If we teach it, they will write it.

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know that I am a convert to the concept that literacy development (beyond decoding) is based primarily on knowledge, not skills. I used to think otherwise and even taught that way.

I write about this all of the time, especially in the context of ramped-up emphasis on reading tests, specifically in Virginia on Reading SOL tests (more on the recent ones soon). See this guest post at the Core Knowledge blog,and see this post, this post, this post, this post, this post, this post, and this post chez moi.

So, yes, I am a fan of E.D. Hirsch's work on content-/knowledge-based curriculum as well as of Dan Willingham's cognitive-science-based rationale of such an approach. However, there's one place where I have to disagree: that we cannot change whose ideas we study.

From a recent article in Politico by Peg Tyre about Hirsch's influence (bolded emphasis mine):

Knowing the national language of culture, even haphazardly, has a vast, far-reaching and brutally cumulative impact on learning. For those who begin their education with sufficient stores of background knowledge, it forms a virtuous circle: They have higher levels of reading comprehension, which helps them understand the daily social, intellectual and political discourse, which in turn helps them obtain more background knowledge. Those who do not have it languish. To level the playing field between rich and poor, schools should intentionally build background knowledge in all children in a wide range of subjects, or, says Hirsch, “It will be impossible to break the cycle of illiteracy that persists from parent to child.”  

Which is where his List came in. To make it, Hirsch, along with two professors, scanned newspapers and popular journals for high-frequency concepts and then polled 500 professionals—lawyers and writers—to determine which of those concepts were the most crucial for cultural literacy. “I have a Spock-like mind,” he reflects. “I like to take things to their logical conclusion.”  

Still, critics loved to point out—and they were right—that it is long on the Founding Fathers and the English literary canon. Isn’t championing, say, John Locke over Lao Tzu a choice rife with unspoken values and cultural biases? Hirsch sighs. “I agree with those who say we have to change American culture, but we cannot do it at the expense of people at the bottom,” he says when I ask the inevitable question. “Vocabulary—and cultural literacy—is shaped by history. There is really nothing to be done about that.” OK, I say, that might have made sense in the 1970s, but what about now when the complexion of American public schools is changing? The population of Latinos is growing and this year, the majority of children enrolled in public schools are expected to be non-white. How can any dictionary of cultural literacy keep pace with such a rapidly changing world? Hirsch grows crisp. “Why do you think one’s color or ethnicity would affect one’s vocabulary? Without a doubt, Latino culture is having a big influence on America, and the language of culture will change around the margins. But educated conversation is still going on. And you want to make sure those kids—particularly those kids—have the tools they need to be included.”

Dan Willingham said something rather similar in his book Why Don't Students Like School (page 36):

We might ask ourselves, Which knowledge should students be taught? This questions often becomes politically charged rather quickly. When we start to specify what must be taught and what can be omitted, it appears that we are grading information on its importance. The inclusion of omission of historical events and figures, playwrights, scientific achievements, and so on, leads to charges of cultural bias. A cognitive scientist sees these issues differently. The question, What should students be taught is equivalent not to What knowledge  is important? but rather to What knowledge yields the greatest cognitive benefit? The question has two answers. 

For reading, students must know whatever information writers assume they know and hence leave out. The necessary knowledge will vary depending on what students read, but most observers would agree that a reasonable human target would be to read a daily newspaper and to read books written for the intelligent layman on serious topics such as science and politics. Using that criterion, we may still be distressed that much of what writers assume their readers know seems to be touchstones of the culture of dead white males. From the cognitive scientist's point of view, the only choice in that case is to try to persuade writers and editors at the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and so on to assume different knowledge on the part of their readers. I don't think anyone would claim that change would be easy to bring about. It really amounts to a change in culture. Unless and until that happens, I advocate teaching that material to our students. The simple fact is that without that knowledge, they cannot read the breadth of material that their more knowledgeable schoolmates can, not with the depth of comprehension.

While I agree with Hirsch and Willingham in how literacy develops, I disagree there's nothing we can do about whose history or culture we learn about or that changing whose ideas we learn about depends upon who writes and edits major newspapers. Obviously, writers and editors of newspapers have a lot of influence but there are other places of influence, like schools.

Hegemony as defined by Autumn Tooms Cypres (2013) is:

"a socio-political construct that explains how groups or individuals can maintain their dominance over other groups of individuals in a society via coercion rather than violence. This phenomenon is achieved through persuading those in the subordinate group to accept, adopt, and internalize the dominant group's definition of what is normal. This kind of veiled oppression is achieved via mechanisms such as the media and school curriculum, which are used to inculcate and maintain this viewpoint and the power of the dominant class."

If I say that there's nothing I can do, I am accepting and aiding unhealthy and imbalanced cultural hegemony of white males. Since schools and curricula (and not just newspapers and publishers) can help achieve hegemony then one of the best places to "change the culture" and over turn hegemony of white males is to start teaching the ideas and work of non-white males, too. Essentially, if we teach it, they will write it.

Jane M. Gangi, an associate professor in the Division of Education at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, New York, and Nancy Benfer, an instructor in literacy and literature at Mount Saint Mary College and a fourth-grade teacher at Bishop Dunn Memorial School, have endeavored over the course of their careers to expand what is read in their classrooms and in the classrooms of the teachers they teach. They also have also worked with architects of Common Core, to see that a more diverse set of literature and authors are included with other works in Common Core recommended texts. They explain their reasoning here:

One is rooted in the proficient reading research. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, researchers asked, “What do good readers do?” They found that good readers make connections to themselves and their communities. When classroom collections are largely by and about white people, white children have many more opportunities to make connections and become proficient readers. Appendix B of the CCSS as presented added to the aggregate that consistently marginalizes multicultural children’s literature: book lists, school book fairs and book order forms, literacy textbooks (books that teach teachers), and transitional books (books that help children segue from picture books to lengthier texts). If we want all children to become proficient readers, we must stock classrooms with mirror books for all children. This change in our classroom libraries will also allow children of the dominant culture to see literature about others who look different and live differently.

A second reason we must ensure that all children have mirror books is identity development. For African American children, Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are not enough. They must also see African-American artists, writers, political leaders, judges, mathematicians, astronauts, and scientists. The same is true for children of other ethnicities. They must see authors and illustrators who look like them on book jackets. Children must be able to envision possibilities for their futures. And they must fall in love with books. Culturally relevant books help children discover a passion for reading.

Unfortunately, no changes to the Common Core Appendix B have been made.

Education writer, edu-color activist, and Montgomery County Public School parent Melinda Anderson has advocated for public education to better serve students of color including recruiting and retaining more teachers of color, developing more culturally competent teachers, and teaching richer and more relevant curricula including literature by and about people of color:

The mirrors metaphor is strong and powerful. Writers of color started a Twitter campaign #WeNeedDiverseBooks as a rallying cry to build momentum for greater diversity in literature. The need for people of color to see themselves reflected in the pages of books, in school curriculum and classrooms, and in leadership positions is real and inescapable. Equally, people of color need to be recognized for their excellence – it matters who we as a society lift up as worthy of recognition.

I would argue further that all students would benefit from a shift in the canon. As a K-12 student, some of my greatest experiences with literature were with works by authors of color: Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, Ralph Ellison, Claude Brown, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Sandra Cisneros. In later and more recent years I have added: Amy Tan, Yiyun Li, Kazuo Ishiguro, Haruki Murakami, Julia Alvarez, Junot Diaz, Edward Jones, Manil Suri, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Esmeralda Santiago, Isabelle Allende, Reinaldo Arenas, and Naguib Mahfouz. And those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head. I read these books because many of my teachers assigned them (and most of my K-12 teachers were African-American) but also because they were in my house growing up--my parents read them and gave them to us to read. Then I was hooked and on on my own, I read more.

The cultural canon is movable.  It takes hard work, but it can be done. After all, Hirsch said he had a "spock-like" mind. Star Trek isn't exactly what comes to mind when we think of the "cultural canon," is it? No matter your stance on it, the Common Core would be a great place to start as would Virginia's Standards of Learning.

If we say that we value black lives, that black lives matter, then we also have to show that black ideas, inventions, research, and creativity matter and have been integral, not just to students of color but to our country as a whole.

The Common Condescension

Politico had a particularly agitating article about the Common Core out yesterday entitled, "Moms winning the Common Core war."

First  of all "war"? I am about to declare war on writers of ridiculous headlines. . .

Anyway, to get to the content of the article. Basically, Common Core advocates have decided that they need a new PR strategy:

Supporters of the Common Core academic standards have spent big this past year to persuade wavering state legislators to stick with the new guidelines for math and language arts instruction. Given the firestorm of opposition that took them by surprise, they consider it a victory that just five states, so far, have taken steps to back out. 

But in a series of strategy sessions in recent months, top promoters of the standards have concluded they’re losing the broader public debate — and need to devise better PR.

Granted there is plenty of misinformation surrounding the Common Core debate, and there are plenty of people who are misinformed, some willfully so, Glen, ahem, Beck, or who just hate Obama and the United Nations. But otherwise, this approach is maddening. It's the same reformy solution to disagreement and dissent that we've witnessed for nearly a decade, i.e., there's nothing wrong with the substance of our reforms, it's just the style with which they're presented. Or, to use business parlance, there's nothing wrong with our product, we just need to sell/market it better. 

The contempt is just dripping:

“The Common Core message so far has been a head message. We’ve done a good job talking about facts and figures. But we need to move 18 inches south and start talking about a heart message,” said Wes Farno, executive director of the Higher State Standards Partnership, a coalition supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable.

And,

“We’re so good at all our statistics and data and rational arguments … [but] emotion is what gets people feeling passionate,” Oldham said. “It may not be the most comfortable place for the business community … [but] we need to get better at doing it.”

People who criticize the Common Core are just emotional. We have to speak emotional back to them. Here we've been giving them the facts and well, I'll be! That doesn't work. Those emotional people, the are too simple-minded to handle the truth and the facts, gosh darnit! Let's get tugging on their heart-strings with some videos.

And then there's this:

“The bottom line here is that parents need more information, and maybe we haven’t been good enough at telling them the story,” said Karen Nussle, a veteran PR strategist who runs the Collaborative for Student Success.

Right, parents and Common Core skeptics just need more in-for-ma-tion. They don't have enough! That's why they don't like the Common Core--because they don't know anything! Gee, I wonder how that could be when the Common Core has only been reported and/or promoted on every major news outlet and education blog there is.

Finally, there's Common Core Noonegivesashithowyoufeel architect David Coleman:

Common Core supporters acknowledge they also erred in publicly belittling opponents as silly, ignorant or outright kooky. “We make a great mistake by caricaturing the opponents of the standards as crazies or people who don’t tell the truth,” David Coleman, an architect of the standards, told Bloomberg EDU recently.

Yes, again the thinking is, we made a mistake in how we "belittled" and "caricatured" opponents rather than we made a mistake in not listening to our critics and acting on some of their criticisms. At some point, you actually have to listen to people and act upon on their (legitimate) criticisms and feedback, not send a kinder, gentler salesperson to their door armed with some ridiculous video about some student who learned a new word.

Just as I have always agreed that many of our nation's public school systems need reform, I agree that they need a common basic, broad set of knowledge, concepts, and skills. The reformers and Common Core advocates started out with decent popular support and had a tremendous opportunity and unheard of sums of money to work on this. Too bad they've squandered both.

Are standardized testing and absence of oversight civil rights?

During the next several days, when I am taking breaks from my budding career as a statistics wonderkid, I will be guest posting along with Diana Senechal and Michael Lopez over at Joanne Jacobs' blog.

My first post is in response to Politico education reporter Stephanie Simon's article about the tensions in Louisiana between Bobby Jindal and John White:

Now, this isn’t a post about the merits of the Common Core Standards or their associated assessments, though that is fodder for many long and complex conversations (to see what I have said about the Common Core, go here), nor is it about the politics behind Jindal’s about-face. Rather, it is about John White’s hysteria and perversion of the term “civil rights.”

Please head over and read the whole thing.

On strange bedfellows in ed reform skepticism

Lately there has been some debate over whether progressives align themselves with the Tea Party to defeat the Common Core. I would argue that progressives should be skeptical of aligning ourselves with Tea Party at all because it is an affront to anti-racism and it may lead us to win the battle but lose the war for public education.

Within the progressive white education reform movement, there seems to be a troubling double standard, among some members. Why is it an unacceptable violation take Gates money, find common ground with Gates, or consider any potential merits of the Common Core, while working with the Tea Party (many members of which don't think public education should exist) on one issue is acceptable because it's "pragmatic"?

 Nancy Flanagan brought it up a couple of months ago and concluded:

Agreeing with the folks who see the Common Core as tearing children from the arms of their parents is a dangerous business. Let's have a rational conversation about the uses and misuses of content standards.

I agree: Public education advocacy work should be about policies and not about aligning ourselves with individuals or groups--in this case policies about standards and discussions about their use. If individuals or groups endorse the same policies I do, so be it. If your elected official happens to be a Tea Partier, you should still call them to express your views. Just because members of the Tea Party are in power doesn't mean we should abdicate our rights and powers as citizens, or that we should give up hope that people can change their opinions. I will never surrender my rightful role in the political process or give up give up efforts, if I think they might be fruitful, to change someone's point of view.

Jose Vilson addressed the issue on his blog and at the NPE:

There’s a big difference between having a difference of opinion, as so many do with our union representatives, for example, and a difference of vision. The difference is in how we view others in the same tent. Do we see each other as equal, capable of leading this movement, or as subordinate, a step towards a goal that eventually excludes? Inclusion along race, gender, and class lines matters. Examining the ways in which we hinder ourselves is so crucial to this work.

Some have responded to this by saying that saving public education is the bigger picture. But whose bigger picture? Don't they understand that for people of color, the bigger picture includes one where they are not considered as less than others because of the color of their skin? Asking people in the public education advocacy community to compartmentalize racism and "balance it" with other concerns is not reasonable. None of us should be doing that, none of us should lose sight of the components of the bigger picture. Part of white privilege is having the luxury to compartmentalize issues, i.e., saying this is about race and this isn't, or even though this is about race, I can see past that to the bigger picture. And in that case we're also, as white people, controlling the conversation, i.e., "This is/isn't about race because I say it is." or "Race doesn't matter here as much as preserving public education because that's the issue that is most important to me." Of course it wouldn't matter as much to a white person because it doesn't have to. No one is going to shoot one of us for walking down the street or stopping in a gas station while being white. Furthermore, what if the Tea Party's bigger picture includes the end of public education?

Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates on supporting Ron Paul and Rand Paul is instructive here. The War on Drugs and War on Terror/ NSA over-reach are awful policies that Ron and Rand Paul are against. But both have also promoted all kinds of racist bile. (And also think public education should not exist). I agree that the War on Drugs needs to end but I can not see getting it to end by propping up men such as Ron or Rand Paul even if temporarily. If you read some of TNC's thoughts about his peers' embracing of the Pauls you can get an idea of the position that any alliance with the Tea Party regarding Common Core puts a person of color from our public education community in:

To those who dimly perceived something wrong, something that could not be put on a placard, or could not move the party machine, men such as this become something more than political operators, they become symbols. Substantive charges against them, no matter the reasons, are dismissed. The movement they represent means more. But as sure as the followers of Farrakhan deserved more than UFOs, anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories, those of us who oppose the drug-war, who oppose the Patriot Act deserve better than Ron Paul. 

It is not enough to simply proffer Paul as a protest candidate.One must fully imagine the import of a Paul presidency. How, precisely, would Paul end the drug war? What, exactly, would he do about the Middle East? How, specifically,would the world look for women under a Ron Paul presidency?  

And then the dispatches must be honestly grappled with: It must be argued that a man who could not manage a newsletter should be promoted to managing a nuclear arsenal. Failing that, it must be asserted that a man who once claimedthat black people were knowingly injecting white people with HIV, who fund-raised by predicting a race-war, who handsomely profited from it all, should lead the free world. If that line falls too, we are forced to confess that  Ron Paul regularly summoned up the specters of racism for his own politically gain, and thus stands convicted of moral cowardice.

It's a no-brainer and it should be. I, Rachel, might protest Big Data or the Common Core but I protest far more any person or group who thinks people of color as less than white people or who thinks the Civil Rights movement is bogus. I'm willing to talk and listen to them but I'm not willing to prop up people of such political views even temporarily.

I have written a few times about the shortcomings of single-issue advocacy. Michelle Rhee and StudentsFirst defend their support of anti-gay, anti-poor people, and otherwise right-wing legislators by saying that their issue is education reform and not GLTB rights or poverty. And our community is always criticizing TFA for taking Walton money. Well, this is not dissimilar. To quote myself:

When reformers see fit to hand over the reigns of a sacred, public, democratic institution to people who hate the government, how is that supposed to work out? How can these education "reformers" imagine that anti-intellectuals can have anything of substance to offer to the intellectual pursuit of education? Is getting your questionable education reforms passed really worth empowering people who don't value knowledge-based education, public or otherwise? At some point, being anti-science and anti-intellectual means you're anti-education. If you have disdain for the creation of knowledge, or for knowledge itself even, you can't really be trusted to oversee the reform of one of our society's principal mechanisms for generating and transferring knowledge. 

The problem with a single-issue approach to education reform is that students don't lead single-issue lives. Democrats and neo-liberals who support decision-makers who would use their power to crush the Democratic party (through a war on unions of all stripes), who hate gay people, who deny climate change science, who support the disastrous Wars on Drugs and Terror, who don't even have the support of the saner members of their own party, who sell their states off to the highest bidders are acting irresponsibly and short-sightedly. 

Do we really want to employ a pyromaniac to fix our fireplaces if it means giving him the opportunity soon thereafter to burn down our homes? When I do the calculus, I don't see children or students, public or knowledge-rich and meaningful education winning. I see homo-phobic, poverty-criminalizing, anti-intellectual, knowledge-agnostic, right-wing ideology winning and I have yet to understand why any self-described liberal or education reformer would support that.

To read some thoughts and questions I posted as a follow-up to this post, go here.

Public education for me but not for thee

Although he has since quasi-apologized, Arne Duncan put his foot in his mouth, saying that,

It’s fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were, and that’s pretty scary,” Duncan said. “You’ve bet your house and where you live and everything on, ‘My child’s going to be prepared.’ That can be a punch in the gut.” 

Overcoming that will require communicating to parents that competition is now global, not local, he said.

This was a wrong (as in incorrect) and stupid (as in politically dense) thing to say. As Sabrina Joy Stevens explains here, the low-poverty, suburban demographic does fairly well on international comparisons. Suburban moms were a key constituency for Obama in 2012 and telling them that some Common Core aligned test being promoted by the feds knows their child better than they do is a huge political mistake (this is why people hate Democrats). Finally, it's unfair to boil down public school parents' objections to the Common Core to, "you think your kids are brilliant, but they're not." Duncan reinforced the hubris so endemic in so many modern school reformers: if you are critical of our policies, you're deluded or lying to your kids and yourselves, you're a status quo defender or you don't like children or you think poor children can't learn.

Certainly, more affluent school districts coast on their reputations and are probably not doing as good a job as they should be, but I would hardly chalk this up to delusional suburban moms. I would chalk it up to the same things everyone else is suffering from: a broken accountability structure, too much emphasis on (too many and poorly designed) standardized tests and not enough rich and meaningful curriculum, plus the same budget cuts everyone else is experiencing. In short, more affluent school districts are suffering from what less affluent ones are: modern education reform.

Unlike Secretary Duncan, I don't agree that the Common Core and its accompanying tests will cure public education's ills. To the contrary, it will be more of the same. I've said over and over again that the substance of the Common Core standards are not worth debating when the way they were made and and the rigid accountability structure they will be filtered through are so problematic and will result in more of the same.

Another important piece in this is what Sherman Dorn brings up here: That maybe more people in whose favor the current system works, including suburban white families, would support more shifts, say in curriculum or assessment, if they didn't have to sacrifice their children's success to them. This goes back to the idea that slow and steady (with plenty of time for reflection and tweaking and input from all stakeholders) wins the race. 

Current hullabaloo aside, it's taken an awfully long while for ed reform fatigue to trickle up to the more affluent. It's upsetting to consider that only now that they have been offended, that suburban white moms might pay attention to what's going on with school reform. I won't repeat what Jose Vilson has written already about this or what Paul Thomas said but I can vouch for it given my current access to white suburbanites. I've heard plenty of parents of students in low-poverty schools say things like, Isn't Michelle Rhee wonderful? I like what she's doing. Um, would you want someone steamrolling through your school district talking about "collaboration and consensus-building are overrated? Oh, that doesn't work for you? I didn't think so. I've also heard, TFA. What a fabulous organization. Um, do you want TFAers teaching in your district? Because I've noticed that when one of your child's teachers goes on maternity leave you demand an actual licensed and vetted teacher just to sub in their long-term absence. Another example: when I tried to alert other Virginians to the dangers of the Opportunity Education Institution in Virginia, I heard so things like, Well, in Petersburg, they need that help or Well, that's because Richmond is a mess. Richmond and Petersburg are majority black cities with high levels of poverty, so yes, such comments are code for those poor black people just can't get it together.

My response is usually some or all of: a) There are historical conditions and policies that have contributed to the poverty of those communities; it's not endemic; b) No, democracy and local control is not just for the affluent; and c) It's a slippery slope, or as Jose Vilson said, "First, they came for the Urban Black and Latina moms." With the SOL tests getting more tricky rigorous, some schools in more affluent districts may find themselves under OEI's control (should OEI be found constitutional) and whatcha gonna do then? Are you going to want to be disenfranchised? I didn't think so.

Some reactions to Duncan's comments haven't been much different. Now that kids who don't usually fail standardized tests are failing, then it matters--it's okay for kids that are supposed to fail but not my kids. While he definitely misspoke, I wince at the Now, I'm mad. Now you've pissed off the wrong people comments. Why were you not mad before? "The wrong people"? What's that supposed to mean? That just reinforces the idea that non-suburban white moms don't care as much about their kids' education and reinforces Duncan's implication that non-suburban-white moms support his policies.

The reformers have decided that they speak for poor people of color, that they should be happy that they're there to fix their dysfunctional systems, that the answer to dysfunction is disempowerment. White suburban folks have seemed largely to accept that. Remember that Michelle Rhee's supporters (and Arne Duncan is certainly among them--he all but endorsed her and Fenty in DC's mayoral election) have claimed that one reason Adrian Fenty lost in DC is because Rhee is Korean-American and that black people in DC were too full of race pride and too busy shielding their incompetence to admit that she was right. And who's been buying copies of the Bee Eater and Radical? My guess is: yes, suburban white people.

As I've learned in the activism work I have been doing locally, the truth of the matter is that, indeed, many parents only start to get worked up when something affects their kids. And while I wish that were different, maybe we should go with the better-late-than-never attitude and hope that suburban white moms' political muscle trickles down. Maybe this will open the eyes of parents of children in more affluent schools to the reformy fiasco their peers in many U.S. cities have already been subjected to. Maybe they'll realize that there's no "I' in public education, that the attitude of democracy and public education for me but not for thee may cost all of us both.

Reforminess: 120, Content-rich Curriculum: 45

I saw this article in the Washington Post about DCPS's cutting the minimum recess for elementary students to 20 minutes day. It goes without saying that twenty minutes per day of recess for younger students is ridiculously inadequate. But here's what really caught my eye (emphasis mine):

Recess time varies in the District. Some schools saw a reduction this year as Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson implemented new requirements meant to ensure that all elementary students get a minimum amount of time in each subject each day: two hours of literacy, 90 minutes of math, and 45 minutes of science or social studies. An additional 45 minutes is required for an elective, such as art, music or physical education.

What? Isn't DC a Common Core adopter? Isn't the Common Core supposed the second coming of curricular education reform?

If you're spending two hours a day on "literacy" and forty-five minutes a day on non-math content (social studies or science) and if you consider art, music, physical education, or foreign language to be an "elective" rather than crucial content, then the Common Core will not help your students because you're not getting the Common Core's supposed intent. In this case, the assumption is that literacy is a skill that must be mastered before children learn content. "Literacy" is primary and content is an after thought.

So what do Common Core advocates, especially those who also support current education reforms, think of this? Just as I find their silence on expansion of central bureaucracy and spending thereon baffling, I find their silence on this topic baffling, and troubling, as well.

When the Common Core is old wine in new bottles

I have been enjoying Education Week's series about the Common Core Standards in action. The second article depicts classroom practice in a DCPS middle school Language Arts classroom. I found this post especially intriguing--I felt like a fly on the wall reading it.

This is what impresses me:

First of all, it does seem like the teacher has a certain amount of freedom--not much of the what (the curriculum), or the how is being dictated. It does seem like the standards are doing what they are supposed to do: guiding. Also, the use of coaches are apt and administrators get that the students need a lot of guidance and that they can't go straight to "grade-level" texts.

Second, the authors and the art that the students are reading and studying seem amazing. Many of the assignments also seem worthy. I would want my own children to read those authors and texts (though, in full--I'll get to this) and write such essays.

Finally, learning grammar, vocabulary,and literary devices as the students are doing in Ms. McNair-Lee's class is a good idea (and all the better that they're doing so not isolated from the text). This serves not so much to develop them as readers but to develop them as writers (though, yes, one must be a good reader to have a shot at being a good writer).

Here's what troubles me:

He [the student] gets the material one-on-one but not on the assessment. Okay, so the kid is reading the book and getting it, but this isn't reflected on the assessment. Therefore, we are failing him. Because it's all about the tests, not about what the kid actually gets and learns? This is where I would say that there is something wrong with the test. Except we can't because in the current climate the test is all mighty.

There seems to be a lot of practice that happened just the same as pre-Common Core standards, but just that the Common Core texts are more "complex." As I said before, it is a step forward that they are reading such texts and authors, but I noticed that they are often not reading entire texts but "excerpts." Yes, see with the old standards, students read "passages." If no one is reading whole books, it doesn't matter if you call them "excerpts" or "passages" because the students are still not reading whole books or whole articles or collections of poetry.

It is good practice to have students cite evidence from the text when they make arguments. But otherwise, students are also still practicing things like finding the main idea, making inferences, and using context clues to figure out meaning of words. Also, I fail to see the difference between doing a "close reading" of an "excerpt" (Common Core) and "attacking a passage" (old state standards) I have said this over and over and over again (and I will say it again in the future): Reading comprehension can't be taught. As in you can't teach someone to comprehend what they're reading. If reading is not a skill, then reading is not a skill. Finding the main idea may be a strategy, but you either know how to do it or you don't. You can't practice it and get better at it. Same with making inferences. These are strategies that can't be practiced and the ability to successfully complete such strategies is highly dependent on background knowledge. I thought the Common Core was supposed to deliver us from the misguided emphasis on reading strategies. But at least from this account, it doesn't seem to be.

And this leads me to two more points. One is what I argued here, it doesn't matter if the texts are more complex, it doesn't mean teaching reading strategies and reading as a skill works any better to make kids stronger readers. Simply promoting what students are reading from "simple" to "complex" and from "passages" to "excerpts" will not do the trick. There is not some dial on the rigor-o-meter that you turn up and presto our "scholars" are all career and college ready.

Two is that are they learning about any of this literature in context? I can't say definitively that they aren't because the article doesn't address the matter, but NCLB doesn't mandate and DCPS doesn't give comparable history assessments so I am assuming that no, the context, aka history, is de-emphasized or not taught at all. A text's meaning is heavily dependent on the context in which it is written. Truly comprehending a text is heavily dependent on what you know already. This is not to claim that previously students learned about the history or content highlighted in conjunction with reading a text, but, again, the Common Core is supposed to be a vast improvement. You can't do a true close reading of a text and get much out it if you are ignorant of the context of the text-- a "close reading" of a "complex text" puts us in the same boat we were in with the old, supposedly inferior standards.

Finally, and this isn't a Common Core practice per se, but it's emblematic of the reformy approach of which the Common Core is a part: K-12 students aren't "scholars." You're a scholar when you're making a career of studying something, which K -12 students aren't doing yet. Calling them "scholars" doesn't make them so; it's patronizing and propagandistic.

So far students of the Common Core ELA Standards seem to be attacking decontextualized isolated passages and practicing reading strategies which can't be practiced. And there is nothing scholarly or reformed about that.


UPDATE: A critical response to the same article from Lisa Hansel of the Core Knowledge Foundation is posted on the WaPo's Answer Sheet.

Sex, Shit 'n Standardized Testing!

First, there was this:

"You get this rage up that we're wasting time testing, and you're making testing shorter and shittier," Coleman said at a Brookings panel Thursday.

That's David Coleman, one of the architects of the Common Core English & Language Arts Standards, and president of the College Board. This isn't the first time Coleman has cursed when speaking publicly about education. Several months ago, he reportedly said in another public speaking engagement, “as you grow up in this world, you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”

But people do give a shit about what language you use. As I always tell my students, cursing is not wrong, but there's a time and a place for it and an art to it, and school and academic work (making exceptions for creative writing, but you still have to have a justification for it there) are not some of them. Furthermore, I tell them, when you curse instead of using other words, people think you're not smart, that you're not articulate. And, it lets me, as a teacher, know that you need more vocabulary enrichment.

How are we take one of the lead advocates of the more "rigorous" and intellectual ELA Common Core Standards seriously when he doesn't see fit to use appropriate, professional, and specific language when advocating for the standards and for their accompanying tests. Coleman may be thinking I'm brash, but all I can think is, No, you're full of disdain. Disdain for teachers, disdain for students, and disdain for engaging in any process of education reform.

It also epitomizes a chasm in status and experience between reformers like Coleman and the students they are trying to help. What would happen if a student were to use the word "shit" or "shittier" in a Common Core aligned essay exam? How about on the writing section of the SAT? How about on the College Board's AP English exam? What happens when students curse in school, especially at a "no excuses" school with a rigid, zero-tolerance code of conduct? A white elite like Coleman can curse without consequence in public academic or professional settings, while a poor black kid using the same profanity publicly in a KIPP-esque school would likely face severe consequences.

In the same article, there's this other pro-longer and -better testing statement quoted:

Such changes can bring anxiety for the test takers. Gerard Robinson, the former education chief of Florida and Virginia, put it this way: "I won't pretend that tests don't matter and there's no anxiety -- but I also tell people there's anxiety with sex. There's anxiety with sex, but there isn't any talk about getting rid of that."

Standardized testing is just like sex? What? This, from a former state education chief? Are you kidding me?!?! This guy is in charge of people who educate children? First of all, unlike Coleman's statement, this statement is not in any way logical. Second of all, and more gravely, it's indecent. 

Is that what I am supposed to say to my test-stressed children--that their anxiety surrounding high-stakes testing is just like anxiety surrounding sex? Is that supposed to help? What if a K-12 student asked critical questions about standardized testing and their teacher responded in the same fashion that Robinson answered? How would that go over? Wouldn't Campbell Brown come after him with a pitchfork? Finally, this statement indicates that Robinson, too, is disdainful of criticisms of high-stakes testing and that he refuses to engage with the substance of those criticisms. For teachers, for parents, and for students, this anxiety, this stress, is not a joke, and it's not like sex.

If people like Coleman and Robinson expect parents and teachers like me to take seriously what they say, they need show these topics some respect. Save that other kind of talk for the StudentsFirst locker room.

When the Common Core ELA Standards = Teaching Reading Strategies 2.0

This week, I have another post on the Core Knowledge Blog, this one about the Common Core,  complex text, and teaching reading strategies. It seems that some Common Core advocates are operating on the assumption that complex text is something you can explicitly teach kids to read. I see this as the same old reading strategies approach to literacy that hasn't been fruitful with the current reading standards. Until we change how we approach developing literacy (beyond decoding) differently, struggling readers will continue to struggle, no matter the standards:

Although I’ve been critical of the Common Core Standards, that they focus on reading strategies was not one of my criticisms; to the contrary, that they emphasized content knowledge, a greater study of literature, and more and more complex writing were selling points. But this account makes the Common Core ELA Standards sound as if they areskill-heavy, or at least that teachers are being guided to implement them as if they were. The problem is you can’t really teach something like “text complexity” any more than you can teach something like the “main idea.” Just because the texts are more “complex” doesn’t make using them in the place of simpler texts a superior approach or any different from the reading strategies approach. Apart from the acknowledgement that all teachers have to teach vocabulary (agreed), there’s no nod to background knowledge or context in Headden’s post. And even teaching vocabulary doesn’t do much good if it’s taught in isolation, though certainly explicitly teaching the meaning of morphemes can help students to build and make meaning of vocabulary.

Read all of it.

In Defense of Non-fiction

The overarching Common Core vs. No Common Core and Core Knowledge vs. Balanced Literacy debates (see this New York Times articleand this Learning Matters segment) have spawned another debate: fiction vs. non-fiction. I think this misses the point and causes their critics to unfairly tarnish “non-fiction” as a genre. My apprehensions about the Common Core Standards aside, just as I defended the lecture several posts ago, I feel compelled to defend non-fiction.

In the creative writing communities I’ve been a part of, there is debate over how much attention to pay to labels such as fiction and non-fiction or poetry and prose. Many advocate for sticking to the designations but others find it needlessly restrictive. Writers will critique the work of other writers not on what it does or what they learn from reading it but on whether it has the proper label affixed to it. This is a good piece of work, but is this really poetry? To which I want to respond: Does it matter? Is that the most worthwhile thing to talk about here? Why get hung up on labels? Literature is literature. Because of the This American Life-Mike Daisey scandal, a similar questioning of David Sedaris’ work is being mounted, but Sedaris is not a scientist or journalist. Does it change his contribution to the understanding of humanity that he’s embellished or made some stuff up, that his work might include fictional accounts? Not in my mind, it doesn’t.

There is a fantastic interview in The Paris Review with John McPhee about his formative experiences as a high school English student, the writing life, being a non-fiction writer, and teaching writing. Here is an excerpt that reflects some of the debates that occur around discussions of labels and fiction vs. non-fiction:

Interviewer: Was there any significant change in terms of interest, or in the way that people viewed nonfiction writing? 

McPhee: The only significant change is that, in a general way, nonfiction writing began to be regarded as more than something for wrapping fish. It acquired various forms of respectability. When I was in college, no teacher taught anything that was like the stuff that I write. The subject was beneath the consideration of the academic apparatus.

Sometime during the eighties I was invited to do a reading at the University of Utah, and I accepted. And several weeks later, the person who approached me got back in touch and said he was really embarrassed and sorry. While he had wanted me to come to Utah and do a reading and talk to students, his colleagues did not. They didn’t approve of the genre I write in. I wrote back to him and said that I really appreciated his wanting me to be there. And certainly I didn’t feel anything toward him but gratitude, but as for his colleagues—when they come into the twentieth century I’ll be standing under a lamp looking at my watch. 

Interviewer: What do you call the type of writing you do? Your course at Princeton has sometimes been called The Literature of Fact and sometimes Creative Nonfiction. 

McPhee: I prefer to call it factual writing. Those other titles all have flaws. But so does fiction. Fiction is a weird name to use. It doesn’t mean anything—it just means “made” or “to make.” Facere is the root. There’s no real way to lay brackets around something and say, This is what it is. The novelists that write terrible, trashy, horrible stuff; the people that write things that change the world by their loftiness: fiction. Well, it’s a name, and it means “to make.” Since you can’t define it in a single word, why not use a word that’s as simple as that?

Whereas nonfiction—what the hell, that just says, this is nongrapefruit we’re having this morning. It doesn’t mean anything. You had nongrapefruit for breakfast; think how much you know about that breakfast. I don’t object to any of these things because it’s so hard to pick—it’s like naming your kid. You know, the child carries that label all through life. 

Sound familiar? Non-fiction was, as science fiction is now (though in light of the recent New Yorker  "Science Fiction Issue," perhaps this is changing), a literary stepchild and remnants of that past disdain, of non-fiction as not being “serious” enough, remain. There are works of non-fiction that are great works and there are works of fiction that are junk. As a writer and voracious consumer of non-fiction, I bristle when critics of the Common Core disparage non-fiction as merely “instructional manuals” or “informational materials” (though, yes, kids need to learn how to read those, too. I, for one, would like for my kid to know how to read a bus schedule and dishwasher detergent directions). Non-fiction informs but it also contributes to our understanding of the human condition as much a fiction does.

As I said in my last post, it doesn’t help when CCS architect David Coleman diminishes fiction and student writing about “feelings," and requiring a fixed ratio of fiction to non-fiction is just as pointless as debating the worth of Sedaris' work based on the ratio of non-fictional to fictional accounts therein. So, yes, let’s beware of the Common Core, but let’s not dismiss non-fiction along the way. Two thoughtless assertions don’t make a thoughtful one.

Some Thoughts on the (ELA) Common Core Standards

The idea of having a basic, broad set of knowledge, concepts, and skills that all Americans should learn about, while leaving plenty of room for teacher discretion and creativity and plenty of time for going deeper, resonates with me. I also would like to see American schools stop teaching reading as a subject and, beyond teaching decoding and a limited teaching of reading strategies, stop teaching it as a transferable skill. Reading strategies are not something to be studied in depth, and teaching reading as a discrete subject is tedious for students and has crowded out the teaching of many other meaty subjects such as science, social studies, the arts, foreign language, literature, and English. When I look at the ELA Common Core Standards and compare them with the ELA/Reading SOLs (Virginia Standards of Learning) for elementary students, I want to cry. I desperately want my children to do more stuff that looks like the ELA CCS, i.e., more studying content, more reading literature, and more complex writing, and a lot less of reading strategies. In substance, the CCS (at least the ELA ones--I can't speak for the math ones) look like the closest thing to good that we're going to get in standards. hat all being said, the CCS make me very nervous. 


First of all, I don’t like the idea of privatizing, centralizing and mandating standards, curricula, assessments for public schools—I think they should be created and maintained under the auspices of public democratic institutions. 


Second, I don’t like that the CCS are being forced on states or on teachers—many teachers feel this is being done to them and not with them. This is a recipe for resentment and poor implementation. How have NCLB and RTTT worked out? That’s right, not well. I'm not confident about doing such things on a grand scale, especially when they are being handed down in such detailed, prescribed, and rigidity-inducing manner. If we could have the CCS without pairing it with the current accountability structure I'd feel much differently about it. The current accountability structure corrupts almost everything that gets filtered through it. Also, yes, the logistics of financing and selling all of the materials and assessments and sorting out matters of intellectual property, all of that gives me pause given the way our economy and financial system is structured right now. I am suspicious of much that gets filtered through that, too. 


And it doesn’t help when CCS architect David Coleman’s talking points includes dismissing student writing about “feelings.” And like so many percentages in education policy (e.g., the “lowest 5% of schools” must get turned around or the “lowest 5% of teachers” must be fired because as long we’re employing certain statistical models there will ALWAYS be a lowest 5%, no matter how satisfactorily anyone is performing and there will always be students not progressing within that same continuum if they’re already performing at 90 – 100%), I find it ridiculously arbitrary that teachers will now be mandated to teach a certain ratio of texts to other texts.


Kathleen Porter-Magee talks about allowing and learning from the Common Core’s failures, about seeing what works and what doesn’t. Yes! Great idea! Let's pilot them! Ooops. The CCS are already terribly far away from any tweaking stage--they're going straight to the big time. I believe teachers when they say the CCS are being rammed down their throats and that in many cases the standards and expectations are developmentally appropriate for our younger students (again, how well has NCLB heeded developmentally appropriate practices, especially for ELLs, given what language acquisition research has shown us). The current accountability structure does not allow for failure, even healthy failure. It's premised on the idea that failure is entirely intolerable, that it is the problem.


Finally, even if we accept that the ELA CCS are superior to most states' current ELA standards, that they're more intellectual and more conducive to critical thinking (and I don't know enough to claim that they do or are), it's going to be very hard to implement them in an intellectual spirit if they're being interpreted and handed down in a decidedly rigid, anti-intellectual manner. Furthermore, if systems that are adopting them are purging the more intellectual, knowledgeable, and critically thinking teachers such as the one I discussed in this post, there won't be anyone left who has the subject knowledge and experience enough to implement them as their architects say they are to be implemented. Autocracy does not beget democracy and no matter how fit and hard working they are, good athletes won't make good soccer coaches if they know next to nothing about the game and about good coaching.


I have no horse in this race, no reason to hope the the CCS will fail, but I think my skepticism is well founded. If I'm wrong about this, I shall only be glad.


UPDATE: My next post is a follow-up to this one.