National Standards

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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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We Interrupt this Writing Process . . .

Pay attention, educators.  Here are some verbs from our drafted National Standards that describe what writers should do to be “college- and career-ready:”

make an argument, inform, explain, represent, synthesize, convey, make claims, link claims and evidence, and produce high-quality text the first time.

We have trafficked in literacy standards long enough to know what these verbs foreshadow.  They foreshadow a highly-structured, rigidly-sequenced curriculum that features the kinds of writing privileged by college admissions tests for the past half-century.  They foreshadow the demise of personal and reflective writing. They foreshadow the repossession of genres, media, and styles that do not match the legal and corporate purposes of writing.  They foreshadow the revocation of ownership, passion, and reflection that inspires authors to do their best work.

Now here are some nouns which apparently do not apply to writing for  “college-and career-readiness” and which you will not find in the draft of “Standards for Reading, Writing and Communication:”

genre, voice, irony, code-switching, reflection, process, transfer, meta-cognition,  self-evaluation, and portfolio.

Mind you, this is only a draft of the Standards, so we accept that it is not an example of “producing high quality text the first time under a tight deadline.” According to this document, writers “frequently” engage in this kind of “writing on- demand.”  This draft of National Standards represents one of those rare occasions when writers “have the opportunity to take a piece of writing through multiple drafts, receiving feedback along the way, successfully polishing and refining the text.”  Moreover, someone has interrupted the writing process of these Standards, and we now are allowed to evaluate their unfinished work.  Probably the writers of the Standards would have gladly avoided the hassle of  “receiving feedback along the way,” but they also might have wished for more time to consider this freighted language about how all graduates of high schools in the United States should write. Their work has been published before they were finished. There might be poetic justice in this.

In this document, narrative writing actually has its own sidebar. Rather than an honorable distinction, it appears to be a disclaimer about the diminished importance of narrative.  While giving it credit for “faithfully describing the steps in a scientific process,” the sidebar also characterizes narrative as a “principal steppingstone to writing forms directly relevant to college and career readiness.”   The role of “steppingstone” lacks the dignity that we might accord to some forms of narrative, such as eyewitness testimony, college admissions essays, and the narrative background for proposing national standards. Narrative deserves better than a sidebar.

Why are these nouns, from “genre” to “portfolio,” absent from national standards, when they overpopulate the curricula of first-year writing programs in our nation’s colleges?  Why are words synonymous with “thinking” excluded from literacy standards? Their omission is no oversight or exclusion for lack of space. These words represent the leisure of pre-writing, the power to select (topics, genres and formality of language), the luxury of process and self-evaluation, and the dignity of explaining what you have written.  Once the domain of writing is allowed to expand beyond the “on-demand” kind, our testing instruments become expensive and time-consuming.  No one will say this openly, but Standards may only represent what we can conveniently and economically test.
If you follow the work of Achieve, Inc. for the last twelve years, you will find their fingerprints all over this document.  Through the auspices of the National Governors’ Association they have become the arbiters of state requirements, until 46 states have subscribed to their college- and career-ready standards.  When they examine each state’s standards they claim to have benchmarks created by academic and corporate experts, but the ultimate criteria are whether their standards are testable. The critical question they ask of all state standards is “How clear, specific, and measurable?”

When standards are created to be measurable, they become reductive.  Not that standards should not be measured, but measurement entails efficiency and efficiency implies reduction. Hence the jettisoning of the writing process. Hence the neglect of genre study.  Hence the absence of reflection, meta-cognition, and self-evaluation.  Hence the  demotion of  narrative writing, a mode of expression with messy boundaries.

If we have intruded on the writing process for these Standards, then it is not a moment too soon.  They are not mere standards, but blueprints for national testing.  They are an emerging national curriculum, a criterion for funding, a pretext for punishment, and the subversion of effective teaching of literacy. On the pretense of raising the bar, the designers are erecting a guillotine. No one should doubt from the content and structure of these Standards that they are for execution, not for a benign “race to the top.”

This writing process for National Standards badly needs the feedback and revision it would deny to high school writers in the “on-demand” environment. For those who designed the draft we are seeing now, it would be a process well-learned.