Common Core Standards

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The Common Core Standards: Reflections on the Race to Oblivion

The right says it’s a dangerous national curriculum. The left says it’s a threat to teacher autonomy.  Some states immediately devised tests to measure the “rigor” of their math and English language arts programs, while others have recently dropped the standards, considering them badly-aligned with their own curricula.  The Common Core State Standards, rather than unifying the goals of K-12 education, have become a stage for political theater. And this is the first turn onto the road to oblivion in educational reform.

Regardless of which side you take, you have to wonder whether the notion of “common” in school curricula has a future in the United States. Many teachers welcomed the notion of standards consistent from state to state (Education Week, May 12, 2014). With a mobile school population, there was a chance for continuity when families moved across the country.  There was a chance for national discussions of how the curricula would be locally implemented. And there was a new playing field where international competition looked beatable.

But when the federal government stepped in to validate the Common Core with “The Race to the Top,” it began to look like “No Child Left Behind” all over again.  Education Secretary Arne Duncan dangled millions in funding to states who would adopt the Common Core and connected the evaluation of teachers to adhering to the Standards. Immediately forty-four states adopted them and the “Race to the Top” was on.

As soon as pilot tests were developed in New York, and students performed poorly on them, it was clear that the Standards would be used against the schools, not to reform them.  Teacher evaluations were already being designed to expose the achievement gap between student performance and the Standards and to reward or punish teachers accordingly.  This short-sighted implementation is inevitably its death knell.  Since “A Nation at Risk,” when Education Secretary William Bennett tried to set states in competition over SAT scores, the popularizers of tests and accountability have doomed curriculum reform by turning it into assess-and-punish policy.  The vision of learning from the standards has been replaced by the spectacle of being disgraced by the standards.

Many teachers find it impossible to separate standards from the tests that evaluate them, because teachers have become the targets of “reform”  instead of the instruments of it.  The blunt and arbitrary instrument of multiple-choice tests is the crudest known tool of reform.  It makes teachers the problem, instead of understanding the complexity of failing schools. It turns standards into implements of punishment, rather than frameworks for improvement.

Curriculum standards, and the Common Core State Standards in particular, are not the problem when it comes to school reform.  The CCSS are general and selective when it comes to implementation.  They are “general” because they broadly address certain academic skills associated with “college readiness.” And they are selective in the sense that they don’t purport to be a comprehensive school curriculum, because they exclude the arts, the occupations, and health and physical education. None of these areas are optional components of a K-12 curriculum.

Schools should be considering the infusion of the Common Core Standards into a comprehensive curriculum, not displacing the full scope and sequence and then evaluating teachers based primarily on their students testing well on hastily-constructed assessments. School reform should not be a “Race to the Top.” It is more like cardiology rehabilitation, where the health of one organ is promoted by changes in diet, exercise, lifestyle, medication, and careful monitoring. Imagine treating cardiac patients by offering them bonuses for winning a triathalon.

As soon as citizens and tax-payers realized their children were at risk in this awkward implementation of reform, the drum-beat against the Standards began.  Politicians, with their ears always to the ground, realized the CCSS reform bandwagon was about to crash and were quick to jump off.

The same cycle began to turn with “No Child Left Behind,” when it was clear a lot of children were being left behind because of poor performances on standardized tests. And further, the “Texas Miracle” was exposed as manipulating school enrollments and teaching to the test. Most urban schools were not improving, as the early adopters had claimed.  They were merely gaming the system.

We are witnessing deja vu with the Common Core State Standards, because the testing establishment has once again seized control. State legislatures have conflated the Standards with the tests and the public outcry. Indiana and North Carolina have passed legislation to slow, if not stop implementation. Republicans have found attacking the Standards harmonizes nicely with federal de-regulation. Democrats have heard from their teacher constituencies and see the CCSS as a potential albatross in the midterm and Presidential elections.  Now it appears the Standards are descending from the zenith.

Veteran teachers are tired of “curriculum du’jour” that upsets their classrooms every ten years.  They cynically view each reform movement as a passing phase, and their predictions have proven true.  This cyclic implementation and dismantling of curricula harms students as well. They march from K to 12 as the wheels of reform halt and switch gears again and again. Reform has interrupted the growth of learning, rather than nurturing it.

There is usually something worth preserving in reform movements. Rather than sacrificing the current standards to the whim of politicians, school leaders should be salvaging the worthy parts of the Common Core.  With the Common Core there’s literacy across the curriculum; the recursive nature of the proficiencies; and the separation of proficiencies from content requirements, among its possible virtues.  These parts can grafted into new ideas for reform. Teachers understand that good practices can endure, while the bad practices can be culled and carried out back to the heap of futile expectations. Only politicians believe that reform programs must be canonized or shot, depending on what the lobbyists are saying that week.

The Common Core’s most significant contribution has been the distribution of literacy proficiencies across the curriculum. The notion that reading and writing should be taught in the context of the discipline of study is not new, but the CCSS made literacy central to academic study and charged teachers in each subject to model their practices of reading and writing in the context of their subject area. So when students would do research in U.S. History, they would learn how to cite valid historical evidence and imitate the style historians use to interpret history.  The teaching of reading and writing of all matters would no longer be relegated to one teacher, but to a team of content teachers: English, social studies, science and math.

If we could dispense with the metaphor of racing to the top, we could reflect on the baggage we’re carrying there. It would be a shame to cast away the consequential reform of literacy across the curriculum with the refuse of the Common Core, and it is hopefully not too late rescue it.  The CCSS might yet return to its 2013 glory, but just in case it doesn’t, I wanted to recognize its contribution.

Before politicians take it off to be shot or hang it from the highest tree.

 

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Products or Patients?

The New York Times’ Sunday Dialogue this week raises the question: Will a new set of standards and more tests help students?

The Common Core Standards have been praised, maligned and scrutinized, but mostly they have been mythologized as the solution to academic mediocrity. This comes from a business-model of product control. If you raise the quality standards, the product will improve.

The dangerous inference of this model is that testing controls the quality of students graduating from our schools.  To anyone confounded by the problem of mediocrity in the public schools, this is a seductive model, and it has driven school reform for at least fifteen years.

Rather than treating students as products, we should treat them as patients, not because they are sick, but because the decisions we make regarding their education are as complex as medical care, not as simplistic as product control.

The standardized test is the equivalent of taking a patient’s temperature: it can tell us if something is wrong, but not what. It is a crude instrument of screening. What does the doctor do with raw information? She checks it against other observations such as case history, other vital signs, and the patient’s reports.  The doctor makes a diagnosis and says, “Call me in a week, if the condition doesn’t improve.”  She does not use the body temperature to diagnose anything and the actual diagnosis is tentative.

We trust doctors because they are cautious, but methodical, in their diagnoses and, if we are good patients, we try to participate and make suggestions to be sure we are regaining our health. We understand that medicine has side-effects and diagnoses are tentative. Why do we assume testing of our minds is definitive and students are malleable products we can improve based on a single test score?

Cost. It costs a lot more to keep a patient healthy than to improve a product for the market.  Yet if we were asked if our children are more like products or patients, would any of us say they were “products”?

So we take the cheap way out: we test and fail and make our students better test-takers to improve their performance.  Or we use the tests to drive the curriculum by posting the standards on the board each day and focus our students’ attention on the product, instead of the process. That process is called “learning-how-to-learn.”

If we expect anything but the usual frustration with testing and failure, we have to invest more in our students. We need smaller classes, more collaboration of the professionals within the school, more professional development about how to use test results, more support of family literacy, and more collaboration between pre-service education and the schools.

The cost will be the hiring of more teachers, more hours in the school day for collaboration, more hours after school for professional development and family literacy, and more time devoted to training novice teachers in the schools.  Schools will become more like hospitals, where multiple measurements, collaboration across specialties, and a continuum of professional education from internship to residency has been the norm for decades.

Why would we ignore this superb model of professional practice operating right under our noses? Money. It’s cheaper to treat students like products than patients. We already spend too much medical care.

Yet, while the medical profession is learning to economize, education could be learning to assess and collaborate with the care and precision of medicine.  Eventually we will learn to control medical costs and to treat students with the dignity of primary care patients.

Unless we continue to treat students as products and their improvement as product control.

 

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Stop Teaching Writing?

In the recent edition of Education Week (September 21, 2011 ), Paula Stacey describes the many travesties of teaching writing inspired by a decade of standards and textbooks that function like cookbooks.*  Most of these anecdotes are from her personal teaching experience, and they ring with authenticity. Her conclusion is to “Stop Teaching Writing” and merely ask questions and consider the answers.  She does not define the characteristic challenge of teaching writing, which is, to echo the venerable Don Murray, “Teach the Process, Not the Product.”

The problem is that teaching writing is not teaching to the standards or teaching by the book. It is teaching the writer first,  then the writing. A  great writing teacher views the writer as an actor, the writing as the rehearsal, and the standards as the critics, who like to have the last word. In the tentative bursts of language students produce in writing classes, the teacher sees a performer with talents that can be coached. The standards are the afterthought, not the dialogue in the drama. The textbook is the proposal, not the script, for the play.

The teacher seems to be a director in this metaphor. When actors praise directors, they always seem to appreciate their ability to bring out the best in the actor, to understand the capabilities the actor brings to the performance. They never comment on the good reviews they received, because of the director’s savvy anticipation of the critics. Rather they admire the director’s making the most of what they bring to the drama.

Another reason to like this theatrical metaphor is that rehearsals become the focus of growth.  Rarely will anyone pay to see a rehearsal, but if you wanted to see how a play comes alive that would be the place to be. No one expects perfect performance in rehearsals, but what you can observe is the evolution of the actor and character as they perform the same scene over and over again. So it is with writers and writing.

Educators have been more fond of metaphors of teachers as sculptors or master gardeners. Although these analogies ennoble the profession, attributing depths of understanding and skill to teaching, they fail to characterize the student as an agent of learning. Statues and lilies have very little initiative in their growth. They appear more as artifacts fashioned by the skill of the artist. These metaphors miss the point about teaching writing. It is very dependent on the participation of the writer.

When teachers formulate writing, they minimize that participation. Yet every writing teacher is prey to this tendency, because every teacher wants to make learning easier for students.  The good writing teacher will read the results of these formulations and consider why the writing seems lifeless or so uniform throughout the class. The answer will often be traced to the dimensions of the writing assignment or the graphic organizer that choked the writing in its attempt to provide structure.  Teachers with the souls of directors will bring a new approach to the next rehearsal.

Unless directors are not teachers, then writing can be taught.  Like the performance, writing is taught in the rehearsals with the focus on the actor and the actor’s capabilities. The actor is never asked to  be a macho super-hero if he is built slightly with a boyish face. The actress is not required to rely on feminine wiles, if she is tall and muscular. The director teaches to their strengths, while coaching their flexibility.

So, if we are not obsessed with our reviews or expect our performers to excel at their weaknesses, we can teach writing.  It may not look pretty, but that’s what rehearsals are for.

* http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/09/21/04stacey.h31.html?tkn=LLWFXCotiHDKc1Q1skAZmvCV5dLFk4ogMpLQ&cmp=ENL-EU-VIEWS1

 

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The Deliberate and the Driven

To be college and career ready writers, students must take task, purpose and audience into careful consideration, choosing words, information, structures and formats deliberately.

They must have the flexibility, concentration, and fluency to produce high-quality first draft text under a tight deadline and the capacity to revisit and make improvements to a piece of writing over multiple drafts when circumstances encourage or require it. (“College and Career Anchor Standards for Writing” 63)

Reading the Common Core State Standards, teachers of writing come away with a mixed message. Writing is described as rich in thought and content, but sometimes it is quick and dirty and sometimes it is careful and reconsidered. Both are true, but  it leaves open  the question of how to teach writing.

The above passages, from the  CCSS sidebar titled “Range and content of student writing,” illustrate how our national standards for writing are torn between the deliberate and the driven. In the first sentence, the words “careful consideration” and “deliberately” stand out.  This emphasizes that writing is a process. In the second sentence, the key words seem to be “high-quality first draft text under a tight deadline,”  which suggests the need for a “quick and dirty” approach.  However this is followed by a disclaimer which urges the “capacity to revisit and make improvements to a piece of writing.”  Then,  lest we become too leisurely in the process of writing, the final phrase cautions “when circumstances encourage or require it.”

The beauty of these contradictions about “range and content of student writing” is that they are probably all true. Writing is both deliberate and driven, according to the purpose and occasion. It would be petty to insist that the standards for writing be unwavering and consistent, because writing is not like that.

What does annoy me is that we assess only the “driven” side of writing, the world of desperation and deadlines. The language about “high-quality first draft text” is an obvious rationale for the impromptu essay, written in thirty minutes or less and unapologetically assessed as “first-draft writing.” This how the ACT, the College Board, and most state assessments evaluate writing.   The question is “Of what social or professional value is first draft writing?” Or “Why be driven?”

Some professional roles dictate a “high-quality first draft text under a tight deadline.” Newspaper reporters come to mind.  Office scribes — secretaries, document drafters, those who write for their bosses — may be required to write under short deadlines.  For some reason, this remarkable skill is often uncompensated and yet under-girds the other forms of writing that allow newspapers to publish and businesses to function.  It is a valuable skill, but not always valued.

Every other kind of writing falls under the “capacity to revisit and make improvements,” and it is the kind of writing most respected in journalism and commerce.  Feature articles, Op-ed articles, Topical columns, Investigative articles. Project or marketing proposals, contracts, human resources documents, end-user documents, public relations documents.  No one writes these in one draft or under unreasonable time constraints. Oh yes, deadlines will sometimes be sudden and arbitrary, but no one considers high pressure the formula for good writing. And writing in journalism, law and business is incurably collaborative. Numerous pairs of eyes must examine work in progress and editors may insist on putting their mark on it, even a controversial comma.

In the “real world” the writing process is alive and well and respected. Only in school is it considered a sideline, producing the kind of writing pored over by teachers, but rarely high stakes, rarely a standard for “success.”  The writing that counts is “driven” writing.  It is the kind of writing most students claim they are good at.  Why? Because that is the kind of writing we assess for success.  To many students the quickwrite is the money genre, the one that counts.  Students who claim they can write well, but need time, seem to be asking for special consideration. They are somehow deficient because their writing process is an actual process.

To be college and career ready writers, students must take task, purpose and audience into careful consideration, choosing words, information, structures and formats deliberately.

Deliberation. To me that describes what writers really do.  It comes from a Middle English word meaning to “balance or weigh.” Writers balance “task, purpose and audience . . . words, information, structures and formats.” That’s a lot of balancing, and it will not be easily executed in thirty minutes. It will be executed  . . . deliberately.  Writing teachers’ message to their students is to “trust the process.” The message of our standardized assessments is “Get ‘er done.”

. . . choosing words, information, structures and formats deliberately.

It is comforting to see deliberation validated in the Common Core State Standards. It gives dignity to writing and the teaching of writing.  Now if it would only be reinforced by the Common Core State Assessments. The Deliberate . . . not the Driven.

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A Shared or Shackling Curriculum?

The call of 75 national leaders for a common curriculum to accompany the emerging national standards for English language arts and mathematics should be considered judiciously by educators.  The position that schools should categorically resist a common curriculum for some fraction of the school year may be too extreme. However, the impact of such a curriculum on the individual classroom may be seriously underestimated by its proponents.

Curriculum reformers  need to borrow a phrase from the physician’s oath: “First, do no harm.”

School reformers at the highest levels usually underestimate the disruption that a “voluntary” curriculum can cause in K-12 classrooms.  What is pronounced as a friendly suggestion comes down through superintendents and principals as a high priority mandate to teachers. Why? Because their schools will now be judged by how well they perform on the goals of this “voluntary” curriculum.  Curricular pressure on teachers is completely understandable, in this case, because superintendents and principals are judged entirely on their students’ performance on the “voluntary” curriculum.

Moreover,  the ELA and mathematics standards now being touted are a culmination of numerous prerequisite standards that are not firmly in place in some schools, especially struggling high schools.  Take the new standard for reading that involves analysis of so-called “foundational documents” of U.S. History:

Analyze seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth-century foundational U.S. documents of historical and literary significance (including the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, , and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address) for their themes, purposes and rhetorical features (Reading Standards for Informational Text, 6-12, #9)

As worthy a goal as this appears, it comprises so many sub-goals that it might generate a whole new course of study: 1- arcane vocabulary (“a well-regulated militia”?) 2- rhetorical strategies (ever read a “declaration” before?) 3- historical context (what was happening before that “Second Inaugural Address”?) 4- ambiguity (why does no one agree on the First Amendment?) 5- genre (what is  the effect of a”preamble” and the “amendments” on the whole?) 6- syntax ( how does the adverbial clause affect the main clause?) 7- themes (how is the Red Badge of Courage connected to the Inaugural Address?)   8- context and interpretation (how has the meaning changed over time?)

Sometimes I think curriculum and standards writers imagine that topics will merely be “covered” in the classroom and students will be tested on the gist of the meaning. These same writers will then complain that students do not read closely or rigorously and thus stumble on the challenging tasks presented by international tests of reading. Because the curriculum and standards writers have no, or very distant, classroom experience, they forget that “covering” a text does not produce good readers. When new and historically remote texts are added to a curriculum they multiply the topics and the time needed to address them. Nothing worth reading  should be merely “covered.” It should be studied.

The time consumed by these curriculum “suggestions” displaces effective curricula, which may involve students choosing texts to read, genre for writing, and language strategies to address, related to these choices.  The growing edge of writing and speaking, especially, involves reading and writing about non-canonical texts, i.e. texts that relate to students’ daily experiences.   I know curriculum writers tend to belittle young adult texts, even though they are proliferating in subject matter and quality. They assume students are not being challenged by age-appropriate subject matter.

But students learn to write and speak by addressing books and topics from their own experiences, topics which include, conformity, integrity, decision-making, respect, loyalty, independence. These lessons are assimilated and expressed through age-appropriate reading and viewing.  Writing and speaking are complex skills that are first tested on familiar ground before racheting up the difficulty of reading and listening.  Active classroom teachers understand how to bring students up to more challenging texts by “successive approximation.”  Those who abandoned teaching years ago have forgotten that teaching is a continuum of experiences from the familiar context to the remote centuries and cultures. These familiar and age-appropriate texts should not be carelessly discarded in favor of new curricula.

New curricula have a ripple effect on existing curricula, starting as a trickle and ending with a tidal wave.  Curriculum writers may anticipate the trickle and perhaps the stream of curricular change, but seldom do they understand the torrent of prerequisite goals they have unleashed with their “modest proposals.”  They expect to influence the teaching of English and mathematics, but they have no concept of how they may throttle the curriculum from top to bottom.

If a “shared curriculum” can be introduced with the caveat that the best of local curriculum can be preserved, then the change could be beneficial. We could have cross-district and cross-state dialogues about how to infuse these new topics with the old.  We could have celebrations of successful learning units around these topics.  We could have the joy of shared goals, successfully implemented.

But a shared curriculum requires respect for the those who implement it. It should come in increments, with funding for teachers to develop their own units, with  grace periods for implementation, and with caveats for school administrators who fret about test scores. It should be shared constructively and deliberately with schools, not delivered like a subpoena.

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How Long to Make a Teacher?

The “Op-Chart” in the Sunday Times takes a fascinating look at the incubation of “street cops,” “Presidents,” and “Lawyers,” and many other roles and processes. It takes three years to make a good street cop, four years to make a President, five years to make a lawyer and six years to make a friend. I could not help but wonder: How long to make a teacher?

In every case the relationship between formal education and experience is the crucial variable. You can learn everything you should know about the principles of law in three years or the essentials of education in two years of schooling, but applying that knowledge to real cases and real students is the most critical phase of the incubation period.  In fact “Teach for America” made its reputation on shortening the formal instruction of a teacher and intensifying the field experience, essentially making it “on-the-job” training.

You can make a case for a teacher’s learning curve beginning with a year of formal preparation, followed by two years of hard knocks in the classroom, as the TFA model would advocate.  Research has shown that the students of these teachers are performing nearly at the same level as traditionally-prepared teachers at the end of two years in the classroom.  As I noted in “School Reform: the Popular Narrative”

In a follow-up to this study, the alternatively certified teachers registered significant gains in their students’ scores in mathematics after two years of teaching and completed certification.  However, 80% of the Teach for America recruits had left teaching by year four. Only 30% of the traditionally prepared teachers had left teaching in the fourth year (Darling-Hammond 47).

So, by the standards of Teach for America it takes two years to make a teacher and three years to disillusion one.  Arguably the reward system of TFA does not promote longevity in teaching, but I would argue that something else is going on in that third year, based on my own experience in the classroom and the experience of teachers who attend our Summer Invitational Institute for teachers of writing.

As the current Common Core State Standards reveal, there are two kinds of learning in English Language Arts and in the other academic subjects: formal content and “capacities of the literate individual.”  The “capacities” are given cursory attention in the ELA section of the Common Core State Standards. Among them are “independence,” “adapting their communication in relation to audience, task, purpose, and discipline,” “comprehending and critiquing,” “citing specific evidence,” “using technology and digital media capably,” and understanding “other perspectives and cultures” (7)

For most teachers the centrality of these “capacities” or “habits of mind,” as they are often called, becomes evident after three years of teaching to a formal curriculum, i.e. the standards in place in their state or district.  They discover, by trial and error, that students fail to consolidate what they learn in the formal curriculum because they are not acquiring the necessary “habits of mind” along the way. They discover that habits of mind are not casually absorbed in the process of mastering the content of the curriculum, but must be taught explicitly as part of the curriculum.

This is where the Common Core State Standards misses the mark. It treats the processes of learning as incidental to the content of learning and gives the processes, i.e. the habits, short shrift. Every teacher who makes it beyond the second year of teaching eventually becomes aware of the centrality of these “habits,” and it either inspires them to reinvent their teaching or drives them out of the profession.

There are many reasons for teachers leaving the profession, but I would argue this is a significant cause: the discovery that teaching is not only the delivery of content, but the assimilation of hard-won habits.  And I would argue that this is a developmental process. You have to watch students learn and forget before you see the underpinnings of that learning, the habits, the meta-cognitive skills, the conscious disciplines.

Although teacher educators emphasize the so-called “critical” and “meta-cognitive” skills in the preparation of teachers, there is only so much about habits you can internalize without watching students trying to operate without them.  To truly get the meaning of “habits of mind” you need to see what happens in their absence, what is happening in many, if not most, high school classrooms today. This is a late-developing awareness for most teachers. To be frank, my own understanding of the significance of these habits came during my eighth and ninth years of teaching English.  I knew the essential truth of “habits of mind,” but I didn’t recognize their impact on my students until then.

So how long to make a teacher? Four years at best, and for the slow learners like me, eight, nine or ten years.  To think that teachers are made by the straightforward delivery of the formal curriculum is to maintain a short-sighted view of education. It is the unfortunate view of the current Common Core State Standards and the microwaved preparation of teachers modeled by Teach for America.

I think the Chinese proverb paraphrased in today’s Times says it best: It takes ten years to sharpen a sword (New York Times, p. 9).

Darling-Hammond, Linda. The Flat World and Education. New York: Teachers College Press, 2010.

Common Core State Standards Initiative: English Language Arts and Literacy in History/ Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects, 2010.

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The Seed on the Path

When anyone hears the message about the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what was sown in the heart. This is the seed sown along the path (Matt 13:19).

The difference between hearing and understanding has been pondered by educators since long before Jesus and ever afterward. It is not limited to the word of God. It is current in our demand  for  “rigor” and “college readiness.”  It is inherent in the notion of literacy as a structure built on a foundation–each year new standards are added to the structure, which ascends toward the gates of the college of your choice.

The notion of “cultural literacy,” that we are what we have read, supports the edifice metaphor of literacy.  Our knowledge is sequentially built upon classical authors, like Hawthorne, Shakespeare, and Ben Franklin, and we are judged illiterate in proportion to the texts we have not read.  Sometimes we mock those who claim to be educated, yet have not read our honored texts. What, you call yourself a high school graduate, but never read Hamlet?

Literacy is more like an organic process, like the body absorbing food for growth. Readers and writers process language selectively, and turn it into living tissue. It is not like we absorb protein at a certain age and vitamins later on. We absorb them as our body requires them and turn them into something living and functional. The body’s demand for iron and calcium very much depends on our age and gender.

“Understanding” a text is the kind of rigor we should advocate. “Understanding” means that we assimilate what we read, as the body assimilates nutrients from food.  You know what happens to the food we don’t assimilate. In cases where understanding is not part of the reading experience, nothing is assimilated. It is all waste.

The point is not what we hear, as Jesus said, or what we “decode,” as cognitive theorists currently say, but of “understanding.”  You can read Animal Farm in sixth grade or Romeo and Juliet in eighth grade, but what do you get out of them? Perhaps a good story and certainly “exposure” to a canonical text, but what about “understanding”?  In many cases you get a lifetime of alienation from allegory and Shakespeare, because the reading was so distant from the understanding.

Many adolescents hate reading, not because they are addicted to visual and social media, but because their understanding of assigned texts is so cloudy. They would give up on video games as well, if their computer monitor lost its resolution or if the enjoyment of the game relied on an extensive background in the canonical games of yore. They can be seduced by reading that addresses developmentally appropriate issues and that challenges their thinking at their own level.

Why do we now have a version of Huckleberry Finn that purges the “N-word?” Because we treat reading as though it were hearing. I am offended by those who use that word in my hearing, and I would demand that they restrain themselves, regardless of their cultural background. But in a book the “N-word” is a portrayal, not an actual event. It is fiction, where characters may display their ignorance with impunity.  If we are offended, we consider the source and learn more about people we might not otherwise associate with.  The same rule should apply to other offensive literary texts, the portrayal of the Jew in Merchant of Venice, the portrayal of the clergy in The Scarlet Letter. We can read without sanctioning the behavior of literary characters or being corrupted by it.

The problem often arises from adult texts being forced on the young. Maybe Huckleberry Finn shouldn’t be assigned in ninth grade.  Maybe Lord of the Flies should not be required reading in middle school. In our relentless pursuit of rigor, we assume that more difficult reading is also appropriate reading for adolescents and pre-adolescents.  Even a young adult text like The Giver can be assigned prematurely, because adults love the notion of collective memory, but young children may not.  Yes, they can read it. But understand it?

As the “Parable of the Sower” teaches us, not all seed takes root and grows to full stature.  So it will be with the scattered seed of the “rigorous” curriculum and the treasured fruit of “college readiness.”

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The Day of Small Things

Time for reflection and repentance for not sustaining this conversation. Since the Fall Semester resumed, I have been mostly responding to news stories that outraged and intrigued me. Today I will try to  pick up the thread I dropped back in July: the joy and satisfaction of writing.

My text is Zechariah 4:10 – “Who despises the day of small things?” This verse drops into the midst of chapters on the apocalyptic visions of Zechariah, so I am not even sure how it sits in context. But it seemed to address the problem of writing for fun, rather than work.  “Small things” are the subjects we can write about daily, without addressing the “big things” of school reform, pronouncements of the Secretary of Education, and the failure of the “Dream Act.”  I have been guilty of dealing only with “big things” in this blog for the past six months. For this, I repent.

“Small things” are the topics of “expressive writing,” as I commented in the summer. The writing is done only for the satisfaction of writing, not for ulterior motives. It is both the most self-indulgent and the most rejuvenating writing we do. As I wrote in July,

With the proliferation of e-mail, texting, and blogging, this daily writing becomes more and more recreational, something that gives the writer pleasure in the act itself. She is not concerned with work accomplished by expressive writing, because she feels satisfaction in merely writing (July 19, 2010).

My point was that expressive writing was more inclusive and egalitarian than transactional writing and could be expected to get more people writing and feeling the benefit of writing.  I called this the horizontal axis of school reform: the axis that expands the field of writers without severely regulating what they write. I had traced this horizontal growth from the early 1970’s with the writing and research of Peter Elbow and James Britton.

The institution of the Common Core State Standards in Language Arts would be a more vertical trend in school reform, since words like “rigor”  and “high quality first draft text under a tight deadline” proliferate throughout the document.  Obviously the very notion of standards has a vertical momentum to it. Far be it from me to deny the vertical path to glory.

But my theme for 2011 will continue to be the “day of small things,” because I believe that ultimately better writers are motivated by more writers, and that writing can be fun as well as hard work.  The best analogy I can give is how water boils.

Water boils when all the molecules are in furious motion and not a moment before they reach 212 degrees Fahrenheit.  They start bumping each other and pretty soon they have the urge to evaporate. Then we get steam, a very productive form of the water molecule.   So productivity comes from individual and communal energy. The horizontal axis expands and the vertical axis rises to glory.

I am not claiming that the laws of physics pertain to literacy, but I am claiming that development of literacy is both horizontal and vertical. The small things we write about daily constitute the horizontal axis and should not be neglected.

Do not despise the “day of small things.” My New Year’s resolution and a word of encouragement for teachers of writing in 2011.

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Rigor Mortis

Got rigor? Michigan does not apparently. We took a “D” on the chin from the Fordham Institute.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute released a report on Wednesday (July 21) ranking the state standards in English language arts and math according to rigor and clarity. The New York Times used the occasion to report that 27 states had already adopted the Common Core Standards and that even Massachusetts, the gold standard of standards, would soon adopt the Common Core. The Times concluded its lead article quoting conflicting claims about which standards were more “rigorous,”  the Massachusetts document or the Common Core.

Yet unexamined are the reasons the Fordham Institute found the standards  of 39 states in English language arts and the standards of 37 states in math less “clear and rigorous” than the national standards. Educators and concerned citizens should challenge the assumption that a conservative think tank might control the discussion of whose standards are more rigorous, yours or mine.

For some reason the word “rigor” has become the supreme value in describing educational standards, this despite the leading synonyms  in the dictionary entry are “strictness,” “severity,” and “harshness” and the derivation from the Latin meaning “stiffness” (Webster’s Unabridged, 2003).  These are words we could approve in the quality control of prescription drugs and fire extinguishers, but in the evaluation of the learning of human beings?

At the same time “rigorous” in casual conversation might mean “challenging,” and no one would object to “challenging” educational standards.  No doubt this is the sense the Fordham Institute intended to convey in its press release. However, if you study their critique of state standards, you find the operational meaning of “rigorous,” is “measurable.” “Rigorous” and “measurable” do not belong in the same sentence, not even this one.

Hoping not to take its assessment personally, I’ll review what Fordham has to say about the Michigan High School writing “standards” (We call them “Content Expectations”).

The author of the Fordham critique, Sheila Byrd Carmichael (founder of the American Diploma Project) writes,

In high school, writing is addressed in a strand called, Writing, Speaking and Visual Expression. Explicit writing expectations are often missing. One unmeasurable “writing attitude” standard is included; it simply exhorts students at each level from K-8 to “be enthusiastic about writing and learning to write”

The ultimate criticism of  the “rigor” of the standard is it is “unmeasurable” ( a word my spell-checker and Webster’s rejects). Because we don’t have standardized tests to measure “writing attitude,” it must lack rigor as a standard. As a writing teacher, I can assure anyone who cares to listen that “attitude” is supremely important in writing, whether I can objectively measure it or not.

Ms. Carmichael reserves her strongest criticism for what she call’s Michigan’s “hybrid” standards for writing. Such standards offend by mentioning a variety of genres or purposes of writing in the same statement. Here is the standard singled out for being “devoid of content.”

Compose written, spoken, and/ or multimedia compositions in a range of genres (e.g. personal narrative, fiction, biography, essay, poem, drama, autobiography, and creative nonfiction); that serve a variety of purposes (e.g. expressive, informative, creative, and persuasive) and that use a variety of organizational  patterns (e.g. autobiography, free verse, dialogue, comparison/ contrast, definition, or cause and effect).

The least problem of a standard listing seven genres, four purposes, and six “organizational patterns” is a lack of “content.”  There is plenty of that.  What is lacking is “measurable” content, a single genre that could be tested on its own. Ms. Carmichael recommends, “It would be far more helpful to teachers to describe the expected characteristics of each genre listed, and to state which genres are most appropriate for study at each grade level.”

Presumably Ms. Carmichael admires the way the Common Core Standards list “argument” as a primary “text type” of the study of writing and then adds five traits or “outcomes” that delineate a good argument. Perhaps she is less pleased that the same three text types (“argument,” informative/explanatory,” and “narrative”) are addressed in each grade, 9-12, in the Common Core, because it does not “state which genres are most appropriate for study at each grade level.”  To this I say “bravo” to the Common Core Standards, because they  make very little differentiation of genres and outcomes over the four grades of high school, just as the Michigan standards for writing do not isolate one high school grade from the others. They acknowledge that the challenging kinds of argumentative, expository and expressive writing taught in high school require (4) years of practice and increasing sophistication of content. It is a rigorous program, even though it does not isolate one kind of writing from another by grade level.

Returning to Michigan’s “hybrid” standard: “Compose written, spoken, and/ or multimedia compositions in a range of genres (e.g. personal narrative, fiction, biography, essay, poem, drama, autobiography,and creative nonfiction); etc.” The intent is clearly to advocate a “range of genres” instead of limiting the curriculum to single genre in each grade. Could this be less “rigorous” than addressing one particular genre in each grade? Could this be less “rigorous” than denying the writer the power to find the best genre for the message she wants to convey?  Less rigorous than never experimenting with alternative genres to convey that message?

Of course these are rigorous challenges for writers,  but with so many genres in play, how will we measure the accomplishment of this standard? (Ms. Carmichael will be asking). And yet such a “hybrid” standard could be evaluated by a portfolio of writing in several genres. No doubt the Michigan standards writers had this in mind. Doubtless Ms. Carmichael could not have a portfolio assessment in mind, if she calls this standard “devoid of content.”

When the Fordham Institute claims that standards lack “clarity” or “rigor” or are “unmeasurable” or  “devoid of content,” the media and educators should be furiously decoding their messages. Chester Finn and his colleagues should not be allowed to control the conversation about standards, just because they have assumed the tedious task of reviewing all the standards of all the grades in all the states. Just because their dream of national standards has come to pass does not mean we have to fulfill it in every detail.

My dictionary accepts only  “immeasurable,” but I won’t be “rigorous” about it.

All citations from “Michigan” at  http://edexcellence.net/index.cfm/news_the-state-of-state-standards-and-the-common-core-in-2010

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If Writing Were a Celebrity . . .

If writing were a celebrity, it would have a public and private image called “transactional” and “expressive” writing respectively.  The teaching of writing over the last forty years has been the struggle of the private persona to keep up with the public.  James Britton, who coined this distinction between the transaction and the expression, first reported in 1975  (Britton, Burgess, Martin, McLeod and Rosen) that the majority of writing in the British secondary schools was transactional.

In the public eye, writing is about business and politics, the power brokers of society.  Just peruse the Common Core Standards for Language Arts, published in June, 2010 and see the prominent text types are “Information/ explanation” and “Argument,” the staples of business and politics respectively.  Oh yes, Narrative was inserted in the three position, after some lobbying from literacy educators over the last year. But Narrative, as described here, is what Britton called “poetic” writing. If writing were a celebrity, “poetic writing” would be her avocation or hobby.

I realize personifying writing as I have, as a marriage partner (July 15) and as a celebrity, is a bit incredible and romantic, but the media personifies all kinds of objects today, from sports to music to decongestants, and it seems to convey their status and identity in society, not to mention attract consumers. And I am all about attracting consumers, or rather, practitioners, to writing.

Britton’s classification of writing’s facets has helped us understand how it works in our lives.  He allows the reader,  the consumer of the writing, to define what it is.  So if the reader is concerned with the information and message of the writing foremost, he calls it “transactional.” If the reader is most interested in the craft or technique of the writing, he calls it “poetic.” If the reader is most intrigued by the writer, the composer of the writing, he calls it “expressive.”

These personas of writing are really a continuum, in which one merges with the other, but Britton thought the most generative, the one that allowed writers to move in and out of the other personas, was “expressive.”  Expressive writing tells us about who the writer is, as he rambles in a journal, in a notebook, in reflection, in writing to explore an unfamiliar subject.  It is the entry point when writing is difficult or when a subject is being learned. It is the facet most interesting to the writer, himself, and to the teacher of writing. It is not typically published writing.

But the private lives of celebrities do attract the snooping public.  Although the proper subject of business and politics is the trends in the economy and in reforming legislation, we are very curious about the people who negotiate these changes.  Sometimes we begin to comprehend the arcane procedures of business and government by understanding the people who wield that power. And so it is for transactional and expressive writing.  We understand the transactional by our familiarity with the expressive facet of writing.

Returning to the writer of expressive writing, she finds everything easier to write about expressively and sometimes she even finds joy in writing in a diary, a reflective journal, a trip log, or a workout journal.  Unless her career depends on transactional or poetic writing, her satisfaction comes from the expressive mode that arises in daily life.  With the proliferation of e-mail, texting, and blogging, this daily writing becomes more and more recreational, something that gives the writer pleasure in the act itself. She is not concerned with work accomplished by expressive writing, because she feels satisfaction in merely writing.

Writing’s pleasurable, expressive identity is key to its gaining social and cultural prominence. While readers know they will find pleasure in their favorite genre, whether political columnists, graphic novels or mystery or romance, writers may know the pleasure of writing by indulging in its expressive forms. The rigors of grammar and convention are eased in expressive writing, and the writer has the privilege of exploring his favorite subject– himself and what he thinks.

The public persona of writing, the transactional, is a little disdainful of the private one. The private persona is not visibly productive or powerful in the commerce of society.  It seems self-indulgent and self-absorbed.  It does not deserve to be considered “serious” writing.  So it struggles for equity in the celebrity’s personality.

The struggle between the public and private persona of writing has continued lo, these forty years. Can this be a healthy struggle, a personality torn by conflict? More on the celebrity we know as  “writing” in the next installment.

Reference–

Britton, J., Burgess, T. , Martin, N.,  McLeod, A.,  and Rosen, H. (1975). The development of writing abilities of , 11-18. London: MacMillan.