The Common Core State Standards state that they do not outline the content that students should learn; this, they say, is the role of a curriculum. Yet it seems someone hasn’t been listening. Two groups of states are already rushing to develop assessments, which, according to the New York Times, will rely on technology and include “performance-based tasks, designed to mirror complex, real-world situations.”
Why the rush to make new tests? Isn’t there a great danger—even likelihood—that the tests will define and even impede the curriculum? This is worse than the cart going before the horse. This is a cart boasting that it will give birth to the horse—a horse with wheels that will follow in the cart’s grooves. O hubristic cart, how many fake horses will you bring forth before you regret your ways?
Here’s what I mean. The Common Core State Standards leave room for actual curricular courses in literature. Imagine how it would be, for instance, if middle and high schools offered English courses in ancient comedy and tragedy, the art of the essay, the sonnet, allegory, philosophy, the “story within the story,” satire, Russian literature, and other such topics! There is no reason why they should not. Such courses, if designed carefully, would meet the standards yet go beyond the standards. The literature would be at the center—and it would be the sort of literature that provokes thought and discussion. Students would read works that they could carry throughout their lives.
That is precisely what a curriculum should do. A curriculum brings life to the standards by defining what it is that students should learn (beyond skills). It may be difficult to agree on a single national ELA curriculum; it may not even be necessary. We could have several model curricula, each with a somewhat different emphasis, each with required and optional components. Schools could select one of the options and bring something of their own to it. All curricula would meet the standards. They would specify what to teach but not how to teach it; that would be up to the teachers.
Once we had such curricula, there could be assessments based on the curricula, as E. D. Hirsch has repeatedly recommended. The tests would measure what students had learned in their literature, history, and other classes—the actual readings and knowledge, not just the general skills. That way, the courses would have integrity, and teachers could teach them with peace of mind. Teachers wouldn’t have to worry about squeezing “environmental literacy” into a unit on Aristophanes’ The Birds. They wouldn’t have to integrate “financial literacy” with a study of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 146. They could focus on the literature without getting pulled this way and that.
A curriculum can be exciting, challenging, and beautiful. But if the assessments come to us first, they may leave little room for literature courses. Instead, we may be stuck with generic skills, just as we were before—with a strong “21st century” component. Given the new “strategic management relationship” between P21 and CCSSO, and given the emphases of the new Model Core Teaching Standards, it is quite likely that the assessments will reflect these organizations’ priorities. This may mean, among other things, more “real-life” problem-solving, more technology, more group work, more “literacies” of various kinds, and little room for works and ideas that require time and thought.
We may even move into an era of “mass personalization” (a term used by Lauren Resnick and Larry Berger in “An American Examination System”). Pointing to Amazon.com and Netflix as examples, Resnick and Berger argue that it is time to bring “mass personalization” into education. It is unclear exactly how it will play out in the classroom, but if the School of One hints at what is in store, teachers may receive computer-generated lesson plans based on computerized analyses of student skill mastery. One day they may be teaching skill X to group A, skill Y to group B, and skill Z to group C; the next day the groups and topics may shuffle. Literature courses may have no place in such a scheme.
Part of the point of the Common Core State Standards is to make way for inspiring, difficult, beautiful curricula. The test makers should do the same. Otherwise our curricula may be decided for us in ways we never envisioned or wanted.
Diana Senechal has a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale; her translations of the poetry of Tomas Venclova have appeared in two books. A former (and possibly future) NYC public school teacher, she is currently writing a book on the loss of solitude in schools and culture.
Here’s another one of the accompanying documents to implementing Common Core that’s technically public but not well-known on the central role of assessments in driving the curriculum.
http://www.ccsso.org/Documents/2010/Performance_Counts_Assessment_Systems_2010.pdf
It was written by LDH and published in February 2010 and sees the assessments as embedded in the curriculum and open-ended. Unlike the high performing countries she cites, LDH wants to monitor how well students use and apply supplied knowledge.
Everything in this document and in her 2008 report “Democracy at Risk” makes it clear the emphasis is on skills.
In fact the wonderful Literature class you describe Diana is what LDH derides as an antiquated “transmission curriculum”.
Comment by Student of History — September 16, 2010 @ 1:38 pm
I marvel at Duncan’s confidence in “smart technology.” Naturally, students will write more sophisticated literary analyses because they’ll be doing so on a computer. O, hubristic educrat.
Here also is yet more evidence of the futility of applying universal solutions in education.
Comment by James — September 16, 2010 @ 3:10 pm
DS: “Isn’t there a great danger—even likelihood—that the tests will define and even impede the curriculum?”
Well, yes. Thanks for hitting the proverbial nail you know where.
Why the rush? Well, until we have national tests we won’t know, with exquisite numerical precision, which students and corresponding teachers are failing. What they’re failing at isn’t the issue.
I’m a great fan of rich and inspiring (I love that word, Diana) curriculum, actual comprehensive knowledge, tailored to the children who will be learning it. Not so excited about a detailed, prescriptive national curriculum, although I’m willing to endorse a set of common disciplinary benchmarks and recommended materials, as long as there’s some flex.
But constructing the tests before the curriculum makes absolutely no sense, no matter how much rhetorical spin and polish is given to “authentic assessments.” If this is an attempt to use “backward design”–deciding what you want the kids to know and be able to do before you start teaching–then the assessments will drive the curriculum.
Not a bad way to develop lesson plans (given a curriculum) but a recipe for misalignment on a national scale.
Comment by Nancy Flanagan — September 16, 2010 @ 6:06 pm
why is anyone surprised? saddened that nothing has changed but surprised? No…has education always been fire…aim…ready? at least for the past three or so decades anyway…
Comment by tim-10-ber — September 16, 2010 @ 7:38 pm
Glad you mentioned, “The Birds,” Diana. Written twenty-four hundred years ago, it is the dead on perfect comic description of the world contemporary public school teachers spend their lives in: “Cloudcuckooland.” Peisetairos, the sly old dissembler, is a familiar figure: the moonshine peddling educational entrepreneur-guru; and the naive birds are us, the typical teaching staff, with their leaders being the typical administrators. Manipulating dim memories of a Golden Age, Peisetairos convinces the birds to reconstruct this Cloudcuckooland out of thin air. In the end he is worshiped as a god. The AFT ought to fund a re-staging of this play and perform it at Lincoln Center. Arne Duncan will get complementary box seats along with all the other gurus who have plagued us.
Comment by bill eccleston — September 17, 2010 @ 6:23 am
Thanks for the Lauren Resnick link. She is certainly being more coy and careful with her words than 20 years ago when describing her long sought for dream of radically new tests that would promote a “thinking curriculum for everyone”.
And free rides on unicorns to boot!
Notice her current definition, used repeatedly above, of what makes an assessment valid. Does it show progress after directed classroom activity?
She’s supplying the tests and the planned activities and learning tasks. I certainly hope the posttest shows some change in skills from the posttest.
But does that mean any learning occurred if we use that classic definition of changes in long term memory within an individual’s brain?
The test may measure some change but if the activities being pushed do not result in real individual learning and knowledge, why are these new, extremely expensive tests assumed to be valid?
Most of us are familiar with LDH and her agenda but Resnick was also on the Common Core validation committee.
In the early 1990’s Resnick was writing that “the tests we now use, the ones that dominate so much of our school life, are almost the antithesis of the kind of assessment we will need for the thinking programs of tomorrow”.
What if the real intended purpose of Common Core is to institutionalize these radically different assessments that actually measure nothing?
Comment by Student of History — September 17, 2010 @ 7:16 am
For the answer, Student of History, read “The Birds.” You’ll meet Resnick and LDH in full feather. Look for them in the chorus. They’ll sing the answer to you.
Comment by bill eccleston — September 17, 2010 @ 11:34 am
That’s a well-paid chorus then.
Comment by Student of History — September 17, 2010 @ 1:05 pm
Thanks to everyone for the comments so far. I wrote a related piece on “mass personalization” for the Answer Sheet. In the comments, someone referred to “using” a text. I realized that this is exactly where some of the miscommunication lies. Many believe that you “use” a literary text (or other “content”) to teach cognitive skills. I don’t see it that way; I believe the works of literature are inherently valuable.
Now, of course it is difficult to define “inherently valuable,” but essentially it’s this: that a work of literature is worth reading not because it has metaphors or themes, but because of its special life and character–whatever combination of qualities it has that makes it worth reading again and again.
Something similar can be said about history, math, or any other subject. One doesn’t “use” Russian history to teach students cause and effect, for instance. One studies Russian history because it is interesting and because one can study it one’s whole life and never reach full understanding.
Some education researchers and policymakers seem to lose sight of the intrinsic value of subjects. With good intentions and a lot of knowledge, they still miss some of the point. They are so intent on getting students to think in complex ways that they forget about the things worth thinking about and forget to devote attention to those things.
Now, one could turn it around and say: but one goal of education is good thinking, so indeed the subjects should serve this end. In a way, that is true. But that doesn’t mean the subjects should be subordinated to “thinking skills.” Students learn to think well when immersed in a subject. For that to happen, the subject must be honored. If it is treated as a passing thing, a vehicle, then much of its meaning will be lost.
Comment by Diana Senechal — September 17, 2010 @ 1:26 pm
I don’t think this community is doing itself any favors by imagining that the Common Core standards primarily reflect the influence of Lauren Resnick and Linda Darling-Hammond.
Achieve is driving this. The testing companies are driving it, and Gates is, although in their usual haphazard and internally contradictory way.
It doesn’t have anything to do with whether you should like the standards more or less, but if you chase your comfortable boogeymen instead of the people actually driving the process, it is going to be hard to be politically effective.
Comment by Tom Hoffman — September 17, 2010 @ 2:01 pm
Tom, you make a good point that this is not the work of individuals. I would argue that no matter who is behind it, it is important to sort out the ideas.
For instance, there seems to be deep misunderstanding (or various understandings) of the meaning of “content.” The standards state quite clearly that they do not specify all or even most of the content to be taught:
“Furthermore, while the Standards make references to some particular forms of content, including mythology, foundational U.S. documents, and Shakespeare, they do not—indeed, cannot—enumerate all or even most of the content that students should learn. The Standards must therefore be complemented by a well-developed, content-rich curriculum consistent with the expectations laid out in this document.”
Yet Resnick and Berger write that the formative assessments “would be aligned with the learning trajectories derived from the Common Core Standards, and thus aligned with what teachers need to teach.”
The formative assessments may be aligned with the learning trajectories derived from the Common Core Standards, but it does not follow that they will be aligned with what teachers need to teach.
I do not mean that Resnick is responsible for the rush to create new assessments. Clearly there are larger forces behind this. But the confusion over “content” is playing a large part in this as well.
Comment by Diana Senechal — September 17, 2010 @ 3:32 pm
Thanks, Tom. I really appreciate your sharp insights here.
I come to this blog because–unfortunately–it’s one of the few places where folks in Ed Policy World discuss curriculum and instruction. And curriculum and instruction are what matters most when we’re talking about how teachers can be more effective and how schools can make steady and genuine increases in learning. They’re the things we have control over. “School reformers” continually overlook curriculum and instruction (Diane Ravitch was pilloried by the “reform” community when she promoted them in her book as the primary tools of lasting and positive change)–probably because they’re hard to quantify and occur at the lowest level of the educational hierarchy, the place where we actually come face to face with students.
The automatic boogeyman/superman enemy-identification process that you identified here has got to end if we expect to do a better job of educating kids in America.
“The true test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time…”
Comment by Nancy Flanagan — September 17, 2010 @ 5:38 pm
Diana,
I agree with what you are saying. However, many teachers today are trying to devise curriculum without much guidance, other than the skills set out by standards. Can you suggest any books or articles to assist teachers in achieving the sort of careful course design that you recommend?
Comment by Robert Fauceau — September 20, 2010 @ 9:56 pm
Robert,
Yes–it is a shame that teachers are left on their own to devise curriculum. It is an enormous undertaking. I think the best guide to curriculum writing is an excellent curriculum. If I were a high school English teacher writing a curriculum with my colleagues, I would use Stuyvesant’s English course offerings as a model or starting point. They are both grounded and thrilling. For the earlier grades, I would work with the CK curriculum.
It is important to understand the philosophical premises of a given curriculum. For philosophical and historical perspective I recommend Michael John Demiashkevich’s An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (1935) and Diane Ravitch’s Left Back. Wesley Null’s forthcoming book on curriculum is informative and thought-provoking; it describes various curriculum traditions and argues for a deliberative curriculum. For a refreshing perspective on education jargon and associated misconceptions, I recommend Hirsch’s The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them.
My limited experience with curriculum writing has taught me that it cannot be done in a rush. It takes years of thought, reading, planning, trial, and refinement.
Comment by Diana Senechal — September 21, 2010 @ 10:11 am
I meant to include a link to Stuyvesant High School’s English curriculum. Here it is. (Somehow my comment doesn’t go through when I include it as a link; let’s see whether this works.)
register.stuy.edu/program_office/all_%20courses/english_courses.htm
Read it and salivate.
Comment by Diana Senechal — September 21, 2010 @ 10:17 am