That Dog Won’t Hunt

by Robert Pondiscio
August 16th, 2012

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Posted in Education Practice, Literacy | 8 Comments »

“How many legs does a dog have if you call its tail a leg?” Abraham Lincoln is famously reported to have asked.   Four, said Abe.  “Because calling it a leg doesn’t make it one.”

And calling your ELA curriculum Common Core aligned doesn’t mean it really is.

At Fordham’s Common Core Watch blog last week, Kathleen Porter-Magee posted a piece that deserves more attention.  It’s an eye-opening look at how literacy guru Lucy Calkins is “rewriting the Common Core” to basically argue for the same old literacy practices that have largely failed our students.  A new book by Calkins, Mary Ehrenworth and Christopher Lehman, Pathways to the Common Core “sounds like a useful resource that ELA teachers can use to figure out how to align their instruction to the new standards,” writes Porter-Magee. However…

“Unfortunately, it misses the mark. Part ideological co-opting of the Common Core (CCSS) and part defense of existing—and poorly aligned—materials produced by Heinemann, the book is the leading edge of an all-out effort to ensure that adoption of the new standards requires very few changes on the part of some of the leading voices—and biggest publishing houses—in education.”

This is as unsurprising as it is dispiriting. “The anti-intellectual monopoly of the education world, combined with the financial power of a few large publishers makes the new common-core initiative highly precarious,” E.D. Hirsch warned two years ago.  “There is every likelihood that the same diluted and fragmented early curriculum will be given a new label and present itself as conforming to the new standards.”

The helpful-sounding mission of Pathways to the Common Core is to help educators “grasp what the standards say and imply—as well as what they do not say—deeply enough that they can join in the work of interpreting the standards for the classroom and in questioning interpretations others may make.”  Here’s Porter-Magee:

“And question the ‘interpretations’ others propose, they do, as they often contradict not only the guidance released by the lead authors of the Standards (including that found in the “publishers criteria” for ELA, something the authors outright dismiss), but also the guidance included within the four corners of the CCSS document itself. Of course with any set of expectations there is room for debate on some of the finer points. But the lengths that the authors go to explain away the parts of the standards with which they are least comfortable is breathtaking.”

Phonics, for example, is derided as “the low-level literacy work of sound-letter correspondence and so on” which has been, “thankfully, marginalized in its own separate section of the CCSS.”  Whoa, says Porter-Magee. “These statements are patently false and represent a damaging misdirection of the expectations laid out in the Common Core standards.”

“The truth is that there is an entire section of the standards—a section that is given the same prominence and importance as the Reading Standards for Literature and the Reading Standards for Informational Text—called “Reading Standards: Foundational Skills (K-5).” There, the standards make the importance of student mastery of these supposedly “low-level” skills abundantly clear, not only by delineating precisely what is expected of students, but also by saying that they “are necessary and important components of an effective, comprehensive reading program designed to develop proficient readers with the capacity to comprehend texts across a range of types and disciplines.”

There’s much more, and I strongly recommend reading Porter-Magee’s smart takedown start to finish.  I’ve just ordered a copy Pathways to the Common Core.  Having been trained in Calkins’ content-hostile approach to reading and writing and forced to implement it in my classroom, I’ll be very interested to see how she explains away CCSS’s insistence that “texts—within and across grade levels—need to be selected around topics or themes that systematically develop the knowledge base of students.”  Or the Standards’ clear and unambiguous call for a content-rich approach to literacy:

“By reading texts in history/social studies, science, and other disciplines, students build a foundation of knowledge in these fields that will also give them the background to be better readers in all content areas. Students can only gain this foundation when the curriculum is intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades.”

“We will never have an honest discussion about the relative merits of one approach versus another if publishers avoid the difficult conversations and merely seek to bend the Common Core to their own will—and self-interests,” Porter-Magee concludes.

N.B.  Kathleen has another piece on CCSS implementation at the Shanker Blog that is also a must-read.  And check out the comments for a surprise appearance by CCSS authors David Coleman and Sue Pimentel, who log in to say, “Kathleen’s got it right.”

It’s on.

Pretty Good Gatsby

by Robert Pondiscio
July 15th, 2011

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Posted in Curriculum, Teaching | 8 Comments »

Film critic Roger Ebert is spitting mad at a “retelling” of The Great Gatsby that scrubs away the novel’s poetry and lyricism to produce a simplified version for “intermediate level” readers.  Here’s the conclusion of F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s novel:

“Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes–a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

“And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter–tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—-

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

And here, per Ebert, is what students encounter in a “retold” version published by Macmillan:

“Gatsby had believed in his dream. He had followed it and nearly made it come true.

“Everybody has a dream. And, like Gatsby, we must all follow our dream wherever it takes us.

“Some unpleasant people became part of Gatsby’s dream. But he cannot be blamed for that. Gatsby was a success, in the end, wasn’t he?”

This is wince-worthy stuff, and Ebert is justified in his full-throated denunciation.  “There is no purpose in “reading” The Great Gatsby unless you actually read it,” he writes.

“Fitzgerald’s novel is not about a story. It is about how the story is told. Its poetry, its message, its evocation of Gatsby’s lost American dream, is expressed in Fitzgerald’s style–in the precise words he chose to write what some consider the great American novel. Unless you have read them, you have not read the book at all. You have been imprisoned in an educational system that cheats and insults you by inflicting a barbaric dumbing-down process. You are left with the impression of having read a book, and may never feel you need return for a closer look.”

Over at Flypaper, Fordham’s Kathleen Porter-Magee seconds Ebert’s take, but observes that giving students ”bastardized translations” in place of the original is “common practice in far too many classrooms.”  Particularly, she notes, ”in places where standards and curricula are focused more on teaching abstract reading ‘skills’ than on ensuring that all students read and understand rich literature.”  But Porter-Magee holds out hope that the advent of Common Core State Standards should make classrooms less safe for ham-handed abridgements of  literature.   The new standards, she says, require us to “refocus our time and attention on the importance of reading sufficiently complex texts and using evidence from those texts to guide discussion, writing, activities, etc.”

“To my eye, that is among the most significant take-aways from David Coleman’s and Sue Pimentel’s publishers’ criteria.  That we need to stop feeding our struggling readers dumbed-down versions of complex texts. That we need to stop focusing on empty skills like making “text to self” or “text to world” connections. And we need to stop organizing our curricula around broad and empty themes that may only be tangentially related to the texts students are reading.

“That is to say: we need to refocus literature class on actually reading literature.”

I hope Porter-Magee is right.  But I’m certain Ebert is, even though saying so puts me in an awkward position.  It was just a few months ago that I opined in this space in favor of a sanitized version of Huckleberry Finn that changed 200 uses of the racial epithet “nigger” to slave, and “injun” to Indian.  If softening the language for modern ears means a foundational book, commonly banned, will now be taught and embraced again then (I said at the time) that seems not too high a price to pay  Now I’m no longer so sure.  I still see much value in educated people reading deeply some great works of literature while being at least familiar with the characters, plots and themes of many more.  But Ebert’s denunciation is powerful and persuasive.

“You can’t become literate by being taught illiteracy,” he writes, ”and you can’t read The Great Gatsby without reading it.”