Nancy Bailey features a post about an absurdly inappropriate reading program, citing work by Betty Casey in Tulsa.
Casey interviewed experienced reading teachers, who gave her examples of age-inappropriate questions in the Core Knowledge Amplify scripted program.
Casey writes:
Do you think primogeniture is fair? Justify your answer with three supporting reasons.
You may think this is from a high school test, but it’s a question from a Common Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) workbook for third-graders.
Why is the War of 1812 often referred to as America’s second war for independence? In your response, describe what caused the war and Great Britain’s three-part plan for defeating the United States. This is a writing task for second-grade students.
A first-grade Tulsa Public Schools teacher described this reading lesson: “You say, ‘I’m going to say one of the vocabulary words, and I’m going to use it in a sentence. If I use it correctly in a sentence, I want you to circle a happy face. If I use it incorrectly, I want you to circle a sad face. The sentence is Personification is when animals act like a person.’”
That lesson is given 10 days after the start of school. “I had kids who wouldn’t circle either one,” the teacher said. “Some cried. I have sped (special education) kids in my room, and they had no idea. That’s wrong. Good grief! These are 6-year-olds!”
Because consultants snuggle up to know-nothing administrators.
In the olden days, teachers wrote and chose their curricula.
Exactly, Christine!!!
Is this the same Core Knowledge curriculum (E.D. Hirsch) that’s used in Hillsdale Barney charter schools, the so-called classical academies?
The issue is the ridiculous standards themselves (which to a lay person look so gloriously impressive). Every publisher must make their materials fit this Procrustean bed. I hear similar complains about the non-CKLA elementary curriculum our district uses. Every ELA program in America is rife with obtuse, mind-bending, obscure questions. Why? Because they’re mirroring the SBAC/PARCC questions, which in turn mirror the standards. Recently I’ve been looking at sample copies of the new middle school science textbooks. Their uniform awfulness really has nothing to do with the publishers. The publishers are merely obediently and conscientiously conforming to the gobbledygook “integrated” NGSS standards. Given the horrible standards saddling America, there’s no way publishers can make sensible products.
“uniform awfulness” — seems to have now become the standard
Amplify content language arts is being used by more than three million students in the country. Teachers are frustrated because like so many disruptive initiatives, instruction is driven by a computer, not the teacher. If there is no time to help struggling students, what is the point of the program?
Educators are questioning the selection of the content for diverse learners. In an attempt to cover ground, the program appears to be dumping large amounts decontextualized content that is above the developmental stages of the students. Information without understanding will not help students, particularly very poor, classified and ELL students. This theme resonates with teachers that have been forced to use Amplify.
It is interesting to note that the teacher that used real literature instead of Amplify had the students that performed the best on the end of year assessment. Why are administrators forcing teachers to use this program?
OK. A little background on this.
E.D. Hirsch, Jr., was a literary scholar whose work focused on a) the Romantics (Wordsworth and Blake in particular) and b) hermeneutics (the theory of interpretation). His very controversial position with regard to hermeneutics was that literary works have valid interpretations that can be arrived at by reconstructing, from the text itself and from background knowledge about genre and the author’s life and work, what the author’s INTENTION was in the work. See his book Validity in Interpretation. This critical stance put him in direct conflict with folks who were arguing that works had a variety of interpretations, depending on who was reading them. I won’t go further into this fascinating stuff about the literary critical “theory wars.”
Hirsch became quite famous because of the success of his book Cultural Literacy. In that book, he argued that a culture was bound together by the shared background knowledge of its citizens, and he provided a list of “What educated adults should know” based on a study he had conducted of what lawyers in the U.S. know (e.g., who Homer was; Mother Goose rhymes). The list made the book a HUGE bestseller. Everyone wanted a copy to find out if he or she knew what was on Hirsch’s list.
E. D. Hirsch, Jr., created the Core Knowledge Foundation to advance his belief that schools should have as their primary goal communicating a body of knowledge. Hirsch was opposed to the skills-based education paradigm dominating the country and wrote eloquently about his opposition to what he thought of as progressivist, skills-based education in books like The Schools We Need and The Knowledge Deficit. These ideas about education grew out of his work on Cultural Literacy.
The Core Knowledge Foundation published the Core Knowledge Sequence, the goal of which was to specify what kids should know at each grade level. The goal was to show people how to create schools that would create culturally literate adults–ones who would have the necessary, shared background knowledge to read well, understand the news, and participate in the great Democratic experiment. The CK Sequence is a list of topics for kids to learn about at each grade level. It’s a knowledge list. The CK Sequence was followed by a series of books called What Your _____ Grader Should Know that taught material from the Sequence.
Hirsch launched Core Knowledge at the same time that the multiculturalism movement was taking off in the U.S. He took a lot of flak for the Sequence being too focused on works by dead white men, though the Sequence was not as lily white as people imagined it to be. A more serious objection to the Sequence and necessary modification to Hirsch’s argument for content-based education and against skills-based education is, I think, my own: Hirsch failed to recognize that if one thought not in terms of abstract skills but, instead, in terms of SPECIFIC PROCEDURAL KNOWLEDGE, there could be value in some skills instruction. In other words, he was arguing for teaching of descriptive knowledge, where he should have been, I think, arguing for teaching of concrete descriptive AND procedural knowledge, rather than vague, abstract skills.
Unfortunately for Hirsch and his foundation, when Hirsch put together the Core Knowledge Sequence, he didn’t know much about the details of state curricular requirements at each grade level. He didn’t know, for example, that almost every state mandated teaching of American history at Grade 7 or 8 and again at Grade 11. In contrast, the CK Sequence called for a little American history instruction at each grade level. So, in many ways, the CK Sequence COULD NOT BE ADOPTED by public schools in most states except by tiny ones who managed to fly under the radar and not follow mandated curricular progressions. And also ironically, given Hirsch’s distaste for Progressivist education, his Core Knowledge Schools actually did a lot of project-based discovery work, which resulted from his having a teacher trainer, in his Foundation, who was a very creative ex elementary school teacher.
So, the objective of the Foundation was to create a lot of Core Knowledge Schools, but after years of existence, only a tiny, tiny fraction of public schools had adopted the Core Knowledge Sequence and its curriculum proposals. Why? Well, literally, they couldn’t because the Sequence hadn’t been designed in a way that work work with mandated grade-by-grade curriculum guidelines in the various states (You and your family at Grade 1, Your Community at Grade 2, American history at Grade 7, American Lit at Grade 11, Chemistry at Grade 11, etc).
So, Hirsch thought he might take another tack and create a Reading program to promulgate his ideas. Unfortunately, the had no staff people at his foundation who were experts in making textbook programs. Eventually, however, he got some assistance and cobbled together an outline for a reading program for elementary school kids with two tracks: one, a phonics track, the other, a content-instruction track. The idea was that having mastered phonics and bodies of background information, kids would then be able to read well. (See The Two Keys, by Dr. Matt Davis, who was then Core Knowledge Reading Director, for an outline of the theoretical basis for the CK reading program. It’s a good book, though there are some issues. Davis, now an English professor at the University of Virginia, is a very, very bright guy.)
But there was a problem. Again, the Core Knowledge staff didn’t have a lot of professional textbook people, so the materials that they created didn’t do a very good job of instantiating Hirsch’s (and Davis’s) vision. For one thing, they were highly scripted, and good teachers and motivated learners (in Core Knowledge Schools, for example) don’t work that way.
Then, along came Amplify, and Hirsch sold the CK curriculum to them. Hirsch also, initially, bought onto the Common [sic] Core [sic] standards, despite the facts that a) the standards were a skills bullet list, and b) he had spent his lifetime arguing against basing education on skills bullet lists? WHY ON EARTH would he do such a thing? Well, the CCSS people sold him on the idea that they were calling for a great return to reading substantive, classic literary works, and Hirsch wanted that. Deformers still point to Hirsch as one of their champions, even though Hirsch himself soon saw his error and wrote publicly about his opposition to the CCSS standards bullet list.
By that time, however, his Foundation had gotten away from him. It was under the spell of Amplify and the whole CCSS Deformer crowd and putting together curricula that were somehow supposed to be true to Hirsch’s vision of creating a content-based curriculum while being based on a “standards” list that was almost entirely content free!!!!! Idiotic. But that’s what happened.
Among the founders of Amplify was Joel Klein, the former Commissioner of Education for the state of New York. The Core Knowledge/Amplify Reading Curriculum was made the official New York State reading curriculum and was made available for free online (though people could purchase hardcopy materials from Amplify or Core Knowledge.
So here we are.
As T. S. Eliot says in “:The Hollow Men,”
Between the conception
And the creation . . .
Falls the Shadow
BTW, “Who was Homer?” is a trick question, but I won’t go into the long and complicated story there. Basically, he was an imaginative creation, possibly based on some actual ancient bard, attached to some traditional orally transmitted works (the Homeric Hymns, the Iliad, and the Odyssey).
cx: Well, literally, they couldn’t because the Core Knowledge Sequence hadn’t been designed in a way that WOULD work with mandated grade-by-grade COURSE REQUIREMENTS in the various states.
BTW, there’s a passage in the article linked to above that is unclear. Murdoch’s News Corp (the folks who bring you Faux News and the Wall Street Journal of Corporate Apologetics) sold Amplify to Joel Klein and other Amplify executives back in 2015 after the great Amplify tablet debacle.
Ah, I see. Ms. Bailey’s article is clear enough. She does say that News Corp sold Amplify “to private investors.” Mea culpa.
In 2015, Amplify has lost $500 million and Murdoch was happy to unload it. Probably for $1.
Joel Klein now works for an online health insurance company called Oscar, owned by Jared Kushner’s brother.
Ms. Bailey absolutely nails the big problem with this approach: It’s highly scripted and so not flexible, so that it can meet the needs of diverse learners. Deformers LOVE top-down, highly scripted approaches because they are basically autocrats. They want to be the deciders for everyone else. They don’t want teachers; they want bots. And they seek to motivate by means of external punishments and rewards (test scores).
But people don’t work that way. People flourish in conditions of autonomy, and only under such conditions do they develop intrinsic motivation. There’s significant research showing what people ought to know from their own personal experience, that external punishments and rewards are, in fact, DEMOTIVATING for cognitive tasks. Deformers, themselves stunted folk who are motivated only by the external rewards of money and power, don’t grok this.
Recently, I have seen numerous posts on social media bashing balanced reading instruction. I had a feeling it was related to products for sale by Pearson, Amplify and others. Bailey explains why “the science of reading” is the new, same old phonics, only taught by a computer now. https://nancyebailey.com/2020/02/05/the-science-of-reading-plot-to-replace-reading-teachers-with-phonics-on-a-screen/
Thanks for sharing this one retired teacher. This is a serious concern worth following as more tech programs sell the SoR. Amplify is one of many.
And most of them are about “the Core.”
Hi Bob, The article is by Betty Casey.
Ah, thanks, Nancy! Sorry I didn’t catch that!
Thank you, Ms. Bailey, for this brilliant, incisive article!!! When will these Deformers start listening to real teachers like you? They have a lot to learn.
I was pleased that Betty Casey shared it. I think it’s a serious message.
Bob:
Shouldn’t the sentence read: Personification is where animals act like people. (Not “a person”)?
Actually, it could be either, if all one is worried about is agreement, for “a person” can be interpreted as generic, as in “A chicken has a beak and wings.”
The actual problem with this definition it is incorrect, for three reasons:
An animal being spoken of as though he or she were human would be an example of personification, but an animal doing something humanlike isn’t. Crows solve problems requiring memory. That’s acting like a person, but it’s not personification.
Another problem with the definition, of course, is that any nonhuman thing can be personified, not just other animals. So, “The moon smiled down upon us” and “My car has been acting out lately” are personifications, but last I checked, the moon and cars weren’t animals. LOL.
Another problem with this shoddy definition, of course, is that humans ARE animals. We are members of the biological kingdom Animalia.
I do believe that society should have a common cache of literature which binds us together. The question is whether it should still be Shakespeare, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, etc. or if it should include more contemporary novels such as The Hunger Games, Pachinko, A Gentleman in Moscow, Cutting for Stone, A Man Called Ove, The Alice Network, Becoming, . . . Or a combination.
My brother’s complaint was that his kids were bored by the books they were forced to read and I couldn’t convince him why they needed to read the so called “classics”. They would rather read Stephen King or James Patterson or Nicholas Sparks. Though perhaps you could get some advanced readers to tackle The Game of Thrones series.
As a librarian, my attitude is, “whatever, as long of they are reading” but that doesn’t set a baseline of books. Yet I’m also against the Common Core List of “Required” reading (especially the choices they made and the grade levels they were assigned.) There should be choices to meet the needs of an individual class. (FYI: My son was dyslexic so we listened to books on tape. Just because he couldn’t read it, didn’t mean he shouldn’t be exposed. Harry Potter was one of his favorites which is as close as we are going to get to a voluntary “must read” book.)
Your thoughts?
The best Reading teacher I ever knew had difficulty moving into her classroom every year. Why? Well, she had an ENORMOUS library of children’s and young adult literature, at many different levels, about an ENORMOUS variety of topics, and lots and lots of bookcases for all these. She got to know her kids and gave them books they would want to read, and for the most challenged ones, she would ease them into the books, reading parts to them, having them read others. As a result, her kids discovered imaginative worlds that they cared about inhabiting, and they became readers. I saw her kids, often ones who had long done badly in all their classes, carrying around and devouring whole series of books. Other teachers would complain, even, that it was difficult to get her students to stop talking about whatever they were reading for this woman’s class and pay attention to their History lesson or Biology lesson or whatever! Put away that book, darn it!!! LOL. Create a reader, and he or she will get to those classics in time. And when he or she does, that young person will actually care about those classics, having learned that reading is a joy.
All that said, there are TONS of classics that ARE developmentally appropriate for little ones, including things like poems by Stevenson and Carroll and Mother Goose Rhymes and the retellings of Greek and Norse myths by the husband and wife team Ingri and Edgar d’Aulaire and stories from the world’s wisdom traditions. I strongly believe that early readers should get exposure to lots and lots of wonderful tales from oral traditions around the world–Ananzi and the Sky God, the tales of Mullah Nasreddin, The White Snake, and so on. I believe in giving kids a foundation in these because the elements of later, more sophisticated literature are there–the narrative structures, the motifs, the archetypes, the genres–in elementary, accessible form. Kids acquire, unconsciously, a lot that will make more sophisticated, later literature accessible to them. Memorizing a bunch of Mother Goose rhymes as little children will go farther than any number of lessons in prosody, later on, toward creating kids who can read and write poetry and who care to do so.
In addition, one can do wonderful things to expose kids to pretty sophisticated literature, such as the plays of Shakespeare. I’ve seen lots of great enactments of pieces from Shakespeare by elementary school kids. My feeling is that people should SEE a lot of Shakespeare before they ever try to read him. And I’m a strong believer in having kids not only read but also, routinely, LISTEN to literature, as well as in having them memorize pieces. My grandmother, at 90 years old, would proudly recite for you the lines from Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” that she had learned in 3rd grade, and my grandfather would do the same with the whole of “Little Orphant Annie.”
The Common [sic] Core [sic] Disrupter types understand nothing of this.
And, of course, this amazing Reading teacher was constantly getting in trouble with parents and administrators because her kids were often reading stuff they didn’t consider appropriate–something not a schoolroom standard.
As usual I totally agree with you Bob. And in our conversations from the past when I was still a school library with small children, I did those very things to bring the world of reading to those little ones, a life long learning skill. At the upper levels, I often went into the classroom to read aloud since I’m a good oral reader, a skill some classroom teachers don’t have. Now I do stories for my Sunday School class (which I sometimes have to write myself since the curriculum isn’t always age appropriate. What a surprise?😉)
As an aside – “There is no such thing as too many books, but there is the dilemma of too little room.” 👩🏼🏫📖📚
AWESOME! xoxoxo!!!
Ah, yes, SparkNotes. Ofc. Thanks for the correction!
My other candidate for the Greatest American Novel is The Grapes of Wrath. What a tale!!! I just started reading Lucy Ellman’s Ducks’, Newburyport. It’s sooooooo good. Brilliant, moving, interesting, funny.
It has long amused me that English teachers, since forever, have dutifully assigned The Scarlet Letter to 11th graders. Of course, the fact is that Hawthorne is breathtakingly inaccessible to most kids (and, in fact, to many English teachers) because of the sophistication of his vocabulary and his astonishingly complex syntax and the unfamiliarity of the concepts he is dealing with. (How many of them can explain the difference between the Covenant of Works and the Covenant of Grace?) But year after year, they assign this book and fool themselves into thinking that their kids have read it (instead of reading the Cliff’s Notes). If they had more sense, they would have the 11th graders read a couple of the more interesting and accessible pieces of short fiction by Hawthorne (such as “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Minister’s Black Veil” or “Rappaccini’s Daughter”) and, perhaps, some excerpts from Scarlet Letter, and allow them to come back to SL later in life, when and if they develop enough to be able to read it. Assigning this book to the typical group of 11th graders is like giving 9th-grade Math students Gödel’s “On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems” to read.
“Oh, but my kids LOVE that book!” I hear English teachers say. LOL. They see what they want to see, like folks watching performances by Clever Hans.
Hawthorne is one of my favorite writers EVER!!! On the whole issue of kids being “bored” by the classics….Well, first, kids nowadays are bored by everything except their cell phones. My husband often says that classes are just a period of time kids have to sit through before they can get on their phones again. And it’s true. Also, kids now have these little ear phones so now we can be sure that they have music and other things going into their heads instead of hearing the teacher’s voice. But when I was a kid, my aunt would take me to the opera, dance performances, museums, nice restaurants and many other cultural things that often “bored” me. But now, I am grateful that she did because I love many of those things. My point being that we should expose kids to a variety of things (even Hawthorne and his “boring” Scarlet Letter) even if they don’t seen to enjoy it when they’re kids. They may come to appreciate it later!
My issue with The Scarlet Letter isn’t that the kids will be bored by it but that almost none of them actually CAN read it with comprehension. Hawthorne writes about concepts quite foreign to them in sentences that run to many lines, have numerous subordinate clauses, and that almost all contain three or four words they won’t know. The book has a Lexile Reading Level of 1420, which is 100 points higher than the highest, “stretch” reading level band (11th-CCR) in the Common [sci] Score [sic]. I, too, am a huge fan of Hawthorne. I’m a fan of Shiraz, too, but I’m not going to give it to my grandchildren. LOL. My advice: Give them a taste of it to let them know that it’s out there. Tell them that theyprobably aren’t ready for it yet but that it’s a great story they will want to read later.
That’s one of the problems with the Common Core Reading List, the recommendations don’t match the grade levels, either with their reading ability or interests (meaning ability to appreciate the literature at that point in their lives). How about using Graphic Novels of the classics to whet their appetites?
When I was a kid, I used to gobble up Classics Illustrated comic books. My teachers HATED these, thought them something like blasphemy, but guess what? I grew up to read the originals.
There is one great selection on the CC reading list.
It’s The American Reader, editor unnamed.
Mine! Great stuff!
Bob,
You’re probably right. I’ve stopped teaching so many things because kids just can’t handle it anymore. So has my husband who is an English teacher. 😦
I found that my students really struggled with the syntax and vocabulary of Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle.” Though these are considered children’s classics, they turn out to have very high reading levels. What’s a teacher to do? Well, sometimes, it’s a good idea to have the kids LISTEN to a story, for aural comprehension considerably outpaces reading comprehension. Sometimes, a teacher might have kids listen to part and read part. I like the latter alternative a lot.
I remember reading Dicken’s Great Expectations in my youth and considering it a good cure for insomnia. I recently reread this title (over forty years later) and I loved it. There is a time and a place for everything, including books. Oh, now they use Spark Notes (online), not Cliff Notes.
As an aside: I dropped A Tale of Two Cities on my toe. Boy, it hurt like the dickens.
An amazing book, Great Expectations, isn’t it!
Sometimes, it is worthwhile using a few excerpts and telling kids about a book that they may want to approach later on. I typically did this, for example, with Moby Dick (my candidate for the greatest American novel). I wanted them to know that it was out there. And I wanted them to taste a few of its delicacies. But I wasn’t going to expect them to plow through all gazillion delicious but decidedly adult pages of it.
“But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.” –Herman Melville, Moby Dick
“EdReports, an independent curriculum review nonprofit, rates curriculum on three gateways: Text Quality, Building Knowledge, and Usability. Amplify CKLA earned a green rating in all three.”
This should not be regarded as a trustworthy endorsement. Here is Why. Recall that the Common Core State (sic) Standards were first marketed as if they were not intended to be about curriculum (but they were), because the owners of the CCSS soon offered up “publisher’s criteria” for curriculum materials (2011). Those criteria morphed into a system for reviewing curricula, based on absolute compliance with the CCSS, including grade-by grade alignments. In 2013, the initial criteria for reviewing curriculum materials for compliance with the CCSS were called “drop dead” (meaning comply with these criteria or do not waste the time of reviewers). A year later, the language was softened to the idea that materials had to meet “gateway” criteria (2014), but with the same meaning,—comply or else the reviewers will not bother to look at anything else.
By 2015, the promoters of the CCSS had set up a non-profit called EdReports.org to function in the capacity of a consumer-reports of newly published math and ELA materials. The purpose was to rate publications that claimed to be in compliance with the CCSS.
EdReports is said to be the result of a meeting at the Annenberg estate of “the nation’s leading minds in math, science, K-12 and higher education.” I have not been able to find a list of participants in that meeting or the sponsors, but in 2014 professionals in branding and communications were hired to promote EdReports. You can see the strategy and their pride in getting coverage in national news, http://www.widmeyer.com/work/edreports-org.html including from Peter Greene at http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/search?q=EdReports
In August 2015 the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave $1,499,988 to EdReports for operating support followed in 2016 with $6,674,956 for operating support. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation gave EdReports.org $1.5 million in 2015 and $2 million in 2016.
Ed Reports.org is also funded by Broadcom Corporation (Board member from Broadcom is with EdReports), the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Foundation, the Helmsley Charitable Trust, the Overdeck Family Foundation, the Samuel Foundation, the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, and the Stuart Foundation.
You can find more about the quest for absolute continuity from the writing of the CCSS, largely funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to current efforts to impose “approved curriculum materials” for any state that has adopted the CCSS… https://www.edreports.org/about/index.html
EdReports is a Gates funded review process initially marketed to ensure that “approved” curriculum materials were in compliance with the common core. Any curriculum materials that did not pass muster with three gateway “drop dead criteria” would not be subjected to further review.
Amplify does not want you to know the history of this phony system of rating materials. Bob Shepard has offered another excellent history of this absurdly wrong effort to standardize ELA curriculum.
I see that Margaret Spellings, former Secretary of Education, has found a position at Amplify. She also serves on the board of Gates’ relatively new lobby shop. She is not competent to make judgments about education, but that seems to qualify her to be a crony of the disrupters who will do almost anything to please a billionaire.
Thank you, Laura!
Of late, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute for Securing Big Bucks for the Officers of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute has been running a lot of articles about the need to “stay the course” with the Common [sic] Core [sic] and its associated high-stakes testing AND to ensure that these will continue to work their MAGIC by creating a national Curriculum Commissariat, or Thought Police, to approve the curricular materials that will be used with them. So, EdReports, evidently, isn’t enough in their eyes. They need something more ENFORCEABLE. So, faced with the fact that their deforms have not improved outcomes as measured by test scores and has not closed achievement gaps, they are now arguing that the issue is curricula improperly aligned with the Core [sic] and that we need to go much further in letting the Deformers be the DECIDERS FOR THE REST OF US.
Say what you will of Fordham (and most of what I have to say of them cannot be said in a public forum, for it involves the full arsenal for cursing available in English, with which we are so blessed), the Fordhamites inhabit an ecological niche within the very aquifer from which flow the toxic springs of Deform (the Gates,Walton, ALEC springs on Mt. HELL-I-CON) and generally know what’s about to spew forth.
So, I’m expecting that creation of a new, official Curricular Thought Police (Ed Reports, but with muscle?) is the Deformers’ next move. The Brookings Institution ran a piece calling for this years ago, and I got into quite a nasty spat with the authors of that. Perhaps that was around about the time that EdReports was created. .
cx: and HAVE not closed achievement gaps
BTW, EdReports gives its highest ranking to Pearson’s My Perspectives literature program. Several years ago, my administrators dropped boxes of these off in my room and insisted that I had to swtich to using them. I reviewed the program and was appalled. It was full of errors in grammar, usage, mechanics, and, most importantly, FACTS. The units in the survey course books (American Lit, British lit) contained only tiny snippets of literature from the various periods and almost no historical background or background on the cultural advances and intellectual milieus of those periods, and the few snippets of period literature were mixed in with a lot of REALLY LOW-QUALITY contemporary material that was supposed to be related but wasn’t (oh, this piece from HuffPost is about trees, so it must belong in the Transcendentalists unit, because they wrote about nature, too). The theory seems to have been that all classics from the canon are nasty, bitter pills that can only be taken in tiny bits and then only with lots and lots and lost of enveloping contemporary saccharine. The questions about the lit were inane and evinced little understanding of it on the part of the program’s “authors,” none of whom, I’m certain, were the people actually listed as authors on the program. The program was clearly thrown together by freelance hacks paid extremely low wages, was barely edited, and then was rushed out the door. I chose one spread in the program at random and sent to my colleagues and administrators an essay detailing 35 or so outright errors on these pages and critiquing the pedagogical practices employed in them. This was without doubt the dumbest, least coherent lit program I’ve ever seen. And it’s very, very Common Core-y–consisting mostly of random exercises on random CC$$ skills.
Highest ranking from EdReports.
This is sick. This is (I hope) an extreme example of inappropriate curriculum. What happens, in less extreme circumstances – but still not developmentally appropriate – is inexperienced teachers are presented with curriculum and think this is what first graders (2nd graders) need to know. They assume their administrators and the curriculum companies know what they are doing. And it becomes their frame of reference for teaching that grade level.
It’s so strange that we are allowing this to happen to young children.