This is an interesting and even-handed report by Sarah Carr on the implementation of Common Core in the Florida schools.
Clearly, the new standards will be easier for affluent students and harder for disadvantaged students. There is no indication that they will close the achievement gap. Maybe the bright students will arrive in college even better prepared for their English classes. Who knows what will happen to the English learners and the students who are struggling to read?
Two things jumped out at me:
First, the English teachers said they would not be able to teach To Kill a Mockingbird or The Great Gatsby anymore. No time for that. Anyway, they are not informational text.
Second, one English teacher said she would just have to give up assigning whole novels. Now, students will read excerpts. That makes me despair. Authors write whole novels, not excerpts. You cannot understand what the book is about unless you read the whole thing.
And one other point: Did no one read the New York Times’ article about the study showing that reading great literature is the best preparation for a job interview and for personal interactions?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I agree but my son only read the Spark Notes for the “great” literature he was assigned to read in high school!
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Watch this video parodying New York State
Ed Commisioner’s pushing of excessive
testing and Common Core standards.
This is King behind the scenes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvKVkitKOgk
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I just watched this movie on Netflix. Scary but revealing, isn’t it?
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CT: Yeah, that’s an issue we have to deal with, and there’s considerable differences of opinion among English teachers about how to deal with it. Quote based reading quizzes are my method of making sure they read the real thing; journal assignments are another method. Even well-intentioned kids will evade reading assignments when they can get away with it, simply because reading complex literature can be challenging, and like most of us they have trouble with time-management.
But ditching whole books is emphatically NOT the way to deal with it. Talk about doing the opposite of raising standards!
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This is what John King really thinks
of parents who “opt out”, or even
complain about his “education
reform.”
http://www.southbronxschool.com/2013/10/fine-dining-with-new-york-state.html
King draws an asinine analogy
between parents bitching about
Common Core, or excessive or
inappropriate-for-grade-level
testing or whatever…
to…
the lack of restraint to a customer
would show at a restaurant when
that customer has a problem with
the wine or food served to him:
http://www.southbronxschool.com/2013/10/fine-dining-with-new-york-state.html
He puts himself in a higher order
of class than those belly-aching
parents because when a waiter
brings him substandard food or
wine… well… in such a situation,
he doesn’t complain, or send it
back. He sits there and eats it
whether he likes it or not…
(*** actual quote… no joke***)
JOHN KING: “When I’m in a
restaurant, and the waiter opens
the bottle of wine for me to taste,
I never say ‘No,’ send it back,
even if it’s horrible. The same with
my meal; if I don’t like it I’ll eat it
anyway.”
AND DAMN IT!!! THAT’S WHAT
THE PARENTS AND STUDENTS
IN NEW YORK STATE SHOULD
DO AS WELL WITH MY
COMMON CORE TESTING
AND CURRICULUM!!!
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Amen, Diane!! I’m so frustrated by the excerpts in the Pearson literature books our teachers are required to use! They are often quite meaningless without the greater context of the novels. How much richer the reading experience would be for these children if the time were spent on the novel, instead. Alas, the teachers must follow the literature book and complete each ” selection test” in a timely manner.
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If the HS English teachers are dropping literature for informational texts, then they need to work on their own reading comprehension skills. I am not sure why so many English teachers fail to understand that a 70%30% split across THE WHOLE CURRICULUM should mean more reading for information/ reading primary sources from other classes far more than it should mean a change of the ELA curriculum.
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English teachers understand it, but districts do not. They are no longer allowed to choose the material they teach in their classes but are mandated to teach modules that are mostly informational text with smattering of excerpts from great literature.
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Coleman and his gang did a lot of backtracking on this 70% business. Originally, they were saying 70% of the texts read in English classes should be nonfiction. Then there was a howl of derision across the land, and they said, “Oh, gee, you misunderstood us.” But I have copies of the original documents and know what they originally said. Like Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, these slippery characters understand how to rewrite the past.
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Please share these original documents.
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Yes, you’re exactly right. And the public won’t know if we don’t get this info out there!
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This is correct! So much misunderstanding and misinformation out there. Dr. Ravitch is doing an amazing job at getting people to talk about this but there are still some serious problems with the roll out that are making teachers believe crazy things. Teachers should be pairing texts and giving assignments that involve more in depth analysis. They should not be cutting literature for the sake of cutting. They may also cut things because critical analysis takes more time. That is a legitimate debate. It is also true that many are dealing with this issue by teaching more excerpts. That is a huge problem but not really the same problem as the 70/30 split. It is important to remember that the Common Core does not prescribe which curriculum should be taught and makes no mention of which novels are required. Everyone says that they want local control but then when hundreds of local school boards and administrators or even individual states make terrible decisions, they blame the whole system without thinking about where the problem comes from. It is just like the new health care law: an attempt to get states on the same page that is widely misunderstood and derided for all the wrong reasons when there are plenty of real problems that are totally ignored. Anyone think that the online testing will run smoother than healthcare.gov?
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The online tests are going to be the biggest failure in the history of education.
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Agree that the reduced time for reading great literature would be a huge loss for children and for society. Another concern is the ill advised call for greater text complexity at the lower grades. In this blog entry I talk about how the new lexile bands recommended by the CCSS is the wrong thing for young children.
http://russonreading.blogspot.com/2013/10/could-common-core-widen-achievement-gap.html
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At a SAC meeting last year, when parents, other than me actually showed up upset over Springboard and the lack of real novels being read the reading specialist, on the admin track, told the parents that they were the best excerpts from each book. (Says who?!) I countered, as a reading specialist, that a word is harder to read than a sentence, a sentence is harder to read than a paragraph, etc….and that a book must be read in it’s entirety to get what ever point the author is trying to make and that it is ALWAYS better to read a novel than a paragraph, otherwise, why would someone take the time to write in the first place? She then started spewing all types of CC propaganda, and then gave me the hand and said, “That it is not true that it is better to read a novel than a paragraph. Simply not true.” And that’s when I thought, it’s hard enough to fight the uninformed, but it’s worse when it’s someone who should know better. I find these teacher turncoats and enablers.
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Collaborators, Our schools are like Vichy, France. They have been invaded, and these collaborators are everywhere.
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“I find these teacher turncoats and enablers.”
They’re GAGAers:
Going Along to Get Along (GAGA): Nefarious practice of most educators who implement the edudeformers agenda even though the educators know that those educational malpractices will cause harm to the students and defile the teaching and learning process. The members of the GAGA gang are destined to be greeted by the Karmic Gods of Retribution upon their passing from this realm.
Karmic Gods of Retribution: Those ethereal beings specifically evolved to construct the 21st level in Dante’s Hell. The 21st level signifies the combination of the 4th (greed), 8th (fraud) and 9th (treachery) levels into one mega level reserved especially for the edudeformers and those, who, knowing the negative consequences of the edudeformers agenda, willing implemented it so as to go along to get along. The Karmic Gods of Retribution also personally escort these poor souls, upon their physical death, to the 21st level unless they enlighten themselves, a la one D. Ravitch, to the evil and harm they have caused so many innocent children, and repent and fight against their former fellow deformers. There the edudeformers will lie down on a floor of smashed and broken ipads and ebooks curled in a fetal position alternately sucking their thumbs to the bones while listening to two words-Educational Excellence-repeated without pause for eternity.
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“And that’s when I thought, it’s hard enough to fight the uninformed, but it’s worse when it’s someone who should know better.”
Amen. The problem I am finding is that most teachers by nature are not boat rockers. They might complain about things in the faculty lounge, but after that they will roll up their sleeves and do their best to accommodate whatever mandates the district hands down. In the past, this is the point at which unions would provide leadership and direction. Unfortunately, they appear to have been significantly weakened or bought off or both.
In the example you cite, the person has clearly guzzled down her share of the Kool-aid and then went back for seconds. “On the admin track” tells me all I need to know about that. Unfortunately, I think most teachers only know about CCSS what reformers have told them through professional development and the like.
Even people who are inclined to be cynical about the “next big thing” are more focused on questioning how to implement it rather than on questioning if it’s something that should be implemented to begin with. At least part of that is due to the cloak of inevitability the “reformers” have wrapped around CCSS.
It’s looking more and more like we’ll need to rely on parents to save public education.
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But I thought public school teachers could do no wrong because they care about kids.
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Harlan. Come on. Too broad a brush. You are mocking. Quit it.
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C’mon, Harlan, everyone knows public school teachers only care about tenure, pay raises, and summers off, amirite?
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You described the faculty at my Florida school to a T.
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“The problem I am finding is that most teachers by nature are not boat rockers.”
They’re GAGAers. See above response for definition.
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Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to me that any standards would be more easily attained by affluent kids than poor kids. I don’t think standards can close the achievement gap. Good teaching, smart allocation of resources, giving teachers time to plan and assess, giving them fewer students to teach, and good quality content-based professional development to help them use teaching methods that take advantage of those smaller class sizes to benefit students might help with the achievement gap.
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You’re not missing anything, you are correct in all you’ve said. However, all the things you mentioned are becoming more scarce with more government control. We teachers are worn out, people just don’t realize how much autonomy is being taken away. It’s tough to be a good teacher when you’re forced to follow a poor curriculum.
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Yes, I’m very aware of all of that. I’m saying that’s what would need to happen with schools. And until it does we won’t see any improvement in any achievement gaps.
Of course, the biggest issue with achievement gaps has nothing to do with what goes on in schools. If anyone is really serious about addressing this problem, it starts with addressing poverty.
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“people just don’t realize how much autonomy is being taken away”
Wow, Bookworm 23, you said a LOT there!!! And what you said is extremely important. No one works at all well in conditions involving little autonomy. Such conditions violate our very natures. There is something FUNDAMENTALLY inhumane about what is happening, about what the technocrats have imposed on all of us.
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“. . . good quality content-based professional development. . . ”
Isn’t that an oxymoron?
I get to be “professionally developed” all day tomorrow, joy o joys!
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Oh, but this WILL close the achievement gap–EVERYONE will be reading “Cliff’s Notes,” since there is not enough time allocated to read books such as Mockingbird and Gatsby.
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We must move beyond the utilitarian and narrowly outcomes based justification of our educational decisions and more generally of schooling. Often, we should, and indeed MUST have a moral obligation to expose children to beautiful things, deep emotions, dissonant ideas, transformative perspectives, different cultures, beliefs and experiences. Children have a right to experience -the great poetry and literature of humanity, to see a spectacular sunset, to dig through the intricate and gory details of a dissected frog, to ponder about insightful ideas, to wonder about the evolution of species and the the biodiversity of a tidepool, to dwell on a beautiful scientific theory, to listen to powerful music from many different cultures, to see radical images and movies, to understand transformative ideas from all fields of human activity, to feel on their faces the warmth of a fire in a starry night, to cry over the sadness of a song.
Dr. Jose Gabriel Maldonado
Executive Director PRO Educacion y Ambiente http://www.proea.org 917 328-5463 (USA) 829 343-1859 (DR)
Skype: sparisomaatomarium
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amen
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* clicks the “like” button…
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The Common Core implementation in Florida and elsewhere is an utter disaster. We started with TERRIBLE, backward, ignorant standards written by amateurs. Then those were turned into incoherent curricula and pedagogy with two purposes–a) to prepare kids to bubble in those bubbles and b) to write formulaic answers to extended-response test questions. I have a litmus test for whether someone knows anything at all about the teaching of English: does he or she want to see the CCSS in ELA implemented?
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And no, kids will not be reading The Grapes of Wrath. They will be reading the 500-word selection from The Grapes of Wrath and comparing it to a five-hundred word piece of nonfiction about the Dust Bowl in a five-paragraph-theme meant to demonstrate “mastery” (what a joke!) of some ill-conceived “standard” on a checklist that is supposed to represent general reading proficiency. The people who conceived this nightmare haven’t a clue. It’s time for English teachers to tell them to get the hell out of their classrooms and to take their checklist with them.
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Off the top of my head, I can’t think of an assignment that could be more boring, thereby doing a great disservice to both The Grapes of Wrath and the Dust Bowl (if we want to compare things, how about comparing how the Dust Bowl shapes the stories in The Grapes of Wrath and in The Storm in the Barn (beautiful book if you haven’t read it yet)?).
I love your last sentence; it goes along with what Paul Thomas said in this article: http://atthechalkface.com/2013/10/15/hess-please-begin-the-moratorium/
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I have looked at a LOT (hundreds and hundreds, literally) of these Common Core lessons and have thought to myself, “The kids would get as much out of this if they had been given the assignment to count up the number of commas, em-dashes, and semicolons in Chapter 18 of Tristram Shandy.
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It’s time for the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] in English Language Arts to be subjected to the critique that they were NOT subjected to before they were foisted upon the entire country. I’ve started working on a book about them. Suggestions for titles, anyone? It’s time to end the coring of our curricula.
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Through the Apple Core: The Other Side of the CCSS
Cover art: close up of a cored apple with a scene from the Mad Hatter’s tea party on the other side, the Mad Hatter being a caricature of Bill Gates with David Coleman and Arne Duncan standing in for Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee.
I’m sure there will be much better titles offered, but I thought I’d get the ball rolling.
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Did you read the NYT article that you site at the end? Or the Science article that the NYT article is based on? The empathy study was based on people reading excerpts of literary fiction, not whole texts.
I’m not disagreeing with your blog post, I just thought you might want to do some real research before making blanket statements like the one above
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Yes, I read the articles cited. I never cite articles without reading them. How in the world can anyone understand a novel without reading the whole thing ? If the writer wanted you to read an excerpt, he would have written a short story.
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“How in the world can anyone understand a novel without reading the whole thing ?”
Word!
Keep speaking truth, my friend! You are changing the world.
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Indeed she is.
Thank you, Diane Ravitch, for your wisdom and tenacity!
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Theresa, the fact that this study used excerpts does not, of course, say anything about the relative value of reading whole or excerpted works, so what Professor Ravitch said here is no contradiction. It is legitimate to draw from these studies the conclusion that storytelling is valuable, and it’s also legitimate, though it is another matter altogether, to make the point that experiencing whole stories is more valuable than is experiencing partial ones.
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Am I missing something. The last time I was in Barnes & Noble there seems to be a lot more literature than tech manuals. I know a person needs to be able to read informational texts, that’s why we teach History and Science in school. But what about the enjoyment of reading? A student can get a low grade for informational reading, yet an A in Science or History. Go Figure! They had to be able to read informational texts to get the good grades!. What exactly are we testing or teaching?
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Well said, Bill!
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Human beings are storytelling creatures. Storytelling–to others and, importantly, to ourselves–is one of our PRIMARY ways of making sense of the world. And this distinction that is made in the Common Core between informational and literary texts is, of course, extraordinarily crude. It doesn’t stand up under the slightest examination. Only a barbarian or one who has never thought at all seriously about the making of texts would fail to understand this.
And, of course, the CCSS in ELA constrict horrifically the possibilities for learning and teaching. That is, in a nutshell, the consequence of implementing these. What a tragedy for our profession these putative “standards” are! I laugh a bitter laugh every time I hear someone describe these ridiculous “standards” as “raising the bar” or being in some way “rigorous,” for they certainly aren’t rigorously thought through. When you present kids with something that isn’t well thought out and they are confused by it, that doesn’t mean that you have raised the bar. It means that you have failed as a teacher.
Don Marquis ends his poem “The Old Trouper” with this line: “Come, my dear, both of our professions are being ruined by amateurs.”
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Humans are storytelling creatures. Here’s how deep that goes: We are our memories, our current states, and our futures–our projections of ourselves. As contemporary cognitive and neurological science have taught us, our memories are largely constructions–stories that we tell ourselves about the past. Our current states are stories that we tell ourselves about what is happening now and our role or roles in what is happening. And our projections, our projects, our cares (what Heidegger thought we most are, and I am inclined to think he was right about this)–what are those but stories we tell ourselves about the future? about what might be? And what are our social relations but stories? What, for example, is social sanction but storytelling? And as Hayden White pointed out long ago in “The Literary Text as Historical Artifact,” we say we have “understood” some bit of history when we have, in fact, imposed upon it a narrative frame. Read Donald D. Hoffman on perception. Our very seeing is storytelling. And our language is absolutely shot through with and dependent upon metaphor, as Nietzsche so astutely observed in his great essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” and as George Lakoff and others have explained so clearly. Every metaphor is a story, of course.
So, it would be wise for us all to learn a little something about stories and how they work. I wish the authors of the Common Core State “Standards” had.
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I am looking forward to the day that “Cliff Notes” on “Cliff Notes” will be available! http://teachersdontsuck.blogspot.com/http://wsautter.com/
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The Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] in ELA have managed to make something extraordinarily important–the teaching of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and thinking–into something extraordinarily vapid, extraordinarily shallow.
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My sister (high school librarian) took a class on teaching IB English in which they used a passage from Middlemarch. One of the main characters is a doctor who wants to elevate the practice of medicine by separating it from pharmacy sales. He is unable to do this because his spoiled wife wants the things Daddy used to buy for her, so the doctor gives in and takes the money from the pharmacists. The passage in the IB class made it seem that the doctor was the problem, not his spoiled wife. That’s what everyone in the class concluded from the passage. So if you had actually read the book, you would be handicapped in your response (800 odd pages of reading wasted!) although you would know what George Eliot was REALLY trying to say.
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Pidge, that’s a rich example. it’s only 3:31 AM, and you’ve you made my day, and you’ve made me want to drop everything and read Middlemarch again.
A wondrous thing about the novel (and any fine novel) is that we can go into interior worlds with George Eliot, and other people can go there, too. That particular work was an important watershed for my friendship cohort during a difficult time in our early adulthood. One friend was so impressed by it, he named his first daughter Dorothea and got a second BA in English Literature. That’s what he teaches now at TSU, and I’m sure David Coleman has no idea why.
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Is anyone familiar with the “text-based questions” component of the new ELA standards? I agree it’s important for students to back up their responses to text with evidence, in many cases. I was concerned, however, when the materials and facilitators at the summer training sessions encouraged us to make a definite shift away from the connections students might make in their own lives. Two statements:
•Departing from the text in classroom discussion privileges only those who already have experience with the topic.
•It is easier to talk about our experiences than to analyze the text—especially for students reluctant to engage with reading.
If, by these statements, we are being told not to let the class get entirely off the subject and ramble about something meaningless….well that’s just insulting. Good teachers know how to monitor and guide a discussion and bring it back around if it gets too far off base. However, we are actually being told not to let students share personal experiences or connections they made with the text. To that I ask “Why on earth not?” The official answer to my question would be summed up in the statements above.
Opinions, anyone?
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In my reading of the CCSS and in the supporting materials such as those listed on achievethecore.org, I find similar recommendations to what you cite here.. As you rightly point out, this is a mistake. One of the clear reasons to fight back at the CCSS is its lack of understanding of decades of research on what works in literacy instruction. We know that student background knowledge matters. We know that having students make connections to the text matters. I recommend reading Notice and Note by Beers and Probst for a clear, research based approach to close reading. I addressed the issue of background knowledge in this blog post: http://russonreading.blogspot.com/2013/05/does-background-knowledge-matter-to.html. I discuss close reading here: http://russonreading.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-blue-guitar-towards-reader-response.html
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Of course background knowledge matters. Imagine the average high-school student approaching, for example, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, which is on the CCSS list of sample exemplary HS texts, cold, out of context, with no background knowledge related to the questions that Plato is addressing. Few would make any sense of it whatsoever. I suspect that if questioned about this, the authors of the new “standards” would say that they didn’t mean that background knowledge is unimportant to comprehension (that’s a completely crazy notion). Rather, they would say, I imagine, that they meant that in the past, we’ve had a lot of prior knowledge activities preceding texts that resulted in students’ substituting the outcomes of those activities for attention to the texts themselves. So, for example, a prior knowledge activity might ask students to think about a time when he or she behaved in a nonconformist way, and the moral of the activity might be that conformity is bad and nonconformity is good, and then the student might pay little attention to the poem itself because he or she already “knows” what it “means”: The poem is just a convoluted way of saying that conformity is bad and nonconformity is good because the prior knowledge activity already made that clear. I suspect that that is what the authors of these “standards” would say–that they have been misunderstood.
But this is what always happens with these education reforms–a decent idea gets applied too broadly. It gets applied to situations to which it does not apply. It becomes a rigid, invariant rule, and pedagogy and curricula get distorted as a result. When people mandate standards in ELA, that sort of thing is inevitable. That’s one of the many reasons why any standards we adopt should be adaptable in practice and why we should have COMPETING standards, continually vying for adoption by local teachers free to adopt or adapt at will–because such infelicities are inevitable and inevitably need to be addressed.
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Over the years I’ve learned that district trainers and educational publishing houses have a tendency to take a decent idea and apply it across the board, to every circumstance, and by this means, they distort reasonable initial intentions. If the only tool you have is a hammer, you end up treating everything as if it were a nail. Educational publishers LOVE invariant, predictable lesson formats. For several years, educational publishers issued specs that called for lessons to begin with activities that connected the lesson to students’ prior knowledge and that raised higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) questions. Many of those activities turned out to be counterproductive. On the basis of the initial activity, the student had already decided what the text was about, and he or she then didn’t attend to the text itself–to what the text said. The authors of the CCSS in ELA tried to counter that tendency by asserting, in documents ancillary to the “standards” themselves that connections to students’ prior knowledge and HOTS questions should be delayed until after kids have attended carefully to the text itself. The CCSS in ELA encouraged people to dive into the text itself without preliminaries. Now, of course, if that were general advice rather than some sort of across-the-board, invariant mandate, it wouldn’t be bad advice at all. But there would, of course, be MANY exceptions. In a particular case, with a particular text, specific background experience might be essential to comprehension, and some kids might have this experience while other kids do not. So, for such a text, providing that background might well be key. And, of course, comprehension of any text requires understanding of whatever the author might have taken for granted in his or her readers, and some of that material might be abstract or conceptual. For example, the CCSS in ELA lists Plato’s allegory of the cave as an example of an exemplary complex text to be used with high-school students, but it’s impossible to imagine most students having a clue what’s going on in that text without quite a bit of setup at the beginning–without quite a bit of upfront higher-order thinking.
So, there are a couple problems here: One is the across-the-board prescription of pedagogical method and the other is assuming that teachers are idiots and have to have the decisions made for them by some distant, self-appointed curriculum and pedagogy commissariat.
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During my second year (with TFA) the district handed down a “no more novels” mandate as well… just excerpts. Our school only had just one student who performed above “grade level” in reading, and an administrator asked him what his secret was so that they could attempt to replicate it in ridiculous test prep sessions. The student’s response was “I read books.” Of course, they made no attempt to replicate that particular strategy.
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Like Like Like! This kid said it all. The administrator should have been asking himself, hmm.. how do we replicate that?
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Common Core isn’t just about informational texts. Students
should have a 70/30 split across the school day meaning that they
should still be reading Literature in English since they get
informational texts in all their other classes. These standards are
much more aimed at the future our students are heading for instead
of being stuck in the past. Yes, they are a bit more difficult in
some areas, but I have seen my low students achieve these standards
with the right scaffolding. Common Core allows for novels and
anyone who has read the standards should see that many of the
skills needed can be easily taught while doing a novel. I really
find it troubling that people are seeing things in these standards
that don’t exist. Common Core is about challenging teachers to have
higher expectations for their students and to find ways to help
students reach where they need to be. Personally I feel that these
standards are great and that they allow me to help students be
better at communicating their own thoughts and ideas instead of the
gotcha only one right answer forum that NGSSS and FCAT provide.
Maybe this won’t fix everything, but what we’ve been doing isn’t
working and something needs to change.
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Just a parent here (& an educator of FL for the very young, but w/a degree in literature). I had imagined that the Common Core ELA was being implemented in most places with all sorts of overly-directional supplemental material that was causing teachers to make perhaps poor curriculum choices.
This post confuses me. The teacher sounds like she’s getting no direction at all, & making, to me, counterintuitive curriculum choices. Why, for example, would a CC emphasis on ‘close reading and textual analysis’ result in choosing novel [or non-fiction] excerpts? The opposite would seem to be the case. One can give all sorts of assignments during the course of studying a novel, including close reading & textual analysis, & a cross-textual study can be made once 2 or 3 works have been studied. If you want to start off the year that way, do it on several short works or articles & expand the exercise to longer works as the year progresses.
I also found this article quote odd: “Students will be expected to make written arguments using specific evidence from reading assignments, often pulling together examples from multiple texts. No longer should teachers ask students to write solely based on their personal experience or opinion—arguing for or against school uniforms, for instance.”
Why on earth wouldn’t one have been doing both, & well before h.s.?
What really puzzles me is how a CCSS multiple-choice test could possibly assess a student’s ability to do either of these things.
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Spanish freelancer: People understand clearly that EVERYTHING will now depend upon outcomes on national tests of these “standards.” So, “standard” CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.9 reads, “Demonstrate knowledge of eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century foundational works of American literature, including how two or more texts from the same period treat similar themes or topics.” People imagine what a test item on this standard might look like so that they can give kids work to prepare them for the all-important test. In this case, a test item might contain two short excerpts from nineteenth-century works that deal with a similar topic and a writing assignment asking students to compare the treatment of the topic in the two selections. So, for example, students might be given a letter describing Abraham Lincoln’s reaction to a slave auction that he witnessed in New Orleans and a chapter describing a slave auction taken from William Wells Brown’s novel Clotell. The passages will be brief because passages included in test items will be brief, and the writing assignment will be modeled as closely as possible on the released items from the test and scored using the rubrics for scoring writing from Smarter Balanced or PARCC. This is one of the ways in which the standards and the tests end up driving what is taught and how–end up determining curricula and pedagogy.
And, of course, the two passages will be presented to the students at random and out of any context, and the student writing produced will be judged on whether it meets the criteria of the rubric. The more closely that writing follows the expected formula, the better it will be judged to be.
Now, the writers of the “standards” might not have INTENDED such a consequence. Perhaps they meant that students would read a wide variety of foundational works of eighteenth-, ninteenth-, and early-twentieth-century American literature.Some of the “standards” are extremely broad, and others (e.g., “CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.8.2b Use an ellipsis to indicate an omission”) are extremely narrow–the “standards” are all over the place in that regard. However, as long as high-stakes tests are being given on these “standards,” people are going to train kids in the answering of test items–to the extent possible, that’s what instruction in English is going to become–test prep. Yes, the material ancillary to the CCSS in ELA says, specifically, that kids should read works of various lengths, that they should do extended reading in particular knowledge domains–they say a LOT of things. But what matters is that there is a long list of skills that will be tested, and every curriculum coordinator and every curriculum developer is going to put together a curriculum that “covers” the list–that whips through a bunch of activities keyed to those standards, checking them off, one by one. Well, we’ve “done” standard CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.8.2b. Now we’re going to “do” standard CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.8.3. Anyone who knew anything at all about what happens when one issues these standards would have predicted that. I did. I knew exactly what sort of crap pedagogy and curricula they were going to engender.
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Thank you for your detailed response, Mr Shepherd. As usual, the devil is in the details… although I would have to find fault with the basics, not the details, in the standard you cite, “Demonstrate knowledge of eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century foundational works of American literature, including how two or more texts from the same period treat similar themes or topics.” Sounds like a description of a 2-semester college course. And am I to understand that (in keeping with ‘standards– NOT curriculum’), one has not even a hint of what the promulgators consider ‘foundational works’?… a student is therefore expected to have learned during one year [or even 4 yrs] of hs English what characterizes ’18th-, 19th- and early 20thc foundational works’? (if such a categorization is even possible, which I highly doubt)… yegods!
I had hoped to conclude that perhaps the standards themselves, if not the wrongheaded implementation, had some merit. You have proved me wrong.
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The business about students no longer writing based on their personal experience or opinion is a response to something in the Publishers’ Criteria document that accompanies the CCSS in ELA. The authors of the new “standards” noticed that a lot of lousy writing assignments were being given to kids on NCLB-inspired tests that asked students to state and support some opinion based on their own experience rather than on anything substantive that they had learned (“You are a student at Horace Mann High School. The school board is considering requiring students at your school to wear uniforms. Write a letter to the board explaining why students should or should not be required to wear uniforms, and support your opinion with three reasons.” The authors of the “standards” had good intentions–to keep kids from doing that sort of insipid writing about insipid topics, and they hit upon the notion of having them write, instead, not about their personal experiences and opinions but in response to texts, citing evidence from those. Now, that’s not a bad thing–until one makes it into yet another across-the-board, invariant formula for responding to a test item, for one ends up replacing one set of awful writing assignments with another–formulaic five-paragraph themes (introduce the question, summarize the opinion and evidence given by the author of the first excerpt, summarize the opinion and evidence given by the author of the second excerpt, and then tell which you think is correct and why).
Good writing does not come from teaching kids abstract formulas for producing compositions. It comes about when students grapple in writing with real issues that they have learned a lot about and have opinions about. A curriculum that moves from one abstract skill (comparing two opinions from two different pieces) to another rather than concentrating on topics of study can be put together only by someone who has forgotten altogether WHY WE READ and WHY WE WRITE. Imagine a course on becoming a guitar maker, but instead of anyone actually building a guitar in the course, all that the students do is learn how to use a micrometer, then learn how to use a fret hammer, then learn how to use a hand router. That’s the equivalent of what a standards-driven curriculum ends up looking like if those standards are a list of abstract skills.
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You got it…..if we can see and predict this, why can’t the powers that be?
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Robert Shepard,
Would you post the publisher”s criteria for CCSS?
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Here’s the revised version of the Publishers’ Criteria for ELA, Grades 3-12:
Click to access Publishers_Criteria_for_3-12.pdf
There’s a similar doc for K-2, and there’s also one of these for math.
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The previous draft of these guidelines is here:
Click to access publisherscriteria-literacy-grades3-12.pdf
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Spanish and French freelancer, there are new writing assessments going along with all this, so some of the standards will be assessed in that way. I’m also looking for additional info to help answer your other questions.
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http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/12/questionable-quality-of-the-common-core-english-language-arts-standards
Not sure if that link took, but I did find this quite on heritage.org which might partially answer your question.
“Common Core’s damage to the English curriculum is already taking shape. Anecdotal reports from high school English teachers indicate that the amount of informational or nonfiction reading they are being told to do in their classroom is 50 percent or more of their reading instructional time—and that they will have time only for excerpts from novels, plays, or epic poems if they want students to read more than very short stories and poems.”
I was unable to find references, but I can tell you that in some trainings by state common-core coaches, teachers have been told to use excerpts because novels take too long. This certainly may not have been the intention when the standards were written, but it is what a lot of teachers are hearing and feeling tied down to.
There are a couple of other reasons a teacher may be using text excerpts. One is the pressure of the writing assessments. Teachers know their students will be required to read and respond to text excerpts, so they want to get their students prepared by having them read and respond to text excerpts in class. It’s sad, but that’s the environment of fear that has been created.
Another thing that may have some teachers confined to excerpts is a requirement by administration to utilize a specific textbook their district has purchased. If your job requires you to use that particular textbook, administer the tests that come with it, and turn the results of those tests in, you’re pretty much stuck. Stuck using only excerpts because that’s what’s in the core-aligned textbook, and you have no time left for anything else.
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I think what’s also in play is the more-is-better boulder that acquires layers as it rolls downhill.
State: You need to do X.
District: (scrambling because state handed this down with zero time to implement) Hmm, if we need to do X, we’ll do 5X to make sure.
Principal: Don’t shoot the messenger, but we have to do 10X (my school is not going to be the laughing stock of the district) by yesterday!
Teachers: If they need 10X and my job now depends on it, then hopefully 20X will suffice (crosses fingers)…
It happens all the time. And no one, apparently, thinks to ask “is doing X really a wise thing to do in the first place?” Also, this is the simplified version since it doesn’t take into account misinformation that infects the whole system (ask 10 people at district for a definitive answer and you will get 10 completely different definitive answers).
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Well said, Cynewulf. Happens all the time! A game of operator gets played in which what started as a decent-enough idea, but a nuanced one, loses all nuance and becomes a silly, rigid, across-the-board mandate, pushing out sane approaches. Experience has taught us that standards-and-testing-based systems inevitably have such a result. NCLB spawned a lot of REALLY AWFUL curricula and pedagogy based on modeling of test items and silly interpretations of standards, and from what I’ve seen so far, CCSS is even worse. I have seen a lot of CCSS lessons that were complete garbage because a nuanced idea from, say, the Publishers’ Criteria had been picked up, stripped of its nuance, and turned into an invariant lesson component or requirement by some bone-headed district curriculum person or editor at an educational publishing house.
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So, the fault cannot always be laid at the feet of the complete amateurs who wrote the CCSS in ELA. We start with TERRIBLE standards, and then THOSE get made worse in translation.
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Thanks for the link, bookworm. But I wonder whether Stotsky is reading too much into the CCSS emphasis on informational texts. I looked at the actual stds, & altho they specify an increasing proportion of informational:literary texts as the grades progress, they also say: “Because the ELA classroom must focus on literature (stories, drama, and poetry) as well as literary nonfiction, a great deal of informational reading in grades 6–12 must take place in other classes if the NAEP assessment framework is to be matched instructionally.” (cite http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/introduction/key-design-consideration) In other words, CCSS-ELA may be saying, in science class one analyzes a writer’s conclusions vs one’s own lab info; in history class one analyzes a writer’s opinion vs one’s own reading of the historical facts, etc.
Could it be that we are seeing here just another hasty implementation of CCSS, wherein the non-ELA disciplines decide that English class must cover everything?
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Here’s a Catch-22: The problems with the new “standards” in ELA are pretty technical, and they require a lot of explaining, but NO ONE, it seems, has the patience to listen to the explanations–no one in the reformer camp, for certain. When one starts to explain why a particular standard is bone-headed or why it will lead to awful pedagogy and curricula, and especially when one begins to describe examples of that to them, their eyes glaze over. They don’t want to hear the details. And so, the problems don’t get addressed, even though these problems are enormous. Basically, we’ve had no discussion, no debate, and no vetting of these putative standards, and we’re not having any yet, either. I have had a dozen teachers tell me about trainings they have attended in which they were specifically told that discussion of the merits of the standards or of the scripted lesson formats they were being handed were NOT open for discussion. These “trainings” are one way: Teachers are being told what test prep they now have to do under the new CCSS regime.
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I’d be willing to be that the same excuse is used for this that was used to avoid the issue of poverty: There’s nothing we can do about it, and we’re not going to waste time “admiring the problem.” We need to work on what we can actually have an impact on, so let’s get down to business…
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These people don’t recognize that there are alternatives–competing, voluntary standards that are adapted continuously in light of actual practice, with actual, differing students, in light of vigorous, high-profile national debate about particular curricular and pedagogical practices in specific parts of particular domains in the English language arts. Those people who refuse, at the local level, to encourage dissent and debate about these matters are collaborators with an invasion force that has taken over our schools, and they should be treated as the collaborators that they are.
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At our common core training session this summer, the opening session was actually a list of what the training was and was not. Essentially, we were told up front it was NOT a forum for asking questions about cc or PARCC. We were given an email address for that purpose. Kid you not.
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If students are just supposed to read nonfiction, I vote for excerpts from Reign of Error and Radical (Michelle Rhee’s book). This should result in critical thinking, interesting debates and it covers a real life situation for the students. They can take this information off to their math class and work on analyzing all those test score reports. Let’s empower our students with information!
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And in those math classes, they might start crunching some of the numbers having to do with wealth and income disparity in the United States. And they might look at correlations between poverty and educational outcomes. And they might figure out how much SIX TRILLION is–the amount that the U.S. spent on mostly no-bid contracts for the “wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Six trillion is the number of seconds in 190,133 years.
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No, they didn’t read that NY Times article….they just read an excerpt of it. I know, not funny. Really sad. I’m a public school teacher and a mom. Each day that I learn more about the Common Core, I think more about having my children go to a private or charter school that is still free from this horrible stuff. Or just move to Sweeden.
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Allison, if you are moving, go to Finland, not Sweden. That would be a big mistake.
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Technically, a charter school is a public school that isn’t under jurisdiction of the LEA, but is supposed to follow state rules.I expect that if the state has adopted the CC, the charter school has to use the CC. If charter schools in states that have adopted the CC are not following them, then I would question why they are able to do that, because the CC is coming down from the state, not the LEA. In my town, charter schools received RttT money.
But as many have mentioned on this blog, charter schools aren’t really public schools, they are subsidized private schools so maybe the state gives them a pass on the CC.
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