AFT President Weingarten on PISA 2012 International Results
AFT’s Weingarten: “The crucial question we face now is whether we have the political will to move away from the failed policies and embrace what works in high-performing countries so that we can reclaim the promise of public education.”
WASHINGTON—Statement by American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 results:
“Today’s PISA results drive home what has become abundantly clear: While the intentions may have been good, a decade of top-down, test-based schooling created by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top—focused on hyper-testing students, sanctioning teachers and closing schools—has failed to improve the quality of American public education. Sadly, our nation has ignored the lessons from the high-performing nations. These countries deeply respect public education, work to ensure that teachers are well-prepared and well-supported, and provide students not just with standards but with tools to meet them—such as ensuring a robust curriculum, addressing equity issues so children with the most needs get the most resources, and increasing parental involvement. None of the top-tier countries, nor any of those that have made great leaps in student performance, like Poland and Germany, has a fixation on testing like the United States does.
“The crucial question we face now is whether we have the political will to move away from the failed policies and embrace what works in high-performing countries so that we can reclaim the promise of public education.”
After the 2009 PISA report, Weingarten visited the top-performing nations of Japan, China, Singapore, Finland, Canada and Brazil to talk with teachers, principals, students and government officials about what makes their systems work for students, teachers and parents. Many of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s recommendations informed the AFT’s Quality Education Agenda and its Reclaiming the Promise of Public Education principles.
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Heard it on NPR this morning, as predicted.
“stay the course” were the final words of the report.
Does Weingarten consider Common Core to be among those “failed policies”?
see my comment to Robert below
Deep sigh (and not of relief)
Robert—come on. Seriously. It can’t be all or nothing. Better to keep public school with a tweaked CCSS, then lose it all.
JB,
Do you have any reason to believe that “they” (whoever they are…same people who invented it?) will tweak the ccss in any substantive way?
I have heard it all before.
Been told to wait for a tweak to NCLB since the very beginning.
Now we have RTTT and the CCSS.
Some tweaks.
Joanna, do you think, for some reason, that public schooling is tied to CCSS? What you are saying is not at all clear. In what way would we “lose it all” if we were to do away with these amateurish national standards [sic]?
Joanna, it’s the folks who promulgated the CCSS who made them “all or nothing.” They are the ones who foisted THEIR BULLET LIST on everyone in the country, thereby overruling every teacher, administrator, curriculum coordinator, and curriculum developer in the country with regard to what would be the learning progressions and the outcomes to be measured in the various ELA and mathematics domains.
If they HADN’T made these all or nothing–if they had allowed people to use their own judgment, to submit the standards to learned critique and to adapt them as they saw fit–in other words, if they had made the standards voluntary, not mandatory–then they would have made a genuine contribution to an ongoing discussion. But instead, they said, “End of discussion. Here are your standards. We have made these decisions for you. We don’t give a #@&*#$@*@$*(!!! what you think. No expertise matters, henceforth, except that which we have claimed for ourselves.”
Absurdly, they gave states the choice of adding a few standards of their own–as if adding standards were all that one would have to do in order to create coherent alternate learning progressions based upon alternative ideas about what constitute best practices in particular domains. That’s like telling people that from this day forward, they all have to wear the same national uniform on every occasion, day and night, but they can choose their own earrings and necklaces (as long as those are submitted for approval).
And so, the unelected folks at Achieve basically said to the entire education community–your ideas about learning progressions and outcomes, your knowledge, your expertise, DO NOT MATTER ANYMORE. The only people whose ideas matter in these areas from this day forward are King David Coleman and Queen Susan Pimentel–whom we have appointed absolute monarchs of education in the English language arts.
If we hadn’t had the intervening period of mandatory state-issued standards and tests during the dark days of NCLB, it would be quite clear to everyone that that’s what just happened. But the period of mandatory state standards and testing inured many people to having a distant authority impose enormous constraints on possible curricula and pedagogical approaches. If Achieve and the Feds had tried to do what they have just done without that process of getting people used to centralized command and control, they would have been shouted down in short order. No one would have stood for it, and for OBVIOUS REASONS.
Well, those reasons are STILL obvious.
“I believe in standardizing automobiles, not people.” –Albert Einstein
“There’s no bullet list like Stalin’s bullet list.” –Edward Tufte
Alright. Let me give some context because I do realize I have not given any back story.
NC is getting slammed right now with stuff from our GA. New tax laws, a third grade reading program modeled after Jeb Bush’s in Florida (where 55% of our third graders are targeted as potentially not passing EOGs and thus not passing third grade).
CCSS is the least of our worries.
I spend hours worrying, reading, writing trying to figure out how my son’s adult world will be as good if not better than the one I grew up in. The Common Core came about in a questionable manner—we implemented Race to the Top—-but those funds are going to be spent down and our state has a ton of other things to think about other than CCSS. Our teachers are not bothered by CCSS in comparison with the other things our General Assembly is doing right now.
I appreciate all you have to say. . .always. It’s just that sometimes I come to this blog hoping for new insight and possible direction, and I end up knowing that you hate CCSS and Duane hates standardized testing, and Mercedes showed the money corruption. . .and yet we still have no answers for moving forward.
I am hoping and looking to find creative ways to move forward in a positive direction for my children.
I am asking the most verbal and thoughtful on this blog to please consider possibilities like that. Regard answers that are EVERYTHING you would like to see as far-off goals, and consider goals in the immediate future.
I have moved CCSS to the least of my worries because in my state I can tell that to NOT do so would prove a waste of energy. What I can affect is the wording in mission statements (I have an ear in Raleigh who matters and I think these small steps are HUGE in terms of what we can do).
So when I say lose everything, I say CCSS is a side show. The real battle is going on in front of me and I want parents to notice. Our General Assembly in NC, desperate for power, is doing things that are dismantling what has taken decades to build (laws from 1941, 1971, 1986 all gone in one swoop of a surreptitious budget addendum).
I get it. I get what you are saying. But I have had to prioritize. And I wonder if maybe all those who care about public school should prioritize too.
Or maybe you are the CCSS outspoken guy and that’s what i can expect. And tha’ts fine too. I just thought I might get a little more out of you if I tried.
Weingarten visited Finland, made a beautiful video report about their excellent system, and then almost immediately embraced the Common Core. She also received $5 million dollars from the Gates Foundation. She can’t possibly be against high stakes testing and tying teacher evaluations to student testing and continue to be for “getting it right.” (the Common Core that is)
I know she is your friend, Diane, but at this point she has lost all credibility.
Weingarten has done almost as much as the Gates Foundation, the Obama administration, the Bush administration, et al. to drive the NCLB and RttT policies with her “solution-oriented unionism” jive.
AFT’s Weingarten: “The crucial question we face now is whether we have the political will to move away from the failed policies and embrace what works in high-performing countries so that we can reclaim the promise of public education.”
You have a political role – now is the time to be brave and bold…challenge the reform movement – speak to the media, speak to parents, embrace educators…lobby, lobby, lobby
Weingarten is an unconscionable hypocrite: while she doles out press releases to mollify the teachers she ostensibly represents, she simultaneously touts the Common Corporate Standards – a vehicle for high stakes exams, teacher firings and school closings – and gotcha teacher evaluation checklists.
Her words are meaningless.
Don’t listen to what she says; watch what she does.
I don’t think there will ever be an admission that any reform idea failed. Part of it is probably sunk cost fallacy at this point. They’ve poured money into this for a decade and in my opinion they’re emotionally attached to it. “Stay the course” is a really tempting route once you’ve spent billions.
A lot of the promoters are also really powerful (wealth or political power) and we just don’t see a whole lot of humility in our business and political “leaders”.
I keep going back to how Gates “admitted” there was too much standardized testing, in an op ed. It wasn’t an admission at all. He simply blamed states and public school districts for screwing up his brilliant idea. He actually used my state (Ohio) as an example of stupid state legislators fumbling the proper EXECUTION of “assessments”.
They can also just move the goalposts or change the measure. I read Duncan as often as I can and he’s currently promoting high school graduation rates as proof of success. It worries me because at-risk kids here (rural Ohio) tell me “credit recovery” programs are gamed, but I suppose it’ll take years for that to be discovered or documented.
Ms. Weingarten, thank you for calling out the summative testing and for pointing out that over a decade of the testing-and-standards regime inaugurated by NCLB has led to no progress by the education deformers’ own preferred measures.
Now, surely someone as bright and experienced as you are can understand how
dramatically an amateurish set of national standards [sic] like the CCSS in ELA constrains and distorts the possibilities for ELA curricula and pedagogy, making impossible the development of many, many sound ideas in both areas that happen to be incompatible with David Coleman and Susan Pimentel’s particular bullet list
hackneyed and unexamined the CCSS in ELA are
the CCSS in ELA seem to have been written in complete ignorance of what we now know about language acquisition
educational publishers are treated these amateurish standards [sic] AS the curriculum and beginning every project by making a spreadsheet with the standards [sic] in one column and the lessons where those are “covered” in the next
the prior restraints on curricular and pedagogical development instantiated in these standards [sic] prevent hundreds of thousands of professionals–cognitive scientists, linguists, literature and writing professors, education professors, curriculum designers, etc., from developing and getting a hearing in the marketplace for alternative curricular and pedagogical ideas
the ELA standards [sic] encourage skills-based, content-agnostic and often content-free education and thus curricular incoherence
the standards were bought and paid for by folks interested in creating and/or maintaining monopoly positions in the educational materials market–people who needed national standards in order to create markets at a scale at which smaller competitors with innovative materials could not compete (Arne Duncan’s Chief of Staff was blunt about this. She wrote in the Harvard Business Review blog that the purpose of the new standards was to create national markets for products that could be brought to scale.)
And surely someone as bright and as motivated by concern as you are, Ms. Weingarten, must cringe when you read particular ELA standards [sic] in the CCSS and see how they instantiate particular unwarranted, unscientific, ignorant, hackneyed assumptions about learning in particular domains or seem to have been assigned to particular grade levels totally at random. And surely you understand that if a couple of amateurs like Coleman and Pimentel had presumed to write new standards [sic] for the medical profession based upon their perusal of the 1858 edition of Gray’s Anatomy, they would have long ago been laughed off the national stage.
So why do you persist in defending the indefensible? Is it because, setting the standards [sic] themselves aside, there are a few good ideas in the Publishers’ Criteria document? If so, shouldn’t those ideas be subject to national debate, and shouldn’t those pushing them be no more than a couple of voices engaged in that debate? Did the rest of us miss the news that David Coleman and Susan Pimentel had been appointed absolute monarchs of education in the English language arts in the United States?
And does it not bother you, since you represent TEACHERS, that in promoting this bullet list of standards [sic], you are taking away the autonomy that teachers once enjoyed whereby they could determine, based on their professional judgments and knowledge of their students, what outcomes for the learning in their classrooms to measure?
And does it not bother you, since you share with your constituents, an interest in putting kids first, that KIDS DIFFER BUT THE STANDARDS [sic] DO NOT?
cx: “are treated” s/b “are treating”; “[sic] should appear after the word standards in paragraph 9.
Robert–
I don’t see CCSS going away. It’s not what I hear teachers having a problem with. Maybe there will the chance to tweak it; maybe a chance to examine that they were adopted, perhaps, somewhat disingenuously, but I think it is too far into the game to turn completely away from that. Even Linda Darling Hammond (if I recall) predicted (advocated) that at this point completely abandoning them would be wasteful.
I think we are at a critical point where instead of shouting about CCSS continuously, it can/should be one area where some middle ground can be found.
I ask you to be quiet at this moment (in response to what I am typing) and just thoughtfully consider it for a bit (then get back to me later, after you’ve had time to consider it). If we expect a middle ground from “opposition” to public school, then we should expect to let something be a workable point. In her previous book, Diane emphasizes the need for a rich curriculum as a starting point for true reform. It seems to me CCSS is a starting point for that.
The problem now is to shine the light on the fact that stating that our schools are failures, is really stating that our society at large is a failure. And that good leadership does not proclaim foregone conclusions. I really do believe there is a desperate attempt to appeal to the populace’s sense of entitlement, in the wake of the recession lows, and we are hearing it from both parties, have seen it in action, and need to protect our schools from it. In my opinion, having been asking and asking and reading and listening, CCSS is a workable part of this equation.
Please consider that, in order to make productive efforts at truly doing what is right for our schools. I don’t mean CCSS with a celebration of its questionable starting point, but a sober acknowledgement that unless shouting matches are to be the norm, there has to be points that are workable from both sides.
The Hitler analogies, while illustrating a lack of democratic process, are extreme and probably not productive.
Just consider it. Don’t react. Wait. Think. Ask a few teachers.
Joanna, if an unelected agency had promulgated national science standards that said that fire was the release of phlogiston, would people have a responsibility to be quiet about that simply because those standards [sic] weren’t likely to go away?
Precisely what did NOT happen with these standards [sic] is a process by which they were submitted to critique. Such a critique is LONG OVERDUE!!!!
JB,
“Maybe there will the chance to tweak it;…”
You know, those of us who fought NCLB from the beginning (citing things like “100% proficient by 2014” and other absurdities contained in that mess) were often told it would be “tweaked” later and that we shouldn’t “throw out the baby with the bath water”, and that “it is all well intentioned” so we should “find the middle ground”.
Things only got worse.
The ONLY thing good that can come of having these national standards [sic] is that they provide a single target against which learned critique can be leveled. Over time, it is possible that such critiques will bring needed changes to them. However, we shall all have to wait, of course, until the Politburo meets again in five years to write standards [sic] that everyone else must slavishly follow.
Ang ~
Thousands & millions of us called NCLB Junk! It remained Junk and RTTT was continued with more $$$ attached to it. Anyone, and I mean anyone who knows children, how they learn, abilities and disabilities, child development….KNEW RIGHT FROM THE BEGINNING THAT NCLB WOULD NOT WORK – 100% by 2014? Laughable! Not funny, though, because generations of children and their teachers are irreparably harmed by this JUNK! However, the Zillionaires and their bottom feeders make $Zill off the NCLB & RTTT victims. Due to the scramble of profit$$$, the Zillionairs and their groupie bottom feeders will not let go of the last $ with their grubby hands, in spite of their failures and the fact that kids are not being educated under their mandates.
Many of us predicted it, spoke up about it, wrote about it, risked careers, did the right thing anyway, can’t look away, can’t ignore it and are not surprised by the test results.
This will not end anytime soon. Now Gates’ giant combines are crossing the universities where the same Junk will be mandated.
He who has the most $$$$$$$$$$$$…Wins!
(Clue: not the kids, teachers and parents).
About Randi Weingarten: I respect Dr. Ravitch’s opinion about supporting her friend. I keep searching for educational information to support RW, but I am continuously reminded by the connections between CCSS, Gates, $$$ – yet, speaking in support of children and teachers. Can so many of us be so wrong about Randi?
I just want to find a way to move forward.
JB – You said in a later comment: “I just want to find a way forward”….
look at other issues of injustice coming down through the centuries…. “compromise” ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS meant that in ‘trying to find a way forward”, the party with the least power/klout, gave up much more than the party that had the power/resources etc…
How do you find a way forward in a system that is DESIGNED to disenfranchise certain portions of our student populations?
How do you find a way forward in a system that is DESIGNED to keep certain people in certain stations in life?
How do you find a way forward in a system that IDENTIFIES children as units of economic production and as profit centres?
How do you find a way forward in a system that is CONTROLLED by people with power and money?
You dont – you sidestep or over throw that system and rebuild from the ground up….
Tweaking with this system will not bring any meaningful change to our public school students… Buckminster Fuller recognised that when he said: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. To change something, you create a new model and make the old one obsolete”
and this issue in public education, is a micro example of what is happening in /what is the probelm on the macro – if you want to understand this on the broader level, I’d suggest you listen to this (long) piece: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9FDIne7M9o
Sahila:
Ok. So what does that new system look like???
From what you are saying, there is no reason to discuss public education anymore, only to sit back and wait for the “new system.” As things are going, that new system is being designed by folks who want it privatized. And those without a vision for NOT letting that happen are hurting more than helping.
I disagree. I am not that jaded and I have not given up on public school.
My energy matters. What I do every day matters. I am working to help and save my private schools and I will not apologize for being determined or optimistic in doing so.
What is this new thing you speak of? It certainly isn’t going to come about by looking backwards.
I will not subscribe to the nihilism that has led us down this garden path to begin with. No way.
Correction typo: save my PUBLIC schools.
From being private.
I really disagree with your sense that all is lost if we do not go forward with CCSS as a starting point. In the early ’90’s, my state (NJ) issued core curriculum standards in every subject area. They were developed over years, based on expert educational research, and were really quite excellent. Over the ensuing decade, many school systems in my region (metro-NYC) adapted and aligned their curriculum to meet the standards. In my subject area (world languages), by the early 2000’s, only 20% or so of schools had begun full implementation, but there were innovative immersion programs going on, & much cross-district curriculum-sharing was having good results.
The financial collapse of 2008, combined with our governor’s having bought into Common Core & high-stakes teacher evaln, has resulted in NJ narrowing its focus to Math and ELA. The World Language Stds stand for the time being. But the effect of CCSS has been that any district with a pinched budget feels free to withdraw from everything but CCSS Math & ELA (& now the added VAM program); in fact, they are pressed to devote all their budget to the associated tests & the digital platform necessary to administer the tests online. It is only the wealthy districts such as mine which are free to pursue the NJ core curriculum in all subjects. In less-pricey districts nearby, nearly everyone has eliminated early-language-learning– including the Millburn Schools, which long held top state honors for its schools– apparently deciding this was an area they could cut. The pre-1990 status now prevails.
My point is: each state must develop standards appropriate to its own population; there is a multitude of state stds out there to borrow & work from; governors share them freely. And each locality must choose how best to adapt and align the state curriculum to their own needs. This is the way of a democracy. Fed- & state-mandated testing to top-down standards remove all control from the voters who pay to support their community schools.
If the voters in your state are convinced that they must at all costs cut public school funding to the bone & perhaps dispense altogether with state-supported schools, this issue must be met head-on. I don’t believe such voters will be mollified by CCSS for long, especially given the costs associated with its adoption.
French and Spanish:
Thank you for your thoughts.
I will continue to contemplate.
According to a British study completed earlier this year, the results of PISA are meaningless in that the tests are not administered under uniform conditions, nor is the tested population similar in each country. For example, students in some nations only take part of the test while in others, students might take the entire test or portions. Other nations might test their top one percent, others their top ten percent, while the U.S. tests everyone. It makes no sense that people in power place so much confidence in these meaningless tests.
Here are John Jerrim’s papers on this subject:
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the test results can be spun their way by the deformers whatever those results might be. If U.S. students had dominated the rankings, they would say, “See, NCLB has been working. Now, we need to do more of that.” If U.S. students’s scores had plummetted, they would say, “See, we need higher standards and better tests NOW.” And–this option wins the propaganda prize, since the results are inconclusive, they are going to say, “NCLB was a great start. But clearly we didn’t go far enough with these reforms. The great school systems are the ones with NATIONAL standards and tests.”
I suspect that there will be a LOT of public hand-wringing by the deformers about these middle-of-the-road scores. “The Asians are swamping us,” they will say, in their new, improved version of 20th-century “red menace” propaganda, despite the fact that the governments that instituted the totalitarian school systems of Asia are now saying, themselves, that their systems produce obedient do-bots but not the creative, independent, intrinsically motivated thinkers needed in a rapidly changing world, in a world in which, in fact, not just change but the rate of acceleration of change is increasing exponentially.
The Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth can now hold up the People’s Republic of China as the model that we should emulate. Great.
International comparisons like PISA offer some information that no one should draw sweeping conclusions from. For me, the most interesting information PISA provides is not in the contrast with East Asian nations, but with Canada and also the internal contrasts between Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Florida. Both Massachusetts and Florida have had long standing state level reform initiatives and very different outcomes on PISA. Is this worth study? Do the major education initiatives like RTTT draw anything from the Canadian experience? These are questions I would like researchers and policy makers to consider.
superb questions
Let’s take bets on which pundit uses the scores to explain away income inequality in the US.
It’s not that we have a system rigged to favor the wealthy or that our politicians are captured, it’s that our students and thus our workforce are stupid and lazy!
Problem solved! The demise of the middle class is actually the FAULT of the middle class.
Well said, Chiara!
For a moment, assume that we could just put a complete pause, freeze, time out, moratorium – you get the picture – on high-stakes standardized testing, evaluating teachers using test scores, value-added measure applications, untested growth models, ranking schools and teachers, funding based on membership in RTTT, curriculum materials labeled with the good housekeeping seal of CCSS, – – even put a freeze on the NCLB/RTTT and any federal oversight except for civil rights and protecting rights of students with disabilities — wave the magic wand and make it all go away… THEN
What would you (staunch opponents, not the ones who think they just need some work) think about the Common Core Standards (NOT “the curriculum” – NOT the “modules” – or anything else that is being linked to CCSS)?
As a stand alone “This is what we want kids to know and be able to do” standards, would you suggest (sorry this is multiple choice):
1) No standards at all. Period.
2) Only use standards written at the local district
3) Only usestandards written state by state
4) Only use standards from professional organizations (NCTM, NCTE, NSTA, etc.)
5) Write optional “national” standards but completely start over.
6) Put the CCSS in front of teachers and academics and tell them to edit at will – in other words keep CCSS but revise them significantly
7) Leave the CCSS as is but empower local districts and states to tweak / edit / add / omit as they choose?
What we need are competing standards that vie with one another in a free marketplace of ideas. I would support the creation of a national portal for ongoing innovation in the areas of standards, curricular frameworks, and pedagogical approaches and the funding, via grants with no strings attached, of many COMPETING groups of experts in each domain covered by the ELA standards, the publishing on the portal of the ongoing work of these groups, and giving individual schools the autonomy to choose from among these competing standards and to adopt or adapt them as they see fit. In that way, we would get real innovation in English language arts curricula and pedagogy.
Milton put it well in the Areopagitica, almost four centuries ago:
“Let her [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”
The key phrase is “in a free and open encounter.”
Jere,
Read Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” to understand why the concept of educational standards has no basis in logical epistemological and ontological thought. If the base is not logically solid all results/consequences lack validity (as shown by Wilson).
I’m all for a curriculum for each subject/grade level etc. . . . Curriculum is different from standards (which imply measurement, measurement of the teaching and learning process which is a logical impossibility).
Think about this from Wilson:
“It requires an enormous suspension of rational thinking to believe that the best way to describe the complexity of any human achievement, any person’s skill in a complex field of human endeavour, is with a number that is determined by the number of test items they got correct. Yet so conditioned are we that it takes a few moments of strict logical reflection to appreciate the absurdity of this.”
Duane, what constitutes a “standard” in any given domain of procedural or world knowledge definitely does need to be examined and continually reexamined. The conceptualization of “standard” is, of course, itself a fiat, and in the case of the CCSS, that conceptualization was, clearly, not given any scrutiny whatsoever. Until the essential work of deciding what, exactly, we are going to mean by “standard” when applying that notion to particular learnings is done, one simply cannot make a judgment with regard to whether the notion of a “standard” is coherent. And, of course, that process of examining what we mean by a “standard,” what a “standard” is to look like for particular learnings, is going to be a hermeneutic circle. Thus the need to keep continually revisiting our notions about that.
A lot of people, even ones in positions of great power and authority in education, seem not to understand that the promulgation of standards is a selection from within a vastly larger possible design space and therefore, necessarily, a kind of violence.
When I say that the conceptualization of what was to constitute a standard in each of the domains covered by the CCSS clearly was not given any scrutiny, I base that conclusion on the fairly obvious fact that the CCSS were simply an attempted rationalization–a making uniform–of existing state standards, with a few general, overarching ideas tacked onto the bullet list (tacked on, that is, in the appendices and in the Publishers’ Criteria). If any thought had been given, generally, to what a standard should look like in a particular domain–in the learning of vocabulary, for example–then given what we know about the acquisition of vocabulary, those standards would have been very, very differently conceived. And the same is true in all the other domains. Did anyone involved with the CCSS ever stop to consider the question of whether it was appropriate for almost every standard in ELA to be a description of an abstract skill? Did anyone involved ever stop to consider that there are alternatives to that? I sincerely doubt it. Clearly, this task of creating standards was not approached with anything like the high seriousness that such a task required.
And, of course, making ANY set of standards mandatory and thereby stopping, dead, any further innovation there is an INSANE idea.
Some scholars warned that the lagging performance of American students would eventually lead to economic torpor. “Our economy has still been strong because we have a very good economic system that is able to overcome the deficiencies of our education system,” said Eric A. Hanushek, an economist at Stanford University. “But increasingly, we have to rely on the skills of our work force, and if we don’t improve that, we’re going to be slipping.”
I’m 51 and I’m old to remember when businesses actually trained people for specific jobs. When did specific skill training become the duty of the public? We hired a high school graduate 5 years ago and we trained her how to work as a law clerk. I didn’t expect her to come out of high school knowing how to do the specific job I needed, nor did I expect people in this county to pay for law office training.
Oh, and you know what other entity used to train people, back in the day? Labor unions. Yup! They had apprentice programs. Really! I’m not making this up! i was there!
Maybe the virulently anti-labor ed reform “movement” is a tad short-sighted? Perhaps? Where did all the workplace training go? Is this really a mystery?
You probably did require a fairly high degree of literecy from the high school graduate you hired. Is that legal of literecy required of all high school graduates?
“Is that legal of literecy required of all high school graduates?”
I don’t know. She did well in a small rural high school but we didn’t hire her on grades. We hired her on a writing sample and my bet that she would work well with the other people who work here and our clients. She does work well with others.
It might not have worked out. It might have been a bad investment for us. There’s risk in hiring. I accept that. I don’t know that the public should accept responsibility for all the risk of training while I take all the upside of a trained employee who is immediately producing.
I would like to see some numbers on where these jobs are going begging. My middle son has not (yet) gone to college (he’s 20) and he’s in a machinist training program at a local manufacturer here. They’re a Japanese company. They make components for Honda’s US production.
Why are some employers willing to train and some not? Are US companies falling down on investing in employees? Let’s talk about US companies and what THEY could do better, instead of allowing US companies to point at some other entity. Where is the accountability on that end?
I keep noticing how the argument focuses on jobs. It never was the purview of secondary education to provide job training. That is the realm of post-secondary universities and trade schools. High school exists to educate citizens to function in a democratic society. Keep corporate Amerika out of our shorts!
Chiara,
I think the willingness of business to train an employee is in part a function of how much training is required. Would your firm be willing to train your employee to read? Does it have anyone competent who could do that training?
I noticed that Salt Lake City Community College has for credit classes on arithmetic and a workshop on fractions. Would the local manufacturer train your son in arithmetic as part of the training process?
Exactly, Bill!!
You are so right-on with this, Chiara, as is Bill below. My engr husband says tech grads are in high dmand: when pressed, he means, people who for example know CADD, which is something one learns in a tech school, not in hs.
Weigarten needs to get her head out of the sand and stop blaming everyone else but her union and it’s members who are the front line of public education in this country. She’s a disgrace and should do everyone a favor and just get out. I’ve heard her tired song for too long and now it’s time for change.
Jay P Greene cites this article : “t is possible to do credible social scientific analyses of international test scores if you do something like a regression that systematically examines variation in performance within and across countries controlling for other variables. See for example work by Ludger Woessmann. But just eyeballing the top performers and making up stories about why they succeeded based on picking and choosing characteristics about them is pure quackery. As I’ve said before, best practices are the worst.” Fordham has been bashing Greene lately for his concern about selecting on the dependent variable when making over-generalizations …
reference to Woessmann: What accounts for international differences in student performance? : a re-examination using PISA data
Author: Thomas Fuchs; Ludger Woessmann
Publisher: Bonn, Germany : IZA, [2004]
Series: Discussion paper (Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit : Online),
Database: WorldCat
Summary:
“We use the PISA student-level achievement database to estimate international education production functions. Student characteristics, family backgrounds, home inputs, resources, teachers and institutions are all significantly related to math, science and reading achievement. Our models account for more than 85% of the between-country performance variation, with roughly 25% accruing to institutional variation. ”
Of course it will take some time to analyze the 2012-13 but the approach will be similar. Also, see Cornoldi’s articles on Italy and the PISA test data.
Ludger Woessmann
Why Students in Some Countries Do Better
International evidence on the importance of education policy
by LUDGER WOESSMANN
(this article is on Education Next — a Fordham Instiutute site. I point them out but I don’t necessarily recommend them… I read voraciously ……. thanks again Duane for Wilson’s articles
“It is possible to do credible social scientific analyses of international test scores . . . ”
If by social science you mean “pseudo” science, perhaps, but it’s all still a bunch of mental masturbation as all results are “vain and illusory” as proven by Wilson in his “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” at http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
So much noise with so little intelligible sound emanating around these completely invalid PISA results.
As Wilson says: “It requires an enormous suspension of rational thinking to believe that the best way to describe the complexity of any human achievement, any person’s skill in a complex field of human endeavour, is with a number that is determined by the number of test items they got correct. Yet so conditioned are we that it takes a few moments of strict logical reflection to appreciate the absurdity of this.”
Cultural habitus is harder to break than a nicotine habit!
I am not sure there is a “best way to describe the complexity of any human achievement”, but there are good ways.
I don’t know if I can agree with “good” ways. I would say that there are situationally proximate ways that reduce the complexity of life down to some metonymical level of understanding that always results in some form of fallacious reasoning about the human condition, though.
I don’t think Duane is concerned with just the complexity of life, but rather something more on the level of knowledge of algebra. I think there are good and useful ways to assess a person’s skill with this complex mathematical concept, while I believe Duane does not think that there is no way to meaningfully know if a person has the skills to, say, solve a small system of equations.
TE, you seem to be under the impression that the ability to solve a system of equations is a necessary attribute for the functioning of any citizen in the United States. I’ll have to rethink, then, whom I have chosen as my auto mechanic and my yoga instructor, for I doubt that they possess this essential skill.
Robert,
Not at all. I am under the impression that the ability to solve a system of equations is a good indicator of a person’s understanding of basic algebra, “a complex field of human endeavour” to use Wilson’s words.
TE,
You’re close to what I am saying. Basically, to attempt to use a simple number (or categorical name) to describe any learning is to deny the complexity that is that learning no matter what is learned. One “loses” the details of the teaching and learning process through such simplifications.
I presume that using a simple phrase like “fluent” or “beginning” or “advanced” are equally meaningless.
As for losing details through simplifications, that is of course true, but it is by making simplifications that we learn. The goal is to make simplifications that distort the reality the least.
That’s an excellent (hmmm, I first wrote good, then changed it, how apropo to this discussion) response, TheMorrigan. Well said. Allow me to rate it on a scale of 0-10, I give an 11. Oh wait, I can’t do that on the scale as it is defined?
Inherent problems, anyone???
“The goal is to make simplifications that distort the reality the least.”
I agree with TE’s abovementioned statement IF you mean that multiple and different types of “simplifications” must be used to gain approximate knowledge of a single learning that has or has not occurred.
Any and all learning, whether you believe so or not, is central to the human condition.
I wouldn’t call those words meaningless. They do give us approximate understanding in its situational context. But it world be foolish to believe that language is more than metaphor. Those words, as Burke explicitly states, “are not a thing.”
Duane might well correct me, but I think he would call these words meaningless as the are subject to all the criticisms that he often cites (as does using temperature scales to quantify the quality of hotness or coldness, but I digress).
One of my favorite statisticians is a baseball analyst named Bill James. He wrote that
“Baseball statistics are simplifications of much more complex realities. It may be unnecessary to say this because, of course, all human understanding is based on simplification of more complex realities. Economic theories are simplified images of how the economy works, replacing billions of complicated facts with a few broad generalizations. The same is true of psychological and sociological theories, it is true in medicine and astronomy. The search for understanding, wherever it roams, is a search for better simplifications-simplifications which explain more and distort less.”
I think Bill has it basically correct. Developing an understanding of the world must be different than simply reproducing the world.
Good response, TE.
Initially you claimed that there are “good” ways. But James would probably disagree. He would probably argue that we should always “search” for “better” ways. Doesn’t this conflict with your “good ways” already approach?
I don’t see any conflict at all.
“Good ways” suggests that you settle for what we have and are content with what we have; it is more of the destination is important, the end data result that provides us with meaning. Nothing more is needed kinda thing.
“Search for better” means that we shouldn’t settle for what we ALREADY have; the end and the continual search provide us with meaning. James sounds like a Steinbeck/Confucius kind of guy.
Why you do not see the difference: You might have conflated these two. Or you might have a rational explanation for the difference that you have not yet explained. Or I might not have explained myself well enough. Or you might have cherrypicked the passage and it offers more insight into your condition with the missing context. Or you simply misspoke when you said “good ways” and meant “better” ways. Or it might be a possibility that I have not thought of yet. Whatever the case, there is a difference whether you realize it or not.
Read the headline here for a basic understanding between “good” and the “search for better” and you will see why I cannot agree with your “good ways” approach: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/2013/12/01/obamacare_web_site_is_better_but_still_not_good_320965.html
My use of the word good is in contrast to Duane’s quote from Wilson where Wilson talks about the “best” way. I see no conflict between acknowledging that we have good ways to do something and searching for better ways to do the same thing.
Which passage are you concerned that I cherry picked?
I am not concerned that you cherrypicked. I am concerned that you did not read carefully, though.
Thank you for you time.
I suppose I was mislead by your statement that ” Or you might have cherrypicked the passage and it offers more insight into your condition with the missing context” meant that you were concerned that I had cherry-picked the passage. No doubt it was because of my lack of careful reading.
Yes, it is clear you missed the anaphora of ORs at the beginning of each sentence and all the conditional MIGHTs in each sentence and the topic sentence of unclear possibilities that ends in a colon.
But again, thank you for the discussion.
“Chiara,
I think the willingness of business to train an employee is in part a function of how much training is required. Would your firm be willing to train your employee to read? Does it have anyone competent who could do that training?”
Well, no we wouldn’t be willing to train an employee to read. But we have never had a problem with sufficient applicants for jobs. We get hundreds of inquiries when we advertise (admittedly infrequently), and there are only 30k people in this county.
My son took a paper and pencil math test when he went to apply at the Honda supplier. They’re running three shifts. I don’t think they lack for workers.
I object to how one-sided this analysis is. Are businesses actually finding it difficult to fill positions because US workers are stupid and lazy, or are businesses finding it difficult to fill positions because they don’t invest in employees/pay a decent wage? Why are we just accepting this assertion? It’s incredibly beneficial to US companies to assume the entire problem is with public schools or workers. Do US corps have NO role in this? What are they doing poorly? Maybe they’re lousy managers. Maybe they’re paying the top tier too much and the lower tiers too little. Maybe they’re shifting risk from the company to a public entity. I don’t get why we just swallow whatever they say whole.
or maybe they’re just looking to hire low-wage highly-educated people via H1-B visas
I wish Randi would put her money where her mouth is and advocate for action….
oh yes – I nearly forgot… it’s not HER money – its GATES and BROAD money and she’s taking EXACTLY the action that acceptance of that money obliges her to…. dont know which I want to do more – scream with frustration or throw up in disgust…
Asians outscored all other NCLB subgroups on every Pennsylvania System of School Assessment Test (Math, Reading, Science, and Writing). It must be the schools. http://www.portal.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt/community/school_assessments/7442
Or precisely who was tested. I sincerely doubt that any low-functioning special education students take the test in any nation but the U.S. They certainly are not allowed to do so in any Asian or European nation.
Asian immigration skews heavily to the educated professional classes and is not a representative sample. A person from an Indian shantytown has zero chance of coming here due to the self sufficency requirements for a green card post 1965. But you knew that , of course.
As for these intetnational results, of course there is heavy gamemenship when start involving one party states.
Pennsylvania, the state that has allowed its premier city’s ed system to fall into ruin, & which now is considering a bill (SB1085) to allow new charter schools to open without public approval…
As for standards: They are not magic. It’s implementation thta matters:
You’re right, “they are not magic”. They are a chimera, a duende, an illusion, a bump in the night, phantom, spectre, etc. . . .
Implementation doesn’t matter when something (standards) are nothing in reality.
And Common Core is not automatically “here to stay”:
Add Indiana to the Common Core unrest:
http://muscatinejournal.com/news/state-and-regional/indiana-gop-ready-to-ditch-common-core/article_dbeb5e93-b940-5967-b854-4648d36ec038.html
It all comes down to this:
We can have a situation in which a FREE PEOPLE chooses among COMPETING ideas about what is going to be taught to their students, when, where, why, and how, or
We can have an inflexible, distant, top-down, centralized bureaucratic authority MANDATE these matters for us.
I’ll take freedom and the innovation that comes with it ANY DAY. But evidently, there are plenty of people who are comfortable with having their thinking done for them by a small group chosen by members of the oligarchy.
Robert,
Have you read Gerry Spence’s “Give Me Liberty”?
I have not, Duane. I’ll look it up.
The key thing that people do not understand about the Common Core or ANY BULLET LIST OF STANDARDS is this:
Consider the vast design space of possible curricula and pedagogical approaches. A bullet list of standards, with its particular learning progression, is compatible with a very, very tiny part of that design space. Such a list effectively draws a box around some part of that space and says that everything else, no matter how warranted, is forbidden. It’s idiotic to do that.
AND here is more on the farce that is Common Core:
Add to this Common Core Validation Committee member Sandra Stotsky’s comment:
deutsch29: as always, presenting important pertinent information.
Off topic—
On your recommendation, I just bought John Owens’ recently published CONFESSIONS OF A BAD TEACHER. I started reading it today.
I strongly urge others to read your review and consider buying it as well:
Link: http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/11/25/book-review-john-owens-_%EF%BB%BFconfessions-a-bad-teacher_/
And thank you, amidst your own serious difficulties, for struggling so hard for so many others:
“To be doing good deeds is man’s most glorious task.” [Sophocles]
😎
I agree with Krazy. Thank you, Mercedes, for all that you do to expose the rackets!
The PISA test results continue to generate debate – is it “a Sputnik” moment or are international comparisons invalid? What’s the critical element – culture, parents, teachers, better instruction?
Rather than wade into that debate, I’d look more closely at the questions in the PISA test and what student responses tell us about American education. You can put international comparisons aside for that analysis.
Are American students able to analyze, reason and communicate their ideas effectively? Do they have the capacity to continue learning throughout life? Have schools been forced to sacrifice creative problem solving for “adequate yearly progress” on state tests?
Readers might enjoy answering one of PISA questions. It offers insights into the demands of higher order thinking. Do American students learn how to sequence (higher order thinking) or simply memorize sequences provide by the teacher?
See my post for the question, answers, and PISA data – “Stop Worrying About Shanghai, What PISA Test Really Tells Us About American Students” http://bit.ly/tPE1YE
Science questions leave much to be desired.
AFT President Weingarten should have read this expose on Pisa before commenting on PISA 2012 International Results. Perhaps she fails to understand the fundamental flaw. Here is the link http://paceni.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/pisa-2012-major-flaw-exposed/
Well said! One of my favorite book titles, ever, was that given by Robert Graves to a collection of his essays, the tongue-in-cheek title Difficult Questions, Easy Answers.
The standrads-and-summative-testing folks think that learning can be reduced to a bullet list and that summative measurement is easy and desirable. And they are dead wrong on all these counts.
Someone please explain to me how one can compare tests given in different languages considering the difficulties in accurate translating from one to another languages?
And the fact that different languages all have different grammatical structures, syntax, phonemes, etc. . . that result in looking at/viewing/thinking about the world in vastly different ways. And that our language shapes our perception of ourselves and the world in which we live. How does one take that into consideration in attempting to validate the “sameness”/validity of each language’s test? Or is it all to hopelessly complex and we should punt all these types of comparisons? (y’all problably know my answer to that last one.)
Seems to be just some of the many intractable problems associated with PISA.
Señor Swacker: ya has dado en el blanco/you’ve the nail on the head!
I am going to quote below from Howard Wainer’s UNEDUCATED GUESSES: USING EVIDENCE TO UNCOVER MISGUIDED EDUCATION POLICIES (2011) but before I do…
Just who in Sam Blazes is Howard Wainer? And why would his opinion mean a farthing in this discussion?
From his Amazon page: “Dr. Wainer received his Ph. D. from Princeton University in 1968. After serving on the faculty of the University of Chicago, a period at the Bureau of Social Science Research during the Carter Administration, and 21 years as Principal Research Scientist in the Research Statistics Group at Educational Testing Service, he is now Distinguished Research Scientist at the National Board of Medical Examiners and Professor (adjunct) of Statistics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.”
In other words, he is the very definition of a renowned, working and [dare I say?] elite member of the League of Extraordinary Psychometricians [ok, the last is made up].
From p. 25 of the abovementioned work: “Faith-based equating replaces data with assumptions. For example, we could assume that both examinee groups are of equal ability and so any differences observed are due to differential difficult of the two forms. Or we can assume that both forms are of equal difficulty, and so any differences in scores observed are due to differences in group ability.
Faith-based methods are often used in international comparisons. For example, there is a Spanish language version of the SAT (Prueba de Aptitud Académica). A translation of the items in English is made with great care, and it is assumed that the two forms are of equal difficulty, and so differences in performance are chalked up to lower ability of those taking the Spanish version. The alternative assumption is made in equating the French and English forms of the Canadian Forces Aptitude Test. Because it is assumed that the Francophone and Anglophone speakers are of equal ability, any differences in performance must be due to the differential difficulty of the test forms cased by differences in language.
There is convincing evidence that both assumptions are false, and that the truth almost surely lies somewhere in the middle. Such a middle road has been taken by Israel’s National Institute for Testing and Evaluation (NITE) in its Psychometric Entrance Test. This exam is used to place examinees into various Israeli universities, and is given in nine languages. The NITE has strong evidence that the very act of translation changes the difficulty of the exam, and equally strong evidence that some groups of examinees are more able than others.”
I end here because this posting is already overly long; I invite interested readers to buy his slim book and read the entire section. Again, the money excerpt is near the end: “strong evidence that the very act of translation changes the difficulty of the exam.”
And in case anyone hasn’t gotten it yet—Howard Wainer is no Noel Wilson. Yet one thing I will say after reading his book—he understates his strongest points. So this is a ringing affirmation of Señor Swacker’s claim that there are intractable problems translating tests from one language to another.
Quixotic Quest—
NOT!
😎
Here goes Randi Weingarten all over again.
Is she Dracula or the priest?
Is she the troll or the big Billy Goat Gruff?
Is she CInderalla or the wicked stepmother? Snowwhite or the evil queen?
Luke Skywalker or Darth Vadar?
Miley Cyrus or Maria Callas?
Scarface or Schindler?
Will the real Randi Weingarten please stand up?
Like driving on the median:
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/are-american-schools-really-failing-79675459718
She should remember, you’ll get hit from both directions. By the way, thanks for all you do Dr. Schneider. I enjoy your blog, as a former army profiler, I have a more than nodding acquaintance with statistics but find your insights and arguments succinct and pointed. Please continue to reveal the false sanctimonious cover of math given to the lousy arguments we are faced with.
Anything coming out of Weingarten’s mouth is nonsense. Why the NYC Delegate’s Assembly still think she and Mulgrew walk on water is beyond me. Of course if you listen to teachers in the trenches, they do not walk the Unity line. The DA is made of “Yes” men and women. I have absolutely no respect for my union leaders.
AGREED!
But also look at MORE, the new social justice caucus, which is aligned against UNITY and wants to reinvent the UFT from the inside out.
More is a contender . . . . .
It is VERY important that Ms. Weingarten continues to push against this high-stakes testing., and I am very thankful that she is doing so.
HOWEVER, calling for a moratorium on the testing (a waiting period of 2 or 3 years) simply saves the deformer cause. Here’s why:
A perusal of the garbage being developed by Smarter Balanced and PARCC will lead anyone with half a brain to conclude that when these tests are given nationwide, we will have a repeat, across the entire country, of the fiasco in New York. In other words, the tests will FAIL, people will be VERY ANGRY, and the angry villagers will descend upon the deform monster with their pitchforks and shovels.
In other words, the tests, when they are given, are going to put the whole country in a kill-the-beast, “Vade retro me, Satana” sort of mood (LOL).
That the tests will be the end of the deform movement is ALMOST CERTAIN given the abysmal quality of the stuff that Smarter Balanced and PARCC is producing. the PARC material is particularly awful–convoluted to the point of being an unintentional parody of bureaucratic educationese. So, delaying the will just put off the time when the tests themselves are put to the test and fail, utterly.
Therefore, the moratorium is the one thing that is needed in order to save education deform.
One can do nothing better for the deform movement than to place a moratorium on the testing. ONLY THAT can save it.
cx:
So, delaying the national rollout of the tests will just put off the time when the tests themselves are put to the test and fail utterly.
NY has decided to postpone (indefinitely) the PARCC rollout. Unfortunately (or fortunately) the disastrous Pearson paper tests will remain.
Test designed to fail 70% of NY students (95% of IEP students)
show how clueless the educrats really are. No idea that parents love their children too much to sit back and let this continue.
The call by Diane Ravitch and Randi Weingarten to delay the implementation of these tests nationwide was simply a call for SOME RATIONALITY on the part of the deformers. They should listen, for doing that is the only hope that they have for saving their movement.
And NY will probably do what it has always done–arbitrarily adjust not only the cut-offs and the raw-to-scaled score conversions to get whatever results it wants. The DOE wants DATA DATA DATA, but it doesn’t seem to be too discriminating about what data it receives. Random numbers in a table seems to suit them just fine.
The NY DOE will probably hesitate to repeat last year’s magic act.
Predicting the actual results two years in a row would certainly attract some unwanted attention. This time it will be on the qt.
So we have a group that manipulates data in order to fullfill an unscrupulous agenda. Sounds like they never read the character education curriculum they mandated.
The end result is data that is less than worthless.
AFT is wrong to use PISA – for anything. We have to expose these test comparisons as a horse race – to the bottom. http://newpol.org/content/how-teachers-unions-should-respond-pisa-test-results
A key issue in Randi’s statement is “exactly what is its purpose?” To give her some cover as ed deform begins to fall apart. It is certainly not aimed to end NCLB and RTTT because the latter, especially, cannot truly be implemented without the support of the unions. Thus, did Randi call on her old local, the UFT, to reject any cooperation in RTTT and thus end the madness? Or any other local to do the same? Is she supporting parents in the opt-out movement which would deny the deformers the data? I repeat my usual admonition: watch what she does, not what she says.
People do not recognize the extent to which the Common Core State Standards [sic] in ELA distort curricula and pedagogy, but such distortion is having dramatic effects on every lesson being produced for every online and print education product being created today. The Publishers’ Criteria that accompany the standards [sic] call upon teachers to have their students do “close reading”–to start with very close examination of the text itself. However, for each grade level band, there is also a list of Literacy standards. and the creator of the text (online or print) has to make sure that any lesson that is created addresses these standards.
So, the creator of a lesson is presented with two competing and conflicting directives:
to attend closely to the text itself and only to the text (not to external sources), or
to use the text to teach some subset of a particular list of standards
In other words, the author of the lesson can EITHER start with the text and address whatever aspects of that text are important for understanding it, or she can start with the standards [sic] and address one or more of those as it is reflected in the text.
Now, suppose that you want to teach that recognized masterpiece of American literature, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” (This used to be, back in the 1960s, a staple of American literature texts until the fundamentalist lobby in the U.S. got it removed. Let’s suppose that our author is courageous and is ignoring that lobby.) Now, understanding what is going on in Jackson’s “The Lottery” requires some background. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a lot of work was done by cultural anthropologists, sociologists, folklorists, psychologists, and others on ritual across cultures. Durkheim wrote about the key role of ritual in creating social cohesion. Sir James George Frazier wrote a massive work, The Golden Bough, about what he believed to be a universal fertility myth among our primitive ancestors. According to Frazier, ancient peoples practiced fertility cults in which they worshiped an Earth Mother who annually took a consort. From their union came the annual fertility of the land. Central to this mythos was the notion that every year, the consort died and was then resurrected. According to Frazier, peoples throughout the ancient world had rituals that reenacted parts of this annual story of the Earth Mother and her consort. The Earth Mother was associated with the moon because of correlation between the lunar cycle and menstruation. Her consort was associated with the sun–a source of generative power necessary for rebirth. The sun was widely believed by the ancients to be annually reborn or resurrected at the Winter Solstice, and the ancients, according to Frazier, practiced a form of sympathetic magic by which a representative of the fertility deity–the mother’s consort–was annually chosen and then, at the Solstice–ritually killed and resurrected (by replacing that representative with a new one.
Now, at the time when Jackson wrote her story, those ideas were current. They are not so today. In order to understand what is happening in Jackson’s story, one needs this background–one has to understand that the story presents a reenactment of an annual fertility ritual that continues to be carried out even though its original purpose has largely been forgotten by the townspeople. Texts do not exist in isolation. Now, providing this background would violate the Common Core principle of attending to the text and only to the text, but as this example clearly indicates, one often has to do that because texts do not exist in isolation. In order to understand texts at any depth, the reader has to know what the author has taken for granted–in this case, knowledge of the ancient fertility cults and their annual sacrifices.
Suppose, then, that the author of the lesson on “The Lottery” says to herself, “OK. Let me base the lesson, instead, on one of the standards at this grade level (CCSS level 11-12). In order to do this, one has to find, among those standards, one or two, at least, that cover whatever is most central for understanding this particular text.
Standard RL.11-12.1 deals with texts in which the key ideas are not explicitly stated but must be inferred. Now, perhaps, we are getting somewhere, for perhaps one has to infer that what is going on in the story is an annual fertility ritual. But there is a problem with that one, for at one point in the story, a character says, explicitly, “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.”
So, let’s go to the next standard, RL.11-12.2. This one deals with analyzing the development of how or more themes or central ideas of the text over the course of the text. Perhaps one could base a lesson on looking at the themes of a) blind adherence to tradition and b) fertility rituals. But there are two problems with that: These are two very different notions of what a “theme” is–one is a message; the other is simply a topic. The other problem is that while these themes are developed, this is a short text, and how they are developed is not really key to understanding the tale.
And so on, through the list of standards. The general problem is that the standards are a priori. They exist prior to actually examining the text, and typically, seeing a given text through the lens of some standard means not attending to WHATEVER IS NECESSARY FOR UNDERSTANDING THAT TEXT but, rather, to the preexisting standard. The curriculum developer ends up manipulating the work that is done with the text so that it fits one or more of the preexisting ideas–whatever happens to be on the bullet list for that grade level–i.e., fitting the text to a Procrustean bed. It’s one thing to start with a text and ask, “What is necessary in order to understand this?” or “What are some fruitful ways into this text?” and it is another, altogether, to start with one or more preconceived notions of what is important in TEXTS IN GENERAL.\
These problems with individual texts get acerbated when one looks at a unit as a whole. In the past, editors of 11th-grade American literature texts chose selections as representatives of currents in the history of thought in this country (e.g., they would look at the ideas of the Puritans, then at the ideas of the Transcendentalists). Now, with the advent of the CCSS in ELA, This was extremely valuable because those intellectual currents have consequences for how we think today. The fundamentalist right in the U.S. is not explicable except in terms of the Puritan inheritance, and various developments of the 1960s (hippie, New Age, and environmentalist thought spring to mind) are direct inheritances from the Transcendentalists (who drank heavily at the then emerging springs of the Upanishads). Now, in the CCSS era, the curriculum developer throws over the coherence of a historical perspective on thought and literature in this country for units built around abstract standards. So much for curricular coherence.
There are many, many other problems with the literature standards as written. I’ll mention just one. The literature standards are, almost all, descriptions of abstract skills. It’s those that are to be tested. But why are they all abstract skills? Again, the fact that these are abstract skills contradicts the more general CCSS directive to attend to the text itself. Reading literature is NOT like reading a laundry list. For someone to have a truly important experience with a work of literature, she has to enter, imaginatively, into the world of that work and have a concrete experience–an imagined experience. If one skips over that crucial interaction and goes directly to discussion of abstract notions like “development of theme over the course of the text,” one has, in effect, instituted a study of literature that SKIPS OVER THE LITERARY EXPERIENCE. The CCSS encourage the sort of awful teaching of literature that, for example, reduces the reading of Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” to a list of the symbols that the author used. There are, of course, many ways to approach literary study with kids that encourage this entering, imaginatively, into “the world of the work.” However, making the abstract skills employed when reading the ONLY POINT of instruction is not one of them. It would be possible to put together creative, exciting, incredibly valuable curricula that emphasized this entering imaginatively into the world of the work, having an experience there, and then examining the meaning of that experience–curricula that get at HOW LITERATURE WORKS AND WHY IT IS MEANINGFUL–but such curricula would be incompatible with standards [sic] that are ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY devoted to “mastery” of abstract skills of highly abstract formal analysis.
None of this sort of thinking about the consequences of framing the standards [sic] as they were framed was done. The standards [sic] as written have very, very dramatic effects on the actual curricula being produced, and by and large, those effects are disastrous.
Every publisher in the U.S. is now beginning every project by making a spreadsheet with the list of standards in one column and the list of lessons where these are “covered” in the other. And so the lessons become little independent lessons on the mastery of abstract skills of formal analysis in disconnected texts. That’s a really lousy way to approach literature, and the approach actually contradicts what the material AROUND the CCSS says. It does so because there is a disconnect at the heart of the standards [sic] between the general ideas that the authors of these standards [sic] had (close attention to the text itself) and the standards [sic] themselves, which are, in the literature domain, a bullet list of abstract skills for formal analysis. Of course, standards for literature could be formulated in many different ways. They don’t ALMOST ALL have to be descriptions of skills for abstract, formal analysis. But it seems that the authors of the standards [sic][ never stopped to think, for a moment, about what those alternate ways might be.
Of course, a careful reader of “The Lottery” will recognize that it instantiates a Western, rationalist view that these primitive rituals are simply awful superstition. In effect, it presents a hegemonic, one-sided argument. One does not get from this story an appreciation of the value of a worldview that treated the natural world in a Personal way. It would be fascinating to embed experience of this story in the context of study of works that embody that other view, the famous 1854 speech by Chief Seattle, for example. Taking that sort of approach would raise VERY DIFFICULT, fascinating, and currently important issues and get at the heart of how literary works at times challenge and at time PRESUPPOSE dominant paradigms of the cultures in which they were created.
Sorry, Robert, but the Chief Seattle quote is an urban legend and, beautifully written and true though it may be, was actually composed by a Hollywood screenwriter named Ted Perry in the early 1970’s.
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/seattle.asp
What would a literature curriculum based on the idea of developing in students the ability to enter imaginatively into the world of a work and have an experience there look like? Well, it would look very different from ANY that is currently found in literature textbooks, and it would NOT be compatible with a list of standards [sic] that consists ALMOST ENTIRELY of descriptions for skills of formal analysis. However, it WOULD get at the key aspect of the literary experience. One thing is certain, such a curriculum would be extremely active. It would have to be participatory, and it would very likely involve a great deal of ORAL work, going back to the origins of literature in communal, spoken performance.
Unfortunately, having this mandated, invariant, top-down bullet list of standards precludes any such development of an alternative approach to literature because the pressure is on to “cover” that particular bullet list.
And that’s the point. If one considers the design space of POSSIBLE curricula and pedagogical approaches in light of the standards [sic], it becomes immediately evident that the standards [sic] preclude MOST OF THESE. That is, they dramatically limit possible development of curricular and pedagogical approaches. And this is true in EVERY domain covered by the ELA standards, not just in literature.
Children learn the best through hands-on activities in a
play way method. With dedication and persistence you can
absolutely make it happen. There’s undenial fact is
that: 80% of the readers are just book readers.
i throughly believe that NCLB was made with the best intentions possible, but just as you said, it has in fact run its course. once race to the top was put in place it was made ever more clear that standardized testing was becoming tainted. i went to a school that every year faced being shut down because of testing scores, i am one of the lucky few to make it on to a decent college. Besides, when you have a school full of teachers so scared that we won’t do well that all they can manage to teach is exactly what is on the test, than what kind of school are you really left with?