Robert Shepherd has written curriculum, textbooks,
assessments, and lots else in recent decades.
Here he explains what
is wrong with the Common Core’s version of English Language Arts:
The CCSS in ELA appear to have been written by complete NOVICES
based upon
a. poorly conceived, unexamined notions about how the
outcomes of ELA education should be characterized and measured AND
b. vague memories of extremely mediocre English classes that the
authors happened to attend when they were in school years ago.
It would be amusing that so much money and time had been spent on
“standards” (I can barely bring myself to use this term to refer to
them) this mediocre if not for the fact that they are going to have
dire consequences on many different levels, including dire
consequences for curricula, for curricular innovation, for
pedagogical practice.
So, what are the problems with the new
national standards in ELA? (My God, I could write several books on
this topic, but I’ll settle for providing the outline.)
To begin with, with, as almost any teacher will tell you, the very idea of
creating a single set of mandatory standards for every child is
crazy. How could it be, I ask myself, that any sane person, any
thoughtful or experienced educator, anyone who gave the matter the
least critical examination, could possibly conclude that it makes
sense to have a single set of ELA standards for every child in the
nation?
At the risk of stating what ought to be the blindingly
obvious: a. Children differ; b. We need diversity in outcomes, not
identity in outcomes, from Pre-K-12 education; c. a single set of
standards dramatically reduces the design space within which
curricular and pedagogical innovation can occur; d. a single set of
standards for all effectively tells every curriculum coordinator,
every curriculum designer, every teacher, “What you know or think
you know about your students and about outcomes for them doesn’t
matter–we have made these decisions for you. Shut up and do as you
are told.”
These considerations, alone, should have been enough to
have stopped the CCSS in ELA. But I haven’t even begun to address
the problems with these PARTICULAR top-down, across-the-board,
one-size-fits-all, totalitarian “standards.”
A few of the many
problems with these “standards” in particular. The CCSS in ELA
a. are wildly developmentally inappropriate.
b. embody a lot of completely prescientific notions about how children acquire
language skills.
c. are full of glaring lacunae that teachers and
curriculum designers will not be able to address because they will
be told, “It’s not in the standards.”
d.reflect extremely unimaginative, pedestrian, mostly unexamined notions about what
education in that domain should consist of. The characterizations of what education in literature, in writing, and in language skills should consist of are particularly unimaginative and uninformed.
e. seem often to have been assigned to particular grade levels
completely at random.
f. preclude many logical, potentially highly
effective alternate curricular progressions both within particular
grades and across grades
But here’s the biggest problem of all with
these particular standards, and it’s a problem with most of the
state standards that they supplant: It’s an ENORMOUS mistake to
couch desired outcomes in ELA terms of abstract skills to be
attained rather than in terms of a. world knowledge (knowledge of
what) and b. SPECIFIC procedural knowledge (knowledge of how). In
other words, the CCSS in ELA are WRONG FROM THE START, misconceived
at their most fundamental design level, that of their categorical
conceptualization. The Common Core is a monoculture. It’s just NOT
what is needed by a diverse, pluralistic society, one that prizes,
and benefits enormously from, individual autonomy and
difference.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Well said.
Don’t disagree, yet what do we do when it is being done too us?
Thank you so much, Robert. Every school administrator should be arguing like this with every state dept. of ed. in the country. Why someone with your expertise and experience was not consulted in the drafting of the “standards” probably is clear to anyone who understands what is really at stake here. Thanks to a kind stranger on FB who replied to a query of mine regarding what the NCTE had to say about the ELA standards, I received this link. Granted that the NCTE’s response here is to the first draft in 2009, which supposedly (according to Susan Pimentel who spoke at URI recently) was revised, the objections that were explained in this critique seem to me to be as pertinent to the revised standards, implementation of curricula, and testing as to the first draft. http://web.archive.org/web/20130729045259/http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Standards/Report_CoreStds_9-09.pdf
An excellent critique from the NCTE! I see that ALMOST ALL of the NCTM recommendations were IGNORED.
I don’t doubt this assessment of the ELA standards. It’s only and opinion piece, though, without any examples or other evidence provided. It this just a summary of a better cited work?
Please see my posts below. Dr. Ravitch kindly picked up this post from a note I write in a thread on her blog months ago.
Thanks, Robert, I have been saving this one. You write so many great comments!
wrote, not write. yikes.
Thanks for your interest, William. And I am working on a book on this subject. The issues involved are too complex for treatment in sound bites.
Well, that’s to be expected from a testing entrepreneur who has never taught a day in his life, and who was charged by his patron to develop a vehicle for ever-more testing, testing that opens the door to ever-more use of the technology that will further enrich his patron.
A more recent list of my issues with these standards [sic] and the associated tests and teacher evaluations schemes:
a. The standards on which they are based are badly conceived. The CCSS in ELA, in particular, seem to have been written by amateurs with no knowledge of the sciences of language acquisition and little familiarity with best practices in the various domains that the standards cover.
b. Having national standards creates economies of scale that educational materials monopolists can exploit, enabling them to crowd out/keep out smaller competitors.
c. Kids differ. Standards do not.
d. Standards are treated by publishers AS the curriculum and imply particular pedagogical approaches, and so they result in DRAMATIC distortions of curricula and pedagogy.
e. Innovation in educational approaches comes about from the implementation of competing ideas; creating one set of standards puts important innovation on hold.
f. Ten years of doing this stuff under NCLB hasn’t worked. The new math standards are not appreciably different from the preceding state standards, and the new math tests are not appreciably different from the preceding state high-stakes math tests. It’s idiotic to do more of what hasn’t worked and to expect real change/improvement.
g. In a free society, no unelected group (Achieve) has the right to overrule every teacher, curriculum coordinator, and curriculum developer with regard to what the outcomes of educational processes should be.
h. High-stakes tests lead to teaching to the test–for example, to having kids do lots and lots of practice using the test formats–and all this test prep has significant opportunity costs; it crowds out important learning.
i. A complex, diverse, pluralistic society needs kids to be variously trained, not identically milled.
j. The folks who prepared these standards did their work heedlessly; they did not stop to question what a standard should look like in a particular domain but simply made unwarranted but extremely consequential decisions about that based on current practice in state tests.
k. The tests and test prep create enormous test anxiety and undermine the development of love of learning.
l. Real learning tends to be unique and unpredictable. It can’t be summarized in a bullet list.
m. We are living in times of enormous change; kids being born today are going to experience more change in their lifetimes than has occurred in all of human history up to this point, so they need to be intrinsically, not extrinsically, motivated to learn; high-stakes tests belong to the extrinsic punishment/reward school of educational theory.
n. If we create a centralized Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth, that is a first step on a VERY slippery slope.
o. The standards-and-testing regime usurps local teacher and administrator autonomy, and no one works well, at all well, under conditions of low autonomy.
p. The standards and the new tests have not been tested.
q. The standards and the new test formats, though extremely consequential in their effects on every aspect of K-12 schooling, were never subjected to expert critique; nor were they subjected to the equivalent of failure modes and effects analysis.
r. The legislation that created the Department of Education specifically forbade it from getting involved in curricula, but as E. D. Hirsch, Jr., pointed out on this blog a few weeks ago, the new math standard clearly ARE a curriculum outline, and the federal DOE has pushed this curriculum on the country.
And these are just a few general observations. I haven’t even begun, here, to speak of problems with specific standards and guidelines within the standards.
cx: Item a. should read “The standards on which the tests are based. . .”
I copied and pasted this list, and the referent was not clear because of that.
It almost sounds like Communism.
The term Communism raises “red” flags for many people. I think what’s happening is more along the lines of totalitarianism, whether you consider it communist a la the former Soviet Union, or fascist. It’s a neoliberal agenda, starting from the assumption that multi-national corporations are benevolent and have the best interests of the society at heart. (Unfortunately, heart/empathy doesn’t seem to be the strong suit of those clinging to this corporate mindset.)
Well said, Sheila!
Where’s STUVWXY & Z????
LOL. I have some more. 🙂
Nice analysis – thank you.
“To begin with, with, as almost any teacher will tell you, the very idea of
creating a single set of mandatory standards for every child is
crazy.”
If so, then it is a form of Crazy Making, which is a form of emotional abuse.
” Of all of them mental abuse is perhaps the most abstract and difficult to define or even identify, but can also be one of the most cruel and damaging whereby the individual begins to question their very mind and leave you feeling confused, stressed and even depressed.”
And the more I read about the tell-tale signs of this type of psychological abuse, I found myself nodding in recognition of their application in this current “reform” movement.
“Mental abuse can take many forms, but mostly it consists of a series of ‘mind games’ that can be traumatic for the victim. This can mean scare tactics, emotional blackmail, unpredictable mood swings, random acts of cruelty, humiliation, ignoring your emotions, flirting with strangers, being condescending or demeaning of your feelings, lying or even theft.”
As for the “flirting with strangers” above, that might be amended to read “very wealthy strangers”.
(http://www.healthguidance.org/entry/12799/1/Mental-Abuse–Tell-Tale-Signs-of-Crazy-Making-Psychological-Abuse.html)
I like very much your use of the phrase :”cultural reform movement,” for the current deforms remind me, very much, of the Chinese “Cultural Revolution”–of the attempt of a gang at the top of a hierarchy to enforce a particular way of thinking.
I KNEW we were being “gaslighted!”
GE2L2R,
You are quite right in bringing up the psychological harms that these educational malpractices very definitely cause to many students. And as we have read about those psychological harms can manifest themselves with very “real” psysiological symptoms/illnesses and most definitely long term harms/damages to individuals.
Now there may be those who believe in “toughening up” and not “coddling” kids a la “A Boy Named Sue”**. But truly we know that sort of thinking leads to many, many harms. And, unfortunately, it is state sanctioned “bullying”, state sanctioned CHILD ABUSE. Those practices (educational standards with the resulting high stakes tests and the labeling of students via test scores and/or grades) should have no place whatsoever in a just and equitable public school system!
**See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-hYLL7Gpos
As I have asked before, I am truly interested in hearing from critics of the new standards of the problems with the specifics. Indeed, the standards do, as all standards must, prescribe outcomes for all. However, as with any set of goals, there is no other way to begin to think of what schools should be trying to accomplish, not necessarily so that those working in schools can be controlled, but so that those working in schools do what is necessary to help students attain what they need in order to do whatever it is that schools exist to help people be able to do. If the writer here thinks that things were better before the standards, this set, were created, I would like to hear what it was in earlier attempts to define good education that was better than what this set of standards tries to do in the name of good education. I do hear a repeated theme in the condemnations of the CCSS and it has something to do with the notion that standards are anti-teacher, reflect a lack of confidence in teachers to make the proper decisions regarding what needs to be taught and how things need to be taught. Well, if the author of this note can show me how schools, pre-standards, were working well and teachers were making the kinds of decisions they need to have been making, then I ask how it is that the educated public came to be what it is and the people’s political system came to be what it currently is, a system that every day punishes the many for the sake of a few such as the Walton family whose name has come up in several conversations posted to this blog site.
I think teachers, some, are highly capable of making sensible decisions, but I see no way in which truly intelligent and well educated teachers will find anything much in the standards, at least the secondary standards, to prevent them from doing what is right for their students, for their students as citizens who, if properly educated, not only make sensible decisions, but have a good sense of how to make personal decisions that are useful to sensible decision making in the broader society, decisions on things such as a fair and living wage for a day’s work done or sensible decisions that lead to actions that help make the society safe from violence of all kinds including the economic violence that recent years show has been so very prevalent in terms of lost jobs, lowered wages and benefits, people being thrown out of their homes, and people going broke trying to keep themselves and their loved ones alive and healthy.
What is it that the author of the previous pose would write if he were to write standards? Something like what we had under NCLB? Say there were no standards and in a particular location the people there wanted to teach nothing but five paragraph essays and eight sentence paragraphs or teach only bible stories or teach so that only bible stories could be understood to be viable stories because of their uniqueness in being of the word of God? Say a district did not like the teaching of critical analysis skills because critical analysis could lead to disobedience, the the questioning of authority? What if a school decided that teachers, in reading student work should never look beyond the surface, any deeper than spelling and grammar and punctuation so as not to interfere with the thinking (non-thinking) to which parents or church or some notion of patriotism demanded they be confined?
One last thing. Where the hell have the teachers been all these years when they should have been fighting like hell against the kind of impositions and constraints placed upon them by NCLB? If the teachers teaching now had done what they should have been doing when they were forced to conform to a bogus set of educational goals, these created by educators, educators who, in large part sponsored direct instruction methods of instruction, who actually said quite openly that teachers should not be allowed to think for themselves, that the teacher as decision maker model was a terrible one foisted on the world by progressive educations. Go to the Hoover Institute site or to the Direct Instruction Institute sites and read what Diane’s good friend Chester Finn and friends had to say about the proper role of teachers or read what Doug Carnine and Ziggy Englemann and friends were calling for and got in the form of “research based” methods and research that proved the methods of direct instruction to be the best for bringing about the kind of outcomes these researchers were able to define for teachers as being proper outcomes.
Where were the teachers and their protests when these authoritarian educational “researchers” were forcing teachers to teach from scripts and to objectives that were about regimenting and standardizing, with taking from the student and the teacher all of the attributes of individualism and proper intellectual engagement with the world, these folk working for an administration that prospered by the inability of the public to see through rather transparent lies such as those that led to the Patriot Act, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both costly and at least one of which was sold on the basis of something called WMDs and the threat of mushroom clouds if people did not buy the rubbish they were being fed?
The teachers, for the most part, were being their timid selves, doing what many understood to be wrong out of fear for their jobs or that those who might take their place if they were fired might do worse by the children. Who taught to the Reading First curriculum and helped children learn to read so that they could become the kind of illiterate literates Wayne O’Neil worried about, readers who, according to follow-up studies, following evaluation by Dibbles, found that students in the reading programs could not very well comprehend what they read, make inferences, or make connections between what they were reading and their own lives.
This panic over the new standards, it seems to me, comes from a rather frightening place, from a place that exists because too many fear what the standards are asking of teachers, to go beyond what is in the teachers’ editions how to make teaching easy section and teach as thoughtful, intellectually astute individuals who are capable of understanding what the specific standards mean and how they, when achieved, can do what good schools in a democracy do, liberate the minds of individuals so that they can think for themselves and not as someone else wants them to think, think the way someone else wants them to think only when they have thought things over for themselves in an informed and reasonable way.
Watch it good teachers! While there is always room to criticize other peoples’ notions of what is good and should be, many of those criticizing the standards criticize out of fear and not out of a clear and abiding sense of what is good for students. Look at the fact that so many of those rejecting the standards not only did not reject NCLB but embraced it and even helped to create it and enforce the mandates. Notice, too, where it is, in terms of states, that the CCSS, accepted for cash earlier, are now being outlawed. What do these states have in common? One might find that those states are run by politicians who do not have the best track record for promoting individuality, critical thought, true independent mindedness.
Be careful with the criticism for what you come to denounce without much thought could be the next initiative you denounce because of the constraints it places on human beings such as yourselves and you students. What you might find yourself being told to teach is a truly Walmart friendly curriculum.
Here’s the alternative:
Creation of a national portal for VOLUNTARY, COMPETING standards, curriculum frameworks, learning progressions, and pedagogical approaches and ongoing funding of groups of scholars and educators to develop materials for this portal instantiating COMPETING, VOLUNTARY visions for education in each of the subject areas and domains within those subject areas.
National requirements that teachers’ work loads be reduced to provide time for ongoing Japanese-style lesson study in which teachers subject their own practice to critique and revision (real continuous improvement flows from the bottom up; you know what flows from the top down),
Autonomy on the part of individual schools that enables them to choose from among the competing standards, curriculum frameworks, learning progressions, and pedagogical approaches, within certain general guidelines related to Constitutional freedom (e.g., equal funding of education for every child, no segregation).
The elimination of mandatory standardized summative tests in favor of diagnostic and formative assessments.
Federal funding of studies of ways of creating, within individual public schools and school districts, viable alternative tracks for kids who, after all, differ, and will be taking on differing roles in a complex, diverse, pluralistic society.
The creation, for every child, of a continually revised IEP plan and of a group of counselors, consisting of teachers and guidance personnel, who meet with that child and his or her parents or guardians regularly to revisit the plan and to chart his or her particular course through the school.
Such an approach would have many advantages over the establishment of a centralized Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth. It would respect and build upon the differences in students. It would incentivize real innovation. It would encourage real competition instead of monopolies in the educational materials market. It would create bottom-up continuous improvement. It would create the autonomy on the job that teachers (and all workers) need if they are to give a d— about what they are doing. It would avoid handing control over what is taught to a few powerful oligarchs.
If the school three miles away has a standard A that I like and the school B has a different standard that I don’t like, I will not allow so,e polititions to tell me I must send my student to the school with the losing standard. Freedom if schools to adopt different standards is simply not compatible with student assignments to schools based on street addresses. The goal of building level autonomy and parental heteronomy is not achievable in a democratic society.
lafred, Teachers do not have the autonomy to use the standards as just “guidelines for teaching.” The standards are mandatory, aligned to district or school adopted CC curriculum and associated with high-stakes testing that will result in sanctions against teachers, if their students perform poorly on tests.
It is not developmentally appropriate to expect 5 year olds to “read with purpose and understanding.” That represents a pushed down curriculum which was not previously expected of kids until 1st and 2nd Grade. Many districts have long had only half day Kindergarten, because that has traditionally been appreciated as a “children’s garden,” a time when many kids are away from home for the first time, adjusting to being in group care, becoming socialized and developing emotionally, cognitively and physically as well. This is best facilitated through play-based learning experiences. The reading requirement alone is likely to put a great deal of stress on teachers and children and result in the elimination of play, supplanted with drill for skill –which undermines motivation at a time when kids should be experiencing a love of learning.
Kindergartens are not homogeneous classes. In the typical Kindergarten each September, there is a four year range in functional developmental levels. Development is variable and children progress at their own rates, especially in the early years, so young children should not be expected to be on the same page on the same day of their lives.
Literacy does not result from a single year of instruction in school; it emerges gradually over time, starting virtually at birth, due to years of exposure to print and language rich environments. It is cruel to expect kids who haven’t experienced this, or who are just not developmentally ready to read, to be playing several years of catch-up in a single year, let alone in their very first year of formal schooling.
TE, are you suggesting online education as a way of providing alternative tracks? Of course, if a community can support a public school and two charters, it can support one public school that has three very different programs. And, of course, that public school can offer online programs that provide alternative tracks as well. So, I am not getting your point. One can have different schools (what I am calling tracks) within one school, each following different programs, including different curriculum frameworks and learning progressions. But perhaps you have something else in mind? I’m curious.
I am arguing that teacher or building autonomy can only be achieved if students are given the ability to match their individual needs and interests with the choices made in different buildings. If the school board is going to tell students which school they must attend, the parents of the students are going to insist on giving those teachers a set of bullet points that will make the majority happy.
Buffalo has a magnet program. We have Performing Arts, Montessori, Gifted and Talented, MST (Math, Science and Technology), A Science Magnet (in the Science Museum), etc. Yet, every 11th grader reads The Crucible and The Great Gatsby, all seniors read Pride and Prejudice and MacBeth, etc. There are differences, yet there is some constancy.
In a way it is comforting.
There is a program out there, where students who lack enough credits to graduate can go online and complete high school. We had about five kids at Olmsted who needed to take advantage of this program and were on the library computers during and after school so they could walk across the stage and get their diploma. Only one didn’t finish.
They use the same program in the suburban district where I live – they call it AIM.
The new age version of extra credit.
But TE, one can easily have schools within schools, and we used to have a LOT more of that–alternative school programs, early release/work programs, vocational track programs. NCLB sent us spiraling like a helicopter with a broken wing into lock-step, one-size-fits-all offerings by public schools.
One can, and if the school is large enough I think that it would work out fine. Would you be happy if instead of having each elementary school with a Montessori program within the school we just had a couple of schools with Montessori programs and allowed students to attend those schools irregardless of street address?
I agree with you, TE, that a LOT of reform needs to be done there. We are in VIOLENT agreement about that, as Bernie says from time to time. But I think that this can be done within a public school framework.
Robert, TE ALWAYS rants about this same thing regardless of what people say. I tried to tell you before, when you told him he was “profound,” because that encouraged him to keep at it –and he’s already been called out a lot for being a “Johnny one note” regarding this matter. He has been told time and again about the many ways that educators can provide choices within neighborhood schools, but he just keeps saying the same thing over and over. Please don’t encourage that anymore.
I have always directed critical comments to situations where public schools do not provide choices for students. Magnet schools and programs are consistent with the type of diversity and competition between ideas that Robert argues for (Robert strikes me as being much much more in favor of market based reforms than the many who are criticized here). Traditional zoned schools are not compatible with Roberts notions of building level curriculum determination and competition between ideas.
Dr. Ravitch calls her blog “A site to discuss better education for all.” I, for one, appreciate having these discussions with TE. I think that he asks good questions–ones we should think about, the answers to which ought to inform our notions about how to do our jobs, within the public schools, even better.
Robert, If market-based reforms are what you have been tacitly promoting, per TE’s interpretation, then I will be reading your comments from here on out with very skeptical eyes, because I vehemently oppose that, as it ensures the demise of public education in this country, a la Chile and Sweden.
I think that robert would agree that he argues in favor of decentralized decisions being made on the part of teachers about curriculum. I hope that I have gone some way to convince him this is only possible if families also enjoy the same decentralized decision making possibilities. If so, a family will be able to find a school/program that best fits the needs and aspirations of their students. If families are not given the choice of school/program, the families will inevitably draw up the compromise set of bullet points about curriculum that Robert seeks to avoid.
No, Robert, regardless of whatever any of us have told TE about improving education within public schools, he repeatedly denies that it can be done and advocates for market-based reforms, i.e., charter and voucher schools. And even Diane has referred to him as a “Johnny One Note.”
Where have i denied education can not be improved within public schools? It would be helpful if you could provide a link to a post.
I have advocated for a wider range of choices for students than most here are comfortable with, but that includes district run magnet programs. Indeed I have spend some time pointing out that many of the criticisms of charter schools are in fact criticisms of public magnet schools as well.
I dont think I have said very much about voucher programs.
If market-based “reforms” sound appealing, I think it’s important to always remember that they are non-discriminating against businesses. Therefore, they include all the “no excuses,” military style, boot camp charter chain schools serving primarily children of color that have mostly white 5 week trained Teach for America recruits working as drill sergeants, as well as rubber rooms for children as young as age 5 who don’t obey. Those are also promoted most by corporate education “reformers,” including government officials like Duncan.
They also include religious voucher schools which teach creationism, including that the dinosaurs and humans co-existed 6000 years ago.
I cannot get on board with any of that or with anyone who promotes public funds going towards those kinds of schools.
In my view the central characteristic of a market is substituting competition between producers of goods and services for centralized control of the producton and distribution of goods and services.
“teacher or building autonomy can only be achieved if students are given the ability to match their individual needs and interests with the choices made in different buildings.”
Teacher autonomy is dependent on federal, state, school board and administrative supports, not families who can match their needs. Choice is already given to families through magnet programs and magnet schools, but you’ve been demanding more, including free-market charters, not magnets.
Actually I have been arguing for choice schools of all sorts. School boards must take steps to unsure uniformity across buildings so that the assignment of students to schools using street addresses will seem less arbitrary.
As people here have said to you before, TE, there are models of decentralized control within public education, such as in the Chicago public schools, each of which has their own democratically elected Local School Council (LSC).
However, you are kidding yourself if you think corporate education “reform” leads to people power. Politicians and businesses seek to eliminate democracy in education, because they want to be the ones who are the power brokers, not schools, teachers, or parents. So, they have figured out ways to wrestle away control of schools in Chicago, such as by finding loopholes that allow new schools to be exempt from having state mandated LSCs.
School boards have a lot of power and choices. They are not required to ensure uniformity across schools. That’s just bunk. And the only way to ensure uniformity, even within schools, is with scripted curriculum –which would be another school board choice, not a requirement.
They are certainly not required to ensure uniformity. A school board could all students with the first names beginning with the letters A-N to the Waldorf school, M names go to the Chinese immersion school, N-Q get a progressive education, R-Y are sent to the Montessori school, and those few beginning with Z could be assigned go to the French immersion school. I doubt the district parents would allow it to last very long, but it would interesting to see a school board give it a try.
Just because there are occasionally rogue school boards does not mean that democratic representation in education should be eliminated and replaced with privately managed charters where there is absolutely no democratic representation whatsoever.
We have many magnet schools and magnet programs across America. If you really wanted to see more of them in your district, you would be addressing your own school board or running for a seat on that board, not arguing about choice over and over again, as if it is a national problem, when this is really just a local matter.
There may be many magnet schools and programs in some school districts, but many posts here argue against choice schools because they “cream” the strongest students and most involved parents from traditional zoned schools. If those posters are concerned that application and participation in a lottery admission system will result in creaming, what must they think of the admission exams used in magnet schools like Thomas Jefferson High School? Surely it is public magnet schools that “cream” the most.
Having worked in a district with a Magnet component which does skim kids off the top, I have seen the result. The students that are left are the ones whose parents don’t bother applying (they all have a choice) or they have children who are “challenging” students. The neighborhood schools that are left are mostly minority, filled with difficult students (which is not to say that the magnet schools don’t have their share of problem children – this is Buffalo). The charter schools have the same students – many of the leftovers and over 95% minority. The test results are not good. Yet, do you want these students mixed in with the better schools? They wouldn’t be able to keep up, and they would act out and prevent their peers from learning. I’ve seen it happen. Whose rights do we address? Any suggestions?
I think that is a very difficult and interesting question, especially as the title of this blog is a site to discuss better education for all. I don’t have an answer to your question, but I think that your question is central to most of the discussions here.
There is no national movement to prevent magnet schools today. That occurred in the 70s, primarily In the South, because magnets were created to promote integration and prevent racial isolation. If magnets or programs for gifted kids are what you think your community needs, then go advocate for them there. This is not a national issue.
I agree that there is no national movement against magnet schools. Arguments against magnet schools, however, are common on this blog though the posters often do not see they are arguing against magnet schools.
They don’t see it because that really is not what they are arguing against. Only you see it because “choice” is your hammer, so everything you see is a nail.
‘Nuff said from me on this perpetually unending topic of yours.
Cosmic Tinkerer, what I propose is freedom of thought. That notion is sometimes expressed as “a free market in ideas,” one in which, for example, ideas about curricula and pedagogy and learning progressions are not submitted, first, to approval by a Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth.
Robert, then keep on encouraging those who advocate for free-market choice like TE, if you think they need a voice and don’t have enough power over this country already. I happen to believe that the time to resist the tyranny of free-market neoliberalism is long overdue and I will confront it at every turn.
Cosmic Tinkerer, TE and I disagree on the subject of school privatization. He is a proponent, and I am an opponent of this idea. What I was saying is that I absolutely agree that we have not done enough to respond to the fact that kids differ. TE believes that the proper response to that issue, which he raises often, is to create alternatives to the public schools. I think that the proper response is for public schools to do more of what they have in the past done so well–more creation of alternative tracks, for kids who differ, within the common school framework. The vouchers and charter school reforms CLEARLY have given us almost nothing but looting of the public treasury by people adept at making backroom, crony capitalist deals. I have written extensively about that on this blog.
So, TE and I share this notion, which he and I both raise a lot, that kids differ and that schooling should help kids to identify and build upon their differing propensities. We have radically different ideas about how to do that. My belief is that we need to do this through our public schools–that nurturing all our children is a common public trust and should be treated accordingly. He thinks that alterantives to public schools are required in order to have the sort of innovation that we need. I do not agree with TE on this. But it’s important–extremely important–that the issue be raised. I don’t know which to hate more–the crony capitalist exploitation that takes place in charters and voucher receivers that one can only very loosely describe as schools OR the creation by state overseers of the public schools of one-size-fits-all mandates. I hate both equally. But I am a stalwart defender of public education and of the commons generally.
I am not an advocate of privatization, rather an advocate of choice. The difference between my position and some who post here is that I am not opposed to students choosing a privately conceived school rather than a centrally approved public school. Most here approve of some students making choices within schools, I just go one choice further.
“I am not an advocate of privatization, rather an advocate of choice. ”
Whether you admit to it or not, advocating for the “privately conceived school” is not “just one choice further,” it IS privatization.
Those of us in urban areas across the country have been witnessing how that “one choice” is destroying public education, as funds are siphoned off to private entrepreneurs, leaving neighborhood schools under-resourced, ultimately shut down and handed off to become yet more “privately conceived schools.” Many are unregulated, offer fewer choices within and are no better than the neighborhood schools they replaced.
Would you be more to,Lerner of independently conceived schools if there were changes in the funding formula? I think that might be a good idea, as would some tighter regulations in some locations. I do think that choice can substitute for some of the regulations that apply to a system in which students are told where to attend based on street address.
Sorry, Robert, but the only value that I see to this is in refuting free-market choice fallacies:
Because choice is not the panacea for children and families that is touted by people like TE.
Because the “creative destruction” that occurs, and which is promoted by corporate education “reformers,” is detrimental to children and benefits no one more than the privatizers themselves.
And because no one has been listening to the families who don’t want their neighborhood schools shut down and replaced with shopping for privately managed schools, where parents have no democratic representation or even PTOs.
Would you be in favor of charter schools where parents do have representation on the governing board? If parents felt that this was required, no doubt they would reject any school that did not have significant parental input in decisions about the school.
No, TE, I believe in working within public education. I think that public funds should go towards improving public schools, not towards trying to improve privatized schools.
I believe public schools could do a lot more to meet diverse student needs if they were decentralized and deregulated, had democratically elected Local School Councils, had the ability to coordinate their efforts with other schools in the community and if teachers had much more autonomy in their classrooms.
I think that giving public schools away to private enterprises is a betrayal of the common good. Politicians are culpable, because they send the message that non-educator entrepreneurs in charters can do a better job of educating children simply because charters have virtually no regulations and many freedoms. Then they further tie the hands of public schools by imposing ever more regulations on them. That’s a ploy to speed privatization and I do not support any efforts which contribute to that.
I base my analysis on almost forty years of experience working with students in grades PreK through grade twelve at ALL levels of ability, from special ed to gifted and talented.
I was always against NCLB. I am not against the concept of Common Core. I feel that there should be certain guidelines for all children in this country. That said, these particular standards seem our of whack. I’ve read through some of them, I’ve heard subject area teachers discuss the flaws, but I KNOW the reading list is bogus, because that is my area of expertise.
I keep asking but no one will help me understand what is out of whack with the CCSS. Perhaps elementary teachers have some problems with developmental issues raised by the standards, but I am not finding much that could harm and much that could do students well if the CCSS ELA standards are used as guidelines for teaching. The outcomes make a hell of a lot of sense to me. So tell me why they shouldn’t. And do consider where we currently stand in regard to effectiveness of the educational system. Are graduates prepared for participation in the governance of their world or are they more likely be prepared to be the kinds of consumers our corporate “leaders” want them to be, buying stuff because Alan Thicke makes the claim that he was once a TV dad who had to give his TV kids financial advice, people who would allow for candidates like some of those who have “had a chance to win” in our recent elections?
I think the CCSS have a chance of helping us to make schools places where intellect grows and human beings are inspired to think well and for themselves, capable of using the information they acquire to make reasonable decisions. I will bet that amongst those fighting the standards are those who are really afraid of critical thinkers, people who will believe and obey without doing much questioning, ditto head and the like who look for those, who like many of their teachers have, will tell them the right answers and ask that those answers be accepted simply because they come from some “authority,” authority the graduate knows not how to question.
Schools do need to take on stupidity. Schools do need to help people grow smart. There are those who benefit by stupid, who feed stupidity with advertisements and dumb-ass political come-ons, WMD and American right or wrong, exceptional, these idiotic notions to be accepted because, just because.
I can send this blog numerous examples of damned good CCS standards. Before I do that, please help me understand which of them are the bad ones about which people are complaining.
I take exception to your comment that we don’t want our students to ask questions. lafered – that is the goal. Are you familiar with Maslow’s Pyramid or Blooms Taxonomy or the Six Thinking Hats? The tested educational theories are out there. The teachers have been using them. We try to take the kids are far as they can go.
The NYS Regents Curriculum was already rigorous – we didn’t need CCSS. Our students were already kicking the butt out of other states. Now, after a “silly” test (silly, not only meaning unnecessary or even meaningless, but silly meaning poorly constructed), all of a sudden the students in NYS are subpar! What?
When 30% of the students at City Honors, (not only the top school in Buffalo, but one of the best schools in the USA) – a school with an IB diploma program plus multiple AP exams – FAIL, something is wrong. 100% of these kids go to college – some to very prestigious schools. Not college ready? If you believe this test is valid then you are drinking the Kool-Aid.
lafered, Teachers do not have the autonomy to use the standards as just “guidelines for teaching.” The standards are mandatory, aligned to district or school adopted CC curriculum and associated with high-stakes testing that will result in sanctions against teachers, if their students perform poorly on tests.
It is not developmentally appropriate to expect 5 year olds to “read with purpose and understanding.” That represents a pushed down curriculum which was not previously expected of kids until 1st and 2nd Grade. Many districts have long had only half day Kindergarten, because that has traditionally been appreciated as a “children’s garden,” a time when many kids are away from home for the first time, adjusting to being in group care, becoming socialized and developing emotionally, cognitively and physically as well. This is best facilitated through play-based learning experiences. The reading requirement alone is likely to put a great deal of stress on teachers and children and result in the elimination of play, supplanted with drill for skill –which undermines motivation at a time when kids should be experiencing a love of learning.
Kindergartens are not homogeneous classes. In the typical Kindergarten each September, there is a four year range in functional developmental levels. Development is variable and children progress at their own rates, especially in the early years, so young children should not be expected to be on the same page on the same day of their lives.
Literacy does not result from a single year of instruction in school; it emerges gradually over time, starting virtually at birth, due to years of exposure to print and language rich environments. It is cruel to expect kids who haven’t experienced this, or who are just not developmentally ready to read, to be playing several years of catch-up in a single year, let alone in their very first year of formal schooling.
Bravo! CT, I agree with everything you said. In fact, I have actually lived it.
One anecdote: I was a parent representative on the committee that brought full day kindergarten to my school district. As parents our concern was that kindergarten would become the equivalent of first grade and curriculum would be pushed down. We wanted our young children to enjoy the pleasures of discovering the world through play and socialization.
The administration promised this wouldn’t happen. They had the slides and graphics (this was thirty years ago). The answer was predetermined – my participation and comments were irrelevant. The old administration left, a new administration came in, and by the time my next batch of kids went to kindergarten, it was moving towards first grade. Now, for my grand kids, it’s already there. Saying “I told you so!” – doesn’t make me feel any better.
As I said, I have lived the process (and I have lost the battle).
replying to Cosmic Tinker et al.–It’s not surprising that the “standards” for 5 year olds are developmentally inappropriate, considering that of all of the people involved in writing the CC$$, not one was a professional in the field of child development, or child language acquisition, or second language acquisition, or special learning challenges, or literacy development. All of the writers were affiliated with Achieve, the College Board, or were university professors. The standards were back-mapped from what a graduating high school senior should know to attend a community college without needing remediation down to pre-k. How this travesty could have been foisted on the entire country with bribes from the federal DOE without an outcry from the public and without an outcry from all of the professional organizations involved with children and their learning, without a media spotlight, sadly attests to the degree to which the power elites have already succeeded in corrupting our country. With all that we know, and all that we care about, now is the time to speak out en masse.
Well said TC,
My school notices on a daily basis the impact of making kindergarten focus only on academics. From first to fifth grade, kids have little to no social skills. Teachers have to spend too much time with direct instruction on just how to relate to each other as humans.
K used to be time to develop problem solving and social skills on those levels through play and discovery. Many kids don’t interact with humans at home. They are all on one device or another
beautifully said, Cosmic Tinkerer!
Oops, CT, not TC…thanks Robert
You make an excellent point that this monster should have met with fierce resistance from teachers and from teachers’ unions when it first was unleashed on the country in the form of NCLB.
And the point is not whether people agree with my particular proposals for approaches in specific domains within ELA. The point is that no one has the right to dictate these to everyone else. Ossification of standards serves no one.
The Dept of Ed could play an important role in facilitating bottom-up continuous improvement that provides teachers with the time and systems whereby they can subject their own practice to ongoing critique by teachers and scholars in service of continuous improvement and in creating portals for vigorous, ongoing debate of competing visions for instruction in the various subjects and in domains within these.
There is much that I personally like in the new standards [sic]. I like the emphasis on evidence from texts. I like the call for extended reading within knowledge domains (which is in the appendix to the ELA standards but isn’t much discussed). But these are notions that should be part of suggested frameworks, not standards.
Concepts which a school librarian can reinforce.
Wow! I’ve never seen so many run-on sentences in one piece of writing! What curriculum were your English teachers following?
Robert, it’s a bullet list.
And this is a blog. People are allowed, I think, to write colloquially. God knows, I often cringe when I reread a hastily written entry in some online thread. 🙂
Bobert,
Weare teechrs, nut pruuf reedrs.
I was trying to comment on lafered’s post.
Sorry, Robert. Of course. My apologies.
Aye, RT, the nested comment layout here does get confusing at times where there are a lot of comments and you can’t do a direct reply beyond the tertiary.
As for criticizing grammar on a blog, I generally follow the “live by the sword, die by the sword” rationale.
“I am truly interested in hearing from critics of the new standards of the problems with the specifics”
The critique/problem with standards in general (and since the critique is so damning of all educational standards and the resulting high stakes tests then one doesn’t need to worry about the “specifics” because they are included in the general) is that there are so many epistemological and ontological errors in the making of the standards and the resulting tests that, fundamentally they are completely invalid as proven by Wilson in his “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Lafered, have you read this critique?
Until one can prove that educational standards do not suffer from the logical fallacies that Wilson has pointed out in that study, I will continue to contend that CCSS and any others are WRONG and are educational malpractices.
So that leaves the statement of “I do hear a repeated theme in the condemnations of the CCSS and it has something to do with the notion that standards are anti-teacher, reflect a lack of confidence in teachers to make the proper decisions regarding what needs to be taught and how things need to be taught.” as nothing more than bloviation of/about bovine excrement and serves no purpose that to further the edudeformers unethical and unjust agenda!
As a librarian, I say the suggested reading list is incomplete, inaccurate (wrong books at wrong age levels), out of date (many of the publications are out of print, many of the readings are difficult to find articles), and lacking. Lexiles, grade level, interest level, and appropriateness were disregarded.
Do you need specific examples?
Good reading lists are extraordinarily important. Ongoing work to compile those lists–list from which autonomous teachers can freely choose–should be encouraged, and a central national portal for such lists should be created. That would be a legitimate function of a federal dept of education–not to decide what the reading lists should be but to post the lists prepared by experts like you, Ellen.
The upshot is that companies such as Follett and Permabound have come out with packets of books meeting the need for these so called reading lists. New books have been published containing these old, now new, articles. Nothing is created in a vacuum.
When I used to prepare my summer reading list for my schools, I would visit the public library and ask the children what they were reading and what titles they would recommend. I also went to Barnes and Noble and asked the clerk – who was knowledgable on current lit, as well as talked to the parents choosing books with their kids. I looked through unfamiliar titles and noted what was re-released. I talked to the students at my school and the ELA teachers. I read the reviews and looked through brochures about soon to be released titles. I checked the exile levels. I went to workshops, met authors, talked with my fellow school librarians, all because I took book selection very seriously – for collection development and recommendations. I’m out of the loop now, but if I see a book which I know my former students will like, I share this with my replacement librarian.
You can take the librarian out of the library, you can’t take the library out of the librarian.
NCLB was not met with widespraed resistance from teachers for a number of reasons.
1) Meeting AYP only impacted Title 1 schools; especially those with a large number of sub-groups.
2) Teacher evalauations were NEVER tied to test scores; only schools were punished for poor test performance (SINI status)
3) Only grades 3 to 8 were tested in math and ELA, grades 4 and 8 in science
4) Most state standards were age appropriate; companion assessments were reasonably written
5) Teachers were not TIP’d; lessons were not scripted; autonomy was still in place
6)
And what was wrong with the NYS standards? We worked on supporting curriculum in Buffalo for years. Why did we need CCSS when we already had a system in place?
NY, like many states, had a reasonably good set of standards already in place through NCLB; the high school Regents curriculum was way ahead of the standards curve and had a long history of success (until Richard Mills came along). Public schools throughout NY have routinely sent HS graduates to the finest colleges and universities in the world. Between the years 2002 – 2010, NY public high schools have produced 59% (401/680) of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search semi-finalists and 56% (54/96) of the finalists in this nationwide competition.
Yet the same standards and curriculum produced high school graduation rates in many city schools of only 50%. Reformers turn a blind eye and deaf ear to this data set because it proves that standards are a NON-ISSUE. The system can only be as strong as its weakest link; standards, curriculum, and standardized tests were never the weakest link.
We didn’t need CCSS, Governor Cuomo wanted RTTT money and the NCLB waiver that came with it. CCSS, APPR, PARCC (now postponed indefinitely), and InBloom were all part of the devil’s bargain.
Commissioner Mills’ quest to eliminate school diplomas in favor of Regents Diplomas throughout the state has led to low graduation rates in the inner city of Buffalo. Actually, King referred to the resistance towards a mandatory Regents Diploma (and the higher graduation rate that resulted) as an example of why he is disregarding the pushback on CCSS. Of course later he stated that we needed CCSS due to the low graduation rate.
John, you can’t call heads AND tails on the some coin flip.
I should clarify what I mean by “wildly developmentally inappropriate,” for it differs from what some mean when they use that phrase. One of my primary concerns about specific CCSS standards in particular ELA domains is that they are focused on explicit formulations of abstract skills and that the tests encourage cutting to the chase and teaching of the skills per se. Let me give you some examples:
George Miller, the great cognitive psychologist and linguist, estimates in his The Science of Words that the average 18-year-old has learned about 60,000 words, or roughly 10 per day throughout his or her life to that point. Estimates of vocabulary vary enormously based on how one does the estimation–are the various compound, inflected, and derivative forms separate words? But the point is that people acquire a lot of vocabulary and almost none of that acquisition is the result of explicit teaching. Here’s how people learn vocabulary: They encounter related new terms in a semantic context that is meaningful to them and that requires them to use those terms. You take an art class offered by your local Parks and Recreation Dept., and in the course of a few weeks, you learn about filbert brushes and gesso and chiaroscuro and tableaux and stippling–and these terms stick because they are related and because you are actively using them. So, the way to teach vocabulary is to have kids do extended work in particular knowledge domains that are important to them and within which they will encounter and use new, related terms. Now, the CCSS in ELA do say that vocabulary should be learned in context and even call for extended work within knowledge domains, but they also contain lots and lots of specific vocabulary standards that call for teaching of lists of suffixes, affixes, and roots and of a list of context clues strategies, and these have almost no impact on actual vocabulary acquisition. But they will generate a lot of test questions and test prep.
The CCSS contain a lot of language standards that describe explicitly learned grammatical forms and rules (e.g., “Explain the function of verbals (gerunds, participles, infinitives) in general and their function in specific sentences.”) and completely skip over–ignore–the fact that we humans have internal language acquisition devices for acquiring grammars–that we are born with hardwiring for principles of language and that we set the parameters of our grammars based on the ambient spoken linguistic environments that we encounter as kids. Early exposure to syntactically rich spoken linguistic environments–ones that contain the full syntactic richness of the language–is essential to formation of grammatical competence–the grammar in the head that the speaker uses irrespective of his or her ability to state, explicitly, the principles of that grammar–the functions of parts of speech, for example. Teaching kids how to identify parts of speech (underline the gerunds) has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with the acquisition of an internalized grammar allowing for production of those forms in the student’s speech and writing and ability to comprehend sentences containing those forms. Kids enter our schools from vastly different ambient linguistic home environments. Some of those environments are extremely impoverished syntactically and semantically. It is extremely important, given how grammars are actually acquired, that those kids be exposed to compensating syntactically and semantically rich spoken language environments so that the innate acquisition device can do its work. Find THAT in the CCSS in ELA! But instead of creating those compensatory spoken language environments–we expose them, instead, almost exclusively, to written language environments that are INTENTIONALLY SYNTACTICALLY AND SEMANTICALLY IMPOVERISHED (leveled reading) and then we try to teach them explicit formal grammar rules. In other words, we teach “grammar” not in the way in which minds are built to acquire grammars but in the ways instantiated in the CCSS.
The literature standards in the CCSS are ALMOST ALL descriptions of abstract, formal analysis skills (Identify two themes and explain how these relate, identify common types of figurative language). Fine. But all that skips over the literary experience. When one reads a work of literature, one enters into an imaginary world and has an experience there. One HAS TO TAKE THAT TRIP. Literary works MEAN in a unique way. One has an imaginative experience. It is then THAT experience that is meaningful. The most important part of instruction in reading literature is helping people to learn how to do that. The formal analysis is an AFTERTHOUGHT. It’s what happens when we reflect, later on, about WHY we had the experience and derived the meaning that we did. Having literature standards that are ALMOST ALL descriptions of abstract, formal analysis skills encourages the sort of terrible teaching of literature that reduces “Sailing to Byzantium” to identification of the list of symbols that Yeats used.
The writing standards [sic] in the CCSS are almost identical from grade level to grade level, and all focus on writing in three “modes”–narrative writing, expository writing, and argument. And so they encourage the writing of the five-paragraph themes, instantiate an inaccurate view of writing in which these modes are isolated and not intermingled within particular pieces of writing, and completely fail to address the hundreds of thousands of very specific competencies that actual writers in the real world actually draw upon.
This note is already too long. One could go on and on.
Two points: A. These standards [sic] should have been subjected to learned critique and weren’t. B. I don’t expect people to agree with MY ideas about how teaching should be approached in these domains. No one died and made me absolute monarch of instruction in the English language arts. News flash: No one died and conferred that title on David Coleman and Susan Pimentel, either. A small group of unelected arbiters at Achieve did this. We need competing, voluntary standards reflecting alternative visions. That’s how real innovation, real improvement, real reform occurs.
Sorry about any typos in the material above. Rushing here.
Please don’t let the comment above cause you to get uptight about typos etc.
As you indicated, this is a conversation on a blog, conducted in our free time and typed on phones, tablets and occasionally while doing other tasks.
I always read you and can easily get your points.
No worries.
Thanks, Ang. I very much appreciate your comment! Warm regards, Bob
My favorite paragraph: “The literature standards in the CCSS are ALMOST ALL descriptions of abstract, formal analysis skills (Identify two themes and explain how these relate, identify common types of figurative language). Fine. But all that skips over the literary experience. When one reads a work of literature, one enters into an imaginary world and has an experience there. One HAS TO TAKE THAT TRIP. Literary works MEAN in a unique way. One has an imaginative experience. It is then THAT experience that is meaningful. The most important part of instruction in reading literature is helping people to learn how to do that. The formal analysis is an AFTERTHOUGHT. It’s what happens when we reflect, later on, about WHY we had the experience and derived the meaning that we did. Having literature standards that are ALMOST ALL descriptions of abstract, formal analysis skills encourages the sort of terrible teaching of literature that reduces “Sailing to Byzantium” to identification of the list of symbols that Yeats used.” YES–the value of literature is for the reader to inhabit the world that the author’s imagination created, to better understand the human condition and one’s place in it. The other essential piece that is left out of the ELA standards is the development of each student’s voice, and nurturing students’ heritage and interests and talents. This is necessary for their engagement in their learning as well as for their development as members of a society. I doubt that any of this was on Coleman’s radar screen at all. How awful that such an impoverished view of literature and how to support young people in accessing and appreciating it is now being foisted on the entire country.
Yup. Two little things that the literature “standards” leave out:
1. the literature
2. the literary experience
And where do we get to admire the beauty of the written word? While reading Pride and Prejudice, my students lament that it is boring. I read the same book and cry at the beauty and cleverness of Austin’s words.
There are some great LDC modules being produced by great teachers, working collaboratively, who understand these matters. But the CCSS curricula being created by the big publishers are another matter altogether. Generally, this junk skips right to the abstract formal analysis. Gotta teach that CCSS skill. That’s what’s on the TEST!!!
Sadly, what is being skipped over is the stuff that provides the reason why anyone would want to read anything. People read Emerson’s “Brahma” because he has something to say about the nature of divinity, not to make a list of the themes that he introduces and the elements of prosody that he employs. Skipping, right away, to talk and writing at that abstracted level is a crime, especially with little kids. They want to know about sharks. That’s why they read about sharks. Their interest is not in what techniques of expository development the author used.
Well said, Ellen. I think that early literature instruction should be largely verbal. Storytelling in a circle with lights down low. Listening to and memorizing (yes, I said memorizing) and performing poems and songs. Enacting stories and dramas. And largely done with folktales and myths and jump-rope rhymes and other materials from the oral tradition or in imitation of the oral tradition that instantiate archetypes and are close to the roots of literature in the magic of the spoken word.
I have had graduates of English programs at Ivy league schools working for me who could not write a couplet because they had NO EAR WHATSOEVER for the music, for the rhythms of the language. It’s one thing to know that Anglo-Saxon verse is alliterative or that epic verse makes use of formulaic epithets. It’s another altogether to have experience attending to and creating those. Let’s chant that poem and bang on a drum or strum a harp while we do. Let’s learn that to read literature, you have to take the trip: you have to allow yourself to fall down that rabbit hole, step through that wardrobe. We need, early on, to be creating those kinds of experiences, for kids, of literature.
Here’s how Billy Collins says that:
Poem Number 1
Introduction to Poetry
Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
Of course, “what it really means” is what the experience of it means. And that experience can be transformative. See Denise Levertov’s AMAZING “A Tree Telling of Orpheus,” which is about that.
No one ever had his or her life changed by correctly identifying whether paragraph four of the selection uses comparison and contrast or cause-and-effect as its mode of development.
Robert, you would have loved being in my library class. I did all that and more. For my poetry unit, I had the kids recite, I recited, and, if I could get them to do it, the teacher recited. I had them stand in front of the class, nice and tall, and repeat their “poems” from memory. The little kids especially loved it. I did all sorts of poetry, from Nursery Rhymes, to Slam Book poems, to Jump Rope ditties, to limericks, to tongue twisters, to funny poems such as Silverstein and Prelutsky, to the classics of Stevenson and Frost. Some we sang, some I read, some we did with hand motions,some we all recited together, we even played games (one potato, two potato), . . .
I had to have behavioral objectives, which were measurable, in my plan book. I always was able to come up with some crap and align it to the standards.
My real objective was to foster a love of poetry in children. My assessment was if they eagerly participated and laughed with Joy. Then if my shelves in the 800’s (poetry books) were depleted at the end of the unit – I had achieved success. Even better, if those same children continued to ask for poetry books, year after year, and they came and showed me their own poetry, I had reached Nirvana.
wonderful, Ellen. lucky kids to have had these experiences!
“(yes, I said memorizing)”
Well, Robert, I now know that you are truly unrepentant. Such blasphemy!!
Yes, memorizing does indeed have a place in the teaching and learning process.
LOL, Duane. You crack me up.
One of the ways to assist in the process of incorporating a new syntactic form into a kid’s activem, internalized grammar is to have her commit to memory some memorable line employing that form. And, of course, literature has its roots in song–in orally performed poetry. There is a reason why the earliest surviving fragments of material from the oral tradition are poems. No music, no literature. No performance, no music.
Thank you so much for this detailed reply, Dr Shepherd. I have been waiting for you to provide more info on your oft-stated premise that CCSS ELA stds err by emphasizing acquired skills (as opposed to perhaps listing readings & activities through which one might acquire such skills)– & of course the inevitable consequence of tests which isolate these skills, & thus teach-to-the-test classes which are choppy & undermine the logical development of such skills.
As a world-lang educator, I’d like to endorse what you say here: “Explain the function of verbals (gerunds, participles, infinitives) in general and their function in specific sentences.”) and completely skip over–ignore–the fact that we humans have internal language acquisition devices for acquiring grammar…”
which speaks directly to the fatal flaw in US WL-lang teaching in general: despite dime-a-dozen Berlitz etc language-courses for those who actually wish to learn to speak another language, we still (after all these years!) tend to greaduate students who can talk to you about the language and how it works– perhaps can even read and write it– but cannot speak it.
Fortunately for those like me, WL stds are still untouched by CCSS (may it always be so!), & those states with good core curricula use the ACTFL stds, which interpret language acquisition according to modes and proficiency levels without regard to grade. These stds have been onboard in such states for about 15 yrs, & curriculum is slowly catching up.
Exactly, I spent 3 years learning German in high school and another 4 years at a university taking German classes. When I then lived in Germany, I could not communicate. It took at least 6 months of listening before I could understand anything that was said let alone reply. I see this in my English Language learner says well. Talking about language and its forms is not using the language. It is not communication.
Firstgrademonkey,
Although it may seem like a lot of studying of German, but those three years of high school study are about equal to being in a German speaking country for 30 days. How much can one “know” in a second language in 30 days. Just consider how long it takes to acquire the first one (when the brain is more attuned, in synch to learning language).
After studying Spanish for four years in high school, including one summer spent studying three hours a day at the ITESM in Monterrey, Mexico it still took 2-3 months of living in Peru to get to the “flow in/flow out” state where I could actually communicate halfway decently. The first two weeks I was literally exhausted from having to think so hard trying to understand and communicate. But I feel that my school experiences provided enough of a “background” for me to learn that quickly. I wonder how long it would take someone to learn a second language by just plopping them into a country without any prior knowledge/study of the language. My guess, probably a couple of years of massive struggle.
Yet in Buffalo, the kids from countries all over the world (56 languages), many of them refugees with little or no formal education, are expected to pass the CCSS exam after one year in this country. The schools with a heavy ELL population have been cited as low achieving schools and King has threatened to close them down. His solution was to have the district contract with the suburban BOCES program so that the high school students could learn a usable trade. Unfortunately, no ELL teachers were assigned to assist the BOCES teachers. How I would have loved to have been a fly on that wall.
King is still threatening. Lafayette High School had various turn around plans which the state felt unacceptable. They lost the grant money promised by the state for not being timely. Recently, King toured the school and expressed doubts that Buffalo could fix the problems. Lafayette has a partnership with John Hopkins University. King is not impressed and hinted he might have the state take over this school filled with ELL refugees.
As we say in my household – “The inmates are running the asylum”.
Reblogged this on Roy F. McCampbell's Blog.
Thanks, Roy!
Reblogged this on nytechprepper and commented:
Today’s MUST READ!!!
Thanks, leea!
Robert D. Shepherd is completely right.
A ditto from Harold! Here are some standards. Explain to me what is wrong with them:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.1 Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.2 Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.3 Analyze the impact of the author’s choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story or drama (e.g., where a story is set, how the action is ordered, how the characters are introduced and developed).
lafered, thank you for your thoughtful comments. I will try to give you a thoughtful reply.
But first a word about your question. Imagine that a Common Culinary Standards organization had mandated that everyone was to eat rice and beans every evening. Then imagine that, when someone objected that there were many, many other things that one might have for dinner, the response was, “But what’s wrong with rice and beans?”
These matters are complex, so I am not going to tear into every part of all of these standards that you have listed. I just want to give you a sense of the unexamined assumptions that they make in almost every clause.
RL.11-12.5 Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure specific parts of a text (e.g., the choice of where to begin or end a story, the choice to provide a comedic or tragic resolution) contribute to its overall structure and meaning as well as its aesthetic impact.
First, this standard [sic] flies in the face of a century of work in hermeneutics, the theory of interpretation, in its assumption (big assumption!) that an author’s choices are a proper object of study. This is an extremely controversial position, but it is taken for granted in the standard [sic]. E. D. Hirsch stood almost alone, throughout much of the past century, in his heroic defense of the author’s choices, or intentions, as proper objects of scholarly attention. During that time, many scholars and critics, perhaps most professional literary people, contended that the author’s choices, or intentions, were irrelevant or irrecoverable or both and that we must attend, instead,
• to the text itself (Ransom, Tate, Empson, Brooks, Warren, Wimsatt, Beardsley, and others of the New Critical school; Propp, Jakobson, Stith Thompson, Levi-Strauss, and other Formalists and Structuralists);
• to the reader’s construction of the text (in their various ways, Barthes, Fish, Rosenblatt, Derrida, and other Reader Response, Postmodernist, and Deconstructionist critics); or
• to historically determined responses to the text and differences in these over time (Heidegger, Gademer, Foucault, Greenblatt, and other Historicist and new Historicist critics).
It’s fairly typical of these standards [sic] to be worded in complete obliviousness of the fact that people have thought pretty seriously about literature over the past hundred and fifty years and have, in the course of all that, learned a few things and in complete obliviousness of the fact that there are alternative approaches to literary study that take as fundamental the notion that the author’s choices are not a legitimate subject of study. This is a very controversial notion, a notion that was CENTRAL to the raging debates over approaches to literary interpretation (over hermeneutics) in the twentieth century. Who decided that David Coleman and Susan Pimentel had the right to overrule every scholar, every teacher, every curriculum designer, every curriculum coordinator, who belongs to one of those other camps? Are we to have a central committee deciding what IDEAS are acceptable?
Second, why, at this level (Grades 11 and 12) are students being asked to concentrate, in particular, on the structures of specific parts of a text? Would it make more sense, instead, to address overall structure at these grade levels, building upon analyses of structures of specific parts of texts done at earlier grade levels? Was this possibility considered? Certainly, there is much that we know about structure in texts that is quite important to the interpretation of works of all kinds, literary and otherwise, that is never addressed anywhere in the standards [sic]. Unfortunately, the standards [sic] do not build in students, over time, familiarity with many extremely common structural patterns–episodic structure, cyclical structure, choral structure, the five-act play, the monomyth, the three unities–one could make a long list.
Shouldn’t this be the time, at the end of the K-12 program, to sum up what has been learned in earlier grades about specific literary structures, to draw some broad conclusions about common overall literary structures and their determinative influence on the making of literary works? Do we want to make sure, before they graduate, that students understand the basics of conventional plot structure? Shouldn’t we review that because it is so fundamental and because this is our last chance to do so before we ship kids off into their post-secondary colleges and careers? Shouldn’t a school system or a planner of an instructional sequence be free to decide that such an approach would be more preferable in grades 11 and 12? Did someone make Coleman and Pimentel the “deciders” (to use George Bush’s unfortunate phrase) for everyone else in this regard? Were such questions considered by the authors of these standards [sic]? I doubt it.
Third, aren’t the relations of specific structure to a) overall structure, b) meaning, and c) aesthetic impact quite distinct topics of study? Why are they lumped together in this standard [sic]? Don’t these require quite a lot of unpacking? This is a common fault of the standards [sic]. They often combine apples and oranges and shoelaces and are ALL OVER THE PLACE with regard to their level of generality or specificity,. Often, there seems to be no rationale for why a given standard is extremely specific or extremely broad or, like this one, both, in parts.
Fourth, does it make sense, at all, to work in this direction, from general notions about literary works as expressed in a standard [sic] like this, rather than from specific case studies? Wouldn’t real standards be encouraging empirical, inductive thinking, beginning with specific works, with study of patterns of relationship in those works, and then and only then asking students to make generalizations or exposing them to generalizations made by knowledgeable scholars who have thought systematically about those patterns of relationship? Wouldn’t that be a LOT more effective pedagogically? Isn’t that what the Publishers’ Criteria say? Isn’t the overall approach taken in these standards [sic] antithetical to the very “close reading” that they purport to encourage? Isn’t it true that by handing teachers and students nationwide a bunch of implicit generalizations like those in this standard [sic], the makers of the standards [sic] are encouraging uncritical acceptance of those generalizations about texts rather than an empirical approach that proceeds inductively, based on real analysis, to build understanding?
Fifth, what is meant by this word structure in the standard [sic]? The examples given (where the piece begins, comedic or tragic resolution) suggest that students are to analyze narrative structures, but there are many other kinds of structures in literary works. Are teachers to ignore those and concentrate on narrative structures? Was that among the “choices” that the authors of the standards made for the rest of us? What about rhetorical structures? metrical structures? logical structures? imitative or derivative structures based on forms in other media (e.g., John Dos Passos’s “Newsreels”)? Are teachers to ignore those? Is it unimportant for 11th- and 12th-grade students to learn about the reductio (Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan or Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King); the thesis, antithesis, synthesis structure, or dialectic (Rebecca Goldstein’s Mazel); choral structure (The Book of Job, Antigone); metrical structures like formulaic oral composition (the Sundiata, the Iliad) or terza rima? The standards [sic] are shot through with such glaring lacunae. One asks oneself, reading them, why are students studying this, in particular, and not that? Why at this grade level? Why is this and this and this and this left out?
One could do the same for most of the other CCSS ELA standards [sic].
And, did anyone involved in drafting these standards stop to think for one moment about the fact that they are ALL descriptions of abstract formal analysis skills and that there is a LOT more to instruction in literature than that? See my notes, above, on the dire consequences for the English language arts of having curricula designed SOLELY to have it instantiate standards [sic] so conceived.
And here’s another general point: Now, why weren’t these standards [sic] subjected to nationwide critique of the kind that I have given here, for this ONE standard? And why should we not be continuously subjecting proposals for standards, frameworks, pedagogical approaches, etc., to revision and critique? Why shouldn’t there be MANY voices as opposed to this one, the voice of a couple people chosen by Achieve to dictate to the rest of the country?
Now, I happen to be one of those literature teachers who thinks that the reports of the “death of the author” (the phrase comes from Roland Barthes) were exaggerated, but it is not for me (or Coleman or anyone else) to make that decision FOR EVERY OTHER LITERATURE TEACHER IN THE COUNTRY. After all, that notion was fundamental to many schools of literary criticism developed in the twentieth century, and the authors of the standards betray, in their reference to analyzing the author’s choices, what has to be either complete ignorance of that or complete disregard of the opinions of thousands and thousands of scholars.
cx: “unexamined assumptions, made for the rest of us, in almost every phrase,”
not
“in almost every clause”
But who are we mere mortals to argue? After all, the masters at Achieve have appointed David Coleman and Susan Pimentel, by divine right, absolute monarchs of English language arts instruction in the United States, and surely, as Hobbes argued in the Leviathan, monarchy is best, surely, in his words, we all need to live under “a common power to keep [us] all in awe,” and as Queen Elizabeth I wrote in 1601, “The Royal Prerogative [is] not to be canvassed, nor disputed, nor examined, and [does] not even admit of any limitation.”
and before some untutored prescriptive grammarian jumps on this sentence
Now, I happen to be one of those literature teachers who thinks that the reports of the “death of the author” (the phrase comes from Roland Barthes) were exaggerated
to say that I have made an agreement error–that “thinks” should be “think” because it has to agree with “teachers,” let me point out that two different trees can be drawn for two different sentences with different meanings, one in which the subject of the verb is “one” and another in which the subject of the verb is “teachers.” For an excellent discussion of just this sort of ambiguity in just such a construction, see Andrew Carne’s Syntax: A Generative Introduction, which is a standard text in introductory generative syntax classes for undergraduates.
Robert,
Excellent example of how what appears to be a minor, “thinks” or “think” can change the meaning of the thought/idea in that sentence. No doubt language learning is a complex process which the standards can’t ever approximate.
“as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain.”
Far too subjective and abstract.
“analyze [the development of two or more themes] over the course of the text,”
Could you analyze the development of just one theme over the course of the text for us?
To Kill a Mockingbird will do..
“Analyze the impact of the author’s choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story or drama”
Would like to see your take on this as well.
And now tell me how to determine if a student’s analysis is accurate.
Exactly, NY teacher! I can’t begin to tell you how many TERRIBLE lessons about relating two different themes in a work I have seen since the CCSS in ELA came out. If this is appropriate to/important to the understanding of the work being studied, do it. If it makes more sense to think about the two themes separately, then do that.
But the bullet list distorts the curricula. Every unit in a program for this grade level has to have its mandatory couple of lessons in which the kids relate two themes because Kind David Coleman, crowned by Achieve, has spoken. To hell with what any peasant curriculum developer might think about what is best for the unit that he or she is writing.
I’m not an ELA teacher but this general approach seems like a disaster in the making. Close readings, author’s intent, author’s choices, where text leave matters uncertain, three themes? four themes? Can you imagine the test items these standards will generate. The bell weather for this train wreck will be the Pearson grade 11 ELA test in NY. pay close attention to this test. Hope somebody leaks it.
That’s a very quick response to ONE of these standards [sic]. Now let’s look closely at the other 2,000 (or whatever the number is).
And let’s do that nationwide. Let’s hear from scholars about their alternative proposals about what a standard should look like. (e.g., lists of world knowledge (knowledge of what) and specific, operationalized procedural knowledge (knowledge of how) rather than lists of abstract “skills” for formal analysis. Let’s hear the arguments against working from standards at all, as opposed to working from general curriculum frameworks. And let’s have alternative proposals, vigorously and continuously debated, from among which A FREE PEOPLE CAN CHOOSE.
I hope RShepherd will reply to this. In the interim, I was spurred to examine my own state’s (NJ’s) last revision of Core Curriculum Stds (2008) & compare them to the above (which our gov adopted by fiat last year…)
I speak as a graduate in literary analysis (primarily of French & Spanish texts), so I feel I can speak to the reading stds.
One cannot compare line by line. The 2008 stds (which I prefer)
(a)outline results expected by hs graduation, w/o breaking it down into which shall be learned in which grade– I prefer this, as it allows teachers to design curriculum in a building, progressive manner based always from where their particular population is developing– & allows for curriculum to be developed within their [local school system] departments to align with their particular student populations
(b)express several different text approaches to be mastered by students. By comparison, what I dislike about the CCSS ELA for 11-12 reading is that each of the standards reflects one viewpoint, which I would describe as a mid-20thc. method of literary criticism often referred to as ‘close reading [of a text], which is neither better nor worse than many other approaches.
Very well said, as usual (how very much I enjoy reading your posts). I did reply, above.
Here are a few problems that I have:
1. Work backwards from the RL 11-12 standards and tell me where “conflict” is to be analyzed according to the standards. Go all the way to grade 6, and you will see that conflict analysis is NOT part of the standards. It may be hinted at or mentioned in some tangential way, but it clearly is not mentioned. So why did the writers of CCSS leave out conflict? It is almost as though the writers were removing the notion of conflict and replacing it with a universal plus-delta (what is good? What could be better? Never what is wrong.) mindset. And while reading the standards, explain how some of them build to the next level. There are inconsistencies and irrelevancies. Many of us already teach beyond the standards and outside the standards. But perhaps all this free thought is a problem to those imposing this on us.
2. As far as the three types of writing are concerned, why is literary analysis not listed? Reading literature and applying one’s knowlege and understanding of that literature to a prompt such as the AP literature free response essay or the NYS critical lens essay is not valued in the CCSS. In fact, the new CCSS English Regents will no longer have a critical lens essay. It’s part of the effort to keep students within the “four corners of the page.” Who needs background knowlege or outside information?
3. Why are the CCSS multiple choice questions being written with the standards as the question stems? Any skills or knowlege outside the standards will not be valued. Worse, students will learn to talk about and view literature, and life, only through the lens of these very narrow standards.Read some of those engageNY modules at the high school level. Doubleplusungood.
4. If students never learn these literary skills, they will not be successful in college classes. Remember Jason Zimba’s testimony that these standards (he was speaking specifically about math) will not prepare students to attend colleges to which their parents may aspire for them to go (flagship public and selective private colleges). All the outcry has been at the elementary level. Just wait until parents discover the destruction at the high school level.
It’s just as well they eliminated the Critical Lens essay, it was basically a formula. Yes, I agree because … In the short story, title, author . . . And in the play, title author, they also . . . In conclusion, both …. Showed …..
Formula. I taught it to many of the students I tutored and they all passed. Even the girl who couldn’t pass any other Regents Exam, no matter how many times she took it. She took the ELA once – in January of her Junior year. Passed!
An excellent response, nimbus! I, too, have puzzled about why one would have standards for reading fiction and drama, at any grade level, that do not deal with conflict. While there are exceptions (writers are endlessly inventive), in general, a really good answer to the question “What is a plot?” is “It’s the working out of a conflict.” It’s the key bit around which everything else revolves. And the notion that by GR 11 one has “covered that” is just plain silly.
I do think that one can find literary analysis in the CCSS. There’s a lot of call, there, for short response, in writing, using evidence from the text. However, the authors of the standards clearly, in the beginning, were trying to deemphasize literature instruction and to emphasize instruction in reading of nonfiction texts. Only after a howl of outrage about that from around the country did they backpedal and say that they really didn’t mean that stuff about reading in upper-level English classes being 70 percent nonfiction. The claim that they meant that figure to refer to reading across all classes within a school is just crap that they made up after the fact to save face.
But if they started trying to save face with regard to every idiocy in these amateurish “standards,” they would be quite busy for the next few years.
Achieve blew it. They hired a couple of amateurs to do this job. They did not subject those people’s work to learned critique. They did not test the result. But mostly, they blew it by a) thinking that they had legitimate to make these decisions for everyone else in the country and b) promoting mandatory standards instead of a general, voluntary curriculum framework and c) not encouraging the development of alternative visions and d) not employing experts in the various domains within these subject areas.
And so they produced a bullet list of every hackneyed halftruth and cliche about the teaching of English bouncing around the the mostly empty heads of amateurs who think that they know all about the teaching of English because they went to English classes when they were kids.
Have you ever sat down and read a children’s nonfiction book? Most are not very well written. The authors are not getting any awards for good literature. Of course, they were always popular in the school library, but mainly for the photographs and other pictures. Plus, some nonfiction is pure propaganda. Some is just plain boring. The best of nonfiction probably won’t make it to the required reading list.
Now, if they are talking biographies – the ones that are better than most fiction books – biographies such as Death be Not Proud, Tuesday’s with Morrie, Angela’s Ashes, and All Creatures Great and Small, then, yes, let’s read nonfiction. If it’s a Sports Illustrated book on basketball, not so much.
I’m curious to see how the focus on nonfiction is working out. Articles from Ranger Rick or National Geographic For Kids? Scientific American? Or are we talking Time Magazine for Kids? (My guess – each kid is required to buy a subscription for a class set.)
I’d like to see how this all plays out.
A “proof is in the pudding” test: I just spent a little while on the websites of Cranbrook, U of Chicago Lab Schools, Sidwell Friends, Harpeth Hall, Lakeside School, Maumee Valley Country Day School, Dwight School and Delbarton School. For these and others, just use that new fangled invention called the “internet” and a “search engine” called “google.” *If you don’t know what I’m talking about, ask a teenager.*
Hint for the clueless: think of some of the biggest movers and shakers in education rheephorm and ask yourselves where they send THEIR OWN CHILDREN.
Interestingly [?], strangely [?], mystifyingly [?], the greatest innovation in the history of pedagogy—the Common Core—is not featured front and center, or even back and off-side, on any of these websites.
Instead there is space devoted to such useless topics as musical & theatrical performances by, and athletic accomplishments of, students. Such a waste! Or is it?
Robert D. Shepherd, help me out here: could it be that Common Core as it is being actually implemented is a humiliating lash applied only to OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN and not to that undeserving and lazy rabble that consists of the vast majority aka OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN?
This couldn’t be another step in the direction of that dreaded two-tiered education system that that “shrill” and “strident” Diane Ravitch has been complaining about, could it?
I remain perplexed and confused. Please consult the CC standards and enlighten me.
Your local neighborhood KrazyTA.
😎
The snake oil salesman would never dream of drinking his own potion.
LOL
Ron Chernow’s wonderful biography of John D. Rockefeller describes in delightful detail, full of local color, the career of John’s father (or his grandfather, I can’t remember which), who was just such a fellow–one who traveled from frontier town to frontier town peddling a magic elixir for curing cancer (and anything else that ailed people). I often think of that fellow when I think of the promoters of the most recent hysterical magic potion for U.S. education–national standards and summative tests–the latest in a long line of such magic formulae for “reform”–many of which are detailed in Dr. Ravitch’s magisterial and hugely important book Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform.
CCSS = The Magic Elixir
Guaranteed to cure all educational ills
Just one sip and you’ll be college and career ready
Hucksters – all of them!
Must be too much Common Core on the brain:
Fourth from last paragraph should read:
“Robert D. Shepherd, help me out here: could it be that Common Core as it is being actually implemented is a humiliating lash applied only to that undeserving and lazy rabble that consists of the vast majority aka OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN?”
If I make such a careless mistake again, will I have to go back in that sensory deprivation, er, time-out closet again?
😎
I have always wanted to experience one of those sensory deprivation tanks, but I meditate, which is the same sort of thing. But I think that there are very, very few people who get up in the morning and say to themselves, “I want to do a lot of evil in the world today.” I think that those people are vastly outnumbered by the simply ignorant and uniformed who will buy into any plausible line as long as it’s being delivered by some “authority”” (especially if doing so will be lucrative) and by those who actually believe that the best of all possible worlds is one in which the few masters train the proles to be obedient (fill in those bubbles). The latter folks tend to think of everyone not in their class of masters of the universe as helplessly in need of their firm hand–that creating that training for the proles is the proles’ interest and that having education, instead, for the children of the masters of the universe is in the interest of everyone. It’s an old, old story, going all the way back to Plato’s Republic. One thing for certain–these people think of democratic processes as rule by the unthinking, incapable rabble.
There are some, of course, who are merely in this for the money. But I suspect that Bill Gates sleeps very well at night thinking that he’s going to make a LOT of money from having these national standards and tests AND that they are going to do a lot of good in the world by training the proles properly. A win-win!
KraztTA – you are obviously not college ready since using google searches and Wikipedia are unacceptable research techniques for any university student. That said, I did both. It was very interesting to see the pro websites. They almost had me believing that CCSS was the best thing since sliced bread. However, if you look at the authors of these sites, you realize that they might be a “tad bit” biased (which is why they aren’t accepted for scholarly research). It was interesting to note that in Wikipedia under the Response section they referred to Dr Ravitch’s book and commented that her take in CCSS was that they’ve never been field tested and nobody knows if they will work.
KrazyTA, I took a break from this website while I was googling CCSS and ended up reading the Buffalo News articles (and comments) about the CCSS doings in my hometown. One comment was made in reference to King sending his kids to private schools. The “speaker” said she didn’t mind what King was doing, it was people like Diane Ravitch, who were against public options for children and then sent their own kids to private schools. As we say in Buffalo – this woman was drinking the Kool-Aid.
Congratulations, Diane! I didn’t realize you still had school age children.
What is wrong with the common core? Are you kidding? That would take from dawn till doomsday. Let’s ask a different question, what is right with the common core?
……………………
Chirping birds.
“But here’s the biggest problem of all with
these particular standards, and it’s a problem with most of the
state standards that they supplant: It’s an ENORMOUS mistake to
couch desired outcomes in ELA terms of abstract skills to be
attained rather than in terms of a. world knowledge (knowledge of
what) and b. SPECIFIC procedural knowledge (knowledge of how). In
other words, the CCSS in ELA are WRONG FROM THE START, misconceived
at their most fundamental design level, that of their categorical
conceptualization. The Common Core is a monoculture. It’s just NOT
what is needed by a diverse, pluralistic society, one that prizes,
and benefits enormously from, individual autonomy and
difference.”
Garbage. What is meant by world knowledge is the proper propaganda that some one or somebodies of great intellect, above and beyond mortals’, thinks everyone needs to have, and “have” is the operative word when operate upon should be the goal of the teaching that goes on in schools for a democracy, a democracy with respect for the individual’s ability, nurtured by a properly democratic educational system, to make sense of the world for him or herself. To be nasty about it all, because this really is nasty business, this notion of specific world knowledge and specific procedural knowledge, derived from some pseudo scientific notion that the proper kind and the proper amount can be properly determined is plain out authoritarian bunk brought to us by pseudo authorities who think that their knowledge smells better than that of others. As for “chirping birds,” what the hell is such a chirp meant to mean, that what is wrong can be addressed by such knowledge as appears in the comment TC made? This is the problem. This is the kind of answer students get when they question authority, question the world knowledge that comes from these pseudo authorities, the kind of specific procedural knowledge that some think they have discovered that they can teach straight up and that their passive students should accept without question.
I would like to hear some of the specifics of proper knowledge and proper and specific procedural knowledge. What is that knowledge and what are those procedures and where have they been hidden and why? The absurdity of it all, of even a mild claim to knowledge of such specific knowledge and specific procedure needs to be explained with strong rationale for the claim that this stuff is indeed the right stuff.
As for TC, how ever disappointing that one would think that such a statement is legitimate or even allowable. You demean your audience, you exemplify exactly what is wrong with the kind of conversation about education we have been having for so long. Tell me one thing wrong, really, with the standards I posted and, as to the standards being about abstract skills, point them out and tell me how they are not vital to the act of bullshit detection that Neil Postman so rightly argued to be the proper goal of good education, student ability to determine what is valid and what is lie, what has truth value and what is truly garbage.
I’m sorry, llafered, but if you had read my comments, above, with any attention whatsoever. you would have seen that I return, time and time again, to the point that NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT TO MAKE UP THE BULLET LIST FOR THE REST OF US, including THE LIST of the declarative and procedural knowledge that every child should learn. And, by the way, the categorization of knowledge into declarative and procedural is a VERY basic one from contemporary cognitive psychology, based in distinct and well-attested underlying neurology. My point about world knowledge is that we mustn’t, as English teachers, forget WHY we read. Kids read about snakes because they want to learn about snakes. They don’t read because they want to learn the name for the method of expository development used in the fourth paragraph of the text. But the latter kind of thing is ALL that the CCSS in ELA would have kids do. That’s insane. It’s “reading” that IGNORES what we are reading and why.
If you want to create readers, have kids who are interested in snakes read about snakes. Then talk about what they learned about snakes. Then, incidentally, you can do a little of that formal analysis bit. Is that clear enough?
I thought you were advocating for the right of a teacher to make up a bullet list for a student.
TE, I am advocating for the right of building-level teachers to make their own decisions and to subject those to continual critique and revision AND for the point of view that those decisions should allow a great deal of opportunity for kids to follow their own bliss, to build upon their unique potentials.
The community will only grant that right if the members can avoid teacher decisions that they do not agree with,
How many times do I have to say that NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT to make such decisions for the rest of us, not me, not King David Coleman. No one. We don’t legislate what ideas people can have in this country. Well, until we started issuing these laughable “standards” we didn’t.
cx: “not I,” of course
But the school board can set catchment boundaries at will and tell students where they must go to school?
“I believe in standardizing automobiles, not people.” –Albert Einstein
“There’s no bullet list like Stalin’s bullet list.” –Edward Tufte
The CCSS in ELA is a would-be Stalin’s bullet list. I made that point over and over again, above. In how many different ways do I have to say this in order not to get a response like the one just posted?
I posted a quite lengthy analysis of ONE standard [sic]. I guess you didn’t read it. As a previous poster noted, if we started going through the many, many absurdities of the entire amateurish list of CCSS for ELA, we would “be here from dawn to doomsday.”
The analysis was of one of the standards [sic] that you posted, in response to your request. And yet you keep asking that someone do this. So that means that you didn’t not read the response. I did you the courtesy of responding to your request. Please do me the courtesy of reading the response. Thank you.
“The crucial confusion here is between the idea of publicly supported education and the idea of centrally controlled state-administered education. To really get your hands around this distinction simply replace the word “school” with the word “radio” in the following sentences and see what you get:
I am in favor of publicly supported radio.
I am in favor of centrally-controlled state-administered radio.
Not the same thing, are they?”
By Carol Black
YES YES YES!!!!!!!!
WONDERFUL!!!!!!!
Teaching literacy should be similar to what blogs do. Read, analyze, ask questions, confirm thinking, share, debate, negotiate, compromise, inspire, gain new knowledge… This is what I encourage my students to do. It is engaging, builds language skills, writing skills, and speaking skills. Unfortunately elementary CCS require kids to write eloquently before they have acquired orthographic skills. No wonder kids hate writing.
My kids performing below grade level have better verbal skills, but yet we cannot scribe for them on the test. They require kids to use computers for testing, yet there is hardly anytime left in the day to learn keyboarding. And they dare to time each item on CCS assessments. What the h#@! I see a lot of injustice how standards are tied to the test. It is developmentally inappropriate and irresponsibly contrived.
My state is teaching that CCSS is the great equalizer. That none of the reading requires background knowledge. That every student therefore is on equal footing when they begin the reading – a ridiculous notion.
They are also emphasizing that the opinion of the student reader is taken out of the process. That it does not matter what the reader thinks. What matters is finding the one truth of the author’s thoughts and that there is one correct response.
I say what one brings to the reading matters a great deal and what one takes away from it can and should vary. It’s called thinking. That idea that David Coleman ridicules.
I think I’m going to start calling CCSS the “Commoners’ Core” because the elite don’t want this for their own.
Robert – This philosophy goes against everything we have been taught, everything we have learned, and everything our gut tells us about teaching literature.
The business about not teaching background knowledge is an example of something that happens often with education reforms. An initially sensible idea becomes distorted into something grotesque. A bit of background on the “background knowledge” bit:
Many years ago, the idea that readers draw upon their background knowledge became a meme in U.S. K-12 education. There was a lot of excellent research showing that comprehension depended upon readers knowing what the author took for granted.
That meme got combined with a different meme–that the reading instruction should relate to kids’ interests and experiences.
The result was something pretty awful. Instead of doing work to provide the requisite background knowledge for understanding the selection (which, generally, would be partly provided by the teacher and partly elicited from knowledgeable kids for the benefit of those without the requisite background knowledge), textbook publishers started including lots and lots of prereading “Prior Knowledge” activities that were not about providing the requisite background knowledge for understanding a selection but, rather, attempted to connect the selection with the kid by asking very general questions like “Have you ever had a choice to make? What did you do? Do the choices we make sometimes affect our lives in important and unforeseen ways?” And then kids would read “The Road Not Taken.”
Now, as you can see, this kind of activity, which became ubiquitous in reading textbooks, literature textbooks, and leveled readers, had drifted a LONG WAY from the original idea that kids who don’t have the requisite background knowledge to understand a selection need to get it first. AND, there was another problem. Activities of this kind often led kids to assume, before reading a piece, that they already knew what the selection was going to be all about. Oh, this selection is going to be about a choice that makes a big difference. And the problem with that is that kids naturally concluded that they didn’t have to attend closely to the selection because they had already been told, by the Prereading activity what the selection was “all about.”
So, the authors of the Common Core, quite rightly, I think, advised in the Publishers’ Criteria that those sorts of generalizations based on higher-order questions should be delayed until after kids have read attended to the selection closely. At no point did the authors of the CCSS make the UTTERLY STUPID claim that one should never provide the background knowledge without which the selection would make no sense at all to the student. That would be even crazier, even more insane, than the worst of the CCSS standrds [sic] are!!!
But look what has happened. That idea has become dramatically distorted in practice. In teacher trainings all over the country, now, teachers are being told NOT to provide background knowledge before kids read a selection. I’ve seen many, many slideshows for teacher training, templates for lesson design, and directions to writers from publishing houses saying, explicitly, just that. But it’s TOTALLY CRAZY to say that one shouldn’t provide kids with the necessary context for understanding a selection, isn’t it?
One of the suggested “rigorous texts” appended to the CCSS in ELA is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Now, what kids is going to have ANY IDEA WHATSOEVER what that is about without having the context for it set beforehand or at least provided early in the “close reading”?
This kind of distortion of an idea via a sort of game of “operator” in which the idea is HALF HEARD and misinterpreted and turned into TERRIBLE pedagogy and curricula happens ALL THE TIME in education. I could give a hundred examples of the same sort of thing–of some fad that swept textbooks and trainings based on some distorted and ridiculous version of an initially sound idea.
Robert – Your explanation makes total sense. It’s the stupid background questions coming from textbook companies that should be eliminated, not the enlightening background a good teacher gives the reader to help explain the setting and tone of the text, especially in historical fiction. Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby makes more sense when the reader knows the setting is during the Roaring Twenties. A knowledge of bootlegging also helps comprehension. It’s what the reader brings to the table that makes this story great. (I recently reread this book – and I got a lot more out of it as an adult than as a junior in high school.)
However, I was a voracious reader as a child. There was nobody to give me the background since I was reading books way beyond the norm for my age. I got my cues from the text. A good author sets the stage so that even a nine year old can enjoy the story. I didn’t need to know the details behind Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain had me living by their side. I learned more about historical fiction from Kenneth Roberts and James Fennimore Cooper than from any Social Studies class. So, I guess if you read enough, then the background can come through the text. Did discussion in eighth grade of the allegory of Animal Farm assist my understanding? Vaguely – but all I remember is crying when the horse died and that the story had some sort of parallel with communism.
So, as a teacher, I say background is important. As a reader – I’m not so sure.
The “Commoners’ Core”!
That’s brilliant.
Apologies if someone already has posted this; it was just brought to my attention.
“. . . a stunning admission from David Coleman himself discussing his organization Student Achievement Partners whose founders (Coleman, Susan Pimentel and Jason Zimba) were leader writers of the Common Core State Standards.
” ‘One is we’re composed of that collection of unqualified people who were involved in developing the common standards. And our only qualification was our attention to and command of the evidence behind them. That is, it was our insistence in the standards process that it was not enough to say you wanted to or thought that kids should know these things, that you had to have evidence to support it, frankly because it was our conviction that the only way to get an eraser into the standards writing room was with evidence behind it, cause otherwise the way standards are written you get all the adults into the room about what kids should know, and the only way to end the meeting is to include everything. That’s how we’ve gotten to the typical state standards we have today….
” ‘ …I probably spend a little more time on literacy because as weak as my qualifications are there, in math they’re even more desperate in their lacking.”
http://truthinamericaneducation.com/common-core-state-standards/david-coleman-2-years-ago-we-were-a-collection-of-unqualified-people/
Hear him! Hear him!
Thank you, Diane, for sharing it on your blog. I’ve enjoyed reading Robert’s comments since I started reading the comments section a while back (after noticing, in passing, the knowledge and wisdom of many of the commenters); I won’t complain if you decide to post more of his missives.
Robert, I sincerely hope you are working on a book that addresses these issues. If you need a test audience for it, I think you’d have a hard time finding a better one than the commenters here.
I have noticed that there are some supporters of the CCSS in ELA who think that what they are all about is a) getting kids to attend to texts more closely and b) having them think more about what they read. They write and speak a lot about how we now, under CCSS, have the opportunity to start really teaching kids to think, as though we had never done that before, as though the CCSS were Eden with the dew wet on the grass on the first shining day. My blessings on those people. They have the right idea. But that’s what good teachers have always done, and one cannot simply ignore the significant problems with the amateurish CCSS in ELA (see the notes above, which barely begin to expose the problems with Achieve’s mandatory bullet list.
When I was in HS and college we used Cliff and Monarch Notes to assist in analysis. Now the kids have sparknotes.com. Why go it alone when all the answers are online?
Would you care for evidence to prove your words? I teach kindergarden. The five-year olds have an incredibly tight schedule to keep in our county: an hour of math, hour of science, 2 hours of language arts, half hour of social studies. We kindergarten teachers have had to sneak in rest time and social centers (such as puppets, blocks, housekeeping, playdough) which are so critical to their development.
My class has 13 out of 16 ELL students (Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Arabic & a dialect from India are all represented). Ten of them are free or reduced lunch (aka low socio economics). Two of them never went to preschool at all, and two are on the spectrum, one severely so. All of them have to read by the end of the year. All of them have been required to participate in two close reading activities which required writing sentences.
Both of my formal observations were done during the first 60 days of school. I was criticized because my students don’t do “turn & talk” correctly (they didn’t respond to their peer by telling them why they either agree with or disagree with them). I was evaluated as “lacking in pedagogy” because I asked them to give me facts from a kindergarten level book on stars and they repeatedly tried to tell me what they knew/thought. I was told I require action in pedagogy because the book I used to sing and act out verbs also included several words (such as jump, paint, swing, march, & slide) that were also nouns and because my students could not do charades without my assistance (which I gladly gave but caused that part of the lesson to go on too long). Apparently, my pedagogy went mysteriously missing over the summer, as I’ve never been criticized for that in any of my previous 20 years of teaching experience.
They have been forced to sit through the two close readings that go on for three days each and require them to write notes and then sentences to explain what they learned. My poor babies turned in papers with sentences made of fragments from our fact chart we had made, but they hung their heads because they couldn’t read the sentences they’d managed to write. I hugged them, told them they were great, and gave them chocolate. Then I reported that only 4 of my students passed….another poor reflection on my teaching.
If this is happening in kindergarten, I can only imagine what is happening in later grades. My school is set in a high socio-economic neighborhood and has been an A school for 12 years now; I shudder to think how this affects the less fortunate schools!
Tarilee, What you describe is horrendous. Your school administrators are forcing you to engage in educational malpractice. Your evaluators have no credibility and are committing unconscionable offenses. I hope you broadcast this as widely as possible. What you and your students are being subjected to should not continue for one more day. I hope you don’t mind if I copy and paste your comments on FB.
Did the composers of CCSS have children of their own? Have they ever interacted with a four or five year old? What you describe is lunacy. Take that evaluation and hold your head up. Advocate for the kids. They are the reason you are a teacher, not some idiot principal with a clipboard (he should be ashamed of himself) and certainly not the originators of CC.
“The Common Core is a monoculture. It’s just NOT
what is needed by a diverse, pluralistic society, one that prizes,
and benefits enormously from, individual autonomy and
difference.”
Very well stated. You’d be hard pressed to come up with something more un-American.
I picked up that monoculture line from someone on this blog. I wish the heck I could remember who said it. Perfect. The difference between an ecosystem and a monoculture. The latter is a perfect characterization of what Achieve is trying to achieve.
It wasn’t me, though I’ve been thinking along these lines for a while now. Many moons ago when I took a course on assessment for my MA in English Ed, the professor made a strong argument against aborting babies based on any defects they might have (e.g. Down’s) because of the importance of having as diverse of a genetic pool as possible. I wish I could remember the whole of his argument now, but, alas, I did not give it the attention it was due at the time.
But the general gist of it makes sense to me. The more diverse your pool is, whether it’s genetics or standards, the more the pool is able to withstand any particular assault. Something to that effect.
cyn3wulf, have you read Edwin Black’s mind-blowing history of the Eugenics movement in the United States? It’s called War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. A must read by an extraordinarily able historian.
Robert, no I have not, but I’ll definitely put it on my list (perhaps Santa will put a copy in my stocking).
Omg, this is awesome! I particularly like “a single set of
standards dramatically reduces the design space within which
curricular and pedagogical innovation can occur;”
Everyone needs to share this widely with the people who matter.
Thank you, Michael. I believe that that limitation on curricular and pedagogical design has really far-reaching, profoundly negative consequences that the deformers have not considered, at all.
CCSS will act as a limiting factor for knowledge, skills, and the interests that normally follow. Like a lap band for the brain. Especially if APPR/VAM stays in place.
I have written several essays and a book to balance the fear mongering by some climate alarmists in the Common Core curriculum. It offers fascinating nature stories, solid biology and solid climate science. It promotes wise environmental stewardship but is also a muckraking book contrasting good conservation science with bad science that has been defiled by politics and climate alarmism. It will tests your critical thinking skills, which is what real science is about. http://landscapesandcycles.net
Free essays
1. Fabricating Climate Doom: Hijacking Conservation Success in the UK to Build Consensus!
http://landscapesandcycles.net/hijacking-conservation-success-in-the-uk.html
2. Fabricating Climate Doom – Part 3: Extreme Weather Extinctions Enron Style
http://landscapesandcycles.net/fabricating-climate-doom—part-3–extreme-weather.html
3. Contrasting Good and Bad Science: Disease, Climate Change and the Case of the Golden Toad
http://landscapesandcycles.net/contrasting-good-and-bad-science–disease–climate.html
The whole book from which these essays are adapted serves as a superb environmental studies text book for any secondary program. Read the reviews for Landscapes & Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism at Amazon