This article was written by a teacher in Los Angeles. She describes the implantation of the Common Core standards. She is especially perplexed by the practice of “close reading,” which means that students are expected to comprehend text without any context or background knowledge.

She and her colleagues were disappointed by the “professional development,” which was not at all professional.

She writes:

“Our trainer started the session by apologizing sincerely for all the anxiety and confusion surrounding the rushed implementation of the Common Core State Standards in LAUSD. The first slide in her PowerPoint presentation showed the governance structure of LAUSD. At the top was the elected school board. She was letting us know that if we had issues with the Common Core State Standards, we needed to bring these up with the school board. Everyone else down the line, she implied, was just following marching orders, and it would do no good to call and harass them.

“We were lucky. When I returned to school, I found out that the math teachers had had a similar training session. However, theirs started with the trainer telling them that no “negativity” would be tolerated, and that it wasn’t a question-and-answer session. In essence, they were told to sit down and shut up and not bring up concerns about the reordering of the teaching of important concepts that is happening in math under the Common Core State Standards.

“At least we were treated like professionals.”

Then came the training about how to teach the Gettysburg Address by close reading.

The teacher writes:

“When we discussed the sample Gettysburg assessment, several teachers pointed out that the assessment offers no background on the Gettysburg Address. Students are not to be given any information about the speech, even if they are relatively new to the country. Many of us in LAUSD have students in our regular English classes who have only been in the United States a year or two, and they most likely do not know our history.

“Other students may simply not remember their U.S. history lessons from middle school, and may have forgotten who Abraham Lincoln was, or why the Gettysburg Address is important, or even that “address” in this instance means a speech and not a location.

“If a student is clueless but lucky, she might be sitting next to a student who does know this information. (All the Common Core assessments I’ve seen so far require discussion with a partner, but forbid talking to the teacher. So if you are a genius or sit next to one, you hit the Common Core lottery.)

“But those kinds of concerns are apparently very pre-Common Core, and are outdated now.

“When we asked if we could do a little pre-teaching to provide context, our trainer somberly shook her head.

“She actually said it would be best to simply give the “cold, hard assessment,” and that we need to “remove the scaffolding sometime.”

“Then I noticed a relic on the wall from the pre-Common Core era—a poster of Bloom’s Taxonomy. The Bloom’s Taxonomy chart is a pyramid. At the bottom is the foundation of all learning. As you go up the pyramid, the tasks increase in complexity (notice I did not say “rigor”).

“At the base of the pyramid is knowledge. Next up is comprehension. After that come application, analysis, synthesis, and then at the top, evaluation.

“I couldn’t help myself. I raised my hand to ask a question.

“Isn’t giving this assessment without giving the students the background—the context for the speech—kind of like expecting them to come in on the Bloom’s taxonomy chart at comprehension, without making sure they first have the knowledge?”

“Then something interesting happened. The trainer looked like I had zapped her with a stun gun for a second. She actually physically jerked. Then she recovered, and said we could discuss that after the training. (We didn’t.)”