Standards is based on a faulty premise about their quality. For example, on August 18, 2013 in The New York Times, Bill Keller wrote that the Common Core State Standards are “ the most serious educational reform of our lifetime and will raise public school standards nationwide”. Three days later, Charles Blow wrote that the Common Core State Standards will teach students “ to think critically and problem solve” and will “bolster” good teaching.
Not so. The Common Core Stare Standards will diminish student learning in high school English classes and will inhibit good teaching.
The CCSS harken back to the past and contradict the research of the past 70 years in the field of English language arts.
The CCSS will not develop strong readers. The authors of the standards herald the fact that they will require all students to read difficult literature. The truth is that assigning student to read books beyond their ability, rather than putting time and effort into developing the students’ skills and fostering their interest, will make them use the internet to locate summaries and analyses of those books instead of reading them. The CCSS do not address how to motivate students to actually sit and read a book, engage with its ideas and questions, and actively respond to those ideas and questions. With the CCSS, students will not be asked to BE readers.
The CCSS will not develop effective writers. All student writing will fit a prescribed formula for an argument in an impersonal, objective voice. Inductive reasoning and narrative thinking, the two other kinds of thinking that students need to develop through writing, are eliminated due to the CCSS concentration on the deductive reasoning of argument. Students will also be hampered in their development as writers because they will not be allowed to use the personal voice, as both Mr. Blow and Mr. Keller did in their pieces. Timed, in-class writing is valued rather than the deep thinking of multiple revisions. With the CCSS, the students will not be asked to BE writers.
David Coleman, the author of the English Language Arts Standards for the Common Core proudly says, over and over again in his stump speeches that English classrooms now prepare students for a world in which others care about what they think and feel, but in reality, he says, often with an unprintable expletive, “No one really cares what they feel or think.”
That is the world for which the CCSS will prepare the next generation, a world in which individual ideas and questions are absent.
There is an arrogance to the CCSS and to their spokesperson, David Coleman.
There is an arrogance to the English standards being written by people who have never taught English.
There is an arrogance to ignoring the rigorous standards of the professional organization of English language arts teachers, the National Council of Teachers of English, disregarding their published critiques of each draft of the CCSS, and being impervious to the fact that NCTE has not endorsed the Common Core State Standards.
There is an arrogance to saying that the narrow CCSS definition of what it means to read and what it means to write will help students to be the innovative thinkers and autonomous learners that the workplaces of the future will demand them to be.
There is an arrogance to saying that the standards that other countries have determined as measures of achievement, such as the ability to learn when faced with new situations or problems and the ability to think critically and creatively through collaboration with others, are not achievements because those skills are not on the narrowly confined tests aligned with the CCSS.
There is an arrogance to saying that student achievement can be defined only by the tests that the designers of the ill-conceived CCSS have commissioned.
It is time to look at the existing CCSS as a first draft. We have the knowledge and the expertise to write a next and better draft. As researchers, as English teachers, and as those who know well the workplace of the future, let’s work together to create standards which help all of our students to BE readers, to BE writers, to Be thinkers, and to create a world in which, indeed, we are all expected to have the motivation and the skills to express what we think and what we feel.
Ann Policelli Cronin, a recipient of national and state-wide awards for English teaching, curriculum design and professional development, has been creating English programs and supervising middle and high school English teachers in Connecticut for 27 years.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It is absolutely a rough draft and has no business being used to evaluate students, teachers, or districts.
YES! It is sad that the higher ups are only hearing the words “College and Career Ready” instead of what real educators have to say. It is even sadder that teachers must be careful when speaking the truth because their Principal/Superintendent/School Board members are also drinking the Common Core koolaid without really paying attention to the ingredients/details.
I think calling Common Core a rough draft gives it credibility that it dies not deserve. Quit trying to meet these people half way. It is a decree issued by arrogant, unqualified corporatists. Demand its demise so that real experts like Cronin can teach kids, not waste their time and passion dealing with this insulting, destructive nonsense.
Amen. I’m tired of the feds insisting that they know what’s best for every student, in every class, in every subject, in every school, all over the country. Let the local areas choose their own standards.
JoanneS… I so agree with you on this! I say that CC belongs in a trash can. Just one example…when an “educational program” can decide that “exactly no more than 30% of a high school student’s reading in English can be literature… this is clear evidence of BUFFOONERY! And that is just a start to my anger at common core.
Excellent, well thought out piece. Thank you and I’ll be sharing this.
Right on! Powerfully spoken. As an English teacher I’ve witnessed firsthand the damage Anne describes–students robbed of an authentic voice, disempowered, taught to “write by number” , and teachers forced to replace the heart & soul of literature with rhetorical analysis. Criminal.
This is the best critique of CC yet.
This is the finest CCSS critique I have read. Well done.
College professors also ought to have a say, I think. And also perhaps some of our poets and scientists.
The CC ELA standards don’t seem that different than most states’ previous ELA standards. They’re both problematic, in my view, in that they foster a skills-building approach to teaching. Despite what many of them say, teachers cannot impart an all-purpose ability to analyze point-of-view, etc. Kids already know how to analyze; it’s a built-in functionality of their brains. The reason they often can’t analyze points-of-view, or The Scarlet Letter or Letter from Birmingham Jail is that they don’t understand them. So rather than building the background knowledge kids need to understand a wide-variety of texts, English teachers waste their time trying to impart all-purpose skills that have already been imparted by nature. What kids need is more knowledge (which teachers CAN impart) to expand the SCOPE of their in-born thinking skills.
Skills-oriented Reading Workshop and Writing Workshop have been failures. Many kids who’ve suffered through 10 years of YA lit and Writing Workshop still arrive in college needing remediation. American schools need to go back to teaching robust literature, grammar, history, geography, etc. rather than wasting kids’ time with the fruitless skill-building curricula that ELA standards have encouraged. Teaching content IS teaching reading. And knowing about the world and reading good writers is at least as good a way of teaching writing as having kids write persuasive essays about school dress codes.
Just last week I asked a friend why the standards are not written by the National Council of Teachers of English for ELA and the Nat’l Council of Teachers of Mathematics for Math, and the National Council for Teachers of Social Studies for History. As a former English teacher (retired and still a member of NCTE) I know these are the experts. I don’t get it.
My niece, who teaches first grade, now teaches in a high-income school. Her students do well in school, and have done well on state tests. She told me that most of her students are bored with the Common Core lessons (she spices them up and adds her own ideas). Up to this year, she has–for the last few years–taught first grade in a school with a large number of free and reduced lunches, and she said, when they began Common Core last spring, her students found the lessons and the curriculum way too difficult so, as with this year, she just modified some things, threw out a whole bunch of other things, and taught in the way the kids could learn.
My experience with trying to get two, much less a committee of Spanish teachers to agree on much of anything is that not much will be agreed upon, although general outlines of what should be covered at each level can usually be hammered out. Let the teachers focus on what they believe is solid teaching and learning practices.
Morning! I just read this one. Yes, very good. I’m grading sixth grade pre tests today! Looking forward to Thursday.
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Not only arrogance, but a ignorance of an intellectually rich tradition of teaching English beginning with Aristotle and more recently Britton, Emig, Graves, Calkins, and NWP.