Nation Touches Third Rail, Survives

by Robert Pondiscio
July 23rd, 2010

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Posted in Assessment and Testing, Curriculum, Educational Policy | 29 Comments »

Despite the adoption of Common Core State Standards by more than half the states in the nation, the sky remains firmly in place, impervious to the coordinated attack.   Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has declared himself “ecstatic” at the adoption rate telling the New York Times, “This been the third rail of education, and the fact that you’re now seeing half the nation decide that it’s the right thing to do is a game-changer.”

Game-evolver, perhaps, as even CCSS supporters are quick to point out.  At Public School Insights, Claus Von Zastrow writes that high standards will mean little “if the tests are no good, the curriculum is weak, and schools have little or no support to make standards mean something in the classroom.”  The Minister of Propaganda for the education status quo thus finds himself under the same big tent as Checker Finn and Mike Petrilli at Fordham.  Even conservatives love the Common Core Standards, they note at National Review Online, with its call for students to memorize their times tables, learn phonics, and understand the country’s founding documents:

“Anxiety will surely rise when school kids across the land begin (three or four years hence) to take tests linked to these standards, and even more when those test results start to determine promotion from fifth to sixth grade or graduation from high school. (The development of those tests will soon start, aided by $350 million of federal stimulus funds.) But without tests and results-based accountability, along with solid curricula, quality textbooks, and competent teaching, standards alone have no traction in real classrooms. Adopting good standards is like having a goal for your cholesterol; it doesn’t mean you will actually eat a healthy diet or live longer.”

Right.  Critics argue that standards don’t educate children.  Right again.  The true test remains implementation.  For elementary education, the principal benefit of the CCSS is the recognition that verbal achievement is based on general knowledge, and the explicit call for instruction in language arts to include all key academic domains and be integrated with a content-rich curriculum.  Is that a guarantee it will happen?  Of course not.  Even under a single standard, the states that fare the best will be the ones with the best trained teachers and the most thoughtful, rigorous curriculum.

Hey! That sounds like a real race to the top.

Gimme One Good Reason

by Robert Pondiscio
October 2nd, 2009

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Posted in Assessment and Testing, Educational Policy | 2 Comments »

I’ve been as critical of the squishy, content-free proposed national ELA standards as anyone, but over at Flypaper Eric Ulas reminds us that there is at least one good reason to support national standards: an end to the, er, impressionistic definitions of reading proficiency from state to state.  Ulas assumes we would have a single national test (I do too) to accompany national standards.  This would mean apples to apples comparisons and presumably an end to the race to lower cut scores.  The sunshine that would result from a national test would go a long way toward a sensible conversation about what’s working, what’s not working and why. 

Also well worth your time is Tom Hoffman’s take on the standards at Tuttle SVC.  Tom and I don’t always agree, but he knows standards, and  his point that the proposed standards are “narrower, lower, and shallower than the Language Arts standards of high performing countries” is very persuasive and backed up with good examples.  “No country with high reading scores in international assessments conceives of the discipline of Language Arts as being limited to literacy skills, or “college- and career-readiness,” as the Common Standards do,” he writes.

Willingham: Reading Is Not a Skill

by Robert Pondiscio
September 28th, 2009

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Posted in Curriculum, Education Practice, Educational Policy, Research and Reports, Teaching | 34 Comments »

Dan Willingham reviews the draft voluntary national standards in reading and sees a problem:  ”Teachers and administrators are likely to read those 18 standards and to try to teach to them,” he notes.  “But reading comprehension is not a ‘skill’ that can be taught directly.”

His latest blog post at the Washington Post’s education page observes that teachers tend to teach comprehension as a series of “reading strategies” that can be practiced and mastered. “Unfortunately it really doesn’t work that way,” he writes. “The mainspring of comprehension is prior knowledge—the stuff readers already know that enables them to create understanding as they read.”

Prior knowledge is vital to comprehension because writers omit information. For example, suppose you read “He just got a new puppy. His landlord is angry.” You easily understand the logical connection between those sentences because you know things about puppies (they aren’t housebroken), carpets (urine stains them) and landlords (they are protective of their property.)

Policymakers need to pay attention here because this is what those of us who complain about curriculum narrowing are complaining about: the natural impulse to focus on pure reading instruction in an attempt to boost reading scores is self-defeating.  When you see, as Dan does, how “bad readers” look like good readers when they have background knowledge to bring to bear on a topic, the reasonable goal of education becomes increasing the number of topics children know something about.  It may sound smart, even heroic, to focus like a laser on reading instruction, but ultimately the law of diminishing returns kicks in.  You build comprehension by building background knowledge in the reader–not by endless practice in determining the author’s purpose, finding the main idea and making inferences. 

The kids who score well on reading tests are ones who know a lot about the world—they have a lot of prior knowledge about a wide range of things–and so that whatever they are asked to read about on the test, they likely know something about it….Can’t you teach kids how to reason about texts, and thereby wring the meaning out of it even if they don’t have the right prior knowledge?  To some extent, but it doesn’t seem to help as much as you might expect. For one thing, this sort of reasoning is difficult mental work. For another, it’s slow, and so it breaks up the flow of the story you’re reading, and the fun of the story is lost.

And Dan has a line in his post that I wish could be on the wall of every classroom in the country:  “Hoping that students without relevant prior knowledge will reason their way through a story is a recipe for creating a student who doesn’t like reading.”

Ultimately the draft national standards do not serve us well by reinforcing the idea that reading a a skill.  It’s not, Willingham notes:

The mistaken idea that reading is a skill—learn to crack the code, practice comprehension strategies and you can read anything—may be the single biggest factor holding back reading achievement in the country. Students will not meet standards that way. The knowledge base problem must be solved.

A request–no a plea, really:  Forward Dan’s post to every teacher you know.  Tweet it.  Blog it. Put it on your Facebook page.  Do it now.   We’re not going to solve this problem until or unless we see this for what it is.  Here’s the link: Reading Is Not a Skill.  Pass the word.  And while you’re at it, here’s Dan’s video, Teaching Content Is Teaching Reading. 

 

Why Standards Aren’t Sticky

by Robert Pondiscio
September 25th, 2009

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Posted in Education Practice, Literacy | 14 Comments »

In his 2007 book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Stanford business professor Chip Heath describes why some bad ideas such as urban legends and misleading bits of conventional wisdom are “sticky” and gain traction, while some very good ideas don’t make it through the clutter.   Early in the book, Heath describes how the Army used to invest enormous time in planning military operations that turned out to be useless for an obvious reason:  the enemy doesn’t follow the plan.  The answer, developed in the 1980s, is a planning concept called Commander’s Intent (CI).

CI is a crisp, plain-talk statement that appears at the top of every order, specifying the plan’s goal, the desired end-state of an operation.  At high levels of the Army, the CI may be relatively abstract: ‘Break the will of the enemy in the Southeast region.’ At the tactical level, for colonels and captains, it is much more concrete…The CI never specifies so much detail that it risks being rendered obsolete by unpredictable events.

 “Commander’s Intent manages to align the behavior of soldiers at all levels without requiring play-by-play instructions from their leaders,” Heath writes. “When people know the desired destination, they’re free to improvise, as needed in arriving there.”  Right about now, you’re probably thinking, Hey!  That’s just like those voluntary national standards they’re cooking up! Brilliant! 

Isn’t it pretty to think so?

Standards might work just as well as “CI” if there was a shared understanding and deep experience with the tactics needed to achieve the desired results—if our understanding of how to teach reading were as simple and straightforward as determining the range of a piece of artillery.  The problem in education is that it is possible – nearly certain, in fact – to follow “Commander’s Intent” yet still fail miserably.  The draft reading standards put up for public comment this week by the Common Core State Standards Initiative can’t “stick” because they are built on a flawed model of reading as a transferable skill.  By promoting even tacitly the idea the we can teach reading independent of content (decoding + reading strategies = the ability to comprehend everything), the standards offer little useful guidance for teachers, virtually ensuring that even these “fewer, clearer” directions will not be met.  Only by describing specific texts and content across disciplines (making clear that comprehension equals background knowledge) with assessments aligned with those texts and content, can there be any hope of measuarable progress. 

Let’s be blunt:  Find one single teacher drawing breath that needed a secretive committee of two dozen experts to tell her that high school students ought to be able to “discern the most important ideas, events, or information, and summarize them accurately and concisely.”  This is not a standard, it’s a platitude.  As a goal or statement of purpose, it offers as much guidance and direction as military orders to “win the war.”   We do not lack clarity on our goals.  We lack clarity on how to achieve them.  The draft of the voluntary standards promotes tacitly the same flawed concepts that have driven reading instruction for decades. 

Worst of all, the standards movement as currently conceived threatens to make matters worse by sending the message that there is now absolute clarity on what is to be taught in the nation’s schools.  That, of course, is not what standards do.  That would require not national standards, but a national curriculum.  They are the same thing in the public imagination.  This predictable confusion between standards and curriculum, strategies and tactics, already colors everything from the political attractiveness of merit pay to the anger at teachers for our failing education system.  Many education policies assume teachers know exactly how to teach every child to read well but fail to do so out of incompetence, laziness, or refusal to execute the Commander’s Intent.  The reality is infinitely more complex.

 As written, our vague, insubstantial voluntary national standards are not “made to stick.”  In fact, they are virtually guaranteed to have exactly the unintended results.  By refusing to specify content to be taught, they will perversely encourage bad practice—teaching reading as a skill rather than a function of background knowledge.  In the absence of clear guidance, we will have more unnecessary and pointless reading strategy instruction, more test prep, more focus on reading as a transferrable skill.  And less–much less–of what actually creates competent readers—a well-rounded, content-driven, robust core curriculum.

Grammar and Syntax Standards?

by Robert Pondiscio
July 23rd, 2009

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Posted in Humor | 17 Comments »

The “premature” release of the draft national standards on this blog yesterday prompted the National Governors Association to officially release the document today–along with the following statement:

STATEMENT FROM NGA: 
As some of you may be aware, the first working draft of the college and career-ready standards were prematurely released. NGA and CCSSO had hoped to incorporate feedback from states and other experts before releasing a working draft so that we can ensure the best common core possible. 

Sorry about that, er, premature…..wait a second……ummmmm……Hey, shouldn’t that read “was prematurely released?”  The first working draft were prematurely released??  

Ouch.  Any English teachers working on those grammar and syntax standards?

“Clear Guidance and Examples”

by Robert Pondiscio
July 23rd, 2009

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Posted in Curriculum, 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

by Robert Pondiscio
July 22nd, 2009

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Posted 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.

A Band-Aid on the Unkindest Cut?

by Robert Pondiscio
July 18th, 2009

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Posted in Education News | 2 Comments »

Someone must have been unhappy with the reaction to news that Shakespeare would have no place in the emerging national standards currently being drafted by Achieve, ACT and the College Board.  The over-the-top quote from Chris Minnich, director of standards at the Council of Chief State School Officers, has suddenly disappeared from Linda Kulman’s Politics Daily piece, which was cited by Common Core, Joanne Jacobs and the Core Knowledge Blog (HT:  MagisterGreen). 

Original Quote:

“They’re really looking for what students should be able to do to truly be ready for college.  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.”

New Quote:

“They’re really looking for what students should be able to do to truly be ready for college. It means taking out some of the things that aren’t really important. At this point, we don’t know yet what that will be.”  (Emphasis mine).

A misquote? A “clarification?”  Something uttered “off the record” not intended for the light of day?  The bigger problem with what Minnich said remains not his dismissal of Shakespeare, but the clear and unambiguous focus on skills at the expense of content.  That went unchanged in both versions.

Shakespeare in or out, if Mr. Minnich would like to explain the place of specific curricular content in the draft standards, the floor is his.  An invitation has been issued for him to write a guest post on this blog.

The Bard, Barred from National Standards

by Robert Pondiscio
July 17th, 2009

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Posted in Curriculum, Education News, 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?

by Robert Pondiscio
July 2nd, 2009

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Posted in Curriculum, 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.

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