Whither Content? Wither, Content!

Here's a fun quote from the now-inactive website Core4All, from about 2012:

How do we implement the Common Core into our current units of study?
Answer:
We don’t.  In order for our educational system to improve, it is vital that we change the traditional model of teaching, moving from a content- driven curriculum to a skills-based curriculum.

We don't talk about this as much as perhaps we should-- but the Common Core, despite the lovely appendices added to address the very problem I'm about to raise, really don't give a rat's rear about content.


Perhaps in math we can make the case that content and skills are closely wedded enough to be inextricably bound-- a sort of co-location of pedagogical threads.

But in English Teacher Land, we love our content. We while away hours, days, or entire careers holding forth on The Canon and what works of literature should be included. We tweak works in and out of the scope and sequence with a fairly remarkable uniformity and consistency (if you are an American who has finished 9th grade, you are probably familiar in some way with Romeo and Juliet).

We love our literature and we each have a pile of works that in our hearts we believe every student who passes through our classroom ought to be familiar with.

Common Core does not care. There are reformsters who swear up and down that CCSS requires "rich content" works of literature, but there simply isn't a word of the standards that actually supports that (they have perhaps close read the standards until their eyes crossed). Common Core does not care what the students read as long as those students can perform the appropriate reading tricks hinted at in the standards and required by the Big Standardized Tests.

This again brings us back to one of the foundational flaws of CCSS-- the notion that all academic tasks are performed in a vacuum and that relationships are unimportant. Readers need not develop a relationship with text or get to know it in any meaningful way-- just look at it quickly, and perform these simple tasks. What the text is, what the text says-- that should not matter. Hamlet, Pat the Bunny, or Gravity's Rainbow-- it's all reading stuff. If the Common Core included standards on kissing, they would insist that a kiss is just the proper application of the lips to another surface, and it doesn't matter if the surface is your wife, your sister, a stranger, or a toaster.

This fits with another foundational aspect of the Core, which is that we will only show interest in things that can be measured (and relationships cannot be measured). But if English teachers sense a little hollowness at the Core's core, it may be in part this total lack of interest in the actual content, meaning and experience of literature.

Many teachers (and even non-teachers like David "Gives No Shits" Coleman) have convinced themselves that a love of content is somehow implied or suggested or at least tolerated by the Core, but that's just one more way the actual standards have been rewritten on the ground. The test manufacturers and their publishing wings know the truth-- that the Core doesn't care what you read and certainly doesn't care what you know about literature and the great breadth of human wisdom and experience embedded therein.

You know it's true. We could all scrap every bit of traditional literature studies done in our classes, replace them with short random selections from newspapers and magazines paired with some core-modeled questions, and our test score would soar while our students said, "Who's this Shakespeare guy? Was he a writer or something?"

The Core would be perfectly happy to see literature crawl off in a field and die somewhere. CCSS has no use for it, and it has no use for those of us who care about the world of words.