Add White Plains and Rye Neck to the list of districts that are refusing to administer the Pearson field test in New York.
Boycotting districts:
Babylon
Bellmore/Merrick CHSD
Comsewogue
Fairport
HFL
Glen Cove
Great Neck
Happauge
Jericho
Manhasset
Merrick
Mount Sinai
North Bellmore
Ossining
Pittsford
Plainview Old-Bethpage
Rye Neck
Rocky Point
Syosset
West Irondequoit
Webster
White Plains
Diane Ravitch's blog 
what we are seeing is the beginning of an insurrection. may it spread like wild fire.
What are the potential ramifications to the boycotting districts?
I don’t know if there are any sanctions for boycotting districts. My guess is there are none. The more districts that boycott the test, the less likelihood of any sanction. That is the power of mass action.
Diane,
According to our research (confirmed by school lawyers and NYSED), there are no penalties for declining to particpate in the field test although NYSEDs Ken Slentz does send a very stern letter implying that the tests are required, truth be told, the statute is silent on field tests, NYSED has admitted in writing that they are NOT mandated and there are no penalties for refusing to participate in what amounts to a voluntary “test of the test” program.
Spackenkill UFSD in Dutchess County will be declining to particpate in field tests for grades 4&8 this year. The HS tests will be administered.
Please SOTHVNY for a full explanation about why field tests in NYS are not mandatory, despite NYSEDs insistence that they are required.
In other news, the CCSS Thought Police is soon going to have its own Censor Librorum. That was the office of the Church that for centuries reviewed books to see if they were acceptable for reading or would be put on the banned/prohibited list.
This just in from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation:
Someone needs to play ‘Consumer Reports’ and start vetting textbooks and other materials and calling out the bad ones. John White, Louisiana’s exceptionally able commissioner of education, took a stab at that, and a group of foundations is currently standing up a new nonprofit to play this role, too. Of course the publishers will hate it.”
A free people will hate it.
So now we are to have an official Common Core Censorship Office for Textbooks.
I have a suggestion for them.
Call it the MINISTRY OF TRUTH.
A “group of foundations” is going to start issuing a Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
Gee, I wonder who is writing the checks to set that up.
The Sacred Congregation of the Index was the office of the Inquisition that promulgated the index. It was the official censor librorum.
Now we’re going to have something like that for textbooks here in The Land of the Free^TM
Read all about it on the Thomas B. Fordham website:
http://edexcellence.net/articles/intellectual-coherence-and-common-core
cx: the CCSS Thought Police are . . .
of course
Again, buried in that Thomas B. Fordham article is this BREATHTAKING NEWS:
“a group of foundations is currently standing [sic] up a new nonprofit to play this role, too.”
They meant “starting,” of course, but that’s just a typo and of no significance.
But what that clause says is of ENORMOUS significance.
We already have had a group of unelected people–the CCSSO–decide that they had the right to tell every teacher, administrator, curriculum coordinator, and curriculum developer in the country what outcomes education should have in every domain at every grade level in ELA and mathematics.
And now we are to have a group telling everyone what textbooks are acceptable.
Of course, both are what EVERY TOTALITARIAN REGIME DOES.
But in this case, it’s not even the government doing it.
It’s the shadow government, the real government, the boys who write the checks. The deciders for the rest of us.
If you read the piece from Fordham calling for the new TEXTBOOK THOUGHT POLICE AGENCY, you will notice that its author, Chester Finn, is at pains to point out one of his pet peeves:
people are teaching the writing process instead of grammar
That’s right. This guy thinks that teaching the process of writing is doing terrible damage to students and that teaching them to diagram sentences will make them into good writers.
And that we need a censor librorum to make sure that educational materials, textbooks and online, don’t fall into such error.
So, here’s how to create good writers, according to that profound pedagogue Chester Finn. Give kids a steady diet of 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.
But don’t, under any circumstances, teach them about doing research to come up with a thesis, doing research to gather information on that thesis, organizing the information, doing a draft, reviewing and revising the draft, proofreading it for errors, and formatting it for publication–uh, you know, the writing process.
Dear Mr. Finn:
If you are going to write about matters related to acquisition of language skills, you really need to learn something about language acquisition first. Otherwise, you just sound foolish. Here, a short reading list:
Baker, Marc. The Atoms of Language: The Mind’s Hidden Rules of Grammar. Basic/Perseus, 2001.
Carnie, Andrew. Syntax: A Generative Introduction. Blackwell, 2007.
Chomsky, Noam. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT P, 1965. (an oldie but goodie; very important early work on generative grammar and language acquisition)
Haegeman, Liliane. Introduction to Government and Binding. Blackwell, 1994.
Jackendoff, Ray. Patterns in the Mind: Language and Human Nature. Basic/Perseus, 1994.
Jackendoff, Ray. X-Bar Syntax: A Study of Phrase Structure. MIT P, 1977. (again, an oldie but goodie; a very important early book)
Radford, Andrew. Minimalist Syntax: Exploring the Structure of English. Cambridge UP, 2004.
Roeper, Tom. The Prism of Grammar: MIT P, 2007.
After you have read these, Mr. Finn, you will doubtless want to erase any trace of your former posts dealing with grammar instruction. They will seem to you, then, really embarrassing.
And, in the future, please leave discussion of the teaching of English to people who have a clue what they are doing.
And the same goes for the folks who wrote the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] in ELA. They need to go back and take some remedial classes in linguistics and ELA methods so that they do not completely embarrass themselves by attempting to write, again, at some time in the future “standards” for a field about which they know NOTHING.
Robert,
I don’t know much about the best ways of teaching grammar or whether it’s essential (though I enjoyed learning it and I did teach sentence diagramming one year –kids enjoyed it. I do think the conventions of English can and should be taught directly and drilled until students have internalized them). But I do know that writing process has dominated English curricula for the past twenty years and it’s not generating good writers. There is no generic “generating a thesis statement” skill (generating a thesis depends entirely on deep knowledge of the subject you’re writing about). There is no generic writing skill. The sine qua non of good writing (and good reading ability), it seems to me, is mastery of the English language. And that can only be attained through a well-rounded liberal arts education. So teaching the liberal arts is REAL writing education. Everything else is make-believe.
I agree, Ponderosa, that there is no general “generating a thesis statement” skill. Being able to generate a respectable thesis depends PRIMARILY on content knowledge.
However, a little history lesson. Before the advent of writing process instruction, the best-selling writing textbook program in the United States was Warriner’s English Grammar. A typical Warriner’s, back in the day, consisted of about 20 chapters on identifying parts of speech and, as a kind of afterthought, tacked onto the end, a few chapters on writing: one on making a formal outline, one on paragraph form, and one on the composition.
The chapter on the formal outline taught a format of a kind that almost no real writer ever used. Ever. The chapter on writing the paragraph taught a model first cooked up 1866 by Alexander Bain and promulgated in his English Composition and Rhetoric: a Manual, the great grandfather of writing textbooks. Bain characterized a paragraph as a group of sentences related to or supporting a single topic sentence and characterized by unity and coherence. Here we have a classic categorical definition. The set of paragraphs has these essential, or defining, characteristics:
• Possession of a topic sentence
• Possession of a number of sentences related to or supporting the topic sentence
• Unity
• Coherence
Building on this definition, Warriner’s and other school texts typically presented the following heuristic for writing a paragraph: “State a general idea. Then back it up with specific details (or examples or instances). Make sure not to include any unrelated ideas, and make sure to make the connections among your ideas clear by using transitions.”
There’s just one problem with that: real paragraphs produced by real writers typically don’t look anything like that.
Though that definition has been repeated with only minor variation ever since Bain, paragraphs in the real world do not fit the standard textbook definition. Most pieces of writing and, ipso facto, most paragraphs, are narrative, and rarely does a narrative paragraph have a topic sentence. Narrative paragraphs are typically just one damned thing after another. Two of the most common types of paragraphs, those that make up newspaper articles and those that present dialogue in stories, typically contain only one or two sentences, and a paragraph in dialogue can be as short as a grunt or an exhalation. And, of course, it makes little sense to speak of a sentence or fragment as being unified or coherent in the senses in which those terms are usually used when describing paragraphs.
The fact is that the traditional definition of a paragraph describes the fairly rare case in which a single general main idea is illustrated by specifics. Of course, few paragraphs in the real world work that way. Throw a dart at a page in Harper’s magazine. You will not hit a Bain-style paragraph. There are many, many other ways to put several sentences together sensibly. The narrative way is the simplest: Present one damned thing after another. But one can also write quite an effective paragraph that, for example, consists of a thesis, an antithesis, and a synthesis; such a paragraph comes to a conclusion but has no overall main idea in any reasonable sense of the term “main idea.” Many well-crafted nonnarrative paragraphs depart radically from the schoolbook model, having no overall, paragraph-level organizational scheme but, rather, only a part-by-part organization in which each sentence is connected to the one before it and to the one after it in any of a myriad ways. In such cases, the writer often begins a new paragraph only because he or she has run out one head of steam.
The composition chapter in Warriner’s taught the standard five-paragraph theme model: Introductory paragraph that captures the reader’s attention and then states a thesis. Three Bain-style paragraphs, each of which presents a supporting idea. A concluding paragraph that summarizes the whole.
A format almost never found in real writing in the real world.
And following this textbook, before the writing process movement, here’s what generally happened when people assigned writing to do:
The student constructed or was given a thesis.
The student wrote a formal outline.
The student drafted.
The draft was turned in and edited for grammar, usage, mechanics, and spelling by the teacher, who spilled a lot of red ink on it, and the teacher gave it a score, out of 100, for content and conventions, like this: 83/76. And the average of these was the letter grade.
What the writing process movement emphasized is that a lot was being skipped over there: exploring the topic and coming up with a thesis (doing preliminary research, for example), taking notes, doing rough outlines, writing and revising several drafts, doing proofreading, and preparing the piece for “publication.”
In the days when Warriner’s reigned, before the writing process model, teachers felt that they had to COPYEDIT every piece of writing that a kid did. So, if you had six classes of 28 students each, and they each wrote one five-paragraph theme, the teacher would have 840 paragraphs—a NOVEL—to copyedit.
As a result, teachers gave very few writing assignments. (There was a lot of research on this.)
The writing process movement brought about increased attention on prewriting (on research) and increased focus on the central role of revision (of doing multiple drafts). And it introduced new approaches to grading of student writing that led to DRAMATIC INCREASES in the amount of writing that kids did. (This, too, was studied to death.)
And writing is one of those skills, like tennis, that one learns only by actually doing it, a lot.
When I first started as an editor, I sat down one evening with the market leader, Warriner’s, which had about 80 percent of the grammar and composition textbook market in those days, and did a count of the exercises in a Complete Course text. Of 240 exercises sets, only 24 actually dealt with some potential error in student writing or speech. THE REST WERE SOLELY about identifying grammatical forms.
Now, what’s wrong with that?
Well, linguistic research has shown us, definitively, that the explicit models of grammar that kids learn in school ARE ALMOST ENTIRELY IRRELEVANT to the language that they actually produce, which is based, instead, upon an incredibly complex internalized model of the language that was acquired AUTOMATICALLY by mechanisms in the brain that intuit phonological semantic, syntactic, and morphological rules based upon the ambient spoken language that the child encounters.
For example, suppose that I ask an adult speaker of English who has never heard any Yiddish how to form the plurals of the following words:
kvetch
dybbuk
shmeggeggie
Any adult speaker of the language is going to know that the plural of the first is a sound like uhz, of the second a sound like s, and the third a sound like z,
WITHOUT BEING ABLE TO TELL YOU WHAT RULES HE OR SHE IS FOLLOWING. But he or she is, indeed, following rules–ones that were unconsciously, automatically, acquired, not explicitly learned.
Or, consider this example, you know that
the green, great dragon
sounds weird, and that
the great, green dragon
sounds OK.
That’s because your brain has automatically intuited a complex set of rules governing the order of precedence of adjectives in English. You ACQUIRED these rules, but you did not EXPLICITLY LEARN THEM.
And that’s how the learning of a grammar works. The grammar of a language that a six-year-old child has intuited is so complex that despite the fact that many, many thousands of linguists have been working seriously on describing that competence for many, many decades, we are still far from having a description of that competence for any natural language.
People FOOL THEMSELVES into thinking that they make grammatical judgments based on the rules that they learned in school, but those judgments actually account for ALMOST NONE of the actual grammar that they use.
Because grammars are not learned explicitly.
Pervasive ignorance of this is one of the biggest problems in English education today.
Those Warriner’s exercises were worse than useless because of their opportunity cost.
Now, I think that grammars are fascinating. I have spent many years studying them. I have written extensively about them. I think they are worth learning for their own sake, and I even think that learning of some explicit grammar is useful for some limited purposes.
But people who think that teaching explicit grammar is going to make much difference, at all, in students’ production of variants from standard English just do not have a clue what they are talking about. They are ignorant of the relevant science. This is not some idea that I have. WE KNOW THIS. THERE IS A WHOLE SCIENCE OF THIS.
That’s why I listed those references, above–in hope that people will read a bit in the relevant science and get a clue.
One more thing: there are REALLY GOOD models of languages these days, but the “grammars” taught in school texts can most charitably be described as prescientific. They bear the same relation to contemporary models of how languages work as neolithic mythologies bears to modern astronomy, chemistry, and physics.
cx: bear, not bears, of course
What has happened to writing instruction, Ponderosa, is standardized testing.
Those tests favor the production of formulaic writing to a rubric. Variations on the old five-paragraph theme. People figured that out. They now teach InstaWriting to the Test, not writing. We were starting to get somewhere with the writing process model, and then NCLB hit, and every state department in the country started revising their writing curricula to emphasize churning out those acceptable “constructed responses” to writing prompts.
So, that’s what kids learn–the five-paragraph theme model. And OF COURSE mastery of that model does not make them into writers. They get into college and turn in the first paper, having employed the model that worked so well for the MCAS or the FCAT, and the professor says, WTF? These kids can’t write. At all.
And of course they can’t. They haven’t studied writing. They have studied InstaWriting to the Test, which is the subject that has now supplanted writing instruction in the United States.
In short, Ponderosa, grammar, vocabulary, and writing are three areas of human accomplishment about which there are widespread misunderstandings based upon deeply rooted, prescientific misconceptions. And all of those were written in stone into the new national “standards.” If the same thing had happened with the new science standards, then those would be telling teachers to explain to their kids about phlogiston and the luminous ether and the elan vital and how bodies come to a rest after a time because they use up their inherent energies as they seek their “natural” places.
But yes, we have seen a lot of know-nothing folks with education credentials who have believed that one could teach substantively while dealing entirely in vague, abstractly formulated “skills” like Main Idea Finding and Inferencing and other such crap, ones who, themselves, didn’t know much of anything about literature or history or philosophy or logic or rhetoric or anything else substantive, so I understood, full well, what you are reacting to, here. If a student is going to write a paper about snakes, then absolutely the most important thing that he or she needs to do is TO LEARN SOMETHING WORTH SAYING ABOUT SNAKES. Almost all of the rest will follow of its own accord.
Let me clarify what I meant by there not being a general thesis statement writing skill because this is actually a complex little issue.
Of course, it is possible to characterize writing a thesis statement with a heuristic, and it is possible to teach that heuristic to kids. And sometimes it’s even a good idea to do so explicitly.
But here’s the thing: To the extent that someone actually knows something about a subject, he or she will ipso facto have substantive, general ideas to put forward about the subject. The one will follow from the other naturally. Now, an experienced teacher may be able to look at the thesis that the kid has come up with and give some advice: well, that’s a bit broad, don’t you think? Or, what if you took this angle on the same topic, which would be a bit more interesting.
But when people think that teach is PRIMARILY about mouthing blithering generalities about what a thesis statement is and how, in general, to write a good one, they end up teaching NOTHING. They don’t understand how minds work.
We are inferencing machines. We make better unconscious inferences than we make conscious ones IF WE HAVE THE INFORMATION TO BASE THOSE ON.
To the extent that we devalue content and hypothesize abstract skills instruction, we teach airy nothings.
And the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] are ALMOST ENTIRELY a list of such airy nothings.
So, if a kid is going to write a paper on the influence of Godwin’s ideas on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, what he or she needs, first and foremost, is to learn a lot about Godwin and Shelley and Frankenstein. And then, a fruitful conversation can be had about what’s worth writing about there.
But if you start with two days of abstract instruction and thesis writing skills, you have EVERYTHING BACKWARD. This is like teaching your child to walk by doing diagrams for him or her to illustrate muscles and bones and nerves.
autocorrect screwed up my sentence, so here it is again:
To the extent that we devalue content and hypostatize abstract skills instruction, we teach airy nothings.
cx: and then every state in the country started revising its writing curricula, of course
I really wish there were a correction feature on WordPress so that one could fix these typos in posts!
Thanks for taking the time to write a little history of writing instruction. I know little about that. Interesting. I now see what the writing process movement was a reaction to. However I think the opportunity costs of writing process instruction are too high. How many persuasive essays about the school dress code have been penned in the last twenty years? How many dreadful short stories? Even before NCLB, “teaching writing” in many genres was all the rage. The fact that we still produce execrable writers proves that practice alone does not a good writer make. Let’s drastically curtail “teaching writing”. Let’s teach the world, and writing ability will follow.
You make a good case that teaching grammar is not worthwhile.
Ponderosa, I believe in teaching grammar, but I believe in teaching it in the ways in which the human mind is built to learn it. We have astonishing equipment in our heads for intuiting grammatical structures, just as we have astonishing equipment in our heads for pattern recognition. We have to design instruction that works in the ways in which the mind works, and we’re not doing that. Explicit teaching of grammar and vocabulary is almost, though not quite, completely irrelevant to the acquisition of a robust grammatical competence and a large vocabulary. But there are ways in which we can give nature a push and help acquisition along.
In general, I agree with your emphasis on putting what people are reading about and what people are writing about front and center. That was the point of my analogy to trying to teach kids to walk by having them diagram their motor neurons. That would be pretty stupid, wouldn’t it? But MOST of our direct skills instruction is precisely equivalent to that.
Of course, when kids get to be older, there is value to stepping back from writing and reading and thinking to do high-level abstraction about it. Formal logic is a worthwhile undertaking. Various logics that have been developed have various powerful uses–in the design of computers, for example. However, formal logic is not ever going to be the means employed by people in their everyday lives to do much of their thinking. Even professors of logic don’t do that!!!
Bob, I appreciate your history of the teaching of writing. In addition to the problems created by test-prompt writing are complications created by Lord Coleman’s cheesy standards. We are no longer teaching students to write thesis statements; we are now teaching them to write claims or controlling ideas or central ideas. The language is fuzzy all because Coleman promoted claims and counter claims. Nor is there analytical writing. It is strictly argument(with claims and counter claims), explanatory essays and informational essays. We all know how Coleman feels about narration. Furthermore, the horrible engageny materials promote “quick writes,” which are not even paragraphs. The word “essay” is not used in any of these materials.
Coleman is clueless. Really. Clueless.
Narration is one of the primary means by which humans make sense of the world. Our brains are built to weave together disparate pieces of information into a coherent narrative. We say to ourselves that we have understood historical events when we have imposed a narrative structure on them. We tell ourselves stories, all the time, with ourselves and others in leading roles. Much is revealed about this by our dreaming. In our dreams, the narrativizing parts of our brains try to put together random firings of neural circuits from our recent experience and make of them a rational whole. So, for example, I once had a dream that I was on a small prop plane, flying into Cuba, which was a large white wedding cake floating in an emerald sea below the plane, and in the seat next to me on the plane was an orangutan smoking a cigar. Well, in the previous days, I had read a story about Castro’s ill health, been to a wedding, flown in a small prop plane, been on a golf course where people were smoking cigars, and been to the local zoo. An enormous amount of cognitive research exists, now, that shows that people’s memorize are MOSTLY confabulations–they are “just so” stories based on a few actually remembered details and a lot of reconstructed stuff, and the reconstruction–the narrativization–takes place unconsciously BECAUSE PEOPLE’S BRAINS ARE BUILD TO DO THAT AS A FUNDAMENTAL WAY OF MAKING SENSE OF THE WORLD. Over 80 percent of ALL WRITING that people do is narrative. Narrative plays key roles in every kind of informative writing, from scientific studies to transcripts of Congressional hearings. There is even a very powerful new sort of practice in clinical psychology called Cognitive Narrative Therapy which is all about teaching people to tell themselves more empowering, more positive, more life-enchancing, and more rational stories about themselves instead of falling into self-defeating narrative loops.
David Coleman is ignorant and arrogant. He hasn’t a clue what he is talking about. Really, he should learn something, and until he does, he should shut the $*#(*$(#! up. I, for one, do not give a *$#(*$#*(@! what someone as ignorant as he is about the teaching of English has to say about the teaching of English.
Given the central role of narrative in our discourse (remember that 80 percent figure?) and in the ways in which we make sense of the world, it is very, very important that we have a great deal of experience of, understanding of, and analytical tools for thinking about narrative. And narrative is not a genre distinct from exposition and argument, as Coleman seems to think that it is. We tell narratives to inform. We tell them to make arguments. And this works both ways. Our narratives often employ argumentative and expository structures. And we often conceptualize argument and exposition using narrative metaphorical conceptual frames (e.g., argument is a journey or argument is a race).
Don’t go there!
You beat me to it!
You’re out ahead of me there.
We’ve been down that road too many times.
Well, in my experience . . .
We set out to demonstrate that . . . but were surprised to discover . . .
and so on.
There are many, many complete imposters in the edubiz, many of them very, very well known–folks who will go on and on for hours about inferencing but who never studied the least bit of logic or probability or philosophy of science or proof or epistemology or anything else remotely connected to an actual science of inference. The ed-biz is positively CRAWLING with such people.
And many of them write “standards” for others to follow.
I applaud my superintendent of the Ossining public schools for refusing to take on this field test. I am speechlessly proud of the Ossining BOE, the parents, the PTA, the faculty, the Ossining Teacher’s Association, and the community at large for supporting this refusal as well.
Our superintendent and BOE also continue to fight fearlessly for the funding owed to our district from Albany.
In this field test refusal, we have protected precious instructional contact time and given the message to Pearson, the state legislature, NYSED, and Mr. Cuomo that a lack of transparency (will parents really know how their children did on the test and why?) has sub-zero tolerance.
Pearson is a multi-billion dollar corporation and should be conducting compensated participant pilot studies like any other product research and development department of an enterprise . . . .
We must remember that out system have taxation has allowed Pearson unspeakable and unthinkable tax loopholes that allows the company to avoid paying its fair share of taxes. It adds fire to the gasoline to have to subsidize Pearson with free pilot studies. The state has only aided and abetted Pearson in this whole testing industrialized complex foisted upon us by primarily non-educators.
I am preparing to enter a new course of study, my second Masters if all goes well.
I am required to pay a $500 fee to the prospective college, and for what?
I am required to spend the money on an online text book put out by – who else – Pearson. I don’t even get a hardline copy, and if I want any of it printed out, I have to depreciate my own printer and use up my own ink to do so.
Pearson is not a psychometric design company; it is a three headed monster with wings and claws and fangs, and it is attempting to swallow far too many people whole in its monopolization of testing materials . . . .
It’s time the voter and constituent slay the beast . . . . .
Correction:
“We must remember that out system of taxation has allowed Pearson unspeakable and unthinkable tax loopholes that have facilitated the company’s avoidance of paying its fair share of taxes.”