Bob Shepherd, a frequent contributor, also a textbook writer, assessment developer, author, and classroom teacher, writes about the effect of Common Core on the teaching of literature. He omits my biggest gripe about CCSS: the arbitrary requirement that teachers must devote 50% of their time to literature and 50% to “informational texts” in the early grades. As students get older, the proportion of “informational texts” is supposed to increase. There is no rational basis for this prescription. It is based on the NAEP instructions to assessment developers; these instructions were never intended as guidelines for teachers. Literary reading can be as challenging as informational text. Teachers should make their own choices.
Shepherd writes:
For many decades now, as in any occupied country, the Deformer/Disrupter occupiers of U.S. education–the invasion force that went forward, financed by Gates and Walton dollars, to take over our federal and state governments, has dominated discourse about education in the United States. In Vichy France, the motto of the Revolution, liberté, égalité, fraternité, was replaced by the motto of the fascist collaborationist Pétain regime, travail, famille, patrie. These were high-sounding words–work, family, and country–but they masked a terrible reality as the Jews and Socialists started disappearing. Conservatives embraced the official collaborationist view as a corrective to the licentiousness of an era of jazz and night clubs, short skirts and sexual libertinism. There was a resistance, yes, but it operated in the shadows. Moderates found it easy to ignore the disappearances and the surveillance state and to embrace the discourse of the occupiers–to become de facto collaborators–because the alternative was dangerous.
For many decades now, the language of the Deformers/Disrupters has become the official language of the federal government, the state departments of education, of administrators of our schools, and of our textbooks, print and online. It’s as though there were an unwritten but rigidly, severely enforced rule that one was never to mention the puerile, backward Gates/Coleman bullet list of abstract “skills” without prefacing the term “standards” with the adjective “higher.” Everyone throughout the educational system is forced to speak in terms of “data-based decision making” and “accountability,” even if they know quite well that the tests that provide this supposed”data” are sloppy and invalid–a scam. Teachers are given no choice but to post their data walls and hold their data chats. All coherence in ELA textbooks is gone, their texts and study apparatus having been replaced by random exercises, modeled on the state tests, on applying random items from the Gates/Coleman list to random snippets of text. The goals set by the occupiers–school letter grades, the average test scores needed to get an “exemplary” rating as a teacher or administrator, the test scores for avoiding third-grade retention or necessary for high-school graduation–are very like the constant barrage of production figures for pork bellies and pig iron constantly broadcast by fascist regimes. And everywhere are the reports on the glorious successes of regime–the graduation rates, the improved scores, cheered and written about in news stories even as everyone knows them to be lies.
The Chiefs for Ka-ching are The Party running the Vichy Occupation.
But enough with the abstraction. Let’s dig a little deeper. Let’s look at U.S. literature texts before and after Gates and Coleman. Before, there was no top-down curriculum commissariat, but habits of the tribe and tradition and teacher concerns about quality ensured that from one basal program to another, the contents were pretty much (about 90 percent) the same. Poe’s “The Raven” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” Check. Wordsworth’s “I Wondered Lovely as a Cloud.” Check. Hughes’s “A Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Check. The Allegory of the Cave from Plato’s Republic. Check. Substantive literary works. Classics from the canon. And almost all schools used these basal lit texts.
Every selection in these literature textbooks was followed by a series of questions, beginning with factual questions, moving to analysis questions, and ending with evaluation questions, that took students through a step-by-step close reading of the substantive, classic selection. These were followed by extension activities–language activities about grammar or usage or vocabulary in the selection. Writing in response to or in imitation of the selection. Walk into any school in America, and kids were using these texts. In high-school, almost all schools were using a basal world literature text in Grade 10, an American literature survey text in Grade 11, and a British literature survey text in Grade 12. In the non-survey years, the texts were usually organized coherently by genre–poetry, the short story, drama, the nonfiction essay–or, by theme. But always, one had the substantive, classic selections and the close reading questions–facts, analysis, synthesis, following Bloom’s taxonomy.
Enter Gates. Gates wanted a single bullet list, nationally, to key depersonalized education software to. He saw the current system for educating Prole children as terribly wasteful of money spent on facilities and teachers, who could be replaced by computers. And by doing that, he and others in the computer industry could make a LOT of money. So, when he was approached by Coleman and another guy from Achieve, he was all over the idea of national “standards.” Any bullet list would do, and any guy, even Coleman, despite his lack of relevant expertise.
And what did Coleman do? Well, he and his pals reviewed the mediocre, skills-based, lowest-common-denominator existing state standards and cobbled together a list based on those. And his list, like the execrable state “standards” that proceeded it, was almost content-free–it was a list of vague, abstract “skills.” In his ignorance of the fact that there was a de facto, default canon in U.S. literature textbooks of substantive works from British, American, and World literature, he called for “reading of substantive works” for a change. In his ignorance of the fact that EVERY basal literature program was organized around close reading questions, he called for “close reading.” In his ignorance of the fact that every high-school in the U.S. was using a basal lit text in Grade 11 that contained a survey of American literature, including foundational documents like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers, and in ignorance of the fact that almost all schools were doing a Brit Lit survey in Grade 12, he called for reading of “foundational documents” in American literature in Grades 11 and 12 (one of the very, very few actual bits of content-related material in his “standards.”
And what was the actual result of this? Well, before Gates and Coleman, editors and writers of U.S. literature texts would sit down and coherently plan a unit to teach, say, the elements of fiction. It would contain substantive short stories from the canon and treat, in turn, such elements as the central conflict, plot structure, character types and methods of characterization, setting, mood, and theme. After the Coleman/Gates bullet list and the high stakes attached to tests based on this (school, administrator, teacher, and student evaluations, punishments, and rewards), the bullet lists and the tests became all important. Educational publishers started making TEACHING THE BULLET LIST the goal of education. (They didn’t do this when there were differing, competing state “standards.”) The publishers started beginning every project with a spreadsheet containing the bullet list on the left and the place where the item from the list was “covered” to the right. The “standards” and the test question types became the default, de facto curriculum. COHERENCE AND CONTENT IN US LITERATURE TEXTOOKS WAS GONE. They became a random series of random exercises on random snippets of text meant to teach incredibly vague “skills,” some in print, some in online replacements for textbooks. Vague, content-free kill drill.
And now, a whole generation of teachers has entered the profession and grown up under a Vichy regime that treats this madness, this devolved, trivialized curriculum, as ideal.
And after decades of this, after the utter failure of Deform to improve test scores or close achievement gaps, the Deformers want to double down. Stay the course, but add a national Curriculum Commissariat and Thought Police to serve as curriculum gatekeeper. And, ofc, put some idiot like Coleman in charge of it–someone who gets his or her marching orders from Gates or the Waltons. Kill any possibility of innovation by researchers, scholars, and classroom practitioners, whose ideas for modifications of the curricula won’t matter because THEY ARE NOT ON THE LIST. Hew to the list! Do as your betters tell you to do! Yours is to obey. Your superiors will take care of the command and control (and coercion).
Enough. It’s time to start challenging the Deformer/Disrupter NewSpeak at every turn. No, this is not “actionable data” because it comes from invalid, sloppy tests that don’t measure what they purport to measure. No, writing that applies the “standard” to the text doesn’t reflect normal interaction with texts, in which we are interested primarily in the experience of the work and what its authors and characters had to say. No, these “standards” are trivial and vague and backward, not “higher.” No, these test questions are tortured and awkward and invalid and do not reflect normal interactions with texts. If anything, they are superb examples of misreading that misses the point of why people write and why others read. No, teachers are autonomous professionals not to be scripted. No, teaching is a human interaction between people, and computers can’t do it.
Enough. Send the Deformers packing. Vive la révolution!
“And now, a whole generation of teachers has entered the profession and grown up under a Vichy regime that treats this madness, this devolved, trivialized curriculum, as ideal.”
And why? Because we don’t require teachers to have a solid LIBERAL ARTS education. They have a lot of vacuous “education” courses that are filled with gobbledygook. I wouldn’t trade my liberal arts education for the world, and I’m glad I don’t have an “education” degree!
Mamie KA: Is there room for both liberal arts and education in education courses?
I cannot speak for all education programs, of course; but my masters program in education (at UVA) had both, and a wonderful dose of American history as understood through the lens of education, which included social, political, religious themes wrapped around current events. (I loved it.)
What we do in our high school and undergraduate education, of course (and in my view), is where an absence of liberal studies becomes a kind of prescription for a horizon built around a recalcitrant ignorance in later life. I see people like Gates (for what I have seen of him) as having such a horizon; and I don’t need to say what I think of Trump’s educational background, such as it is, and need we wonder about those who have turned into now-hardened cult followers. FWIW, that’s my take on the situation.
If I am a bit correct in my assessment of the situation, you might understand why I turn green and want to vomit when I hear the term “elitism” issued by those who, themselves, are surrounded by the stink of arrogance. CBK
I have a BA in French. At the time Pennsylvania needed teachers. I was able to take education courses as electives in order to be certified. I took a couple of courses in the summer in order to totally meet the certification requirements.
My suggestions for a prep program for English teachers: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/04/09/what-should-be-taught-in-an-english-teacher-preparation-program/
As you will see, my ideal English teacher prep program would contain material related to education generally and to subject-matter content.
However, as with all such stuff, I wouldn’t want any of this written in stone. There have to be mechanisms for continuous improvement.
Ugh. Glad I taught elementary music and band. Of course, now that the arts aren’t important, they can be eliminated so that computers will rule. There is never enough money for Gates and any textbook/testing company.
Time to fire all art/drama/music teachers so REAL stuff can be studied to increase test scores.
Go to Deliberately Dumbing Down by Charlotte Iserbyte. I have told others about her great information about our educational system for a long time. .Someday maybe people will wake up. I am a retired teacher.
And this is the exact reason that child #2 attends a private HS. Three years of MS CCSS, behavior problems due to boredom (grammar packets galore/kill drill math /NGSS!), and SEL sent us packing! Child #1 will graduate from public HS this year and was much more capable of making “lemonade out of lemons” when it came to CCSS….and yes, our state of MD proudly declares CC is alive and well and perfectly aligned to the test du jour. Child #2 reads more classic literature in 1 year of private HS than child #1 has had in 4 yrs of public HS (in GT and AP programs!). So many of the teachers in the private HS’s are veteran teachers of public HS’s that left the public school systems. So many parents are fleeing the public system to save their children. To the parents who want vouchers for private school, I kindly explain to them that to except government money for education (Vouchers) they would need to except CCSS, SEL, testing madness and data collection. I will happily pay for private school and pray for the return of normalcy and teacher autonomy in public schools. It is truly sad that public education has become such a disaster.
Somebody gave me good advice about teaching. If what you are doing works well, keep doing it. If what you are doing does not work, stop doing it. It is a simple, yet important message. Education today is dominated by too many outside influences with no evidence to support the mandates. It is teaching by top down imposition.
Students and teachers are caught in the middle of this politicization of education. On social media there is a continuous bashing of balanced literacy. This bashing is happening in both the US and Great Britain, two locales where privatization has deep, wealthy roots. The same people that gave us the CCSS are promoting the “science of reading” in elementary schools. They claim balanced literacy and writers workshop have failed. They then trot out non-peer reviewed “studies” to support their claims. As I have said before, students need an understanding of the sound system in order to read efficiently and well, and all students need to read a variety of materials including recreational reading.
I taught many ELLs to read well using an adapted form of balanced literacy. I mention adapted because as readers ELLs have somewhat different needs from native speakers of a language. I also read a legitimate study from Great Britain that criticizes the balanced literacy bashing. The conclusion of the study is that there are different ways to teach students to read, and one method is not superior to another. Learners come to the reading process with differing understanding about reading, and they also have different needs. A wise teacher will use this information when planning instruction. All students benefit from opportunities to real reading and writing in both fiction and non-fiction. I think the anti-balanced literacy critics have a political motive for their agenda. Here’s the study for anyone that’s interested.
Here’s the study:https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10648-019-09515-y.pdf
Nice post, Bob. In the same mail, I received the following (see link) which has article headings:
“Education Week. Teachers, the Robots Are Coming. But That’s Not a Bad Thing. Ignoring artificial intelligence won’t keep it out of the classroom. Instead, teachers should be actively shaping it.”
“What Does Big Tech Want From Schools? (Spoiler Alert: It’s Not Money). As Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft make themselves increasingly indispensable in education, teachers are getting worried. Should they be?”
“Ed-Tech Usage Levels Are Low: What Should Schools Do? Evaluating how much students and teachers are using ed-tech products and services is tricky, complicated, and oftentimes confusing. But it can be done. /Special Report: Why Ed Tech Is Not Used and What to Do About It.”
“Data: 5 Big Challenges in Preparing K-12 Students for the World of Work. Schools are trying to forge stronger workforce connections in K-12 by revamping curriculum and school culture to help students explore potential careers.”
“Using Amazon Echo, Google Home to Learn: Skill of the Future or Bad Idea? The growing popularity of voice-activated technologies is forcing educators to think about the role such tools play in preparing students for the jobs of the future.”
“How 4 Communities Are Struggling to Prepare Kids for an Uncertain Future. Schools are slowly figuring out how to balance thinking globally with acting locally, and recognizing that some key skills are valuable no matter where students end up living.”
“Troubleshooting Tech Realities in Rural Schools. Internet connectivity, recruiting staff, and finding partners to learn from are all big challenges for an ed-tech leader in a district off the coast of Alaska.”
All at:
https://www.edweek.org/topics/technology/index.html?M=59036749&U=
Technology will not replace teachers in the same way that charters will not lead to vouchers. When there is money to be made by giant corporations, the so-called solution will always lead to the cheapest option. Once the cheapest option is installed, the corporations will buy politicians to maintain the money making status quo. it would be an uphill battle to get back to real education that is humanistic and imbued with relationships.
well explained: in general, the status quo has become chaos and disruption, and those making money pay those with legislative power to keep the mess in place
Great post, CBK! These Disrupters have not given up, as your frightening list shows. Far from it. They want
a) a single national database of test scores and other student and employee evaluations (a sort of national Social Credit system),
b) depersonalized education via software for Prole children,
c) totally privatized education, and
d) a prescriptive, national Curriculum Commissariat and Thought Police
to complement their puerile national CC$$ bullet list so that monopolies can sell educational products “at scale” for the transformation of new human resources (kids) into obedient, compliant do-bots under the New Feudal Order.
I’ve seen my two grandsons begin to hate reading, writing, math, and “learning” as forced on them by common core in public school in California. It’s outrageous. I agree with all your points and wish we could get a rebellion of public school teachers against it.
At least California still calls their standards the Common Core.
Many states have changed the name, which makes it very easy to dismiss any and all arguments against Common Core with the simple statement “We no longer use Common Core”
It was a very clever ploy and makes arguing against Common Core all but impossible in states that have adopted this strategy.
Apparently, the state officials in California were not as clever.😁
or as dishonest
“my biggest gripe about CCSS: the arbitrary requirement that teachers must devote 50% of their time to literature and 50% to “informational test” in the early grades. ”
I agree. Teachers should devote at least 100% of their time to “informational text” (and Common Core math would indicate even more)
In my experience, the CCSS informational text is information about how glorious technology companies are. We’re reading ads. $$$
LOL
Diane,
You are right that there is no rational basis for the CC”s requirement that students read 50% informational texts. In my view, the requirement is the greatest weakness of the CC ELA Standards.
In English class, at least, students should be reading virtually all fiction (except for in AP English Language, where the focus of the Exam is rhetoric / non-fiction). Without going into all the reasons why, good fiction generally places more demands on the reader than does non-fiction.
Any student who can read Jane Austen with pleasure and understanding will do just fine in school and in life.
Agreed, Neil.
Coleman never explained why he plucked these meaningless ratios out of the NAEP assessment guidelines and turned them into instructional mandates.
meaningless ratios: exactly
On this point, see the following essay. Coleman worked from facile and absurd distinctions between the literary and the nonliterary.
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/03/15/what-happens-when-amateurs-write-standards/
Bob,
Thank you for your thoughtful essay. You are right to use the word “prole,” from Orwell’s “1984,” a novel largely about the use of language as an instrument of social control.
The Disrupters can be quite facile in their use of language. They use euphemisms, like “personalized learning” (which Diane points out in “Slaying Goliath” actually means the precise opposite — depersonalized learning, in which a student stares at a screen instead of conversing with a teacher and with other students), to peddle their “reform” agenda.
The “refomers'” fascination with data is disturbing, as is the conscription of public school teachers in collecting and analyzing (often meaningless) data.
Oh. . . and about that data thing:
More NEWS FROM THE FASCIST EXPRESS
“National Archives Whitewash the Historical Record—Again
More ethical violations surface at the National Archives as it honors ICE’s requests to destroy records related to violations against undocumented immigrants.”
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/the-national-archives-in-one-more-case-of-whitewashing-the-historical-record/?utm_source=NPQ+Newsletters&utm_campaign=99a5955b86-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_11_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_94063a1d17-99a5955b86-12886885&mc_cid=99a5955b86&mc_eid=cc73fe1cff
Of course, the Disrupters will not send their own children to schools where they will spend all their time doing depersonalized education software lessons on applying skill from the Gates/Coleman bullet list to snippets of text. This is “good enough” education for Prole children. The next generation of overlords will continue to go to “Premium Member” schools with teachers and a content-rich curriculum in literature, music, the arts, history, science, mathematics, and philosophy.
Dumbed to the Core
Dumbed by Coleman
Dumbed by Gates
Dumbed by Core men
Norman Bates?
Dumbed by psychos
Dumbed by cranks
Dumbed by whackos
Thinky tanks
Dumbed by Common
Dumbed to bore
Dumbed by con men
Dumbed to Core
Bob, Let us also give a tip of the hat to Susan Ohanian who was among the first to have a blog and the courage to do what you are also doing in this and other posts.
http://www.susanohanian.org/core.php?id=692
Susan Ohanian is acknowledged in SLAYING GOLIATH.
Agreed. She was there and nailing the Disrupters from the very start.
“There was a resistance, yes, but it operated in the shadows.”
Indeed there was resistance. Not just people like my sister-in-law’s father up in Alsace-Lorainne, but a much more important guy named Marc Bloch, a French historian who with Fernand Braudel began the Annales school of history, an integrated look at history. Historians make rare war heroes, but Bloch returned to occupied France even though he was too old to fight as he had been trying to when he was ferried out of the country at Dunkirk. Finally in his sixties when he was discovered and tortuured, his final act was to take the hand of a young kid and assure him that getting shot did not hurt right before they were executed (the story came from a member of the group that lived through the execution. The Germans were in a hurry as the allies were a few days away)
There are other stories of resistance, but the stories of German professors just shutting up and continuing their research are chilling. Meanwhile, the stories of the resistance in Slaying Goliath are inspirational.
Extraordinarily moving, RT. Thank you!
Bob Shepherd is right on the money. The Common Core homogenized curricula across the board and it has succeeded in dumbing down generations of children. Perhaps the worst example is social studies where democratic principles are seldom taught by example. Students are drilled (and killed) with facts to pass a test. They learn little about how to live in a democracy.
Kids will do what you do, not what you tell them to do. A sound principle in child-rearing and in education, which is, of course, child rearing. There is always a hidden curriculum, isn’t there?
The hidden curriculum of Deform/Disruption is “sit down, shut up, and gritfully apply yourself to whatever trivial, inane task your betters set for you.”
Training for Prole children.
This is what has been done to history and geography education, too. It’s all wrapped up in “reading,” as in, “They get social studies lessons embedded in their reading instruction.” The problem is that it’s just a list of “skills” to check off. No content passes through kid’s heads, and they get to high school not knowing even basic things like the continents or oceans or who won the American Revolution. And it gets worse every year.
And the kicker? They are worse at reading and writingvthan they used to be before we went to “skills-based” reading.
Nailed it.
The problem as I see it is the idea that there is a right and wrong answer to be found in any reading. I think informational reading is important, especially history and science, but that doesn’t mean it has to be boring or again with right and wrong answers as the end result. Where did the idea come from that only English teachers can/must teach reading?
Next Generation Science Standards follow the CC model – only worse. They don’t just “dumb-down” science – these new quasi-standards (performance tasks) virtually eliminate the disciplines of biology, chemistry, physics, geology, astronomy, meteorology, etc. Turning elementary children into “pretend scientists” while integrating the different disciplines into an indistinguishable pile of mush. The NGSS will make objective test writing a near impossibility; beyond ironic given the nature of science.
A short post like the one above (thanks for reposting it, Diane!) is necessarily abstract, for it covers a lot of ground. Sorry about that. However, the post explains pretty accurately, I think, the devolution of ELA curricula in the U.S. as a result of making tests on the CC$$ skills list high stakes. (Thanks, SomeDAM, for pointing out that most states in the U.S. are using a version of the CC$$ under a state-specific name. And those states not using the CC$$ are using something pretty closely modeled on it. So, Gates got what he wanted–one national bullet list to key software to. And kids got the shaft. An entire generation of them, now, has had humane education in literature, theatre, writing, the history of ideas, speaking and listening, grammar, usage, mechanics, STOLEN from them and replaced with random exercises, in test formats, of CC$$ skills based on random snippets of text. This is a TRAGEDY.
Fortunately, there are many English teachers who practice Resistance day in and day out, nodding to the Deformer/Disrupter Party Line (Oh, yes, I am teaching CC$$ skill 666 today!) while continuing to teach writing and speaking and thinking and substantive, whole, authentic works from the canons of American, British, and World Literature. But operating humanely under the occupation–saying one thing but doing another–takes its toll.
None of this will change until
a) the federal high-stakes testing mandate is killed, and
b) states replace their prescriptive, content-free standards bullet lists with more general frameworks that allow for specific innovation within these (e.g.: students will learn about significant social and historical developments and significant developments in the history of ideas and how these are reflected in and influenced by works of literature; students will have significant experiences within the worlds created by literary works from the past and present and explore the meanings of these experiences so that they can develop intrinsic motivation to read; students will learn to recognize and to use, in original work of their own, major literary techniques, structures, motifs, archetypes, and genres). General frameworks that call for acquisition of descriptive and procedural knowledge, not content-free, abstract skills lists like the puerile, execrable Common [sic] Core [sic].
Why content-based general frameworks instead of standards bullet lists? Because these need to be general enough to allow an entire nation of scholars, creative artists, researchers, classroom practitioners, and students to innovate within them. Gates RIDICULOUSLY claimed that standardization would lead to innovation. LOL. This is Orwellian NewSpeak. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is Strength. War is Peace. Standardization is Innovation.
But one expects a monopolist to make such an absurd claim. Of course he would.
Another positive consequence of issuing such general frameworks as opposed to one-size-fits-all standards bullet lists is that the general framework allows classroom practitioners to adapt their instruction to the needs of particular students and student groups and to emerging conditions in the culture at large. Standardization is death.
Thank you, Diane! This is life-changing stuff. Much appreciated.
I was chased out of my classroom, which I personally filled with a library of YA books to entice kids to enjoy reading, for 20 minutes before my lessons began. From the day I started teaching until the day that I left, no one told me what to teach, nada, nothing… at the most in some early classrooms inthe sixties there was a set of basil readers.
So, I chose the reading, usually interesting well-written stories in lelmentary grades, and when I was given my seventh grade ‘room’ in 1990–devoid of books and any learning materials, I chose the books and the literature that we would read together… great stories and lyrical exceptional writing.
We then talked, and talked and talked about the writing and then they wrote, and talked and wrote and talked, uni the words flowed onto paper (drafts) , at which point I taught them how to edit for an audience.
My kids aced every test on writing, and were 3rd in the date on the new ELA tests… they. were also accepted into all the top high school programs, and many won prestigious.story-writing contest. Today, in their twenties and thirties they find me on social media to tell me how they used what they learned with me, all their lives.
I was the professional in the practice who was given the authority/autonomy to chose what works.
I had the eduction in humanities, and in educational practice, as well as a personal background in Speech, Theater and Communications (my minor in college). Other degrees in teaching literacy, as well as graphic and fine arts, came later.
The deform movement is just the. ‘face’ of the marketization of education. Just like making our health system into a market which ended genuine, and affordable health care for our citizens, os did the marketization of education end the INSTITUTION of EDUCATION
I couldn’t teach today. I would not want to.