Kristen Blair writes that classics are disappearing from the English classroom, and the single biggest reason is the Common Core, which emphasizes “informational text.”
Her source: a report by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. TBF bears big responsility for the widespread adoption of those deeply flawed standards. It was paid millions by the Gates Foundation to evaluate them, and found them to be terrific. Then it was paid millions to promote them. Mike Petrilli testified on behalf of the CC before state legislatures.
Blame the Thomas B. Fordham Institute if you are upset about the loss of classic literature.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In many ways I blame Governors, State Legislator, Secretaries of Educations for not paying serious attention to what is going on with Common Core and what it is doing to the education of our children. Our state leaders are just accepting what they are told without really digging into Common Core and what it really does. They are responsible for the education of our children but are turning a blind eye to the reality in our educational systems today.
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The emphasis on informational text is not the only culprit. The CCSS in ELA is a list of abstract skills that will be tested using small, random chunks of text. Textbooks and online instructional materials have imitated this modus operandi. Give kids random snippets of text and have them practice finding “how the figurative language affects the tone and mood,” and other such CCSS nonsense. This is the REALLY PERNICIOUS part of CCSS. The accountability system is motivating the curricula. A hair on the tail is wagging the dog.
Forget reading To Kill a Mockingbird or Siddhartha or The Crucible or Our Town. Instead, we’ll have a paragraph about Pluto here and a paragraph about the 1918 World’s Fair there, followed by six multiple-choice questions with plausible distractors, all based on a Common Core “standard.” I call this the “And now for something completely different” approach to English education.
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An English Department Chairperson in a local charter school recently explained to me that this is ALL she does until the tests are given in April. Then, she and the kids will read a book. But all the current English literature programs, print and online, are infected by toxic test prep mania.
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about that standard referenced in my comment: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/on-developing-curricula-in-the-age-of-the-thought-police/
But one could do this with almost any other Common Core ELA “standard”
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A hair on the tail is wagging the dog.
Wonderful summary of the problem…Bob Shepard strikes again.
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And to make matters worse, the students have been brainwashed to “learn” this way (or IMHO…not learn or think at all). My public HS daughter had an ELA teacher last year (10th grade) who chose to ignore the standards and really teach English. My daughter loved it, but her friends were always complaining and wondering why he just wouldn’t “teach” them what would be on the test. This year she is stuck with an AP ELA teacher who follows the standards and my daughter is bored to death. Child #2 started in private HS due to this….along with the stupid math standards that the teachers choose to follow.
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These teachers who choose to teach anyway, in SPITE OF the stupid standards and the stupid tests, are real heroes. It takes real bravery to do that.
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My students come to me in 8th and 9th grade social studies with almost no content knowledge anymore. It’s frustrating and sad that our general, shared knowledge has been destroyed in this generation.
And when I complained to the English department that the essays students have to write about different essay topics on the BS tests, I was told that, “English teachers don’t teach content, they teach skills.” Therefore, it “didn’t matter” that students were writing essays on different subjects.
But it sure mattered to the kids. Background knowledge is invaluable, and yet the CC has devalued it to the point that kids don’t know content anymore.
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These are teachers who themselves know no “content.” I’ve met a lot of these, unfortunately. An example: The “reading coordinator” at my previous school, who had authority over the members of the English Department, thought that the Odyssey was a novel and that “classical literature” was anything that was “a classic.” She had a PhD in “reading.”
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I asked this person what she liked to read. Her answer: “I don’t get much of a chance to do that. I’m far too busy.”
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Lately, I’ve met many English teachers and coordinators who don’t read, or who read only little how to get rich quick books and the like. Yep, they don’t have time. They have screen time. They have time to spend their workdays checking their emails and web pages. At home, they have time to Netflix, time for Amazon. They push teachers like me to teach online, to use all the tech possible. That’s what stands out to me, the pervasive tech push in leadership.
Is it any coincidence that the CEOs of the companies producing all that screen time and monetizing all the data are the “philanthropists” behind Common Core? Nope. Is it any coincidence that reading has been reduced to short snippets of informational text so that test data can be produced? No. Literature is losing all meaning, drowned under a deluge of data.
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My GUT tells me that the Common Gore, High Stakes Testing, Charters, and Vouchers are nothing more than JIM CROW … keep the masses down so the oligarchs can USE them as their slaves.
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LCT: if I were principal… (If I were a rich man… If I were King of the Forest…), I’d mandate that every teacher be seen by students in spare moments not to be checking digital device or doing ppwk, but [ostentatiously, e.g., as students are arriving at class] to be nose in his/her fave book of the moment, be it self-help trash, genre mystery– whatever. I’d even keep a lending-library of paperbacks for the disinclined.
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Bob: I figured you would have a comment about informational text, and you did not disappoint. I do have a question. One of my best educational experiences was being exposed to the nonfiction in my high school courses. Because I was at a prep school, history class was pretty much like college. We had a lot of reading requirements, including monographs like Crane Brinton’s Age of Revolution and Chamberlain’s history of the Russian Revolution.
Thus I was excited when I learned CC had a nonfiction emphasis. Why does the CC emphasize the informational text without including whole monographs by noted authors? Could it be because it would be too full of content? You can imagine my disappointment when the informational text was restricted to short segments of original sources like Andrew Carnegie. What happened to real informational text?
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LOVE this post. The Common Core State Standards for ELA are schizophrenic about this. On the one hand, the standards themselves are almost content free, and those are what are tested. On the other, the notes accompanying the standards encourage people to use rigorous, classic texts. People do what the think might work to prepare kids for the tests–using those short selections. I agree wholeheartedly that students should read longer literary and nonfiction texts.
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In other words, people are doing in their instructional materials precisely what the tests do–having kids apply content-free abstract skills standards to short selections. Anything else WON’T BE ON THE TEST. It’s really that simple.
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And I so, so agree about the importance of reading longer informational texts. I just finished reading, this summer, a slew of books on Russian history, US-Soviet relations, and the US intelligence services during the Cold War. Revelatory. Fascinating. Relevant. And what got me onto that kick? Well, reading the novel Red Sparrow, which was outstanding.
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Thanks for your reply. At the risk of sounding like those who believe that there is nothing to learning but common knowledge, I would like to place some of the responsibility for CC and its fragmented approach on education schools and their “what works” approach to deciding how to teach. By focusing students on “evidence-based” instruction methods, education professionals have advocated some of this methodology whereby students start to analyse complex systems far too soon.
Young people can form legitimate opinions on some things. I can recall arguing against sympathy for Shylock in Merchant of Venice on the basis of his having too much sympathy for himself. It was a pretty well developed argument for a ninth grader, based on Shakespeare. Devoid of an understanding of the rise of anti-semitism in late medieval Europe, however, it was an exercise in futility. I am really not sure if I am qualified to write about that topic yet today.
Elsewhere in today’s posts, we discuss Trump’s references to Robert E Lee, who used to be revered for his dedication but is now vilified by some for his ownership of slaves. Neither of these views of the historical figure is historically complete, so neither of these views is a legitimate stream of thought. It is not only CC that induces us to form opinions devoid of facts. I am no disciple of Lee, but he, like all other humans, was a bundle of contradictions. That is what makes us interesting.
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Lee was indeed a complex man. I’m a huge fan of Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels.
One of the most powerful experiences of my life was standing on his porch remembering how he sat there, looking over the Potomac and the very seat of the Union federal government, with two letters in his hands, one from Lincoln and one from Jefferson Davis, both offering him leadership of their respective armies.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uu00Sv7VrEA
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“By focusing students on “evidence-based” instruction methods, education professionals have advocated some of this methodology whereby students start to analyse complex systems far too soon.”
Roy, this is is intriguing, but I don’t know anything about ed schools. Does “‘evidence-based’ instruction methods” refer to how to get stdzd test scores higher [I hope not] or something else? And I assume from context you mean the ed students’ future students are encouraged [due to to their teachers’ training in evidence-based instruction methods] to analyze complex systems prematurely – what complex systems?
I tend to read this as, teachers trained in Coleman CCSS-ELA close textual reading methods will assign complex texts too early, & encourage writing that may be deft at drawing surface connections among structural writing elements, while missing content nearly entirely due to lack of historical et al context. But you may mean something else.
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Blame the Thomas B. Fordham Institute…
Blame the Common Gore…
Blame the Reds (repubs and rooskies)…
Blame the “deplorables”…
Blame the selectoral collage…
Blame the Faux News channel…
Blame the Charters…
Blame Besty…
Blame the DOE…
Blame the SCROTUS amungus…
NEVER, repeat, NEVER blame
“our continuing abject failure to address the authoritarian absurdity of core political and judicial institutions crafted by 18thcentury slaveowners and merchant capitalists for whom popular self-governance was the ultimate nightmare.”
For Popular Sovereignty, Beyond Absurdity by Paul Street
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This. 100 times, this. And Paul Street is brilliant.
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Fordham is to blame for its part in promoting what led to the scamming of Ohio taxpayers of $1 bil. The money was intended for community schools. And, Fordham should take blame for the students enrolled in virtual schools who never completed a single class. Fordham’s actions have horrible outcomes. Their staff must be desperate for jobs or, so avaricious that they are callous to the impact of what they do.
They should be held accountable.
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What’s missing from this policy “pedagogical” study is the fact that now, more than ever, children need breaks from the phrenetic, structured, “multitasking” world. No way better to do that than spend some quality time with a book. Preferably weighted toward classics the younger one is.
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Ir’s not the “classics” per se that I grieve for, it’s reading, period. I don’t think THE SCARLET LETTER is necessarily a better book than THE PREGNANCY PROJECT, which my stepdaughter read last year and really connected with. Same basic themes, but the latter is in far more accessible language for high school kids and far more relevant than a 170 year old book.
The problem is, as Bob Shepherd detailed above, is that many kids aren’t reading any longer works. The tests focus on obscure clips from boring informational texts, so that is what gets taught.
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It’s interesting what a shelf life some of these “classics” have, despite the practical issues that they present in a contemporary classroom. Having done some experiments with current 11th-grade honors students and English teachers, using passages from this novel, I’ve concluded that The Scarlet Letter would be not much less incomprehensible to most of these people if it were written in Greek. The syntax and vocabulary alone are extremely challenging even for most contemporary college-educated, English-speaking American adults.
But this isn’t the whole of the problem. Many of the ideas that Hawthorne was most concerned with in the novel are no longer current enough for most readers, lacking the necessary background in history and theology, even to recognize as among its central issues, and Hawthorne himself raises many of these issues but leaves them quite unresolved because he, himself, was ambivalent about them–pulled now one way and now another. So, even if you know what issues are at stake in the novel, you will find that it’s often confusing and/or confused about them.
And there are better written and more accessible works by Hawthorne. Some of his short stories–“Young Goodman Brown” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” for example, are more accessible than SL is (though they are still challenging) and doubtless better written on the whole, though SL certainly has moments of brilliance.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a moderately enthusiastic fan of the novel, having read it several times over as an adult, but I think it’s far more difficult to read than is, say, King Lear or Hamlet, which are themselves quite challenging, and that many people who think that they love the book don’t have a very clear understanding of it.
So, yes, students should read longer works. And they should read classics. But these need to be at their zone of proximal development. The readiness is all.
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Hawthorne is brilliant. Go to Concord, Mass. and immerse yourself in the history of the Transcendentalists, Emerson, Thoreau, et al., the Alcotts, and the American Revolution all in the same little place. Their lives are palpable in that little town. I can still see them going about their lives there if I sit outside the Old Manse and really imagine it all. My husband (an English teacher) and I go all the time and stay at little inns and read their books and tour the Old Manse, Emerson’s house, the Wayside and Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Walden Pond. The power of books, travel and imagination all rolled into one. I LOVE it. I feel bad for kids now who will only know the superficial excitement of a snapchat or reading instructions about how to put together a fan. Poor kids!
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Much I have traveled in Concord, Marnie! I lived nearby, in Wenham and Beverly, for many years. I’ve been to all these places many times and often return to them in my mind. What a delight.
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I freaking LOVE LOVE LOVE this post!
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And how wonderful to share a surname with Dante, of all people! “E questo dubbio e impossibile a solvere a chi non fosse in simile grado fedele d’Amore.” –La vita nuova
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The Gates Foundation’s gift of English Lit to the youth of America, a close reading of a toaster warranty policy.
They would be better to spend their money to document carpet schemes of the 80s and 90s at Bellevue and Redmond hotels and convention centers. That would be a more productive use of Bill Gates wealth.
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Good analysis and parallel, TC. Gates doesn’t care. Harvard’s Roland Fryer who got $1 mil. from Gates made it clear that the elite’s kids get one kind of education and the rest, who have parents that actually contribute to GDP, get the education that will profit the tech industry and hedge funds.
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LOL. Well said.
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Here is my reaction to information text: SNORE!
The goal should be to encourage children to enjoy reading, not hate it. Forcing children to read information text is going to turn many of them off to reading and they will not grow up to become life-long-learners, critical thinkers and problem solvers.
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Well said!
Not only should we get rid of PARCC but these standards.
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Hey, didn’t Trump promise to get rid of Common Core. Please remind him he did not keep that promise.
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Trump would just say, “I never said that. I didn’t mean it. It was locker room talk. It’s fake news.” Then he would pivot until DT’s mad mob at one of his hate rallies was shouting “Lock her up!” But this time, DT’s mob might be referring to Hillary or Ford or both.
How long before DT’s mob starts shouting while foaming at the mouth, “Off with their heads!”
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I would suggest there are many young kids interested in informational SUBJECTS – maybe not informational texts per se (all are engaged by narrative; some are turned off by expository prose). I see it all the time w/ little ones. I teach PreK/K Spanish: stories have mostly animal characters, & kids are always wanting to volunteer context info about environment, habitat, observed or heard-of animal behavior. Why govtl agencies think proportion of fiction/nonfiction needs to be dictated is beyond me. My kids got good reading habits in first grade [’90’s – pre-CCSS], where there were baskets of leveled readers that they could choose from at will [but advancing w/teacher guidance], each containing a spectrum from pure fantasy to factual exposé. It’s not like those teachers didn’t know what they were doing.
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Offering young children a choice of text to read is the best idea. I had my middle school and then high school students after I moved to the high school read a book a month and I told them if the book didn’t hook them in the first few pages return it to the school library and find another one so they were reading what interested them and kept them reading.
My favorite place when was a K-12 student was the town library and the school library. A book mobile came to the grade school and we lined up to enter one door and walk between all the shelved books on both sides to the back door where we checked out our selection and exited. I loved historical fiction, science fiction, and fantasy and read hundreds if not thousands of paperbacks by the time I finished high school. Historical fiction is often based on fact so that led me to nonfiction to learn more about the real life characters and events. I read a ton of books. In high school, I signed up to be a student assistant in the school library.
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Ha LL I was like you. My rural elem schoolroom walls were lined w/books, each w/sign-out card so we learned library routines early. Mom would drop me at downtown library while she did shopping. Library-asst was my jr-hi ‘job’ & between shelving assnts I read every single scifi book in the section 🙂
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It’s even more tragic at elem and early childhood level. When kids say they don’t like to read, teachers need to own that, too.
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Yes. Tragic is precisely the word.
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“When kids say they don’t like to read, teachers need to own that, too.”
NO! Teachers are not responsible for children that say they don’t like to read. If a child doesn’t like to read, that started at home long before kindergarten.
For instance, in Finland where children start school at age 7 instead of age 5, most of them begin their first year of school already knowing how to read because parents in Finland know how important it is for their child to learn to read so they start teaching them at home as early as two or even younger.
When a child in the U.S. grows up in a home with parents that don’t read, then that child is programmed to not want to read either.
Teachers cannot work magic especially in a K-12 education system that is being managed from the top down and teachers are required to teach to the Common Core high stakes rank and punish tests using scripted lessons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Orb6xXPPBKo
The man sitting on that couch reading the book to his young son, is the father, not the teacher.
I have no patience for ignorant fools that blame teachers for everything!
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This early reading by parents with their kids is essential, if for no other reason than that what the child craves most–that bonding with the parent–is connected emotionally to reading–spills over into reading being viewed by the child as a pleasurable activity. If they don’t come to love it, pretty early on, it’s going to be very difficult to make that happen later, for this requires a profound conversion experience. I suspect that one reason that most adults don’t read poetry, today, is that they experienced it as “meaning hunting” activity conducted by English teachers rather than as a vital, living, spoken, enacted form of communicating. Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson, and Browning were all among the best-selling authors of their times. Today, our most lauded poets are lucky to be published in editions of 2,500 copies that are purchased mostly be libraries. This requires some explaining, and I think that that’s a large part of the explanation.
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I agree with you. But, I will also continue to own the kinds of experiences I subject my students to, regardless of what is “expected” of me. Young children deserve teachers to do right by them. Not submit to malpractice.
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I taught for thirty years and I never gave in to that “malpractice” from the top down. If I hadn’t been an award winning teacher year after year, the district’s administration would have cooked up a reason to get rid of me.
But being free of that “malpractice” didn’t make it easier to win kids over who grew up in homes void of reading material and who started school in kindergarten having never read a book or been read to.
Most kids have between 30 to 50 different teachers K – 12. If a child arrives in your classroom in high school and they still hate reading, there is no magic wand to win a kid over and turn them into avid readers.
The hate for reading is learned because they started behind at 5 and stayed behind year after year.
Teachers that thinks it is their responsibility to overcome this home made handicap one period a day for one school year and thinks teachers that can’t are failures and have to suck up the blame is someone that needs counselling with a psychologist.
Thinking like that is the same as an enlisted man, not an officer, in a million-man army thinking it is his fault if that army loses the war.
The system has to change so starting in kindergarten, every teacher is using well known methods to catch these kid sup and that isn’t gong to happen in a country with a public education system under attack from the top down.
In thirty years, I had one student move from a non reader to an avid reader and it would not have happened without help from the parent. That mother came to me and asked for advice. I told her what to do like I told other parents through those decades that asked the same question. She was the only one who did it.
My advice was simple:
turn off the TV and no video games, lock them up.
visit the library every week and check out books for everyone in the family, books that each family member wants to read because of the topic or story.
the entire family reads at least one hour every day, an hour outside of school, and after reading, they gather and each family member talks about the story they were reading, sharing.
That girl went from reading at 4th grade level in one year to 9th grade level and caught up with her grade level.
If the parents and guardians are not willing to do what’s needed, little will change.
Teachers cannot be in dozens of homes every night so kids and their families will read.
Studies show that’s what it takes. Reading at school is not enough. Children must also read at home at least 30 minutes or more every afternoon or night after school to develop the habit of reading.
A student might have six or seven classes during the day and many of those classes do not include reading.
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A great literary work has a few timeless messages. I think the key to good English teaching involves unlocking the messages. That can’t be done if you only assign one short passage of the work, or if you assign an article about how emoticons were invented by Bill Gates (that was in a California mandated curriculum a few years ago).
English is being ruined by standardized testing and standardized curricula.
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When the English teacher has passion for the stories used in class, that passion often transfers to the student.
I’d be surprised to find a teacher that has passion for high stakes, rank and punish tests and scripted curriculum created by idiots.
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There never was such a person.
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I stumbled over this, early on in Kristen Blair’s article:
“Among the good: Teachers are increasingly emphasizing “close reading” of texts…”
1. “Close reading” of texts is good? I started on a lengthy diatribe, but decided this article says most of what needs to be said:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/07/22/common-core-and-martin-luther-king-jr-is-this-any-way-to-teach-his-famous-letter-from-jail/?utm_term=.57ad0937d7e4
I would only add: “New Criticism” (of which close textual reading is a hallmark) was just a necessary transition in lit-crit: it replaced old-fashioned sentimental generalities about beauty and morality with a focus on structural elements like rhyme, meter, setting, characters, plot, irony, ambiguity, encouraging folks to write intelligently about what they were reading.
But those were features of K12 ELA way before CCSS. Coleman, convinced that public schooling was awash in subjective & self-involved writing about reading, reached back to adapt its most radical elements (e.g, reader reaction & historical context are irrelevant) into his skills-based, snippets-of-lit, super-testable transformation of ELA standards. And backed college-grad-level details of the theory into 10th-12th stds, then back-scaffolded from there so that age-inappropriate abstractions made their way into early grades, there to snuff out reading interest for many youngsters.
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Of course, they’ve thrown out the classics. They know these works are subversive. The problem with art is that it will always make us think and that’s revolutionary, that’s what stands the tests of time. And these are the best of times and the worst of times… You cannot fake art and you cannot teach anyone anything unless it is inspiring. The only thing these common core standards inspire is rage as children are emotionally and intellectually abused by HOWDY Doody DuncanS Gates Broad borne fascism imposing stupidity on the good people. We shouldn’t let that happen and when I taught-we had an underground book club and I knew it was a great idea when the kids made off with the books they wouldn’t stop talking about. We had a principal who burst into classrooms seizing copies of Luis Rodriguez autobiographical masterpiece, .Always Running, siting a scene in the book in which a teenaged girl gets her period. He also banned tampons as he feared they’d deflower students, who were having anchor babies to remain in this country. The pernicious influence of the plutocracy is no match for the children today. Schools as we know them are over and out.
Rene Diedrich Artsoldier@me.com
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