In my first meeting with School Improvement Team leaders at a local high school, I was asked about the future of the Common Core State Standards in Michigan. The legislature has committed some funding to implementation, but nothing yet to the huge investment required for the Smarter Balanced Assessment, the testing component of the CCSS. So we are at a crossroads.
I replied that I didn’t know the future of the Common Core in Michigan, but I hoped we could preserve the principles of literacy across the curriculum and the residue of common language for talking about writing in every subject. To which the social studies coordinator replied,
“That’s o.k. Teachers are used to working with the residue of policies.” It was a somber moment as we all nodded in agreement and moved on.
Although the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) could be described as wishful thinking, one requirement that could transform secondary education is literacy across the curriculum. From the early roll out of English Language Arts standards the CCSS has portrayed reading and writing as integral to all disciplinary subjects. This was before the actual standards for science and social studies were even laid out. As a teacher of writing and writing teachers, I’m hoping that whatever else happens to the CCSS, this will be the residue of reform.
I’m sure literacy across the curriculum is not universally welcomed in departments of science and social studies across Michigan, but I’ve heard teachers say they appreciate having a common language with which to talk about writing in their subject areas. I’d never considered how important such language was to curriculum reform, but the lack of common language may be the greatest impediment to reform across the curriculum.
In the teaching of writing, here are some words now in circulation across the curriculum, because of the Common Core State Standards:
Argument, claims, counter-claims, evidence, reasons Informative/ explanatory, style appropriate to the discipline and context short as well as more sustained research projects; Craft and structure Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research, reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) Writing teachers will find the language both commonplace and controversial. The distinction between argumentative and explanatory texts can be arbitrary, and the subordination of narrative text-types to more analytical types stokes long-smoldering fires of controversy. Much of the language is borrowed from the research and assessment practices of the NAEP, our only true national test of achievement, but that may add to its usefulness, in spite of its association with standardized testing. While the NAEP persists as a national testing instrument, the vocabulary of writing could prevail, despite the erosion of reform.
School reform in K-12 schools, and especially urban schools, has consisted of a carousel of new programs every seven years or so for the past decades. Frederick Hess argued that much of what ails urban education is actually the result of continuous or fragmentary reform. Hess explained that political incentives drive school superintendents to promote reforms – to demonstrate that they are “making a difference.” Superintendents have to do this quickly, both because their tenure is usually three years or less and because urban communities are impatient to see educational improvement. However, the literacy culture of urban school districts makes it very difficult to demonstrate short-term improvement, especially on standardized tests. The result is what Hess terms “policy churn,” which distracts teachers and principals from efforts to improve teaching, while seldom resulting in successful long-term changes (http://www.frederickhess.org/books/spinning-wheels). “Policy churn” explains why reform is short-lived, and why teachers have come to dismiss it.
The teachers who represent the only stable identity of a school in perpetual transition find the process both futile and laughable. They portray themselves as survivors of endless cycles of reform, viewing each new regime with a jaundiced eye. Many of these survivors are targeted by new principals and superintendents as impediments to reform, but they remain on the job long after their administrators have sought higher and more visible office in education. Their reforms evaporate with them.
So, if schools have an identity, it is in the survivors, who have latched onto the “residue of reform,” and adapt to the changing demography and teaching conditions in the school. As in nature, the survivors are those who successfully adapt to, but also change, the environment to make it a niche for their success.
But it would be a mistake to assume that “the more things change, the more things remain the same” in education. After decades of programmatic reform, the research and practice has finally fixed on the teacher as the crucial element of reform. Ironically this could be the legacy of “No Child Left Behind,” because teaching to the test and scripted teaching were perceived as the most direct means to improving test scores. While such practices have not contributed to the professionalization of teachers, they have made U.S. reformers pay closer attention to the preparation and professional development of teachers, something the rest of the developed world caught onto in the 1990’s. So the means of reform in the United States has finally moved on from programs to teachers.
But how we view teachers has not changed, and that has turned the reform of teaching into coercion and manipulation. Teachers are not viewed as the solution, but the problem. Teachers have been defined as replaceable parts, with a career-expectancy of 3-5 years by such institutions as “Teach for America.” Eighty percent of graduates of TFA leave teaching after three years, but that is not considered a problem by TFA. Rather it is a means for teachers to advance into politically powerful professions.
The career teachers, those “left behind,” will be the actual implementers of reform or the “residue of reform.” Does this mean the Common Core State Standards will meet the same fate as other generations of reform? Can we safely predict that within seven years, or four years from now, the Common Core will have run its course and the purveyors of the status quo will be vindicated?
As a teacher of writing and of teachers of writing, I want to say “no,” because the legacy of the Common Core could be “literacy across the curriculum,” which writing teachers have advocated for decades. It could be wishful thinking, but when I hear secondary teachers welcoming the “common language” that the CCSS has brought to writing pedagogy, I hear a commitment to more than temporary reform. The idea that writing can improve teaching in all other disciplines is timely and credible. Writing in the disciplines might well be the residue of the reform of the Common Core.
What we learn again from the cycle of educational reform is that the survivors are the teachers, not the programs, and the teachers carry forward what is essential in every reform. I don’t mean the “rent-a-teachers” who come to education as a transition in their professional lives, the ones that TFA founder Wendy Kipp expect to influence educational policies in their future incarnations as national leaders. (How is that working out? See Reign of Error by Diane Ravitch). I mean, rather, those who stay in teaching long enough to influence a school culture or improve a program.
These teachers are not the problem, but the solution, because they implement the residue of reform in their own classrooms and support like-minded colleagues in the same. True, every survivor is not a reformer, but it is also true that those who do not adapt do not survive in school, as in nature. So the career teachers are the vital link to implement the residue of reform.
We learn something else from the history of school reform. Reforms should not be trashed or discredited wholesale. Education needs continuity, as well as change, so teachers, teacher educators, and policy-makers should learn to preserve what is useful, rather than nullifying reforms because of their bad associations. While we may rail against the the purveyors of the Common Core State Standards, we may yet find principles or methods worth preserving, and we should resist “policy churn,” which keeps teachers off balance through endless cycles of reform. Continuity is not the same as the status quo. It is necessary for school improvement.
So even as we stand on the threshold of school reform, represented by the Common Core State Standards, we should consider how schools will be changed in the long view and how we can preserve a reform mentality. Teaching will be changed by career teachers, who can negotiate the conflicts of a stressful learning environment by implementing the residue of reform. That residue and the teachers who survive to incorporate it should be the targets for investment in schools, not the “rent-a-teacher” programs like Teach for America. And if that residue is the infusion of literacy across the curriculum, it would make this teacher very happy.