Elfrieda H. Hiebert and Heidi Anne E. Mesmer published an article in a recent issue of Educational Research about the problems posed by Common Core’s demand for “rigorous” and complex text in the early grades.
The researchers show how the writers of the Common Core have raised expectations and “text complexity” for children in the early grades, even though research is scant. Most children do not reach the level that NAEP define as “proficient.” The Common Core tests will raise demands on students in second and third grades to prepare them for college-readiness. The authors ask the obvious question: “When a majority of students is already failing to attain the proficient level, will pushing down demands increase their engagement?”
Hiebert and Mesmer urge that more study and research are needed before raising the bar so high that many more children will fail. They conclude: Increasing the pressure on the primary grades—without careful work that indicates why the necessary levels are not attained by many more students—may have consequences that could widen a gap that is already too large for the students who, at present, are left out of many careers and higher education. How sadly ironic it would be if an effort intended to support these very students limited their readiness for college and careers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
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Inappropriate standards and the resulting failure rates on the attendant exams are a feature, not an aberration, of this process.
Engineered high test failure rates equals failing teachers, equals failing public schools, equals a pretext for accelerating the hostile takeover of public education, to say nothing of high rates of return on investment for edu-profiteers.
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Quite so.
Standardized tests, most especially those of the high-stakes variety, are no casual affairs. The testing companies that design, produce, and put those standardized tests through careful reviews and pretesting, have an good track record of giving customers what they want.
Like the recent 70% fail rate in NY.
😱
If I may, for the benefit of the shills and trolls that don’t seem to understand the obvious, I provide an English-to-English translation of your succinct and pointed last paragraph:
“Engineered high test failure rates equals failing teachers, equals failing public schools, equals a pretext for accelerating the hostile takeover of public education, to say nothing of high rates of return on investment for edu-profiteers.”
= “Sucker punched” [that’s us!] & “$tudent $ucce$$” [for the leaders and enablers and enforcers of the “new civil rights movement of our time” aka “education reformers.”]
Thank you for your comments.
😎
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Another product of teaching students to read on their frustration level often results in teaching students to hate reading. Steven Krashen has written extensively about the benefits of self selected and recreational reading. http://skrashen.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-common-core-disrespects-self.html
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Pls note, I couldn’t find a plain comment box to this blog so sharing this info. here under Diane’s most recent blog post.
Not exactly on topic re: common core here, but watched an excellent take-down re:Teach for America last night on Aljazeera America called: “Don’t Teach for America”. ICYMI, here’s a link:
http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/articles/2014/12/11/the-growing-movementagainstteachforamerica.html
The actual report/segment was longer than this short clip but hope that you can find the longer report at this website later on.
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Master’minds’ of CCSS addressed all aspects of Public School Destruction.
Key people in key positions guaratee Master Plan. Air Tight!?
Curious…usually, in history, someone leaks content of secret planning meetings, details of takeovers, photographs, videos, documents, emails…some information that exposes & cracks the evil-doers’ mission.
Is Gates’ Giant Takeover so airtight that there are no leaks? All participants paid off & living in fear of losing $M?
Will we some day discover secret emails and records of evil plans to FAIL our CHILDREN & TEACHERS? Conniving CCSS Cut Scores & Mass Failures at every aspect of learning? Manipulated college entry scores? Allowing only a set number of kids to taste a successful future? One can go on to explore this nighmare.
Please, someone please crack the Code!
Our children are now roped into AnHourOfCode all over the US.
Maybe they will set themselves free, some day.
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“May be”?
“more research and study”??
“could widen”???
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“Researching the Obvious”
More research is needed
Before the bar is raised
Before more kids are weeded
Before more kids are hazed
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As always, great work.
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Waiting for the Infant Treadmill design to strap in babies & promote early walking?
Why should we waste time and wait until children crawl, scoot and bounce before walking?
Skip those steps.
What do we care about the importance of normal & typical neurological development, or Doman-Delacato Research of brain patterning?
GRIT for Gabby!
Strap’m in & crank that treadmill up according to Gates’ Failure Cut score!
Aligned with the Apgar Scores – owned by Pearson.
Arne would remind us that our babies are not as ‘brilliant’ as we thought.
I am sure they are working in this.
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I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. That was brilliant.
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H.A., don’t give them any more ideas, please! Also, you owe me a cup of coffee for the one I left on my keyboard laughing. See the old Greek at the Pink Slip Bar.
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Old Teacher: what you said.
TAGO!
And apparently you’ve gotten on the good side of the old Greek. I don’t know why he would talk like this, but he said he liked the cut of your jibe, and to let you know he won’t stint on the drachmas or the ouzo the next time you stop at Pink Slip Bar & Grille.
But you already know he is partial to flame starters like yourself because—
“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.”
I have a feeling that after a few cups of ouzo you will be warming up…
😎
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Meanwhile, Politico reports that the marketing of the CCSS continues in high gear, and in Seattle. I wonder why the chief state school officers are meeting in there when the CCSSO has offices in downtown Washington DC where there are spin doctors galore in addition to CCSSO’s own spin machine. Perhaps Bill Gates will make an appearance to cheer them, stay the course, and all of that.
“COMMON CORE COMMUNICATIONS: Members of the Council of Chief State School Officers met this week in Seattle for a conference focused on improving their public outreach around Common Core. Workshops focused on how to understand public opinion polling on the standards; how to craft “messages that resonate emotionally;” how to “demystify the mathematics represented in the Common Core;” and how to deal with “legislative hurdles” such as bills to repeal the standards. Each state will now develop its own plan for improving communications with teachers, parents and the public – a crucial task in the next few months, as standardized testing season approaches.”
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Actual CCSSO Workshops:
Panic 101(how to understand public opinion polling on the standards)
Spin 201(how to “demystify the mathematics represented in the Common Core)
Graft 401(how to deal with “legislative hurdles” such as bills to repeal the standards)
Buck Passing 101 (Each state will now develop its own plan for improving communications with teachers, parents and the public)
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These days teachers, curriculum coordinators, and publishers are being forced to use Lexile measures of readability level, taking their cue from the table of suggested readabilities in the CCSS, but such readability measures, based as they are on sentence length and word frequency, are very, very crude. Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” long a staple of fifth-grade textbooks, has a Lexile score FAR above high-school level (if one judges level by the chart included in the CCSS), and Dylan Thomas’s line “Time held me green and dying” is at below a 2nd-grade level, though the line is conceptually quite sophisticated and certainly beyond the unassisted ken of most K-12 students, who will be assisted in their understanding of it by familiarity with the conventional metaphorical mapping of a human life to the calendar year (green = spring = youth), with the conventional memento mori theme, and with the literary tropes of bathos, ironic juxtaposition, and the oxymoron.
What makes a text complex? Well, lots of things, including its conceptual complexity, its referential density, its syntactic complexity, the familiarity that the reader has with its genre and other conventions, possession (or lack thereof) by the reader of the background knowledge assumed by the writer, the unity or lack thereof of the text, how readily identifiable the situation and speaker are, knowledge on the reader’s part of relevant material related to the period and occasion of composition of the text, and much, much more.
As my fellow teachers on this blog will attest, a student’s motivation to read a text is a HUGE factor in its perceived complexity. If a student isn’t interested in it, then the simplest text will be perceived as difficult, and if the student is interested, then he or she will plow through a text that is quite challenging. We all know the kid who can’t read anything assigned in class who nonetheless plows through, on his own, tons of sci-fi and fantasy, often quite sophisticated stuff.
And, of course, teaching methods also make a huge difference in perceived complexity. High-school kids almost universally balk at the challenge of Shakespeare. They freak when confronted by a long work composed in very densely packed Early Modern English, employing cascades of tropes and an extremely broad vocabulary (the largest yet identified for any writer) and employing unfamiliar characters and situations and terminology peculiar to many archaic professions (e.g., the carrier and the apothecary) and from across the range of social classes and milieus. But there are gifted teachers who have enormous success with elementary kids doing performance of Shakespeare in the original. To listen to kids in those programs wax eloquent about the tribulations of Ophelia or Caliban is a great treat.
Given the complexity of complexity, reducing it to these simple formulae is not data-based decision making. It’s purest numerology.
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It’s scientism and pseudoscience, not science.
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Bob, I am amazed that no one talks about what we in early childhood education and special education have been taught about “zone of proximal development”. If children are presented with a task that is too easy, they learn nothing. A task that is too difficult will cause them to give up or not even try. This is not new to us, and anyone who has studied child development should be familiar with this concept. The word “rigor” is so ridiculous as an educational concept because I suspect most people using the word don’t actually know anything about how children learn. Using a formula to determine text complexity is as crazy as using an algorithm to determine teacher effectiveness.
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Kids differ. The puerile curriculum ladders in the CC$$ do not. The ZPD is a valuable concept. Unfortunately, some makers of rigid educational [sic] software have now appropriated Vygotsky’s term–have started using it for the place where they slot kids on their rigid learning progressions as a result of their pretesting. This travesty they are referring to by the name “personalized learning”!!!!!
Vygotsky must be rolling in his grave.
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Bob Shepherd: once more into the breach…
By comparing the readabilities and such of CCSS with numerology, you have once again subjected me to a barrage of emails of every type and sort and manner, pleading with me to, or demanding that I, intervene with you on behalf of beleaguered numerologists everywhere.
The only thing all the missives share is a sense of incredulity and amazement that anyone could possibly conflate numerology with anything CCSS.
And please, don’t just apologize and then dig an even deeper hole for me with something like “It’s purest phrenology.”
That will simply provoke an even larger outpouring from the Society for the Advancement of Phrenology whose members commonly refer to themselves as “saps.”
¿😧? Yes, they only use lower-case…
And as they’ve already pointed out to me numerous times, even saps know that the numbers and stats used by the self-styled “education reform” crowd are as squishy as…
I stop before I open myself up to new attacks.
I thank you in advance for your consideration of my request.
😎
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Krazy, tell those numerologists that if they will kindly remove David Coleman to their places of business (carnivals, gypsy tea-reading parlors, and the like), so he can practice his numerology in an appropriate venue, then I promise to lay off them. Until then. . . .
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The two most leading experts on early literacy are pushing back against text complexity. We should listen. I just came from the Literacy Research Association annual conference and most of the respected scholars in the field pushed back against lexile levels and the idea that we could level te ts with any accuracy.
In fact Heibert suggested to do well on #CCSS tests feed kids lots of candy because the stories used in testlets came from back issues of Higlight magazine. Thus bad teeth equals better student performance.
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I don’t know anything about tests nor am I a teacher, but I did look at the Common Core english questions and answers for 6th graders (I have a 6th grader) and while the questions are more difficult than the tests I took, the student still has to choose 1 of 4 canned answers. The questions are expansive but the answers are reductive. It’s an odd mismatch, in my opinion. It looks like an ambitious idea that was jammed into a standardized test format.
The Common Core math has gotten all the attention but the english is much worse, because of what I consider this “bait and switch”. There’s an appearance that there’s nuance and a “deeper dive” but then none of that matters: they get the ordinary standardized test list of possible responses. It seems like a bit of a cheat. having them do all that work trying to interpret the reading passage or excerpt and then saying “pick one of these answers we wrote or get it wrong!”
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Years ago teachers were made to feel that part of their job was to raise the bar by getting all they could out of each student. Since the standards movement took over, my students understand none of the fundamentals about fractions, reach for a calculator for simple calculations, and do very well on standardized tests. Maybe the problem is the testing associated with the movement and it’s affect on pedagogy. I had hoped common core would return us to sanity and respect for the teacher. Unfortunately it does not look that way. No top down reform works.
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Would it be possible to get people like Tom Paxton and Peter and Paul to sing at next year’s NPE conference? We need a Pete Seger type to get public attention soon or I fear the privatizers will win. Maybe a young popular group of artists educated in our public schools could help spread the word on the OPT OUT movement or spread the word on the WAR ON OUR PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM with a NEW SONG?
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Although the study referenced the explicit CCS “guidelines [read:mandates] matching grade-level bands (e.g., 2–3, 4–5) with targeted text complexity levels,” it must be understood that in order to get to the 2nd grade level, kindergarteners and first graders have to be held to a certain standard as well. Ugh!
As recently as three years ago, we would celebrate when a kinder in our low SES, high immigrant population, Title I school was able to read patterned text (The cat is in the house. The dog is in the house. The ______ is in the house, etc.), but now that is not good enough. Now every page has different words. Complicated words. And teachers stress and kids stress.
Everything in the Core is pushed down to the lower grades. Whatever didn’t fit into second or first grade standards got crammed into kinder.
And even though a “close read” (how that term sickens me) of the standards will show that students in kinder are to meet the standards with prompting and support, those helps are removed during testing. The teacher can help all day, every day, until each benchmarking period when we push our fledglings out the window and say, Fly! If you fall, oh, well. I’ll help you tomorrow, but if your spirit is broken in the fall, my help tomorrow will be meaningless.
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As a long time early childhood educator and current principal of an elementary school, it is clear to me that the ‘unintended consequences’ of the CCSS for primary grades should be called child abuse. Watching experienced teachers try to teach 7 year old children how to read and compare texts and videos and then write an essay stating an opinion backed by evidence from both texts and the video is agonizing. Second graders are no longer permitted to write about their own experiences; they must write ‘from the text’. There is very little possibility that any second graders will be able to perform these tasks independently which is what they have to do on our district’s six E/LA assessments. And KG and first graders have the same type of assessments. It’s akin to saying, well they are going to be tortured in third grade with the CCSS assessment, so let’s get them used to the torture now.
We have crossed a line into harming children. This has to stop.
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child abuse is precisely the correct term for this
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And, of course, one of the many things that Coleman didn’t know about ELA (one could make a very long list there) is that getting a handle on narrative is essential. He decided unilaterally, for the rest of us, to de-emphasize narrative in favor of argument.
Narrative is arguably the primary means by which we make sense of the world. Let me tell you a story
Not so long ago. . .
the world was completely different.
Anatomically modern humans have existed for about 200,000 years.
But only since the end of the eighteenth century has artificial lighting been widely used. Gas lamps were introduced in European cities about that time, and electric lights came into use only in the twentieth century.
In other words, for most of human history, when night fell, it fell hard. Things got really, really dark. . .
and people gathered under the stars, which they could REALLY see in those days before electric lights. . .
and under those stars, they gathered around fires and told stories.
In every culture around the globe. . .
Storytelling existed LONG before the invention of writing. We know this because the earliest manuscripts that we have in every case record stories that were ancient then.
Where does this storytelling urge among humans come from, and why is it universal?
Contemporary cognitive scientists have learned that storytelling is an essential faculty of the human mind, involved in every aspect of our lives, including our dreams, memories, and beliefs about ourselves and the world.
Storytelling turns out to be the fundamental way in which our brains are organized to make sense of our experience. Only in very recent years have scientists come to understand this. We are ESSENTIALLY storytelling creatures.
If that sounds like an overstatement, attend to what I am about to tell you. It’s amazing, and it will make you rethink a LOT of what you think you know.
When you look out at the world, you have the impression of taking everything in and seeing a continuous field.
But scientists have discovered that in fact, at any given moment, people attend to at most about seven bits of information from their immediate environment. The brain FILLS IN THE REST, based on previously gathered information and beliefs about the world. In short, your brain tells you a STORY about what you are seeing, and that is what you actually “see.”
Again, at any given moment, people attend to at most about seven bits of information from their immediate environment, even though there are literally millions and millions of things that they could be thinking about or attending to. This limitation of our mental processors to seven bits of information at a time is why telephone numbers are typically seven digits long. That’s the most information that people can attend to at any particular moment. So, at any given moment, you are attending to only a few small bits of your environment, and your brain is FILLING IN THE REST, based on previously gathered information, to create a complete picture for you. In short, your brain is continuously telling you a STORY about what you are seeing. The rods and cones at the back of your eye that take in visual information are interrupted by a place where the optic nerve connects to your brain. In other words, there is a blind spot where NO INFORMATION AT ALL IS AVAILABLE, but your brain automatically fills that information in for you. It tells you a story about what’s there.
The same thing happens when you remember something. Your brain only stores PARTS of the VERY FEW THINGS that you attend to in your present moments. Then, when you remember something, it CONFABULATES—it makes up a complete, whole story of what was PROBABLY the case and presents a whole memory to you, with many of the gaps filled in. In other words, memory is very, very, very faulty and based upon the storytelling. (For more on memory as confabulation, see the wonderful work of psychologist Elizabeth Loftus.)
Years ago, I had a dream that I was flying into the island of Cuba on a little prop plane. Through the window, I could see the island below the plane. It looked like a big, white sheet cake, floating in an emerald sea. Next to me on the airplane sat a big, red orangutan with a golf club.
Weird, huh? So why did I have that dream? Well, in the days preceding the dream I had read a newspaper story about the Fidel Castro, the leader of Cuba, being ill; I had flown on a small prop plane; I had attended a wedding where there was a big, white sheet cake; I had been to the zoo with my grandson, where we saw an orangutan; and I had played golf with some friends.
The neural circuits in my brain that had recorded these bits and pieces were firing randomly in my sleeping brain, and the part of the brain that does storytelling was working hard, trying to piece these random fragments together into a coherent, unified story.
That’s the most plausible current explanation of why dreams occur. They make use of this storytelling function of the brain.
Who you are—your very SELF—is a story that your brain tells you about yourself and your history and your relations to others—a story with you as the main character. The story you tell yourself about yourself becomes the PERSON you are.
The word person, by the way, comes from persona—the Latin word for a mask worn by an actor in the Roman theatre (which was, in turn, based on Greek theatre).
So, our very idea of ourselves, of our own personal identity, is dependent upon this storytelling capacity of the human brain, which takes place automatically.
In fact, there is a new form of psychotherapy called cognitive narrative therapy that is all about teaching people to tell themselves more life-enhancing, affirmative stories about themselves, about who they are.
Telling yourself the right kinds of stories about yourself and others can unlock your creative potential, improve your relationships, and help you to self create—to be the person you want to be.
So, storytelling is key to being human. It’s one of our essential characteristics. It’s deeply embedded in our brains. It fills every aspect of our lives. Years ago, the historiographer Hayden White, in an essay called “The Literary Text as Historical Artifact,” pointed out that we tell ourselves that we’ve understood historical events once we have imposed a narrative frame upon them.
We make sense of the world via storytelling.
So it’s no wonder that people throughout history have told stories. People are made to construct stories—plausible and engaging accounts of things—the way a stapler is made to staple and a hammer is made to hammer. We are truly Homo vates, man the storyteller.
Storytelling is an essential, or defining characteristic of our species, one of those things that makes a human a human.
But Coleman understood nothing of that, clearly.
Why is anyone taking him at all seriously?
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For many extraordinary examples of this sort of confabulation that we do, unawares, see Eric Schwitzgebel’s brilliant book Perplexities of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT P. 2011. Schwitzgebel is a leading light among a new breed of “experimental philosophers”–folks to devise experimental tests of hypotheses related to ancient, persisting philosophical problems.
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oops. I meant “folks WHO devise,” of course
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“The Storytellers”
Storytellers is what we are
With tales from near and from afar
Where we’re going, whence we came
Storytelling, the human game
It is ironic that much of what Coleman would consider “informational text” — in a biology book, for example — is actually part of a story that was “made up” by scientists to make sense of the world.
Science itself is a method for making up a story about nature that comports with the facts — a story that is almost certainly incomplete and whose end will probably never be written.
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yes yes yes. See my note below re Colman’s ideas about argument versus persuasion.
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Reblogged this on Elementary Ruminations.
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To somDAMpoet, in response to your comment above:
In the CC$$ for ELA, Lord Coleman proffers a discredited, narrow, simple-to-the-point-of-simple-minded view of the difference between argument and persuasion. One expects more of someone who was a Rhodes Scholar and who studied philosophy.
One way in which the Common Core differs from previous textbooks and from many previously existing state standards is in the authors’ decision to promote use of the term argument over the traditional term persuasion. In the past, most basal composition texts in the United States had separate units on each of three so-called modes of writing: narrative writing, informational or expository writing, and persuasive writing, and most standards followed suit. The authors of the Common Core opted, instead, to label these modes narrative writing, informative writing, and argument because they want, they say, to de-emphasize
1. appeals to emotion and
2. appeals to authority,
both of which they associate, rightly, with persuasion and both of which frighten them (except, of course, when the appeal is to THEIR authority).
I suspect that what’s behind that switch from persuasion to argument, ultimately, is authoritarian presumption. It’s as though the “architect” of these “standards” said to himself: “These fools–these teachers and students–they do not understand, as I do, the difference between reason and emotion. It’s time I gave them some guidelines to follow there, poor things.”
But, of course, the traditional name for the third mode made more sense because persuasion involves making a case that is BOTH appealing and reasonable, and often reasonable BECAUSE it is appealing. Many matters about which people argue–arguably, all the really important ones–deal with topics for which what matters to people—what they care about/what has emotional meaning to the—is precisely what is at issue, and it is those matters—people’s emotional responses–that are relevant as evidence. The authors of the Common Core make the case that the switch from persuasion to argument is important because “college is an argument culture” (Appendix A). They therefore show themselves entirely ignorant of (or on the troglodyte side of) a debate that has raged in the humanities departments of our universities over the past half century over precisely this issue—whether we can and should treat the curriculum in isolation from its human meaning as mattering and the extent to which those facts that we attend to and how we frame them are power plays with meaning as mattering.
When Coleman stands before a crowd and tells the assembled people that “No one gives a $#&*&*$#*&#$!!! what you feel” and then goes on to explain that people are looking, instead, for evidence, he fails to recognize that how people feel is, quite frequently, THE VERY EVIDENCE THAT IS RELEVANT. It’s peculiar that he doesn’t recognize this, for he studied philosophy, and philosophers have almost all long rejected logical positivism, verificationism, and behaviorism on logical, empirical, and ethical grounds, and as a student of philosophy, he should know this, and he should be familiar with the powerful and compelling objections to those discredited positions. Instead, he spouts antiquated, simple-minded nonsense as current REVELATION. I would even go so far as to say that one can, in fact, derive Ought from Is because what matters to people—people’s “oughts”—are themselves observable, demonstrable facts about the world. In fact, one can apply to those “oughts” the same sort of inductive reasoning that one applies to scientific questions generally. I find that I don’t like to have sticks poked into my eye and that I feel that people shouldn’t do that to me. I make a generalization: People don’t like to have sticks poked into their eyes, and people shouldn’t do that to one another. And the former part of the generalization proves to be repeatedly verified, and the latter part of it follows logically from the first by a simple consistency criterion. Perhaps David should go back and take an introductory ethics class before he spouts such hoary, discredited nonsense. Of course people give a $@#*$*(*@$!! how you feel and how they feel, and almost no human interaction is free from such concern, including, ironically, Coleman’s attempt to make his case, in the infamous “No one gives a $##$***!! video, in which he pleads a case that, bizarrely, it seems to me, matters to him.
And, of course, appeals to authority are not bad in and of themselves. Looking a word up in a dictionary is an appeal to authority. What matters is not that it’s an appeal to authority but whether the authority can be trusted. But, again and again, one finds this sort of simple mindedness in the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic]. Appeals to authority are appeals to emotion and therefore bad. Well, no. Looking up the proper pitch of a ¼-inch bolt in a United Fine standards table is an appeal to authority– not one to which a lot of emotion is attached, certainly, though there is some—people feel good about going to what they know is a trustworthy source, and they feel good about getting the measurement right, and that’s why they seek such a source, and we cannot, as Coleman tries to do, drive a wedge down the middle of ourselves and divorce our rational being from our emotional being, for these are inseparable. Even the conclusion of a deductive proof that could be arrived at by a machine comes to us because we have chosen to use the deductive method because it has been proven to yield results that satisfy, that matter, that we can depend upon, that we care about.
That’s what it is to be human. That’s what Heidegger said our kind of being is. It’s caring. It’s giving a $#&$&*#&*!!!.
So, I would suggest to David Coleman that he go read some Heidegger.
Ironically, Coleman studied philosophy, so he should know that verification often fails in many circumstances as a criterion for truth. Almost no professional philosophers these days consider themselves verificationists like the A. J. Ayer of Language, Truth, and Logic. At its most extreme, verificationism assigns to the category of nonsense all statements that are neither well-formed formulas in a purely formal system (e.g., arithmetic or logic) nor declarative descriptions of that which is immediately present, including all statements about what matters, including the whole of aesthetics, ethics, politics, and metaphysics, and literature. For example, a verificationist would be forced to say that a statement like “We should not commit genocide” is neither true nor false but meaningless. In our classrooms and in the world at large, actual discussion and debate has always typically employed appeals based on logic (formal reasoning), empirical evidence (reasoning from facts), and rhetoric (appeals to what matters).
To remove the last of these from our classrooms, as the CC$$ exhort us to do, is to remove from our classrooms, quite literally, WHAT MATTERS!!! And only a simple-minded, walnut-hearted Positivist would want such a thing.
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