Tom Loveless, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has studied NAEP results for years. In this post, he discusses whether the recent flatlining of NAEP was caused by the adoption of the Common Core standards. He says it is too soon to know. We will have to see what happens in 2017 and 2019, maybe even 2021.
But what he does observe is a marked decline in teaching fiction, as compared to informational text. The decline has occurred since 2011, as implementation of Common Core intensified across the nation. The shrinkage of time for teaching fiction was equally large in both fourth and eighth grades. It seems reasonable to conclude that the Common Core standards are causing a decline in teaching fiction.
The Common Core standards recommend that teachers spend 50% of reading time on fiction and 50% on informational text in grades K-8. In high school, the standards propose a division of 30% fiction-70% informational text. When English teachers and members of the public complained about the downgrading of fiction, the CCSS promoters insisted that they referred to the entire curriculum, not just to English. But fiction is not typically taught in science, math, or social studies classes (and when it is taught in social studies classes, it has a good purpose).
Where did these proportions come from? They are drawn directly from NAEP’s guidelines to assessment developers about the source of test questions. The NAEP guidelines were never intended as instructions for teachers about how much time to devote to any genre of reading.
No nation in the world, to my knowledge, directs teachers about the proportion of time to devote to fiction or non-fiction. This is a bizarre recommendation.
I write informational text, so I am all for it. But I think it should be the teachers’ choice about whether to emphasize literature or nonfiction. I believe that learning to read and learning to interpret text can be accomplished in any genre. A student could study all informational text or all literature and be a good or great or poor reader. The genre doesn’t matter as much as other factors, like the student’s level of interest, the age appropriateness of the text, and how it is taught.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The neuroscience of Your Brain on Fiction
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0
Information contained in a band method book or on a page of orchestral part counts as non-fiction. Directions in a math text, history and current events texts all provide opportunities to understand factual and instructional text. Critical studies, dictionaries and grammatical essays (Visual Thesaurus) all contribute to student engagement in non-fiction.
Thus, English and other language teachers are totally free to explore fiction with their students.
It might be interesting to explore how to recognize fiction (self-serving lies by political candidates) and scientific method. I know there are teachers and faculty who can balance all of this!
ginny, English teachers are free to teach fiction, but you can see the stats. The teaching of fiction is dropping sharply.
That gaming of the standards is exactly why standards fail.
Yes, Diane, I get that. I’m offering the notion that the understanding of 50/50 could be argued to be met by thinking of the entire educational experience, thus freeing English teachers to focus more on fiction ;-).
Poetry includes non-fiction expressions of the sense of human relationships…to each other and to events and circumstances. Language as an object/material of invention and/or communication is related to the arts and the materials of the arts (sound, space, visuals). The Balkanization of elements and subjects is the antithesis of the Humanities. At our peril, as a society, we threaten Civilization by ignoring the natural integration of learning and life.
I’m so glad you’re receiving lots of comments on this thread,
MathValue stated: “That gaming of the standards is exactly why standards fail.”
NO! The gaming of the standards is not why the standards fail but is a result of the COMPLETELY INVALID epistemological and ontological conceptualization and implementation of educational standards as proven by Noel Wilson. Wilson has shown some (not all, there are more) errors, falsehoods and psychometric fudges that are “why the standards fail” and any results/usage of said results are COMPLETELY INVALID read and comprehend his never refuted nor rebutted treatise “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
I don’t dispute your point and the references to Wilson. Tests are based on far to many assumptions and then based on a model. A model must eliminate parameters in a balance with complexity. Yes, error in any model is not to be ignored. My beef with tests is they measure only what is on the test. And what is on the test is someone’s interpretation of a model learner. The whole process is dehumanizing and, as you mention, internalized by students with disastrous effects.
But my observation was based on ginnyatherton giving an excellent example of how standards are gamed. Why are they gamed? Because the standards are meaningless and disassociated with the reality of the implementers. Eventually, the gaming undermines the original intent of the standards and the system collapses. A scenario of Campbell’s Law.
One day, older students will be studying science fiction and fantasy as a major genre, and will be using it for at least half the year in English class.
And the content of science fiction and fantasy will be filled with tales of education reform . . . .
“Once upon a time, there lived an alien named Arne who landed on planet Earth . . . . and took all his orders from another inter-galactic monster whoses name wa Obama . . . . “
And hopefully the lower grades will be reading “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”– though in my district I’m sure all HP is banned from anywhere except the library…
I realize that in everyday life we read more non fiction than fiction. However, the growth and development in children’s minds is invigorated from fiction…where the interrelationships of characters and how they resolve their problems are real world experiences which teach invaluable lessons. The analysis and interpretational skills gained which are inherent in the process of reading fiction are for the most part lost in the reading of non fiction. The Common Core designers are out of touch with the fantasy and enjoyment of learning. Information and facts can be gleaned from fiction. After all fiction parallels the historical time of the setting, whereby children can more effectively learn factual information from characters who live in those times. What a shame that a whole generation of children have been robbed of reading much of the classical literature to enrich their lives.
Classical literature is for rich kids . . . .
I would have to say we encounter more non-fiction cumulatively. Directions, instructions, recipes, news, conversation (speaking and hearing)…And yet fiction is essential to expand the learners ability to think flexibly and creatively about matters of history, theory, morality, spirituality, society, human relations…In fact, secretive little gatherings and policy papers that pre-dated the imposition of these new standards described how essential these skills are to ensure that we have creative-thinking problem solvers for the future. Sadly, those skills and the roles that will require them appear to be reserved for familiar last names and large bank accounts/trust funds. The masses are relegated to efficient rote learning of marketable skills and their teachers are held accountable for the production of drones.
This is one of the reasons I am considering leaving teaching early. I have been told by the ELA supervisor in my school that I am not allowed to teach more fiction than what is in the curriculum . Many English teachers have been stripped of the passion that came with their teaching ideals.
It is sad for both the kids and the teachers .
Many of us who have taught great fiction for years have seen that disappear slowly over the past few years.
Robin, teach what you love. Forget the guidelines. The people who wrote CCSS had no idea what they were doing.
“Teach what you love” is, without doubt, the best education advice I have ever read, for what we most teach is our own love (or lack thereof) of what we are teaching. Love for what is being taught makes for teachers who actually know something that they can impart to their students, and a teacher’s passion for his or her subject is contagious.
I am nearing the end of my teaching career, having started at 40 after working a wide variety of previous jobs. I had the good fortune of getting my teaching license before middle age was considered a disqualifier, when professional autonomy was respected, and the union still had some vestigial power and the occasional willingness to use it. Unlike now.
Being tenured and near the end of my career, and having received “Effective” ratings recently, I am now in what NYC teachers delicately call the “F— You Years,” where I am largely free to ignore the inanities that come from on high, and can teach what I love and feel passionate about.
However, “teach what you love” is of no help whatsoever to younger, newer, untenured teachers, or even tenured teachers who have a three-to-ten-year desert to cross before they can retire. For all but the most obstinate or courageous of those teachers, “compliance” (translated as obedience and conformity) is expected, and their careers and mental/physical health are endangered by exhibiting a lack of enthusiasm for, let alone resistance to, the vicious absurdity and authoritarianism of so-called reform.
“Teach what you love” is not a realistic political response to what teachers are facing today. The only response that provides even a distant hope of reclaiming the profession and saving public education, is for teachers to educate themselves about what is being done to them,their students and the public schools, organize through their unions (or in spite of them, in the case of the UFT/AFT) and mobilize against the edu-privateers.
I have questions about these statements at the end of the post: “A student could study all informational text or all literature and be a good or great or poor reader. The genre doesn’t matter as much as other factors, like the student’s level of interest, the age appropriateness of the text, and how it is taught.”
I do agree that those other factors are important, but it seems to me that reading literature is important if we want students to be able to read literature well. Literary texts use many literary devices, such as symbolism, etc., that just aren’t used as much in non-fiction, although they sometimes are. But study of non-fiction texts in school usually omits discussion of the parts that aren’t informational. In other words, symbolism in a non-fiction text will largely be ignored. So, how will students become good at truly understanding fiction, especially sophisticated fiction that uses many literary devices, if they don’t read and study fiction?
Good points. For some reason at the secondary level English teachers were expected to teach “reading.” Content area teachers expected that students would come to the history, science, or math text and just understand it. English teachers would like that as well. They would have liked it if the students could just read literature. But this is not the way the world works.
Teaching is the process of helping students think about the content.
All teachers develop the comprehension and vocabulary of their content area. Teachers must teach the cognitive process particular to the subject matter and present the background knowledge the students need in order to access the original sources and textbooks used in their class. In addition, familiarity with syntactical structures common to the subject being taught must be explained. These are reasons excerpts might not qualify as a best practice.
English teachers have always taught literary fiction and non-fiction. And some have correlated their content with other’s to incorporate literature revealing the human side of history, science, etc. A truly core curriculum would acknowledge multiple ways of reading text.
This part of the CC doesn’t bother me because it’s one area I feel like parents can really “fix”- we can just have them read more, and more fiction, at home.
I just think putting the entire responsibility on schools is misguided and that’s what arguments like this TEND to do. There’s a lot of things they should know, and school isn’t the only place where they can learn anything.
I worry more about the process they’re using with CC- it looks to me like they have to break down the standards really far to reach all the kids in a given class and so my son ends up doing things like parsing a poem a…line…at..a..time…very..slowly which is making him dislike poetry. Maybe he would have disliked poetry anyway, but, boy, some of this looks REALLY dry and grim. Was “close reading” ever intended for fiction? I don’t know but it reminds me of law school, that type of analysis. Does that lend itself to fiction? It seems to suck all the joy out of it and might be better suited to nonfiction.
Close reading was definitely intended for fiction. The close reading that David Coleman espouses comes out of the New Criticism literary tradition, and it was definitely meant for poetry. The idea is that the meaning of the text is the words. As such, background knowledge, context, authorial intent, and so on just don’t matter much if at all.
Also, this type of close reading, since it instructs the reader to ignore context, history, etc. is not good for nonfiction either. Imagine students trying to make sense of the 3/5’s compromise while reading the US Constitution without references to history.
Textual analysis is very important, but it cannot be done in a vacuum. This is a huge problem with New Criticism. David Coleman has simply transported this problem right into the heart of the Common Core standards. What a monstrosity he hath wrought.
Finally, I disagree with the idea that the study of fiction and literature are extras that can be dispensed with because parents can fix this at home. If one of the goals of education is to give students the knowledge and tools to understand their own lives and cultures, then the study of fiction and literature should have a central, not marginal, place in education.
I would go further and advocate that students be exposed to film studies as a discipline before leaving the K-12 system. Just imagine all the videos and movies that students are watching, but no one is really giving them the sort of education that would help them truly understand what they are watching and how the creators of what they are watching are trying to affect and manipulate them.
There would be plenty of time to add this sort of content to the K-12 curriculum if we would just stop wasting so much time on excessive standardized testing.
I respectfully disagree, Chiara, with your suggestion that fictional reading can be taken care of by the parents and that will be enough.
It is one thing to read a piece of literature on your own. It is a completely different experience to read a piece of literature and to study it and discuss it with a community of peers ideally led by a teacher who is capable of guiding students to think critically and creatively about the text.
Why is there such a surge in book clubs for adults? It’s not that people can’t read on their own or aren’t reading on their own. It’s because one of the most enjoyable parts of reading is being able to talk about what you read with other people. Furthermore, discussing literature is not merely enjoyable, but it is essential for the development of critical thinking.
I’m pretty sure that the issues raised in classic books like “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “Catcher in the Rye” or “Beloved” or “Jane Eyre” are not on the table at all in a science, math, or even history classroom.
Actually this kind of parsing was what I had to do to read Emerson’s essays in college. And I loved rereading poetry in this way when I was nineteen. Probably not so much in elementary!
“It’s one area…parents can really fix” would not have worked for most of my students. One bragged that there were three books in his house.
I bought up masses of young adult paperbacks at garage sales hoping a number would be appropriated from my classroom and spread around the neighborhood where I taught.
“But fiction is not typically taught in science, math, or social studies classes (and when it is taught in social studies classes, it has a good purpose).”
If you doubt the “good purpose” claim, ask any subordinate…
Narrative, including narrative fiction, is one of the fundamental ways in which we make sense of the world. We take in bits of information (the little bit of information from the world that we actually attend to–about seven discrete bits at any given moment), and our brains automatically weave together plausible “stories” to account for the rest–for world as it probably is if it contains what we have actually attended to. We then automatically check those stories against further experience. Almost all of this process takes place below the level of consciousness attention.
Abduction, or hypothesis formation, works by weaving plausible stories–accounts that makes sense. We do this, for example, when we attribute motivations to others. It’s essential to what philosophers and psychologists call our theories of other minds and, of course, to that enterprise that we used to call natural philosophy and now call science.
Our very selves are stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves–narrative constructions. Who you are is a story you tell yourself, and much of therapy is about teaching people to tell themselves more life-enhancing stories about themselves and others.
Our very memories are narrative reconstructions and to an enormous extent confabulations–something known to psychologists at least since the work of Elizabeth Loftus but not appreciated by most people.
It is no exaggeration to say that we are Homo vates, man the storyteller. Storytelling ability conferred upon us enormous evolutionary advantage, more advantage than did, say, the invention of fire.
Gee, it might behoove us to understand a little about narrative, huh?
Those who thought that narrative texts were not as important as informative texts–who thought that the latter contained the really serious stuff–were simply profoundly ignorant of a lot of contemporary science.
Oh, and the stories that we tell ourselves about other people–our theories of their motivations, for example–are the essential factor, the sine qua non–in human cooperation, and this ability to cooperate, based on the stories we tell ourselves, conferred the enormous evolutionary advantage that, for good or ill, made us the dominant species on the planet.
And, of course, the distinction between narrative texts and informative texts is crude to the point of being completely deceiving, for almost all informative texts both employ narrative directly and, importantly, are dependent upon presumed narratives.
Our education policies are being formulated by the poorly educated, some of whom are poorly educated despite having received advanced degrees from prestigious universities. It’s inexcusable that folks formulating those policies would be so unfamiliar with recent science regarding narrative and narrative nonfiction.
cx:
It’s inexcusable that folks formulating those policies would be so unfamiliar with recent science regarding the importance of narrative and, in particular, narrative fiction.
We can see the narrativizing function of the human find at work when we dream. Neurons that encode recent stuff we’ve attended to fire at random, and our brains work to weave these together into narratives. We don’t understand much about this process yet, but we know that it is essential. Deprive experimental subjects of the REM portions of sleep, and they go crazy.
Our basic situation in this life is that your mind is over there and mine is over here. Narrative enables us to bridge that ontological gap.
Storytelling is far, far more important than most people ever thought it was, and, again, it behooves us to teach ourselves, and our students, to understand it.
Bob,
Thanks for these comments. I was going to say something like this, but you did it better than I would have.
I would like to see even more time devoted to storytelling in K-12 education in the form instruction about movies. Students should have some formal education in film studies before they graduate from K-12. Just think of all the videos and movies that young people watch now. So much of it is attempting to persuade and manipulate them, but we give them no formal training that would help them better understand this material and defend themselves against it.
Indeed. For better or worse, we are rapidly transitioning to a post-extended-discourse world. My students get very little of what they know of the world from extended discourses. They are completely submerged in digital media audio and video snippets. Teaching them something about how to “read” these would be valuable.
Let me restate that, Eric. Teaching students how to read these and to subject them to critique in light of more sophisticated, extended film and audio texts, would be valuable. It’s important for kids to understand that a little knowledge–that endlessly repeated internet meme–is a dangerous thing.
For example, our Congress seems, these days, to be basing legislation primarily on news flashes–the meme du jour–and to be ignoring long-term, systemic problems. It’s a post-extended discourse phenomenon.
Bob,
I absolutely agree with the need to learn to understand memes and snippets of video and short texts within the context of deep, extended discourses. I was thinking of film studies as an addition to the study of literature.
Hmmmm, “. . . a post-extended-discourse world”. I wonder if “a post-extended-discourse world” is that beyond the post-modern realm???
Seriously, though, if one thinks about it the imperative mood is an example of “post-extended discourse thought” as it truncates language into a do and don’t realm with no discussion. “Go to hell!”, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”, “Shoot, aim later!”, just a few examples of “post-extended discourse”/imperative speech. Is that not how those who seek control over others gain said control, with “post-extended discourse”? (Think military training, good obedient workers, etc. . . .)
Bob, are we in the “post extended discourse” era, or the “post-literacy” era?
The tides of technology, profit and power seem to be taking us toward the latter, if not toward what Lewis Mumford presciently called the “Technological Dark Ages.”
Just finished reading Mumford’s The City in History, btw. Good stuff.
Whoops, small mistake: Mumford called it the “Electronic Dark Ages.”
I chose my words carefully, there, Michael, because I think that there is a new and different kind of literacy emerging. My students know about a wide range of contemporary events but at a very superficial level, and when they get excited about something, like using online tools to create their own electronic music, they throw themselves into it, read and converse about it widely online, often on social media platforms, and learn a lot in short order. I first started thinking in this way a few years ago when I noticed that my stepdaughter’s boyfriend, who was getting great grades at a prestigious college, wasn’t reading any book-length works of his own choosing and yet seemed extremely bright and knowledgeable.
If you haven’t read it yet, check out Mumford’s prophetic “The Pentagon of Power,” which is the second part of his “Technics and Civilization.”
Form and rhythm, device and tone…elements of fiction and other art forms, seems to be frustrated by making the kids do the parsing before reading/hearing the entire work. A current high school student in my family reports reading chapter by chapter in class, taking weeeeeeks to get through easy rides like To Kill a Mockingbird.
Kills the kids’ appetite for our literary canon.
You said it! Devices are not why we read literature. (My post about this wis below.)
* is below
Absolutely. Thanks for stating my objection to the CC approach much better than I did.
I don’t worry about less fiction. I worry about treating fiction like a series or words or phrases, the better to prepare them to “refer back to the text” on the CC test.
I worry a great deal about there being less fiction in our curricula. We are storytelling creatures who need to understand storytelling. See my post, above.
Harsh school-to-prison policies in low-income schools are furthering access to literature even more.
Some background:
Our public high school is entering its second year of struggling to implement a recently-imposed school uniform policy. (A dress code already had been in existence prior to uniforms.) Students are now losing instructional time as they sit in detention halls for not wearing the proper school uniform colors. In addition, our high school has imposed a strict, no-pass policy. Any student needing to use the restroom now must have a hall monitor escort them.
The district response is to spend additional publicly-funded resources to ratchet up enforcement of uniform violations next semester. Meanwhile, our school librarian reports that library usage and circulation is down 50 percent from a year ago.
The librarian has bravely advocated for finding a way to permit students to come to the library. I think many of us are dismayed that the Powers That Be are more concerned over the color of a student’s shirt than the fact that library usage has plummeted.
“The district response is to spend additional publicly-funded resources to ratchet up enforcement of uniform violations next semester. Meanwhile, our school librarian reports that library usage and circulation is down 50 percent from a year ago.”
Eleanor, do you not see the adminimals game here???
A year from now they will quit enforcing the dress code violations as often, claiming that they have now “controlled” discipline issues as shown by fewer dress code infractions. And library usage will go up after the adminimals mandate that all teachers will take their classes to the library at least once a semester. Adminimal saviors at work!! See the adminimals work, decipher their feeble brains. Realize the idiocies that abound!
I’m certainly not defending all the idiocy of the last 15 years of “state testing,” “competencies,” and all the other WMDs that have turned educators into the walking wounded. However, “When English teachers and members of the public complained about the downgrading of fiction, the CCSS promoters insisted that they referred to the entire curriculum, not just to English. But fiction is not typically taught in science, math, or social studies classes ..” is a misleading argument.
CCSS promoters are saying that we should look at a student’s WHOLE DAY (or school year), not the curriculum for every discipline. Thirty percent literature — fiction, poetry, and drama — is actually OK when you look at a student’s whole day. S/he would be exposed many literary genres in ELA, perhaps a bit in SS, and none in math or science, which makes sense. Unfortunately, both teachers and administrators — either deliberately or through laziness — have misread and misused the 30/70 thing ad nauseum over the past several years..
That being said, yes, I do teach mostly American Literature most years and thus deal with a whole lot of non-fiction until we get to the 1830s. What I most object to is all this “what was the author’s purpose” and “how did the author accomplish blah” stuff. It’s fairly useless for the average student not going to major in Humanities in college, and for no one is it it why we read literature– we read it because it makes us better humans, teaches us how to live and die (to coin a phrase from Gray’s “Elegy”).
But, see, that doesn’t happen in the real world. The ELA tests affect the teachers’ salaries or even positions, so of COURSE the ELA teachers are going to emphasize non-fiction. My high school son did not read any fiction for class for TWO YEARS, because now that the test is king, ONLY what is on the test is being taught.
The “reformers” can claim that the fiction/non-fiction percentages are supposed to flow across all classes. But they don’t, because everyone is teaching to the test.
I am in the real world, Threatened– in a public high school, teaching grades 9-12 ELA (no 9 this year but usually I have it). And what I am saying is that, no, fiction does NOT flow along all classes, nor do reformers — any that I have ever heard/read — say that it does or should. You will not find it in the majority of classes students take during the day. And that’s as it always has been.
Are administrators and other teachers mistaken about this and therefore ditching fiction, drama, etc.– yes, because they are working under a misconception. Are test scores going up because of it and teachers getting better evaluations now that they are teaching 70% non-fiction in ELA classes? No. You know they aren’t.
The College Board/SAT, CCSS, etc., official literature states right out that at the HS level, the so-called ELA tests/standards cover readings in science, social studies, the arts, and probably several other disciplines I am juts not remembering at the moment.
If what is happening is that ELA teachers are teaching 70% non-fiction, they need to realize that that was not what was intended, that they are working under a misconception, and force some responsibility onto teachers of OTHER disciplines.
In my school in Massachusetts ninth and tenth grades are largely devoted to preparing students for the MCAS test (Massachusetts’ big test) that high school doesn’t really begin until the 11th grade and students go through the shock they used to go through during the transition from middle school to high school. In effect it means you have two years to get students ready for college, or at least those students who have an interest in college.
I also think that non-fiction is more useful for teaching the kinds of skills one needs to do well on the standardized tests, finding that in the text that supplies the best answer to whatever question is being asked, it is easier to read non-fiction solely for information.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
Yes, I live right over the boarder from MA, in NH. My very-much-younger cousin is in grade 11 in MA. She was one of the highest math scorers in the state but doesn’t take much interest in ELA, so I’m not sure what her readings were in grades 9-10. In my HS in NH, I would say we do about 30% non-fiction in grade 10, about 40% in grade 9. We used SBAC last year; many, many students opted out, esp at grade 8. This year, grade 11 will be using the revised SAT. As usual, people who have actually done the assigned reading in HS will do well, and those who did not won’t.
pc, I agree with you that the main benefit of reading fiction is that it teaches us about humans and world they live in. Learning about ourselves and the world is the main purpose of education.
Literature class should IMPLANT great poems, plays and novels in the brain –not analyze them to death –and by all means not reduce these works to mere vehicles for the quixotic endeavor to teach reading and thinking skills. DNA gives us critical thinking ability; teachers erroneously take credit for it. Teachers can only elicit critical thinking. DNA does not give us knowledge of Shakespeare and Jane Austen; teachers may honestly take credit for this. Movies, too, effectively implant world knowledge, sometimes egregiously distorted. Distortions notwithstanding, I find that my seventh graders have been better educated by movies than by their elementary schools. Elementary schools these days, for the most part, do not teach kids much of anything besides a little math (thanks partly to NCLB and Common Core, but also to the anti-content ideology that has long emanated from our education schools); outside math class, they focus mainly on fruitless skill practice.
To be really heretical…I don’t see much need for analyzing fiction and movies in school. I’d say the critical thing is simply comprehending the story. Once that happens, and the story gets embedded in long-term memory, the mind can digest the contents at its leisure over the course of a lifetime. Our brains have built-in analyzing powers. These do not need to be taught. They will work on the substance of the fiction the way microbes work on compost. I really didn’t grasp the deeper meanings of Macbeth or Hamlet when I was in high school or college, but I think back on them as life events prompt new ability to have insights into them. But these insights cannot happen if the content is never implanted in the mind in the first place.
I referred to the old NH state standards or frameworks or competencies or whatever the NHDOE chose to rename them every few months) as “content free” for many years. CCSS are a tiny, itsy bit better on the content thing, but not enough to make a real difference, I don’t think. “To simply comprehend the story”– well-put, fellow heretic!
Teachers aren’t always free to do as they want, and in high school,with the new common core English exam, teachers must prepare their students for the heavy load of nonfiction the test includes. Whether we like it or not, teachers have to prepare students for these exams. It is our responsibility.
In addition, there have been studies that show reading literary fiction helps make us more empathetic people. I think the United States could use more of that now.
Many schools and districts around the country have replaced much of their traditional instruction in ELA with practice dealing with snippets of isolated informative texts on unrelated topics of the kinds that are encountered on the new CCSS state tests–on the PARCC, Smarter Balanced, AIR, and new SAT exams. This Monty Python “and now for something completely different” approach to education, instantiated in many of the new online ELA education programs, is disastrous.
Which, Bob, is killing social studies as well (I expect you know this). The excuse in elementary schools for ridding the curriculum of social studies is that, “They will get the social studies in reading classes.” But the instruction is not coherent, nor does it flow through history, showing cause and effect.
By 8th and 9th grade, the kids come to my history and geography classes with NO CLUE about the world around them. They don’t know their continents, or even very many countries. On my world map pretest at the beginning of the year, many cannot find the United States or Canada on a world map. Of course, they learn these things by the time I’m done with them, but imagine how much MORE I could teach them if they already knew some of the basics.
Possibly the worst example I have had in my teaching career was a girl, who, three weeks ago, asked me what U.S stood for, and when I explained that, asked me, “Then what is America?” She’s a freshman. And not ELL or with any kind of special need. She had just NEVER HEARD THE TERM!!!!
What are we doing to these kids, who will be voters in four or five years????? I do what I can to teach them the basics on my end, but I’m fighting a lot of years of limited education. And I know it’s not the elementary teachers’ faults. It’s this insane demand of testing.
“Whether we like it or not, teachers have to prepare students for these exams. It is our responsibility.”
Horse manure. What a load of crap. Spoken like a true GAGA*er who has no cojones to stand up to/against blatant insanities that are these educational malpractices. It is your responsibility to teach the subject matter/grade level material not be a test prep mouthpiece.
From Wilson in writing on the invalidity of those exams:
“To the extent that these categorisations are accurate or valid at an individual level, these decisions may be both ethically acceptable to the decision makers, and rationally and emotionally acceptable to the test takers and their advocates. They accept the judgments of their society regarding their mental or emotional capabilities. But to the extent that such categorisations are invalid, they must be deemed unacceptable to all concerned.
Further, to the extent that this invalidity is hidden or denied, they are all involved in a culture of symbolic violence. This is violence related to the meaning of the categorisation event where, firstly, the real source of violation, the state or educational institution that controls the meanings of the categorisations, are disguised, and the authority appears to come from another source, in this case from professional opinion backed by scientific research. If you do not believe this, then consider that no matter how high the status of an educator, his voice is unheard unless he belongs to the relevant institution.
And finally a symbolically violent event is one in which what is manifestly unjust is asserted to be fair and just. In the case of testing, where massive errors and thus miscategorisations are suppressed, scores and categorisations are given with no hint of their large invalidity components. It is significant that in the chapter on Rights and responsibilities of test users, considerable attention is given to the responsibility of the test taker not to cheat. Fair enough. But where is the balancing responsibility of the test user not to cheat, not to pretend that a test event has accuracy vastly exceeding technical or social reality? Indeed where is the indication to the test taker of any inaccuracy at all, except possibly arithmetic additions?”
Oh, Oh, but my job and family depend on my being the good German allowing the “banality of evil” to be foisted on the students. Expediency does not, cannot trump justice for when it does evil surely will result:
“Should we therefore forgo our self-interest? Of course not. But it [self-interest] must be subordinate to justice, not the other way around. . . . To take advantage of a child’s naivete. . . in order to extract from them something [test scores, personal information] that is contrary to their interests, or intentions, without their knowledge [or consent of parents] or through coercion [state mandated testing], is always and everywhere unjust even if in some places and under certain circumstances it is not illegal. . . . Justice is superior to and more valuable than well-being or efficiency; it cannot be sacrificed to them, not even for the happiness of the greatest number [quoting Rawls]. To what could justice legitimately be sacrificed, since without justice there would be no legitimacy or illegitimacy? And in the name of what, since without justice even humanity, happiness and love could have no absolute value?. . . Without justice, values would be nothing more than (self) interests or motives; they would cease to be values or would become values without worth.”—Comte-Sponville [my additions]
*Going Along to Get Along (GAGA): Nefarious practice of most educators who implement the edudeformers agenda even though the educators know that those educational malpractices will cause harm to the students and defile the teaching and learning process. The members of the GAGA gang are destined to be greeted by the Karmic Gods of Retribution** upon their passing from this realm.
**Karmic Gods of Retribution: Those ethereal beings specifically evolved to construct the 21st level in Dante’s Hell. The 21st level signifies the combination of the 4th (greed), 8th (fraud) and 9th (treachery) levels into one mega level reserved especially for the edudeformers and those, who, knowing the negative consequences of the edudeformers agenda, willing implemented it so as to go along to get along. The Karmic Gods of Retribution also personally escort these poor souls, upon their physical death, to the 21st level unless they enlighten themselves, a la one D. Ravitch, to the evil and harm they have caused so many innocent children, and repent and fight against their former fellow deformers. There the edudeformers and GAGAers will lie down on a floor of smashed and broken ipads and ebooks curled in a fetal position alternately sucking their thumbs to the bones while listening to two words-Educational Excellence-repeated without pause for eternity.
Threatened: I teach 11th graders, American lit and AP Language. At 16 and 17 years old, the students who come into my classes can’t distinguish Communism from Capitalism, Protestantism from Catholicism. They can’t find China on a world map. They haven’t even the most rudimentary timelines in their heads of the major periods of Western or U.S. history. They can’t name the century in which the Civil War took place. They can’t distinguish between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They can’t name three American or English poets. They can’t name a Romantic poet and have no notion what Romanticism or Classicism are. They don’t know the mechanism of heredity and have no concept of geological time scales. And for the most part, they never read books, on their own, for pleasure.
They are victims of years of all-skills-all-the-time education that has left them profoundly, breathtakingly ignorant. They have spent years doing “inferencing” and “cause and effect” exercises on random snippets of text. And for the most part, the online, CCSS-inspired ELA education programs that I’ve seen are more of that.
The worst consequence, in ELA, of the current “reforms” is that students are being subjected to random pieces of text–this informative snippet, that informative snippet, without these being tied together into coherent wholes. I call this the Monty Python “and now for something completely different” approach to education. News flash: that’s not how learning works. It works by creating networks of associated material.
Our students will become “dilettantes” of bits of facts, but they won’t grasp the bigger themes that require coherence and connections. Meaning should dominate learning, and from that meaning, numerous skills can be taught. This is the kind of patchwork of information students will acquire if computers and bubble tests dominate instruction.
A few years ago I talked to a reporter at Education Week about how I was being pressured to replace fiction with informational texts. When I told her our curriculum director told English teachers that they would have to stop teaching the literature they love to focus on informational texts I was told about the footnote on page 5. I would have thought that as journalist she would appreciate that good writing does not put something that important in a footnote, but she seemed okay with it. When I tried to talk about the marginalization of poetry she was even less interested. Those defending Common Core talked only of the footnote and seemed to shrug off concerns about how the English curriculum was being modified. The former president of our union (NEA) wrote an editorial for the NEA magazine lamenting the misrepresentation of the Common Core and how good it was for schools. He too did not seem interested in the fact that the curriculum was being changed in troubling ways. He quoted one of the leaders of Common Core as saying “we cannot mandate anything,” which may be true but the states and school districts that implement Common Core can and when it was pointed out how it is being, according to Common Core, mis-implemented Common Core was in no hurry to rise to their own defense, I have yet to hear such a defense. But for me as much as I am grieved by the decline in the teaching of fiction, I am more grieved in the decline in the teaching of poetry, an art form that is much less well understood and in much more need of instruction.
I think this is exacerbated by the move to a “STEM” oriented curriculum. What does fiction, poetry, or arts and Humanities in general have to do with Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics. I have a little sign on the window of my classroom facing the hallway: “PALLMSS practiced here (Philosophy, Art, Language, Literature, Music, and Social Studies, or, in other words, the Humanities). The Humanities are important because they teach us, when they are taught appropriately and well, how to think humanely, a necessary adjunct to thinking well Mathematically and Scientifically. STEM makes us better machines, the Humanities makes us better human beings. And the ambiguity in the first half of this statement is deliberate, STEM both makes us better machines to use, but also makes us more machine like when it is not moderated by some humanizing influence.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
The intent of any standard, by definition, is to restrict freedoms and suppress innovation in return for interoperability and easier governance. Excessive standardization leads to stagnation. Poorly written standards such as Common Core are seen as barriers to learning by teachers implementing the standards. So in order to reestablish freedoms and innovation in the classroom, teachers are forced to circumvent the standards and game the system. This leads to a duplicity of Reformers oddly saying standards are working and useful against the classroom reality of a CCSS flipchart collecting dust in the back of the school boiler room.
I think this depends on how we define standards. It used to be that the standards were used to set goals and expectations, they did not dictate what was taught but helped teachers get a sense of where things stood and helped them plan. When I assess student work I am adhering to a kind of standard, but the standard can be modified or stretched or adjusted based on what is happening in the classroom. I have never seen a set of standards foisted on me as a teacher that did not, where they are valid, identify what was already being done. But as you say once they go from being something like the headlights on a car to the regimental code of instruction the classroom becomes a very scary, uninviting place. I remember reading in the Los Angeles Times about a month or so after I started teaching in the 1980’s a comment made by school principal that nothing frightened him more than teachers developing their own curriculum. I think our abilities have been demeaned for a very long time and the belief that we are lazy and incompetent is a long standing one.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
Yes. Good point. Industry standards often enforce certain specifications. For example, an internet protocol standard helps ensure interoperability and a minimum level of functionality. But the drawback is innovations not part of the standard are delayed or suppressed. Even worse, poor or obsolete standards entrench bad design and scale up deficiencies. Look at the painful transition to HDTV, the odd use of imperial measure over metric, and the fallout from outdated credit card technology.
In education, standards should be open, adaptable, and extensible. Teachers should be able to choose from multiple, competing standards and synthesize a classroom that meets the needs of a particular set of students. Coming from a heavy, standards based industry into teaching, I found it difficult to see the CC initiative as anything but a feeble attempt at true standards. I was used to open standards developed by actual industry experts in the field. Standards that could be extended with innovations. Revisions that were frequent and governed by a meta-standard.
What ever happened to balance and moderation? What happened to tapping into research for guidance? Frankly, Tom Loveless is mistaken. It does matter what genres children read. Nell Duke’s groundbreaking research found that in school young children were exposed to 3.6 minutes a day of nonfiction. Of course, this predates Commom Core. That is simply inadequate. By third grade, when more nonfiction is used to teach science and social studies, those children with no experience reading nonfiction are unable to read and learn satisfactorily. This has been called “the third grade slump,” and it is the result of lack of experience reading nonfiction. Children need to read both fiction and nonfiction because they both appeal to their intellects and their emotions. Also, even young children like nonfiction and can understand it. Do we need more reasons for including it?
I respectfully disagree. Any grade level ‘slump’ is better explained by Piaget than by reading genre selection. Reading selections should be left to teachers who know their students’ interests and developmental levels. My colleague in the classroom nextdoor decides to read about eStuff and iStuff most of the time? Fine. Let me choose whether to do the same or not for myself. The issue here is teacher autonomy.
Common Core appeals to techies. Techies believe that, in the very near future, all gainful employment will involve coding robot algorithms and growing the Internet of Things. Many believe the present and future of our entire economy depends on creating more tech and more techies, a terrible oversimplification at best. At worst, it’s a science fiction fantasy poised to pigeonhole the young into computer programming jobs that will never exist, and prevent any creative thought or invention for generations to come. At worst, it will be the end of ingenuity.
Techies, like the one in the Oval Office, purport that nonfiction (Can I still call it that?) is more complex ‘text’ than poetry and stories. (Can I still call them fun sounding poems and stories instead of boring sounding ‘fictional texts’?) They think ‘informational text’ is complex. Now THAT is fictional. There is more complexity in one line of Shakespeare’s sonnets than in all the memos and instruction manuals put together that the Common Core techies would have us read, reread and annotate, reread again…
By getting schools to eschew the literature of the greats — Maya Angelou, Pablo Neruda, John Steinbeck, to name a few — Common Core techies reveal their narrowminded ignorance of humanity’s true creativity, complexity, and potential. We are not all going to be designing Mars rovers in 2050.
I think engineers are used to benchmarking things. Computers do exactly what they are told, if a program doesn’t work it is not due to “petulance” on the part of the computer, it means the computers “brain” was not wired or instructed properly. Done right once the program can be duplicated ad-infinitum. I think the goal sometimes is something like “Star-Trek” borg that makes every human creature a part of one giant machine which they all serve (I think in fact that is what “the singularity” that has gotten some attention of late comes down to). I think it ironic that twenty-first century techies want to create a nineteenth century classroom where everyone does as they are told in a Gradgrindish sort of fashion that focuses only on what is useful and practical and everyone does the same thing in the same way all the days of their lives. It didn’t really work in the 19th century, hence all the mockery it received. Well as the song says, “we are all in our places with sun shiny faces, good morning to you.” We will all graduate into the universal kindergarten.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
Well said, Professor Wilson!
I’m a techie and I find Common Core appalling. I am trained as an engineer in high tech. But unlike most engineers, I had a moment of intellectual salvation where I broke out of the restrictive mindset of the engineering field into a higher level of understanding.
But seriously, engineering is a wonderful field, but with a very narrow focus. Even the math at its best falls short of demonstrating the true beauty of mathematics as something other than a computational tool. As I grew older in the field, I began to value more the arts and pure sciences. I voraciously read Shakespeare. I vowed to read all of Don Quixote on a long business trip. I reread the Bible, studied Jewish history, and read the translated Koran. I picked up guitar again and had a new appreciation for Bach’s genius as well as a new love of jazz. I am still working on Spanish, but I know better the great Spanish and Mexican artists.
I am still a hard core tech geek, but I am often saddened by the de-emphasis of the arts, literature, and pure sciences for VAM -based narrow STEM curriculums taught under the restrictive regime of Federal and State standards. I, personally, just wish I could live long enough (100 yrs?) to learn MORE…
My students read nonfiction texts. I favor texts dealing with emerging technologies. And I have them read Frankenstein and 1984 and Brave New World to put these into some rational perspective.
I teach AP Language, and I use these three texts as well, plus The Scarlet Letter and Hamlet. They read and analyze lots of nonfiction, both articles and book length, but these are novels about ideas and society, as well as incredibly rich literature. Kids respond very well to dystopian texts, which they are used to from the YA novels and films they know. What I find interesting is that when my supervisor first told us to reduce fiction in our classes, plus made us use computerized testing via Discovery Education, it was the fiction part of the test our students struggled with because of the nuance and use of inference etc. she did not like it when I pointed this out to her, but it did help us fight to keep fiction in our composition courses! She is gone now, and so is Discovery Education. I agree with the posters above who said we have to resist when the powers that be push us to do what we know is wrong.
A very disturbing trend I am seeing is crediting AP LIT under “Humanities” at many colleges instead of under “English.” This classification effectively splits Literature from the core subject of “English,” leaving only the structural “Language” aspects.
Leonardo da Vinci. Ben Franklin. Albert Einstein. They were all much more than STEM focused. They studied literature, art, philosophy… Please note: I left Gates and Jobs off the list.
Didn’t Steve Jobs get some of his aesthetic design from his study of calligraphy?
Yes he (Steve Jobs) did. And Galileo was able to discern the true nature of the surface of the moon because he looked at the moon as someone with training as an artist, a draughtsman, while the other scientist saw exactly what the science of their day taught them to see because they looked at the moon as scientists (of the 17th century variety). They saw it correctly ever after once Galileo taught them how to look.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
Diane, et al., —
I agree with Loveless. One can easily see the results of this ukase from CCSS in many colleges. At the senior undergraduate level, vocabulary skills and comprehension of complex syntactical constructions (of the kind written by Richard Powers, Hawthorne, Melville, and other standard American authors, much less Shakespeare) have nose-dived in the last decade. Undergraduates who are ENGLISH and/or foreign LANGUAGE majors often complain if a novel is assigned that is more than 200 pp. Non-language majors just read Cliff’s Notes and hope for the best. The organization most responsible for developing good literature reading habits, NCTE, has devoted most of its energies to social justice and political correctness issues (laudable in and of themselves), but not as substitutes for reading skill development and the emotional and intellectual growth that comes from promoting deep reading and personal engagement with major literary works. These literary works may not always be centered on just race, class, and gender, but are worthy of reading anyway.
While I do applaud your attacks on the corporate greed associated with far too many charter programs, I would also like to see you consider at least one other of the reasons why the various charter movements have taken hold in so many places: the dissatisfaction with many teaching practices found in the public schools. One can blame the CCSS with considerable justification, but NAEP scores have over the last decade remained fairly stable (and relatively low) in spite of all the billions poured into school reform before “reform” took on its contemporary stigma. Since social media has reduced the average teen’s vocabulary to approx 140 letters or bits, and comic books have shrunk dialogue into fitting in little balloons over a character’s head, the primary place for reading complex writing must still remain in the schools. No amount of political correctness alone will help a student comprehend Toni Morrison’s Biblical, classical, and historic allusions without expecting the students to do a fair amount of reading in her primary sources. Once the CCSS are gotten rid of, the profession still needs to revise its current thinking on reading skills and the canon generally.
John
John V. Knapp, Editor,
Style
Professor of English, Emeritus.
Northern Illinois University,
330 Reavis Hall
DeKalb, Ill. 60115 USA
jknapp@niu.edu
(608) 345-0509
Professor Knapp,
E.D. Hirsch argues that reading comprehension ability is mainly a function of background knowledge. I agree. My students whose parents tell them a lot about the world comprehend written and oral language much better than bright kids whose parents do not teach about the world. Unfortunately, the American k-12 education establishment does not believe that teaching world knowledge is very important. They do think teaching “reading skills” is important. What you see at your university is the fruit of this fixation on teaching “reading skills” (e.g. using context clues to figure out unfamiliar words. Neither you, nor I, nor any good reader ever learned to read by learning these recently-discovered “reading skills”. But the education establishment has swallowed this snake oil) Another popular but wrong-headed approach to teaching reading is to have kids read tons of young adult fiction. But unless this YA fiction contains novel vocabulary or world knowledge, it does little to expand the scope of a student’s reading ability. As you can see, these approaches are not working. If schools started teaching a knowledge-rich curriculum, kids would have the wherewithal to decipher more texts. Ironically our fixation on “reading skills” and YA fiction is preventing our kids from becoming competent readers.
Without a strong foundation of vocabulary and general world knowledge, not only does reading comprehension suffer but learning in general suffers (especially in social studies and science). After more than a decade of ignoring content knowledge as a fundamental philosophy of teaching and learning, after more than a decade of decrying “facts” and memorization, and direct instruction – we are now seeing a generation of very ignorant children ironically addicted to their “smart” phones. It has gotten so bad that if a student actually brings even a single snippet of prior knowledge into my science class I am very pleasantly surprised as my expectation in this regard are total ignorance or worse – misinformation.
yes yes yes
If I may… do I have confidence in CCSS? No, but it’s the framework we have so we use it judiciously. Did the authors know what they were doing? Somewhat, not completely. Should we let every teacher teach anything he or she wants to? In some schools, sure; in mine, no, my kids can’t afford to be someone’s guinea pig. Everyone weighing in on the vital importance of fiction, deep reading, prior knowledge, vocabulary, etcetera, is right: all are important. The pendulum swing to which we subject kids: direct instruction vs. constructivism, ratio of fiction to non-fiction, etcetera, is adult hubris. We have to quit shooting ourselves in the foot with our philosophies because kids need what they need when they need it and it is our job to deliver.
Focus the fight on the attack on public education and the ruining of our kids’ lives by charters, vouchers, RTTT, TFA, and corporate intrusion. The big problem isn’t CCSS– it’s how money drives policy and goads us into fighting ourselves. (And yes, that’s how we got CCSS, but follow the money to the real enemy as you do do well on this blog.) If we keep fighting ourselves, it will be as Pogo said so long ago, in the Okefenokee Swamp, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
“Ironically our fixation on “reading skills” and YA fiction is preventing our kids from becoming competent readers.”
ponderosa:
Maybe it’s time you start building your knowledge base about some of the topics you spout nonsense about. You can start with the work of Stephen Krashen, who maintains (with plenty of research to back him up), that self-selected free reading is a key for children to become competent readers.
It might come as a surprise to you that in addition to kids, a large and growing number of literate adults are selecting YA books (for the same reasons they turn to other genres). You also might want to find out something about YA fiction itself. There are plenty of great YA historical fiction titles, for example, that impart tons of historical knowledge in a way that’s exciting to both kids and adults. But apparently you’re ignorant of those. (There are thousands of librarians out there who could steer you in the right direction, and plenty of resources available online.) Far from having a “fixation,” teachers who are knowledgeable about YA fiction and advocate its use in schools also tend to know about other types of literature and how YA can serve as bridges to and can be integrated into the study of classic works.
I usually try to ignore your diatribes against your fellow teachers (and against any viewpoint that doesn’t spring from your own personal biases), but today I’m making an exception. The idea that the vast majority of American teachers are running knowledge-free classrooms, is patently absurd.
Sorry about that comma . . .
The idea that the vast majority of American teachers are running knowledge-free classrooms is patently absurd.
@Rage Against the Testocracy: your comment really speaks to me: “Without a strong foundation of vocabulary and general world knowledge, not only does reading comprehension suffer but learning in general suffers (especially in social studies and science.” Here’s a roundup of how I see this encouraged (or not) where I teach.
I have been teaching for-lang enrichment in a variety of PreK’s/ daycares for 14 yrs. Storytime is about 1/3 of a 30-min lesson. The kids’ background runs the gamut from working-class thro upper-mid; the stories run the gamut of what’s available in quality picture-books.
The intensity of interest PreK’s bring to a story is a product of the experience they bring to it– which most definitely includes school experience. Kids whose parents work long hours, regardless of SES, are particularly dependent on what they learn of life at school.
The kids at chain-daycare/PreK/K’s are being taught pre-reading/ pre-math skill-sets– plus (via 1/2hr/wk ‘specials’) a smattering of science & music, (& sometimes, something else like Spanish). Art is restricted to uniform cut-&-paste crafts illustrating holiday themes. Their long day is teacher-directed (tho sufficient unstructured play is included, as well as a wkly phys-Ed ‘special’). Much energy is expended on learning to control & direct impulses. Tho they get some field trips, (let’s take Apple-picking & pumpkin patch in autumn e.g.)– they glean little content (any sense of planting cycles– the blossoms that precede in spring; that apples & pumpkins ripen in autumn). ‘. The life experience they bring to a story is pretty much limited to lessons in family & school social relationships. (‘Otis’ [the tractor] was a dud– the farm experience unknown, hence insufficient interest to connect to story’s social lessons.)
Those at the [expensive] private PreK’s are a bit better-rounded. As w/ the chains, music, & often phys-ed, & sometimes a for-lang, are imported via brief wkly specials. Art tho not usually a special is free-form w/easels, clay, et al. These kids will connect something in a story to info gleaned from family trips to Disney/ skiing/ vacation in Mexico, and also connect to stories parents read to them at home.
The Montessori classrooms show evidence of wide & enriching self-directed math, reading, & ‘practical’ (kitchen, dressups) activity, plus free-form Art. Tho music & phys-Ed are just brief wkly specials, there is ample unstructured playground time– but I see little evidence of science & geography… Classes are usually large multi-age groupings, w/ several teachers assisting self-directed activities. So wkly specials like Spanish class & its stories take place in an enormous circle whose response is tightly controlled [& generally stifled] by the several teachers sitting in.
By far the most informed & interested students I’ve had over the yrs are those from a daycare for employees of a local pharmaceutical corp. The kids listen intently to stories & volunteer associations: [re: La Oruga Qué Tenía Mucha Hambre – The Hungry Hungry Caterpillar, all sorts of stuff about eggs and leaves, cocoon, pupa, etc; ‘Los Tres Cabritos Traviesos – The Three Billy Goats Gruff’ solicits speculations about feeding habits, goats’ ability to swim, et al]. These kids also get some multi-lingual/ cultural instruction supported by parents; Indian/ Chinese/ Norwegian/ Polish kids feel free to pipe up w/how that word is said in their home language.
The latter school was founded 30 yrs ago; the teachers are ordinary low-pd nurturing-mama types. They’ve been blessed with excellent direction/ supvn/ subordinate devpt, as well as involved parents who pop in from the nearby lab, & find time to put on Spanish song-CD’s while driving kids to school (some even look over the computer links I provide, at home w/their kids). The classrooms have 8-15 students, & are crowded w/ terraria, fish tanks, plantings-in-pots, maps, puzzles, books, dress-up, miniature kitchens, baby-dolls-in-cradles.
Summarizing:
The chain daycare/ PreK’s have been greatly influenced by stdzd reform. I suspect this is mostly due to the nature of a chain; they have a ‘brand’ curriculum which governs their certification & operation, & these stds clearly show a bent toward age-inappropriate time at a table w/pencil & paper practicing pre-reading & pre-math skill-sets. Since they often serve lower-SES kids, there may also be state-subsidies w/attached state stds involved. Great lacks in terms of acquiring the ‘life knowledge’/ vocabulary that might be afforded by ventures into science & soc studs.
The private PreK’s– usually hitched to a church or a Y– were always mediocre, their curricula artsy-crafty, centered around seasons & holidays, songs & play. Nothing inherently wrong with it, but it shows worn seams today when many kids are there from dawn to dusk rather than the 2.5-hr am or pm session of yesteryear, when the only real goal was socialization. They need an infusion of age-appropriate hands-on science & community geography.
Montessori needs little more than a similar expansion of curriculum to reflect the increased no of hrs kids now spend in preschool. Their self-directed math & reading activities are complex & superior to other PreK’s & pubsch fK.
The study of literature (i.e. fictional texts) is essential to the development of critical thinking. When a student engages with a piece of literature, the student must step into the shoes of someone else and evaluate the decisions made and the actions taken by that character. When we teach literature, we teach students to hypothesize by making predictions, and we teach students how to synthesize different pieces of information in a way that makes sense. With literature, students learn how to understand and how to make analogies, thereby developing their ability to compare and contrast ideas as well as to evaluate those comparisons and contrasts.
Literature provides the opportunity for students to understand human relationships as well as historical events in a way that is more personal and more accessible. I know a student is hooked when the student says, “This character is just like X in my life.” When a student can identify with a character and with a story, then a reader is created, and that reader will go on to read anything else they encounter in the world. Therefore, literature allows students not only to develop their vocabulary and their reading comprehension skills but to develop a consciousness as a member of a larger community of people. It allows students to access different perspectives, and especially on controversial issues, this can sometimes be the only point of access that a student might have.
Gates, Walton, Broad, Zuckerberg, et al are not interested in critical thinkers who might question their decisions. They want human drones who have enough tech skills to produce but not enough critical thinking skills to challenge the way things are.
Anyone who views literature as an option is misguided. Literature is absolutely and fundamentally essential to an educated populace and to democracy.
I thought Common Core was fiction — fantasy, in fact.
David Coleman’s fantasy.
“Night on Coleman’s Mountain”
Dave came down from the mountain
With Common Core in tow
He’d drunk from the Magic Fountain
Which made the fiction flow
“A Whale of a Tale”
The Coleman tells a tale
Both fanciful and grim:
The Common Core’s a whale
That swallows Huck and Jim
I knew SomeDAM Poet would bring some literary greatness to this post! Waited all day for it.
Data is a good way to start a conversation and spark further questions. The data that shows the decline of fiction in ELA classrooms provokes an important conversation. I think it is reasonable to claim the shifting emphasis is influenced by CCSS adoption/implementation, but that is not the end of it. Is the mere act of having standards for informational text causing the shift? Is it the way the standards are written? Is it the way the standards are interpreted or implemented? Based on the research, we don’t have enough information to answer this question.
Since we don’t have enough data to make a causal claim, can we stop trying to fill in the gaps with our own biases and personal explanations?
A better course would be to see what there is to see–prevalence of fiction in ELA classrooms has declined–and then do what we know we need to do. We know we need to provide a rich literary experience for students using a variety of text. We are not prevented from doing so, so let’s make it work.
Brooke, it does matter that the CCSS specify how much time should be devoted to fiction in school: 50% in K-8, not more than 30% in high school. Do you think no one listened?
“We are not prevented from doing so.” Really? We live in the age of the online learning module and the scripted lesson on standard CCSS.ELA.RI.666.2a.
Yes, Bob, really. The fact that scripted online learning modules exist has little to do with the quality of instruction in ELA classrooms.
I don’t have any way of knowing who listened, or how the listener interpreted. It’s safe to say the number of people who took those recommended percentages to heart is greater than 0% and less than 100%. That’s my point in this discussion: we don’t know much.
Since Tom Loveless has research tracking decline in fiction and an increase in informational text in ELA classrooms, it would be interesting to see how close we are to that 30% figure in high schools. The post says decline but does not specify from what number to what number. Did we decline from 68% to 64%? From 76% to 43%? Where are we at all?
Of course they listened, Diane. Parents have been hearing 50/50 from school admin for 2 years. Test scores matter and if the “suggestion” in the footnote was the clue to attainment …
I agree with these postings focusing on the machinations by Show Runners to emphasize a robotic ed system with little regard or care for literature, poetry, social studies, etc. Does anyone else believe Show Runners intent is to debase humanities? Knowledge of this sort could have negative impacts on their goals. After all, revolutionary vision may be seen as detrimental to the agenda. This appears to be the reason why many schools, beginning with K kids, have begun the identification and data collection on the students with a natural affinity for such things. Self guided computer learning for these kids might mold the perfect mouthpieces. The illusion of free will channeled through the nurturing avatar.
Ask the Teacher’s College if they’ve been making these recommendations.
The goals of CCSS are not to educate children about the world but to teach them how to recall facts, question less, abide by expressionist code words and operate “successfully” in their little bubbles. I fear the next phase will absorb history into the 50% fictional category so the brain washing for the corporate store can proceed.
I’d love to see Middle and High School teachers spending more time educating kids on the dangers of revisionist history. Once a gradual process of change it’s now an over night phenomenon.
@ Brooke
“A better course would be to see what there is to see–prevalence of fiction in ELA classrooms has declined–and then do what we know we need to do. We know we need to provide a rich literary experience for students using a variety of text. We are not prevented from doing so, so let’s make it work.”
What’s your vision of “a rich literary experience?”
“Since we don’t have enough data to make a causal claim, can we stop trying to fill in the gaps with our own biases and personal explanations?”
What would be enough data? Do we really need a lot more than since CCSS was mandated, the amount of fiction taught has declined? And just what is it “we” need to do? Whether a teacher can do what needs to be done depends very much on whether, as Mathvale (?) said, s/he has reached those years shortly before retirement where it is much easier to defy idiotic edicts.
If you want a sampling of research that supports the primacy of narrative, you can read Story Proof: The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story, by Kendall Haven. I’m not a fan of how the book is organized, but suffice it to say that David Coleman probably didn’t read any of the cited research before he “authored” the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts. If in fact he did read Jerome Bruner, Steven Pinker, George Lakoff, Mark Turner, Mark Johnson–along with a host of other cognitive scientists, reading researchers, narrative psychologists, writers, teachers, and storytellers cited in the book–he tacitly rejected them all.
You really don’t need to read Haven’s book to see that Coleman is just dead wrong. But if you’re still sitting on the fence about the “shifts” mandated by the Common Core (including the diminishment of personal writing), it’s worth a look.
For a compelling case in favor of storytelling in all phases of work and everyday life, see The Story Factor (2nd Revised Edition), by Annette Simmons. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, by Jonathan Gottschall has a few noticeable flaws (for my taste, anyway), but it’s loaded with insights on why stories are a key to learning, and just about everything else, including the cognitive and social development of children.
Ick. Story Proof! By Kendall Haven…whose clients include DARPA and all things military. What reasons compel “other” professions to involve themselves with story telling in education? Following the “Pot of Gold” seekers for more Ed Tech….and data tracking….
The Story Factor Revised offers a rather creepy description.
“The new material for this revised edition offers an expanded case study of storytelling in action that focuses on one of Simmons’s success stories. Over one hundred stories drawn from the front lines of business and government, as well as myths, fables, and parables from around the world, illustrate how story can be used to persuade, motivate, and inspire in ways that cold facts, bullet points, and directives can’t. These stories, combined with practical storytelling techniques show anyone how to become a more effective communicator. From “who I am” to “I-know-what-you’re thinking,” Simmons identifies the six stories you need to know how to tell and demonstrates how they can be applied. This revised edition offers a guide to using storytelling in specific business circumstances, including corporate reorganizations, layoffs, and diversity issues.”
This is exactly how Billionaire agenda narratives advance. Front load stories with half truths and partial facts….
“A Million Little Pieces” is that the goal? Blur the lines and teach this so kids won’t be able to distinguish between the two and grow up stuck in a matrix of illusions?
I think your missing the point, which is that people understand and pay attention to stories, because it’s through stories that we understand the world. None of these writers advocates the spinning of false narratives. In fact, it’s only by recognizing the effectiveness of narrative that their damaging effects can be unmasked. David Coleman’s narrative of what’s wrong with education and why we “need” the Common Core Standards is false on its face. The so-called standards themselves are ill-informed and founded on false assumptions.
I taught English for over thirty years. My interest in metaphors and stories comes from that experience. One of the things I learned as an English teacher (and as an educated human being) is that you have no basis for criticizing a book unless you’ve at least sampled it. My interest in Haven’s book has less to do with his pronouncements than on the research he offers as his “proof.” If you want to dismiss the work of all the authors he cites, be my guest. But again, if you just want to attack the man’s association with NASA or other government agencies and not the substance of his argument, you’re caught up in fallacious reasoning. Like this . . .
“A Million Little Pieces” is that the goal? Blur the lines and teach this so kids won’t be able to distinguish between the two and grow up stuck in a matrix of illusions?”
Of course my goal is pretty much the opposite, which is one reason I enjoyed teaching Shakespeare, Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, modern British short stories, and lots of other fiction, poetry, and drama the made question the conventional wisdom.
Edit:
Of course my goal is pretty much the opposite, which is one reason I enjoyed teaching Shakespeare, Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, modern British short stories, and lots of other fiction, poetry, and drama that question the conventional wisdom.
“The 70-30 Common Core Split”
Thirty is the percent
Of brain that folks were using
When Common Core was sent
To schools for their abusing
The added attention to increasing nonfiction appears having an impact on the genre itself, not only in the in quantity produced but also in the characteristics of nonfiction itself. While the nonfiction genre is generally understood to be based on real events, a statement by the Newbery Award winning children’s nonfiction author Russell Freedman seems to blur those clear lines that the NAEP and Common Core have tried to separate as distinct. Freedman has stated:
“A nonfiction writer is a storyteller who has sworn an oath to tell the truth.”
Whether it began with the the NAEP Chicken or the CCSS egg, the pressure to emphasize nonfiction is like any other evolutionary force in nature. While the Common Core has fallen out of favor with many states, with at least 12 states introducing legislation to repeal the CCSS standards outright, the nonfiction genre is growing and responding and adapting under the current favorable conditions.
The reduction of fiction in favor of more readable nonfiction in grades 4 & 8, as evidenced by the NAEP survey, continues. The evolution of the nonfiction genre may increase readership as well, especially if engaging texts increase interest in reading in the content areas of history, social studies, science and the technical subject areas.
FULL POST:
http://usedbooksinclass.com/2016/03/29/the-naep-chicken-and-the-common-core-nonfiction-egg/