Mercedes Schneider is keeping track of the debates about the Common Core standards in the states.
So much is happening that she is breaking it into three posts.
This post covers the controversy surrounding Common Core in 12 states:
Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, and South Carolina.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham will introduce a Senate resolution on Wednesday aimed at rolling back implementation of the Common Core standards, which Graham fears are eroding states’ rights and leading to a national, federal education curriculum.”
Nice work Sen. Graham.
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Supporters of the Common Core never tire of saying that the standards don’t tell people what and how to teach–that they are free to develop their own curricula and to employ their own pedagogical approaches to meet the standards. That’s purest equivocation.
The standards are a list, by domain, of outcomes to be measured in mathematics and in English language arts. If a standard says that a student will be able to x, then that means that the student will be taught to x. It also assumes that x should be taught, implies that x is to be taught explicitly, and, importantly, takes time from teaching y, where y is something not in the standards. The whole point of implementing standards is to have them drive curricula and pedagogy, and claims to the contrary are equivocation.
The equivocation from deformers on this issue means one of two things: a) they don’t know what they are talking about or b) they are dissembling, i.e., practicing misdirection.
To illustrate what I’ve said here, let’s look at ONE standard and consider possible objections to it. Bear in mind that the same sort of process that I’m going to carry out below could be carried out for just about every standard on the CC$$ bullet list.
Here’s the standard:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.8.1a Explain the function of verbals (gerunds, participles, infinitives) in general and their function in particular sentences
This standard tells us students are to be assessed on their ability a) to explain the function of verbals (gerunds, participles, infinitives) in general and b) their function in particular sentences. In order for students to do this, they will have to be taught, duh, how to identify gerunds, participles, and infinitives and how to explain their functions generally and in particular sentences. That’s several curriculum items. So much for the Common Core not specifying curricula. Furthermore, in order for the standard to be met, these bits of grammatical taxonomy will have to be explicitly taught and explicitly learned, for the standard requires students to be able to make explicit explanations.
Now, there is a difference between having learned an explicit grammatical taxonomy and having acquired competence in using the grammatical forms listed in that taxonomy. The authors of the standard seem not to have understood this. Instead, the standard requires a particular pedagogical approach that involves explicit instruction in grammatical taxonomy. So much for the standards not requiring particular pedagogy.
So, to recap: the standard requires particular curricula and a particular pedagogical approach.
Let’s think about the kind of activity that this standard envisions our having students do. Identifying the functions of verbals in sentences would require that students be able to do, among other things, something like this:
Underline the gerund phrases in the following sentences and tell whether each is functioning as a subject, direct object, indirect object, object of a preposition, predicate nominative, retained object, subjective complement, objective complement, or appositive of any of these.
That’s what’s entailed by PART of the standard. And since the standard just mentions verbals generally and not any of the many forms that these can take, one doesn’t know whether it covers, for example, infinitives used without the infinitive marker “to,” as in “Let there be peace.” (Compare “John wanted there to be peace.”) Would one of you like to explain to your students how the infinitive functions in that sentence and to do the months and months of prerequisite work in syntax necessary for them to understand the explanation? Have fun. Then tell me whether you think it a good idea to waste precious class time getting kids to the point where they can parse that sentence and explain the function of the verbal in it.
Shouldn’t there have been SOME discussion and debate about this, at the very least? Do the authors of these “standards” have any notion how much curricula and what kinds of pedagogical approaches would be necessary in order for 8th-grade students to be able to do this?
And so it goes for the rest of the long, long list of specific, grade-level standards. All have enormous entailments, and none of these, it seems, were thought through, and certainly, none of them were subjected to critique, and no mechanism was created for revision in light of scholarly critique.
Given what contemporary syntacticians now know about how gerunds, participles, and infinitives function in general and in particular sentences, I seriously doubt that that the authors of this standard understood what they were calling for or that students can be taught to explain these at all accurately, at this level (Grade 8) without that teaching being embedded in an overall explicit grammar curriculum. Furthermore, the authors of the standard doubtless had in mind a prescientific folk theory of grammar that doesn’t resemble contemporary, research-based models of syntax–so they are doing the equivalent, here, of, say, telling teachers of physics that they should teach kids about how empty space is filled with an invisible ether or teachers of biology that living things differ from nonliving ones because of their élan vital.
Of course, people do not acquire competence in using syntactic forms via explicit instruction in those forms and the rules for using them. Anyone with any training whatsoever in language acquisition would know that. While there are, arguably, some reasons for learning an explicit grammar (for example, one might want to do so in the process of training for work as a professional linguist), what we are (or should be) interested in as teachers of English is assisting students in developing grammatical competence, which, again, is done by means other than via explicit instruction in taxonomy and rules (e.g., through oral language activities involving language that uses the forms properly, through committing to memory sentences containing novel constructions, through exposure to these constructions in writing, through modeling of corrections of deviations from standard grammatical rules). The science on this is overwhelming, but the authors of these standards clearly weren’t familiar with it. Their standard requires particular curricula and pedagogical approaches if it is to be met, and these aren’t supported by what we know, scientifically, about language acquisition–about how the grammar of a language is acquired by its speakers. In other words, the standards often assume and/or instantiate backward, hackneyed, often prescientific notions about what we should teach and how.
And, of course, again, these standards were foisted on the country with no professional vetting or critique, and no mechanism was created for ongoing improvement of them based on such critique.
Basically, if one imagines the whole design space of potential curricula and pedagogical approaches in the English language arts, standards such as these draw rather severe boundaries within that space and say, “What is within these boundaries is permitted, and what is outside them is not.” In other words, the standards, as written, preclude some curricula and pedagogical approaches and require others. Basically, they apply a severe prior constraint on curricular and pedagogical innovation based on current knowledge and emerging practice and research
I happen to believe, BTW, that there is a role to be played in the language and writing and literary interpretation portions of our curricula for explicit instruction in some aspects of current scientific models of syntax. However, that’s another discussion entirely, and it’s one that none of us will be having because the decisions about what we are to consider important in instruction have been made for us by Lord Coleman, and ours is but to obey.
That seems, sadly, to be OK with the defenders of the amateurishly prepared CC$$ in ELA.
Let’s turn to the place of this “standard” in the overall learning progression laid out by the Common Core.
Why verbals at this particular level? Why not case assignment or the complement/adjunct distinction or explicit versus null determiners or theta roles or X-bars or varieties of complement phrases or any of a long list of other equally important syntactic categories and concepts? And why are all those and left out of the learning progression as a whole, across all the grades, given that they are key to understanding explicit models of syntax, which, evidently, the authors of these “standards” think important for some reason or another? Answer: this standard appears at this grade level pretty much AT RANDOM, not as part of a coherent, overall progression, the purpose of which was clearly thought out based on current best practices and scientific understanding of language acquisition. It’s as though one opened a text on syntax, laid one’s finger down randomly on a topic, plopped it into the middle of the Grade 8 standards with no consideration of the prerequisites for tackling the topic.
Let’s move on to how the existence of the “standard” precludes development of alternative curricula and pedagogical approaches—to how it stifles innovation in both areas. Suppose I had an argument to make that it’s useful for kids to learn construction of basic syntax trees for coordination as part of a section of a writing program in which students are learning how to create more various, more robust sentences. Now, you can agree or disagree with this proposal, but the point is that you should have the right to do so–to look at the specific proposal and accept it, reject it, or accept it with modifications. The answer to the question, “Should we do that?” should NOT BE, “Well, it’s not in the standards.” And your answer to that question should not be, “We can’t do this because we have to be concentrating on the functions of verbals at these grade levels.” Instead, educators should consider the relative merits of these proposals.
But now, because of the CC$$ in ELA, and previously, because of the state standards, those are the standard answers to most suggestions for innovation in curricula and pedagogy.
That’s not how you get continuous improvement. Continuous improvement comes about when people put forward their suggestions for curricula and pedagogy, without such prior constraint, and those are evaluated critically.
Why has there not been more critique, like this one, of the “standards” themselves? Now, THERE’S A PROBLEM. In order REALLY to be able to counter claims about the standards made by the education deformers promoting them, one has to do fairly detailed analysis of particular standards and what they entail. That’s a big job. And the moment one starts to talk about those matters, people’s eyes glaze over. This stuff can’t be done in pithy soundbites of the kind that is the stock in trade for organizations like Achieve, the Chiefs for Change, Students First, and the Fordham Institute.
There are devils in the generalities around the Common Core. But there are many, many devils in the details. And there are NO MEANS WHATSOEVER built into the CC$$ implementations for exorcising those.
Deformers love to say, “What’s your alternative?” But they expect stone-cold silence in response. Sorry to disappoint. Here’s an alternative to top-down, invariant, inflexible, mandatory, amateurish “standards” like those foisted on the country with no vetting whatsoever:
Competing, voluntary standards, frameworks, learning progressions, curriculum outlines, reading lists, pedagogical approaches, lesson templates, etc.,
for particular domains,
posted by scholars, curriculum developers, and teachers to an open national portal or wiki,
that are crowd sourced and
subjected to ongoing, vigorous, public debate and refinement
based on results in the classroom and ongoing research and development,
freely adopted by autonomous local schools and districts
and subjected to continual critique by teachers who are given the time in their schedules to subject them all, and their own practice, to ongoing critique via something like Japanese Lesson Study.
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I think I’ll go with they are dissembling, Robert!
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this is not a comment, it’s a blog of its own 🙂
Your point of:
“Now, there is a difference between having learned an explicit grammatical taxonomy and having acquired competence in using the grammatical forms listed in that taxonomy.”
cannot be overstated. That’s the downside to teaching to the test, a bunch of bored students drilled in arcane grammatical rules who promptly forget it because it has no application to anything outside of that class. The cherry on top being, as you state, that they miss out on actually learning how to use language.
I suppose part of the problem is that it’s less subjective to put grammar rules into a standardized test, but it’s harder and more expensive to test writing — and more subjective.
It’s so obviously stoopid. I’m just impressed that you broke it down so well.
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Thank you, thufirh. I very much appreciate that.
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Robert D. Shepherd:
I like your analysis of this ridiculous “standard.” I think it was assigned to the eighth grade level because that’s the way it was done fifty years ago. There’s no rhyme nor reason other than it’s a traditional grammar topic that fits into a traditional sequence–received lore from a bygone era. Except now a layer of bogus rigor has been added, and students are asked to “explain the function” of these phrases instead of just locating, labeling, and supplying original examples, as I was assigned to do, back in the same year the Beatles were playing the Ed Sullivan Show.
Fortunately my teacher was asking us to write original stories and essays, too. She might have been requiring us to include verbal phrases in our writing (and to underline those phrases), but if so, I don’t think that made a big difference. My tacit understanding of how to use verbal phrases came from extensive reading, not from grammar drills.
The big question about this standard: Why is it there at all? Does the ability to explain the function of a verbal help a child become a better writer? According to George Hillocks’s meta-analysis of research studies on writing instruction (published in the mid-1980s), NO! Hillocks concluded that traditional grammar study was not shown to improve student writing, and in some studies it was shown to be detrimental. If anyone has convincingly refuted these findings, I’d like to know about it.
As you pointed out, including such a useless “standard” has major consequences. It crowds out other, more valuable concepts and activities, in all the preceding grade levels. Beyond that, its inclusion gives the lie to the idea of “fewer and deeper” standards that is supposed to be one of the foundations of the CCS.
English teachers should know grammar, but for kids learning how to write, dwelling on the terminology is a bad idea. (The best prescription for teaching these topics to get them to read, read, read!) In middle school and beyond, it may be important for them to understand what a phrase is, so they can learn how to fix a bad sentence, but the nomenclature and specific functions of verbals? It’s a huge waste of time.
P.S. Are you going to put an edited version of your various critiques (general and specific) of the CCS online somewhere? Or make it available on Amazon? I’d considering buying it (not hook, line, and sinker, necessarily, but as a cash transaction).
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Sorry for the mixed metaphor. That should’ve read “lock, stock, and barrel.” It’s Coleman and the Common Core promoters who want us to swallow something “hook, line, and sinker.” If you do publish your critique of CCS, I’m definitely buying it.
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the book is coming, Randal
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Looking forward to the book. I hope it’s aimed at a broad audience. The more people you can reach, the better. If you’re looking for advance readers, you have plenty to choose from here.
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One note, rather than point to Common Core, Congress has failed to stop the US DOE from imposing its will on public education at the state level. We should be suspect of any member of Congress which did not speak up in 2010 when 45 states adopted Common Core in the 1st place. It has been parents and teachers who have been the driving force not any member of Congress. Keep up the good work.
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Sure hope that North Carolina will soon do the same!
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One of the most egregious aspects of the foisting of the C.C.$.$. on the educators of the United States is that provision was made neither for
critique of the standards by scholars and practitioners, nor for
revision of the standards
1. to meet the needs of differing students,
2. to accord with differing ideas currently existing about what constitute best practices in the classroom, nor
3. to accord with any ideas about curricula and pedagogy to be developed in the future by researchers, scholars, or practitioners.
By rebranding the C.C.$.$. and insisting on their right to revise them, states are scoffing at requirements by the C.C.$.$.I. that the standards be adopted as is and not modified, and they are violating the copyright secured for the C.C.$.$. to ensure that such modification did not occur.
Of course, insisting upon invariant “standards” is akin to the infamous nineteenth-century episode in which the Indiana State legislature came close to passing a law to the effect that the number pi would henceforth be, as the Indiana law stated, “as five-fourths to four,” 4/1/25, or 3.2.
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Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, and South Carolina.
And only KY has felt the full force of testing. Wait until the tests hit their fans.
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The fact is that educational materials market monopolists, and one would-be monopolist with enormous financial backing, want a single set of invariant, national standards because having such standards creates enormous economies of scale that they they can exploit in ways that smaller competitors in that market cannot. The supporters of the CC$$ among educrats are being played.
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We should be seeing this on US currency soon:
“Apud, Davidem, speramus”
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Hoping the English-to- Latin online translator I used worked properly.
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“With David, we hope?”
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I guess it didn’t work; translation should read:
“In David We Trust”
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http://www.latin-dictionary.net/definition/35479/spero-sperare-speravi-speratus
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http://publicimpact.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Extraordinary_Authority_Districts-Public_Impact.pdf?utm_content=buffer9e538&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
If you still have a local, publicly-run school system, you might want to flip through this. It’s the plan for an Authority District.
Catchy name, huh, Authority District?
Do the people in the listed states know their Authority Districts are being designed at meetings in DC conducted by ed reform non-profits they’ve never heard of and never voted for?
I love the bullet points on Page Two. They all begin with “take over”. Really gives one that cooperative, community feel 🙂
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On page four they openly say that teachers have to be neutralized because they are trusted members of the community:
Click to access Extraordinary_Authority_Districts-Public_Impact.pdf
“All participating EADs saw ‘building demand’ in the community (and the political
leadership representing the community) as critical.
Advice offered by participants included:
Creating ‘raving fans’ is less important than neutralizing opposition and pre-empting misinformation [truth]. Start with teachers since they are the trusted source of information for parents, families, and community members.”
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neutralize the opposition . . . start with teachers
Sometimes these people shape-shift into their true form before your very eyes.
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Ira Shor wrote on this blog that “Mercedes Schneider is a national treasure.”
This series is more evidence of that. Thank you, Mercedes!
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I second that . . . .
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Thanks, guys. 🙂
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First bookless library:
http://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/headlines/20140103-nation-s-first-bookless-library-opens-in-san-antonio.ece
SAN ANTONIO — Texas has seen the future of the public library, and it looks a lot like an Apple Store: Rows of glossy iMacs beckon. iPads mounted on a tangerine-colored bar invite readers. And hundreds of other tablets stand ready for checkout to anyone with a borrowing card.
Even the librarians imitate Apple’s dress code, wearing matching shirts and that standard-bearer of geek-chic, the hoodie. But this $2.3 million library might be most notable for what it does not have — any actual books.
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A decade or so, lots of pundits were writing about the coming death of the library. Today, libraries have more visitors than ever before. Why? Well, part of that is that some have computers that people who can’t afford computers and Internet connections of their own can use. And they have people who know a lot about research and can help people to find information that they need or want. And lots of libraries still run wonderful programs–storytelling for kids, for example. It’s important to keep this part of the Common alive.
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That look in a three year old’s eyes as you read the book, point to the picture(s), turn the page and then back again for them to see the picture(s)…
The Monster at the End of the Book has turned from Sweet to
$our Green…emptying the cookie jar of its delicious Cookies and allowing our children to experience only the leftover Bacterial Infested Crumbs…..
All for the sake of $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$….
The Greedy Mon$ters will continue to rob our children of the education they deserve …
They Steal the Cookies and Taint the Fruit….
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All you PARCC participants, here’s the tip of your iceberg:
Part A Question: Which statement accurately describes the relationship between two central ideas in the biography “Abigail Smith Adams”?
a. Abigail Adams had a significant amount of political influence for a woman of her time, and she used her influence in several ways, including trying to gain rights for women.*
b. Abigail Adams was given many opportunities to prove that women could handle the same tasks as men, and she studied a wide range of topics so that she could show that women could also be educated.
c. John Adams loved and respected his wife, and the letters they wrote each other are important because they show how a typical family was able to survive during the Revolutionary War.
d. President John Adams often called upon his wife Abigail for counsel on personal and political issues, and he encouraged her to help him determine his policy on women’s rights.
Just about right for a 16 year old special education, or ELL student wouldn’t you say?
These tests are traps designed to trick or wear down students into giving up and failing.
TRAPS not TESTS, designed to TRICK or WEAR DOWN student into FAILURE.
Make this the mantra because its true.
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Answer keys and distractors that are so lengthy that comparison and selection becomes nearly impossible for most students. Keep in mind this type of item writing is intentionally bad.
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The PARCC tests really are turning out to be monstrosities. Duane Swacker points out that in European folklore, the names of demons and devils were spelled backward and that PARCC spelled backward is . . . .
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Items like this on summative, high stakes assessments used to determine graduation leave me flabbergasted. I’m surprised they had the nerve to post this on their website. Shouldn’t items like this be drawing outrage from knowledgeable test writers and experts in psychometrics?
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As you said, the price we will pay for not paying attention. When the majority of Americans are more concerned about the name of Snookie’s baby than the corporate take over of public education then maybe we will get what we deserve.
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