Tag Archive for 'CCSO'

“Clear Guidance and Examples”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 23, 2009 in Curriculum and Education News. 3 Comments

Reports of the death of the national standards movement are greatly exaggerated, notes Common Core’s Lynne Munson.  ” This effort is too coordinated, too strategically smart, and has too much momentum to be dismissed out of hand,” she writes on the group’s blog, and I accept her criticism as valid and essentially correct.  To pronounce them D.O.A. was clearly a bit of impulsive hyperbole on my part.  Lynne’s critique of the draft standards is also spot-on:

As they are currently written the “Common Core” ELA standards are poised to repeat NCLB’s mistakes. NCLB has failed to increase reading achievement in any sustained way because it has approached reading purely as a skill and driven the study of literature and other core subjects from the classroom. The current draft of the ELA standards also overlooks the key role that substantial content plays in teaching students to read.

“NGA and CCSSO clearly want their effort to be successful,” she observes.  “This means providing clear guidance and examples of the kind of novels, non-fiction works, poems, and plays that students should read. That is undoubtedly the advice many of the effort’s feedback reviewers—and the larger public—will provide.”

On this Lynne and I may part company at least somewhat.  Getting that feedback and acting upon it are very different matters. It seems we’ve had many decades of calls for detailed content and a national curriculum — yes, curriculum — going largely unheeded.  The reluctance to codify any texts or works of literature as worth reading or even being familiar with betrays a strong (and standard) anti-curriculum bias and a fatally-flawed concept of reading comprehension that needs to be aggressively, adamantly pushed back against.

Does this mean national standards won’t be successful?  That othing less than a National Reading List and orders that every student must read every work on the list will do?  Of course not.  But (I like Lynne’s phrase) “clear guidance and examples” — the kind of information that teachers can use to create lessons, that test-writers can use to select reading passages, and parents can use to effectively use to know if their kids are where they need to be–is essential.   

The writers of the draft standard got one big thing right:  “The literary and informational texts chosen should be rich in content,” they note.  “This includes texts that have broad resonance and are referred to and quoted often, such as influential political documents, foundational literary works, and seminal historical and scientific texts.”

Amen to that.  But we cannot be content for fate, chance, circumstance or caprice to decide what those rich texts are.  It takes a little bravery — but only a little — to take the next step and offer “clear guidance and examples.”

Voluntary National Standards Dead on Arrival

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 22, 2009 in No category. 21 Comments

A draft of the newly developed common core state standards purports to offer “sufficient guidance and clarity so that they are teachable, learnable and measurable,” however the ELA guidelines offer almost no specific content and little that would be of use to teachers in planning lessons–or parents in understanding what their child is expected to know.

Copies of the draft, an effort spearheaded by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association (NGA) have begun circulating among reviewers.  A copy found its way to me without any restrictions on its use or circulation.  I have posted the draft document here.  (Trouble with the link?  Try here instead)

The draft insists that the voluntary standards be “coherent” but defines coherence to mean they “should convey a unified vision of the big ideas and supporting concepts within a discipline and reflect a progression of learning that is meaningful and appropriate.”  Framed as a series of benchmarks students must reach “to be college and career ready,” the draft enumerates standards such as the ability to “determine what text says explicitly and use evidence within text to infer what is implied by or follows logically from the text.”

To put this as blandly as possible, this is neither a revelatory insight nor a meaningful standard.  Educators hoping for guidance on what particular texts are expected to be taught, or how to get students to reach the bland and obvious standards will be disappointed.  On specific “texts” the draft says merely:

The literary and informational texts chosen should be rich in content….This includes texts that have broad resonance and are referred to and quoted often, such as influential political documents, foundational literary works, and seminal historical and scientific texts.

“At first glance, these language standards are, despite the brave descriptors, very similar to the dysfunctional state standards already in place,” notes Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch, Jr.  “Like most state standards, they naively take a formalistic approach to language ability.   They assume that the ability to understand literary and informational language is chiefly a how–to skill, whereas it is chiefly a topic-dependent skill that varies with specific topic familiarity.”   

 A sample scientific text on covalent bonds in the draft document, Hirsch notes, is a “a good illustration of this general point.  Will it be more useful for understanding such texts to spend class time teaching some will-o-the-wisp language proficiency or to impart a good general education in science and the humanities?  

“One begins to despair,” Hirsch concludes.

The Bard, Barred from National Standards

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 17, 2009 in Curriculum, Education News and Educational Policy. 11 Comments

The eagle-eyed Lynne Munson of Common Core spotted a troublesome quote  in a piece at Politics Daily about the work of drafting common state standards.  It doesn’t bode well for those expecting robust, specific content. 

They’re really looking for what students should be able to do to truly be ready for college,” says [Chris] Minnich of the Council of Chief State School Officers, one of the groups overseeing the process along with the National Governors’ Association and a Washington-based group called Achieve. “It means taking out some of the things that aren’t really important, including, he says, “whether or not kids should read Shakespeare. Most of the studies say Shakespeare is not critical.”

First, note that Minnich says the panel is looking for what students should be able to do, not what they should know.  Translation: the standards are all about skills, not content.  I’ll leave to others to comment on the, er…opinion, that Shakespeare belongs on the list of “things that aren’t really important.”  

The dark night of pretending we can divorce skills from content in American schools continues (If there’s one thing “most of the studies say” it’s that you can’t). If the first thing you throw overboard is the language’s most acclaimed writer–someone whose name, like Einstein’s for genius, is a synonym for excellence in writing–then there’s not a lot of room for optimism that there will be any defined content whatsoever in these voluntary standards.

This was the most unkindest cut of all.

A Place at the Standards Table for Content?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 2, 2009 in Curriculum and Educational Policy. 18 Comments

One of the early criticisms of the emerging “Common Core standards” initiative has been the question of who is writing them–and who isn’t.  The groups behind the multi-state effort, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, have set up a website that includes a list of the individuals working on math and English standards. As Edweek notes the list is “dominated by three organizations:” Achieve Inc., the College Board, and ACT Inc.

What’s new and interesting is the announcement of a pair of “Feedback Groups,” to offer expert input on the draft standards, which are due at the end of this month.  “Final decisions regarding the common core standards document will be made by the Standards Development Work Group,” notes the NGA announcement. “The Feedback Group will play an advisory role, not a decision-making role in the process.”

If you believe that content matters as much as process in crafting standards–that any attempt to write national standards should outline the specific material to be covered, not just describe the skills children should master–then the inclusion of Emory University’s Mark Bauerlein is a welcome name among the members of the English-language Arts Feedback Group, along with Fordham’s Checker Finn.  Bauerlein, author of the best-seller The Dumbest Generation, has been a consistent voice in favor of cultural literacy and teaching broad background knowledge.  Ironically, he may have presaged the debate he’ll find himself drawn into when he wrote recently about the difficulty of reaching consensus in college curriculum meetings.  Traditionalists, he observed, ”want to identify core texts, events, figures, and ideas….Progressivists want to enlarge the canon and contexts, to give representation to other cultures and identities, and explode the reigning ‘normativities,’ and they resist a core knowledge of any kind being set down as official.”

There doesn’t seem to be any way out of the impasse, however, which I think partly explains the rise of the “skills” movement in education circles. What the skills emphasis does is neutralize the culture-wars conflicts inherent in any knowledge selections in a curriculum. It speaks about abstract cognitive abilities such as “critical thinking,” “higher-order thinking skills,” and “problem solving.” No disturbing questions about representation of female authors on a syllabus or about Thomas Jefferson’s racial attitudes. Instead, the skills approach promises to empower students to handle those questions better later on — not here in the classroom, but after they have graduated from the skills curriculum.

Whether the feedback process is genuine or merely a way to blunt criticism remains to be seen, of course.  For now, the entire enterprise can be viewed with guarded optimism–the willing suspension of disbelief that anything of use will emerge.