Yesterday was National Support David Coleman's Cash Flow Day, otherwise known as the day that high school juniors across the nation give up a treasure trove of personal information in exchange for the opportunity to take a standardized test that is, if not actually meaningful or useful, at least a venerable tradition.
The P, as I repeatedly remind my highly stressed 11th grade students, stands for "practice." It is, for most of us, the ultimate no stakes test. If a student is perched at the very tippy top of Score Mountain, she will have a shot at a National Merit Scholarship, a scholarship program that functions much like the scholarships attached to beauty pageants-- as a sort of protective fig leaf of uplifting nobility for an otherwise mercenary enterprise. And if you have the misfortune to teach at a school that thinks there's something useful to learn from PSAT-ing every single student, then, well, it sucks to be you.
But for the rest of us, the PSAT means bupkus. Less than bupkus. Just bup.
Note too that the PSAT begins with a 45-minute session of having students volunteer their personal information, a process that makes the College Board one of the leading vendors of student information (the subject of periodic unsuccessful lawsuits).
All of these upgrades are part of the College Board's entry into the 21st century. But their relationship with some aspects of 21st century technology are more complicated. Hence this tweet yesterday:
Congrats #PSAT test-takers! We’re a trending topic 🙌🏻 Please tweet responsibly and don’t share test content. pic.twitter.com/CIHwhRvtmR
And boy, you would think that the combination of signing the PSAT Secrecy Pledge and this hip tweet referencing a movie that came out when PSAT takers were in First Grade-- you'd just think that would do it.
Nevertheless, #PSAT was trending on Twitter, not because of students tweeting, "My, but that was an educationally valuable experience," but because they were cranking out test-based memes. Heck, the College Board somehow failed to lock down PSAT2015 as a handle, and that account has over 10,300 followers and a wealth of test-mocking memery.
Via twitter I know that the test covered Frederick Douglass's thoughts about the 4th of July, cookies, Herminia the poetess, dinosaurs, and wolves vs. dogs. Many enterprising folks tracked down the source material for the reading passages, leading to this interesting exchange:
@James_S_Murphy News to me! Maybe they're planning on notifying me in the next geologic period.
If nothing else, the PSAT pumped energy into the use of smartphones and twitter yesterday. But if they're going to join the new century, they'll need to realize that their privacy pledge is stupid and they had better get used to operating in a transparent world. And this is just the PSAT, a test which everyone takes essentially on the same day. Imagine what the internet does to the SAT, given on many separate dates.
This weekend features the major festival of the year in my town, and as my wife and I walked back from yesterday's round of festivating, we noticed a sign posted many times along the street. It was a no parking sign, boldly lettered "Temporary Police Order," and we made a quick joke about why temporary police would be allowed to issue orders about parking.
But it got me to thinking.
The preferred method for teaching and testing reading in the [Insert Name Here] Core Standards is to treat reading as a discrete set of skills, completely unrelated to any prior knowledge. David Coleman famously admonishes us to stay within the four corners of the text.
A really great reader, Coleman and his acolytes suggest, can read anything in his native tongue, even without prior background knowledge or contextual knowledge from outside those four corners.
And yet here is a simple text, a text so short and sweet that it fits on a tiny sign. And without prior knowledge, without information from outside the four corners, we can't understand it. We can't "read" it.
Does it announce a order issued by police who are only hired for a short period of time? Is it an order issued by the regular police that will be in effect only for a short period of time? In truth, the former seems more likely if I stay within the four corners-- wouldn't the latter be better expressed by "Police Temporary Order," as awkward and ungainly as that sounds?
Of course, the perceived awkwardness is a function of my prior knowledge of how those three words are best arranged. So using that prior knowledge is cheating.
In fact, I'm already cheating by being aware of the context of the text, which is a sign stapled to a piece of wood driven into the ground beside parking places. If I did not have the "no parking" portion of the sign in front of me, I would have no way of knowing if "order" meant a command or directive as opposed to the absence of chaos or a particular arranged sequence of police. So "temporary police order" could be a reference to the sequence in which some part-time police officers might be standing in line, or it could mean that police have quelled ongoing chaos, but that chaos can be expected to erupt again at any moment. Without the context of the sign, I might imagine that the text originally appeared on a pizza shop takeout form, and now a whole new set of possibilities open up.
The clarification can further depend on my knowledge of local history. Is the use of temporary police pretty standard fare here, or does this town depend on a standing police force? Have I encountered rent-a-cops in municipalities often enough for me to think of them as common, or am I unacquainted with that police hiring technique? My own understanding will influence my ideas about which reading of the text seems more probable.
My understanding of the text rests firmly on my prior knowledge and the context in which it appears. In fact, without employing prior knowledge and context, I cannot reach a definitive reading of the text.
My point? Folks like Coleman whose conception of reading is that it is a simple decoding exercise (like dialing in the combination of a safe) or a set of skills that can be simply exercised cut off from any prior knowledge or understanding outside the four corners-- those folks have a poor understanding of just how complex the act of reading actually is and just how difficult it is to measure. You will find it nearly impossible to create a reliable measure of reading that would cut out prior knowledge, restrict readers to the four corners, and still somehow meaningfully measure reading skills. I'm not sure you could do it at all-- not even with a temporary police order.
David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core and current head of the College Board and the guy who decided he was the man to single-handedly redefine what it means to be an educated American, has spoken many times about what the long view of education reform would be. One frequently quoted speech was his keynote address at the Institute for Leadership Senior Leadership Meeting in December of 2011.
The seventy-minute presentation is a lot to watch, but I recently stumbled over a transcript of the whole mess, hosted online by the nice folks at Truth in Education. This was Coleman in 2011 delivering a speech entitled "What Must Be Done in the Next Two Years" at a time before reformsters had learned to be more careful about concealing the details of what they had in mind. The transcript is twenty-six pages long, so we're just going to skip through highlights.
The Testing Smoking Gun
It was Lauren who propounded the great rule that I think is a statement of reality, though not a pretty one, which is teachers will teach towards the test. There is no force strong enough on this earth to prevent that. There is no amount of hand-waving, there's no amount of saying, “They teach to the standards, not the test; we don't do that here.” Whatever. The truth is and if I misrepresent you, you are welcome to take the mic back. But the truth is teachers do. Tests exert an enormous effect on instructional practice,direct and indirect, and it's hence our obligation to make tests that are worthy of that kind of attention. It is in my judgment the single most important work we have to do over the next two years to ensure that that is so, period. So when you ask me, “What do we have to do over the next years?” we gotta do that. If we do anything else over the next two years and don't do that, we are stupid and shall be betrayed again by shallow tests that demean the quality of classroom practice, period.
So, there was no question, no doubt that the standards were about creating tests that would drive instruction and write curriculum.
Coleman outlines some of the issues, joshing and shmoozing his audience. You've got your new standards and your old standards and it's going to be a mess. "My friends from Texas in the back are like, 'Can we leave now and go to a bar? 'Cause we didn't even adopt these stupid standards yet." Oh, the yucks.
But Coleman promises details and specifics and evidence and support. And he'll get to that in a moment, but first he wants to offer a plug for his group Student Achievement Partners.
The Unqualified Leaders
This is the moment where Coleman famously describes his crew as a group of "unqualified people," adding that their qualification was their "attention to and command of the evidence behind" the standards. Nothing made it into the standards without support and evidence. Totally not based just on what people in the room thought students should know. Given this evidence-based approach, one wonders why the CCSS don't come with extensive footnotes delineating the exact support for each and every standard.
Coleman next goes on to make a less commonly-repeated point-- the Core aren't just about what is added in, but what is taken out. Coleman wants to be clear that it's not just a matter of what the standards command teachers to start doing, but also a matter of what they are supposed to stop doing.
SAP is composed mostly of the people who wrote the Core, though Coleman wants to remind us that teachers' unions, teachers, parents, all sorts of folks "was involved in" writing the standards. They followed three principles while doing the work--
First, never take money from any publishers or test manufacturers. Second, they will not compete for any state RFP's. Third, we won't possess any intellectual property. Which raises of the question of why the Core are copyrighted. Coleman wants the crowd to understand that any mistakes he makes are the result of stupidity, not avarice. So, no money was involved back then, though of course the companies involved seemed to have made out okay in the financial windfall of the standards, and Coleman has landed a pretty sweet job. Perhaps he meant to say, "We all agreed that our big paydays would come later."
If you've had the feeling that the Core feel like a big wet blanket thrown over any sort of creative spark, here's a quote from Coleman as he starts to talk about how Eastern Asian countries are "beating the pants off us."
They're working harder than we are, their kids work harder, they may not be quite as creative but that's only gonna last for so long, and this country's best days-- we're gonna get overwhelmed by this kind of tidal wave of harder work.
So there you have it. Creativity is all well and good, but only for a brief time.
The Math Piece
Coleman spends some time selling the math portion with a bunch of jargonesque talk about doing more with less and fluency and how key fluencies will make math whizes, dragging learning French into the fray which leads me to wonder if learning a language the Common Core math way would mean learning only a tiny bit of vocabulary really well, which doesn't sound like fluency to me. But I digress. Coleman does say these key fluencies are basically one or two things you must learn by rote every year, and mentions that "people on the left" don't like that and, well, yes, liberals are known for their dislike of memorizing the times table.
In the end, he wants application and understanding so that (his example) when you're negotiating a mortgage, it occurs to you to get out your calculator and figure out if you're getting shafted.
Coleman next explains why current tests are bad, though his Powers of Explaining Clearly have been seriously weakened at this point. His point seems to be that since the test covers so much stuff, a student can look like they're "passing" when they haven't shown mastery of the parts that are Really Important. All tests do this? Coleman knows this? And actual math teachers don't create tests or other ways of measurement to factor into passing students on? This just seems like a huge statement, requiring Coleman to know both which math skills are the Really Important ones and what every math test in the world covers. But the picture is clear-- Coleman wanted math teachers to stop covering a bunch of extra stuff and letting students sneak by who don't know the Really Important stuff.
Coleman talks about what to do in the next two years about math, and he makes fun of the fact that publishers already claim to have aligned materials developed before the Core were even finished. So go through every grade with every teacher and make sure they know what the Really Important parts are. This should be easy because, Coleman says, and I'm not kidding, "It's like a couple of sentences long." Coleman also says that all PD should be focused only on the Really Important parts, period, full stop.And somehow we get back to how Hong Kong does better on the TIMMS.
There's now a break for audience participation, during which Coleman notes, "I find the softer I speak, the less people can argue with me."
He clarifies for an audience member that this approach doesn't really require teachers to be experts, in year one, but in year two, that should start to happen.
Now for Literacy
First, Coleman talks about "literacy" through all of this, suggesting thatspeaking and listening weren't really on his radar.
He opens with references to "haunting data" which amount to saying that over forty years we've spent more and more money but the eighth grade NAEP reading scores have stayed flat for those forty years. This is "devastating" because if students don't get past eighth grade reading level "they're obviously doomed in terms of career and college readiness and all we hoped for them." Are they "obviously doomed"? As the scores have stayed flat for the last forty years, has US economic history been marked by an unrelenting downward spiral that can be traced to a nation of eighth grade readers? Coleman doesn't offer any data, but he has highlighted one of the ongoing unplugged holes of the reformy argument. If I've been eating a bagel for breakfast for forty years, and you want to tell me that I must change my diet because otherwise the bagel will give me a terrible disease, I'm going to need a little more proof than your panicky announcement because, so far, so good. That doesn't mean I should eat bagels forever just because it's what I've always done. But I have forty years of data on the effects of bagel breakfasts, and you have zero years. Which one of us is making a data driven decision?
So I want you to look at the core standards for a moment as a battering ram, as an engine to take down that wall.
Nice simile. I can't imagine why so many teachers have viewed the Core as an assault on public education. But Coleman proceeds to lay out the shifts that must happen in the next two years.
First, K-5 have to read for knowledge. Coleman finds it "shocking" that only 7-15% of the reading they do is informational-- the rest is stories. And not for the first time, I am amazed that someone who studied literature at Oxford somehow remains ignorant of the role of story in human civilization and the individual psyche. I am less amazed that someone who has no educational experience doesn't seem to know anything about how small children are best engaged to learn about reading.
But Coleman says the data is overwhelming that the knowledge and vocabulary acquired in Pre-k through 5 is absolutely essential for reading more complex texts going forward. So he demands 50% informational texts, and he equates "informational texts" with "learning about the world," as if stories do not teach anybody anything about the world.
So focusing on testing, he points out that elementary testing was reading and math, and since the reading portion was all "literature," everybody dropped science and history to spend more time test-prepping reading. He absolutely has a point, but since he's wedded to the idea of using the Big Standardized Test to drive curriculum, he comes up with absolutely the wrong solution. The correct solution was to look at NCLB's test-and-punish regime and say, "Wow, this is really screwing up schools. We should stop with the test and punish." But Coleman takes a flier and lands on, "We should test and punish a different range of things." Which I'm going equate with an abuser having the epiphany, "I kept hitting my partners with a stick, and then they'd always leave me and call the cops. So going forward I'm going to hit them with my fists, instead. That'll fix the problem."
Coleman says these standards should be exciting for elementary teachers because "they re-inaugurate elementary school teachers' rightful role as guides to the world." In this, whether he understood it or not, Coleman is dead wrong-- the Core inaugurated teachers as Content Delivery Specialists chained to crappy curriculum materials designed to teach to a test.
Coleman on Reading Across the Curriculum
I am sick of people, to be rather frank with you, who tell me that art teachers don‟t want to teach this, 'cause our kids have to be able to do it, period, for their success. And what‟s interesting about the standards is rather than saying to social studies and history teachers that they should become reading teachers, which I think is a losing game, it says instead they must–they must–enable their students to evaluate and analyze primary and secondary sources. Science teachers must not become literary teachers. What they must become is teachers who enable their students to read primary sources of the sort of direct experimental results as well as reference documents to build their knowledge of science. But what is not allowed is a content teacher to think that if they just tell their students enough content and their students have no independent capacity to analyze and build that content knowledge, that they are a success.
I'm now going to say something shocking-- it's possible that Coleman has a point here. But it crashes directly into the wall of the Big Standardized Test, which insists that critical thinking is when you look at the evidence and reach exactly the conclusion that I think you should. Coleman's goals are not out of line, but the BS Tests cannot, and will not, test for this, so if he really wants to see this, he has to let go of his test and punish obsession. But we know he hasn't, because the new SAT that he has overseen has a writing element that enshrines this exact fallacy about what it means to examine evidence and draw conclusions.
Nor, as always, does Coleman have a clue what to do with low-ability students. And as always, Coleman seems to believe that nobody anywhere is already doing any of this, which is unvarnished baloney. Coleman remains that guy who thinks that because he just had a Big Thought, he must be the first and only person to ever have that thought.
Also, because of that overwhelming (but still to this day secret and unseen) data again, Coleman is sure that academic literacy in these areas must be achieved by ninth grade, or the child is doomed.
Evidence
Coleman's second literacy shift is to focus on evidence. This is one of his best-known hobby horses-- writing must be done within the four corners of the text, and while this is not the speech in which he said it, he comes close to his classic "no one gives a shit what you think" line about writing. He also gets in a shot at how Kids These Days are all up in the texting, which may seem inconsequential, but speaks to the thread running throughreformsterism about how modern kids are just awful and need to be whipped into shape.
But here Coleman again assumes the notion that education is only about preparing for the workplace or college (which is where you go to win access to a better workplace), and we don't need that creativity shit there. Text Complexity
Coleman's third big shift is toward text complexity, and back in 2011 he thinks that there are people who can actually measure this fuzzy and ill-defined quality of a text. He acknowledges that leveled reading is important for developing reading vocabulary and a love of reading, and see-- this is why we go back and look at these old documents because sometimes we discover things that were lost in translation. Coleman seems to be saying that core instruction has to be "complex" in order for behinder students to catch up, level-wise, but it's important that other stuff meets the students whereever they are. Which seems different from the more recent policy of making students read above frustration level all the time.
Of course, Coleman's original idea is baloney as well. The plan is we'll find the slowest runners in the race, and we'll get them to run not only as fast as the race leaders, but actually faster so that they can catch up. This seems.... unlikely.
So What To Do Now for Literacy Education?
So what are these education leaders supposed to do over the next two years?
First, be all evidence-based, all the time, and by making students cite evidence for every answer, you'll also push teachers to only ask questions that can be answered with evidence. Because opinions are for dopes. Also, this is as good a time as any to note that after all these years, we are still waiting for any of the evidence and data that allegedly supports the Core, as well as any evidence that BS Testing improves education, as well as evidence that any of these reforms have done any good anywhere. Always remember, boys and girls-- if you're powerful and sure you're right, you don't have to provide evidence to your Lessers. Evidence is for the common people (kind of like Common Core).
Second, rip all those damn storybooks out of the kids' hands and "flood" your schools with informational texts. On the high school level Coleman has some specific ideas about how to "challenge" teachers on the literacy front, and it's in line with what we've heard before. I've responded to Coleman's essay "Cultivating Wonder" before, and if you want to see me rant about his ignorance of how to address reading, you can take a look at that.
Fixing Teachers
For the umpteenth time Coleman transitions by noting that he's saying controversial things and people don't like him because of it, ha ha, and he reminds me mostly of the guy who posts on Facebook, "Most of you aren't going to read this, but--" as a way to humblebrag about how he's so special that most people just don't get him, but it's a cross you have to bear when you're awesome.
Anyway, he pooh-poohs traditional teacher eval language like "use data to inform instruction" and "plan, engage, revise" and offers his own superior plan. Focus on these five areas:
1) Is a high-quality complex text under discussion?
2) Are high quality text-dependent questions being asked?
3) Is there evidence of students drawing from the text in their answers and writing?
4) How diverse a set of students are providing your evidence?
5) What is the quality of teacher feedback?
And then Coleman puts his own severe conceptual limitations on display, worth noting not as a way of picking on Coleman, but because these shortcomings are hardwired into the Core, the Core tests, and the evaluations based on the Core tests.
To me that is a much more exciting set of criteria to engage with a literacy teacher about than, “Did you have a plan? How were your objectives? Were your students engaged?” Who can determine these things? The things I just described to you are countable. That is, in the best meaning of accountable, they are literally things you can count. And so I‟d ask you to think about literacy in this way. While literacy seems like the most mysterious and vague and kind of touchy-feely of our disciplines, I think it can be much improved by daring to count within literacy, and by daring to observe the accumulation of these kinds of facts.
To insist that only things that matter are those which can be assigned a number is symptomatic of a tiny, tiny frame of reference, a deeply limited view of what it means to be human. But the answer to the question, "Who can determine these things" is simple-- trained, experienced, professional educators. Coleman's real problem (and that of the reformster movement as a whole) is not that nobody can determine such things, but that it's hard to put them in a frame of reference that makes sense to somebody whose cramped and meager understanding of education and humanity can only grasp numerical values and concrete nouns.
Exemplars
Coleman figures after a year you'll have a collection of exemplars, such as the legendary Gettysburg Address lesson, in which it takes us three to five days to pick apart the rhetorical tricks of the speech without ever touching the historical background or the human implications of the war, Lincoln's choices, and our character as a nation.
There is actually some discussion at the close that gets back to that lesson and the questions of scaffolding, but Coleman doesn't really add anything useful. But then someone brings up English Language Learners
Coleman says that they expect him to address adaptations, but instead he's going to call for an ELL Bill of Rights, which basically says that ELL learners have the right to be faced with the exact same work that all the other students are learning. So back in 2011, we've already perfected the rhetorical trick of saying that we are doing students a favor by demanding they do work beyond their capabilities, a piece of educational malpractice still enshrined in federal policy. So pretty much the same policy as Sarah Palin's "if you come to America, speak American" only with a smile and some complimentary words attached. Enough already
I agree. That brings us to the end of the transcript. Though Coleman provides some strokes for the events' organizers, as always, he leaves the audience with the impression that he pretty much whipped up the whole Common Core himself. And though he talks a lot about the evidence and support and data that undergirds the Core, he doesn't actually specifically mention any of it.
And if you think you haven't suffered enough, here's the actual video of the event. But don't say you weren't warned.
The unveiling of David Coleman's New, Improved SAT Suite is just around the corner, and that means its time to ramp up the marketing blitz for this great new product.
The College Board website is freshly festooned with a festive font that shows that the new SAT Suite is ready to hang with the cool kids. I mean, you can follow the SAT on twitter! All the young persons are following the twitter, right?
The whole business seems charmingly cheesy in its commercial crassness, but it stands as one more part of David Coleman's crusade to redefine what it means to be an educated person in this country. We've been watching this come down the pike for a while; what can we spot now that it's almost here? I Can Has Skillz
The new SAT comes complete with a new motto-- "skilled it." And copywriters have made sure that theme permeates the site. "Bank on skills." "Show off your skills." "Let's talk skills." "Skill Mail." "Calling all skills." "U of Skill." "Skilled in class. Skilled for college." "Take the test that measures the real skills you've learned in class to show colleges you've got what it takes." Can you spot the unifying feature here? Only one of the blurby graphics mentions the K word-- "Show off the skills and knowledge colleges want most."
The SAT suite has been brought in line with the many unappealing qualities of the Common Core-- a disregard bordering on antipathy when it comes to actual content knowledge.
Granted, the SAT has always been a soul-sucking hypocrite when it comes to this issue, subjecting generations of students to verbal tests that claimed to measure reasoning while actually just being expensive, complicated vocabulary tests. But our new goal seems to be to turn the SAT into PARCC's step-brother. I could, if I wished, prepare my students for the Big Standardized Core test by doing nothing all year but reading newspaper articles and pages from storybooks, followed by multiple choice questions. Coleman wants to take the SAT to that place-- the place where a student's worth is judged by their ability to perform the right tricks.
This is the Coleman vision of education. An educated person doesn't Know Things. And educated person can Do Things. After all, what's the point in knowing things if you can't turn your knowledge into deliverables, use it to add value, grab it like a might crowbar that you can use to pry open the secret moneybanks of the world. Do you think Coleman had to know anything to write the Core or re-configure the SAT? Of course not-- he just had to Get Things Done. An educated person has marketable skills. What else do you need?
Co-opting Khan
Part of the new SAT initiative has been to try to shut down the lucrative SAT prep industry, and to that end, the College Board has teamed up with Khan Academy to provide free test prep of their own. There's even a nifty video of Coleman and Khan videoconferencing about how swell it all is; Coleman seems to think that the Khan academy stuff will achieve college and career readiness all on its own (because that's the core of what it's all about now).
Free seems like an excellent price, especially to build such brand recognition. I'm just going to go ahead and type "There's been such a demand for more tools that give more in depth preparation that we are pleased to make these available for a small fee" now so that I can link back to it a year from now when I want to show off my prognostication skills. Not For Stupid Eggheads
The new SAT push has been weirdly anti-intellectual. The website is repeatedly clear about how it has thrown off the shambling shackles of smarmy smartitude, pointing out that the test will measure what you learned in high school (provided your school followed Coleman's blueprints) and what you need to succeed in college (a bullshit claim that's not backed up with anything concrete for the same reason that Coleman can list the toolsyou need to trap a Yeti). And this: If you think the key to a high score is memorizing words and facts you’ll never use in the real world, think again. You don’t have to discover secret tricks or cram the night before.
Yup. They list the secrets of success: take hard courses, do your homework, prepare fortests (but not with test prep?) and ask and answer lots of questions.
So What's Inside?
In addition to links to the Khan stuff, the site has samples and explanations for each of the test sections. A page gives a general description, noting once again that cramming facts and flashcards won't be necessary, and takes a chatty tone, even using the word "stuff."
Reading
The reading intro includes a sideways definition of reading, opening with the lilting line, "A lot more goes into reading than you might realize — and the Reading Test measures a range of reading skills." That includes Command of Evidence, Words in Context, and Analysis in History/Social Studies and in Science.
A quick look at the sample questions shows selections including Ethan Frome, a piece about commuting's cost in productivity, a piece about turtles navigating sea migration, and a 1974 speech by Barbara Jordan (all excerpts, of course). The intro to the Jordan speech lets us know that it was delivered in the context of impeachment hearings against Richard Nixon, and it opens with this paragraph:
Today I am an inquisitor. An hyperbole would not be fictional and would not overstate the solemnness that I feel right now. My faith in the Constitution as a whole, it is complete, it is total. And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.
It also includes a quote from Federalist No. 65. Then it asks what the best description of Jordan's stance would be (correct answer-- an idealist setting forth principles). And, as seems required in standardized reading tests, a couple of question require the test-taker to speculate on the author's thoughts, feelings, and intent. This test is well-aligned with all the other BS Tests that Common Core has inflicted on us.
Writing and Language
Well, now I just want to punch myself in the brain. This is basically an editing exercise, with a certain amount of spelling, punctuation and usage questions, along with a few tasks that involve making the stylistic choice preferred by the kind of boring white-bread dull writers whose work is favored by test manufacturers. The goal is to insure that nobody on earth could have prior knowledge of the content, so the work is often selected from the Big Book of the Most Boring Damn Pieces of Writing Ever Written, so that it's a chore just to look at their lifeless prose spread out against the page like a patient etherized upon a table. SAT Essay
I have a sneaking suspicion that Coleman oversaw this makeover personally. You'll read a passage, explain how the author builds an argument to persuade the audience, support your explanation with evidence from the text. You have fifty whole minutes to do it and-- You won't be asked to agree or disagree with a position on a topic or to write about your personal experience.
In other words, the top scoring essays should all be close to identical.
Worst. Standardized. Writing. Test. Ever.
The only good part is that it's optional. Somehow, I don't see any colleges finding this particularly useful.
Key Content Differences
So what's actually different about the test? Well, the College Board says these are the key changes--
Words in context-- "Many questions on the new SAT focus on important, widely used words and phrases found in texts in many different subjects." I'm not sure how the College Board measures importance of words and phrases, but I do know that description sounds like part of the cover copy for the dozens of new test prep books about to come out so that people know what to put on their flashcards when they're cramming the night before.
Command of evidence-- The College Board already knows what the point of a selection is, and they already know which words and phrases in the selection are the important evidence. In effect, the College Board has figured out how to turn a multi-paragraph excerpt into a larger, trickier multiple choice question. As always, no personal thinking or interpreting allowed. Read the selection and come up with the right answer, supported by the right evidence for the right reasons.
That's exactly how college works, right??
Math that matters most-- You know I'm not a math teacher. The CB tells us what Most Important Mat is on the test. But the methodology described seems... well... "Current research shows that these areas are used disproportionately in a wide range of majors and careers." So, you know-- know only the things that will help you get a job. College is High Class Vocational Training, right? That's what an educated person is, right-- someone who knows how to leverage what they can do into a nice payday?
Also, they repeat their line about how all this will be real-world related. You know, like Ethan Fromme and Barbara Jordan's 1974 speech quoting the Federalist papers in regards to Nixon's impeachment.
Oh-- that last part goes with the new SAT focus on US Founding Documents and the Great Global Conversation they started. Really.
Expanding the market
Of course, the context of all this is not just David Coleman's desire to impose his own vision of education on the entire country. The context is also that the College Board needs to get revenue rolling into their cash-strapped coffers.
Some of this they have accomplished by conning some states into making every student take the test. And they've had government-backed success with other products, like the AP tests that are part of some schools' evaluation. I know I'm just a simple English teacher, but I would love to sit in on the conversation where a corporate rep convinces elected representatives that it's a good idea to make all the citizens of a state buy his product. It's impressive and unprecedented.
But that's not enough-- the SAT folks are also expanding their reach by adding new testy treats, like the PSAT 8/9, "a test that will help you and your teachers figure out what you need to work on most so that you're ready for college when you graduate from high school." It tests the same stuff as the SAT, PSAT and PSAT 10 (Oh, yeah-- there's a PSAT 10, too) so that your students can be using our products throughout their entire career. Ka-ching!! And what could be better test prep than taking the test manufacturers test prep test annually?
Not enough cross-marketing? Don't forget-- the PSAT will now give you recommendations for which AP courses you should be taking! Ka-chingggggggg!!
College Board's Big Roll of the Dice
This could go great for the CB. Just as the PARCC made noises about encroaching on their territory (why don't colleges just go ahead and use Core Test scores for college admission), the SAT is now positioned to push the various Common Core Big Standardized Tests right out of the market. They've already got the product, they have the experience, and they're run by the guy who wrote half the standards you're trying to test. Plus, they already have a long standing (if unfounded) claim to being monumental measurers of post-secondary preparedness.
With so much product and government backing, they could do the Coke and Pepsi trick of pushing all other colas off the grocery store shelves.
On the other hand, even more colleges could decide to do the right thing and stop holding their future students hostage to a money-sucking test industry that still, after years of playing this game, does not predict future college success better than a student's high school grade point average. The rewrite of the SAT could be David Coleman's New Coke, finally highlighting just how obsolete and useless his product is. This could finally kill the beast.
We shall wait and see. In the meantime, I will stay obnoxiously optimistic and partially positive. Also, I'll grudgingly round up test prep materials for my suffering juniors.
Coming back to school (first student day yesterday, thanks) reminds me once again of the huge hole in the heart of current Core curriculum. The lack of content. The sad fact that there is no there there.
Yes, someone is going to pop up to say that the Core (both in its original incarnation and all the old wine in new skins versions that have promulgated throughout states where "OMGZ NOES! We has no Common Core!" versions of the Core still roam free) is NOT a curriculum, which is part of the trick. Because the Core really isn't a curriculum in a classic sense; the ELA standards are a sort of anti-curriculum in which teachers are forbidden to care about the content, and must only worry about teaching students to perform certain actions, certain tricks, on a test.
Content exists, and teachers a free to select what they will. Teach Romeo and Juliet or Heart of Darkness or Green Eggs and Ham-- we don't care because it doesn't matter because the literature, the content, has no purpose beyond a playing field on which to practice certain plays. I've accused the Core of treating literature like a bucket in which we carry the important part, the "skills" that the Core demands, but it's more accurate to call literature the paper cup-- disposable and replaceable. We just want you to be able to "find support" or "draw conclusions." About what just doesn't matter.
Back in the early days, we had folks arguing that CCSS called for rich content instruction, that it absolutely demanded a classroom filled with the classic canon. At the time I thought those folks were simply hallucinating, since CCSS makes no content demands at all (the closest it comes is the infamous appendix suggested readings list). But I've come to believe that those folks were reacting to the gap that they saw-- "Without rich content, this set of standards is crap, so apparently, by implication and necessity, this must call for rich content. Because otherwise it's crap."
I think the absence of content is also the origin of the "new kind of non-bubble non-memorizing test" talking point. The old school test their thinking of is the kind that asks you to pick the year the Magna Carta was signed, or identify the main characters of Hamlet. But the Big Standardized Tests cover absolutely no content at all. I could throw out all my literature basal texts and never teach a single item from the canon, a single work of literature all year, and still have my students prepared for the BS Test by studying test-taking techniques while reading an article from the newspaper and answering questions about it every single day.
This is also the secret of Depth of Knowledge instruction. It doesn't matter what you teach, as long as you use it to develop certain mental tricks.
Look at it this way:
A student could graduate from high school with top scores on the BS Test and have read nothing in high school except the daily newspaper. The student's teachers would be rated "proficient," the student's school would be high-achieving, and the student could proudly carry the Common Core BS Test "advanced" seal of approval, without that student ever having read a single classic work of literature or every having learned anything except how to perform certain tricks for answering certain questions when confronted with a text.
This is not a high standard. This is neither college nor career ready. Core supporters are going to say, "Well, the local school is free to-- and should-- fill in the blanks with classic literature and great reading." But the test-and-punish reformster system that we live on does not care a whit for content. If students cannot perform the proper tricks on the BS test, students, teachers and schools will be punished. If students cannot identify Huck Finn, MacBeth, James Baldwin, or Toni Morrison, it won't make a bit of difference to the system.
This tilting of the playing field does not just make the Core content neutral; it makes the Core content hostile. It dismisses the value of literature without so much as a conversation. If you are talking to a Core fan who insists otherwise, ask them this question-- Can I prepare my students to be proficient on the BS Test without reading a single important work of literature? The answer is "yes." If they say otherwise, they are lying.
Last Friday, Kate Taylor took to the pages of the New York Times to provide a sort of update on what's going on in English classrooms in the "Common Core era." So how are things going? According to Taylor, pretty swell, thanks.
Taylor focuses on the shiny new injection of "informational" reading into the English classroom, leading with the pairing of fiction and non-fiction works, like Catcher in the Rye and articles about bi-polar disorder, the Odyssey and the GI Bill, Tom Sawyer and an op-ed about teenaged unemployment.
The piece is a monument to reportorial Swiss-cheesery, and while I recognize that reporters do not have infinite space available to them, Taylor has skipped over some fairly significant parts of the story.
Here are some things that Taylor does not know.
Taylor does not know that Common Core is in the weeds
She takes a half-sentence to note that schools choose their own readings, so I'm guessing Taylor's heard that not everybody feels the CCSS love. But she fails to teach the controversy here.
She also fails to note that Common Core increasingly means whatever the local authorities want it to mean, or nothing at all. The Common Core of the actual standards is not the same as the Core in the Big Standardized Test, nor is it the same as whatever teaching materials your district has bought-- and all of that is before we get to your local administrator, who may have her own idea of what edited version of CCSS to enforce. The term "Common Core" now means so many different things that it is essentially meaningless.
Taylor does not know where the informational text requirement came from.
Taylor notes that "the new standards stipulate" that a certain percentage (50 for elementary, 70 for high school) of a student's daily reading diet should be informational. And that's as deep as she digs.
But why is the informational requirement in the Common Core in the first place? There's only one reason-- because David Coleman thought it would be a good idea. All these years later, and not one shred of evidence, one scrap of research, not a solitary other nation that has used such a requirement to good results--- there isn't anything at all to back up the inclusion of the informational reading requirement in the standards except that David Coleman thought it would be a good idea. Coleman, I will remind you, is not a teacher, not an educator, not a person with one iota of expertise in teaching and is, in fact, proud of his lack of qualifications. In fact, Coleman has shared with us his thoughts about how to teach literature, and they are -- not good. If Coleman were student teaching in my classroom, I would be sending him back to the drawing board (or letting him try his ideas out so that we could have a post-crash-and-burn "How could we do better" session).
Coleman has pulled off one of the greatest cons ever. If a random guy walked in off the street into your district office and said, "Hey, I want to rewrite some big chunks of your curriculum just because," he would be justly ignored. But Coleman has managed to walk in off the street and force every American school district pay attention to him.
Taylor does not know what we've given up to meet the new requirements
Taylor uses a quote to both pay lip service to and also to dismiss concerns about curricular cuts.
“Unfortunately there has been some elimination of some literature,” said Kimberly Skillen, the district administrator for secondary curriculum and instruction in Deer Park, N.Y. But she added: “We look at teaching literature as teaching particular concepts and skills. So we maybe aren’t teaching an entire novel, but we’re ensuring that we’re teaching the concepts that that novel would have gotten across.”
So, you see, we really only use literature in the classroom as a sort of bucket to carry in little nuggets of concept and skill. The literature doesn't really have any intrinsic value of its own. Why read the whole novel when we only really care about (aka test) a couple of paragraphs on page 142? If we were hoping to pick up some metaphor-reading skills along the way, why not just read a page of metaphor examples?
This is an attitude of such staggering ignorance and numbskullery that I hardly know how to address it. This is like saying, "Why bother with getting to know someone and dating and talking to each other and listening to each other and spending months just doing things together and sharing hopes and dreams and finally deciding to commit your lives to each other and planning a life together and then after all that finally sleeping together-- why do all that when you could just hire a fifty-dollar hooker and skid straight to the sex?" It so completely misses the point, and if neither Taylor nor Skillen can see how it misses the point, I'm not even sure where to begin.
Literature creates a complex web of relationships, relationships between the reader and the author, between the various parts of the text, between the writing techniques and the meaning.
You don't get the literature without reading the whole thing. The "we'll just read the critical part of the work" school of teaching belongs right up there with a "Just the last five minutes" film festival. Heck, as long as you see the sled go into the furnace or the death star blow up or Kevin Spacey lose the limp, you don't really need the rest of the film for anything, right?
Taylor does not know that English teachers have heard of non-fiction
Taylor makes sure to point out that sometimes, non-fiction is interesting to students. Why, thanks, ma'm! I have also heard that students enjoy the rap music and often eat more than one type of food. Also, water is wet. Taylor also doesn't know that some literature is non-fiction; like most writers on this topic, she mentions the Gettysburg Address as a new non-fiction focus, even though the speech (along with "I Will Fight No More Forever") is in every major 11th grade literature anthology in the US.
But Taylor goes with the notion, anecdotally supported by one administrator, that the English teaching world is loaded with teachers who only and always teach fiction, even though there was this one time that an administrator totally saw a class fully engaged in discussion about a real life issue.
I don't know. Maybe New York is just another world. But I find it hard to believe that Taylor could not have walked up any hall and found an English teacher who has always taught non-fiction material in her class. So if non-fiction is not news to us, then what's the big deal? Hold that thought for a few subheadings.
Taylor does not know why we teach literature in the first place
Hint: it's not just so that literature can be a bucket in which to carry other skills to the student.
The purposes of teaching literature is a topic that deserves not just its own post, but its own blog. But let me just skim the surface of the surface.
Literature lets students experience people and places and feelings and ideas that they do not encounter in their own world, and it lets them encounter things exactly like what they experience in their own, and it lets them experience both in ways that open the experience up to new understanding and expression. Literature opens up new worlds to students, and it opens up familiar worlds as well. It builds depth of understanding and depth of expression. It gives them practice and exercise in developing, holding, connecting many ideas. Reading literature is part of the process of growing and advancing and becoming more fully human.
Taylor slips in the notion that some literature is just hard and probably pointless; she recounts the story of one teacher who was happy to cut Beowulf back to an excerpt because, you know, who really wants to teach that piece of ancient junk?
But the selection of particular works is tricky, because the "right" work is found at the intersection of teacher, students, and the work itself. A literary teacher is the students' guide to that world. The best guides to a place are not the ones who either don't know it or who just plain hate it; the best guides are the people who know and love the territory. You could not pay me enough to teach Paradise Lost to high school students, but I have a colleague who does it every year with huge success. Meanwhile, I'm about the only teacher I know who likes to teach Heart of Darkness. Most on point, I teach Hamlet every year, and I teach it differently every year, partly because of me and partly because of whatever group of students I'm teaching.
Pet peeve: "making" works relevant. Either you can see how it connects to the world and your students or you can't-- there's no point in trying to force or fake it. But of course all of that also applies to non-fiction as well. Here's a delightful quote from a newly-minted assistant principal:
Ms. Thomas said she believed many students were more interested in
talking about real-world issues like genetic testing than about how a
character changed over the course of a novel.
Yes, because how people change and grow and develop is certainly a fake, not-real-world issue that teenagers could never relate to. Gah! The notion that fiction is somehow "fake" and unrelated to the "real" world is just so-- dumb! Literature is one more engage with what is real and true about the world, and anybody who doesn't get that is welcome to come watch my students argue endlessly about Edna Pontillier (The Awakening) and the proper role of women in the world.
Taylor does not know what the real problem with Common Core reading is
If administrators keep their heads and don't let Common Core scare them, the losses under Core reading are minimal. But if administrators start to worry about test scores, things get ugly.
Perdido Street School lays out some of the losses in New York school district that lose their heads and jump into the EngageNY pool. That's similar to what happens in places where administrators take seriously all the baloney about Close Reading 2.0, which is a thing that calls itself close reading and which is really just test prep.
For schools that decide to let the Big Standardized Test drive the curriculum bus, the path is clear-- the significant change is not read more non-fiction, but to do all reading in little chunks. The Common Core can pay lip service to reading whole works and developing an understanding of themes and ideas that are developed through an entire work, but that will never, ever be on the test.
So, as Taylor's article hints but never flat out admits, we don't cut Romeo and Juliet entirely, but we only read a few key portions. Tom Sawyer? We'll just read that fence-painting scene, thanks. We'll read literary slices and filets. We'll get our non-fiction fill with short articles. But we will never, ever again, read an entire book from front to back.
And we will always read our short selections to suit someone else's purpose. Personal responses are not the point; the point is to find the answers to the (probably multiple choice) questions in the packet, questions modeled on the BS Test so that students are better prepared for that experience. Do not stop to develop any sort of personal relationship with the reading; figure out what the questions want from you, and go look for that.
Common Core ELA supports the notion that reading, in fact all human relationships, are simple transactions in which the only real question is "What can I get from this and how can I get it?" It is dehumanizing for both teachers and students.
Outside of missing all of that, Taylor did a super job with the article. It's fluffy and to the untrained eye hardly looks like more Common Core PR at all.
Back in the summer of 2011, the Hunt Institute (they work at "the intersection of policy and politics," so right at the corner of Corporate Lobbying Way and Educational Profiteering Avenue, just across from where Lobbyist Alley empties into the sewers) produced a series of promotional videos for the Common Core.
I find it instructive to look at these older materials about the Core because reformsters were speaking so much more plainly back then, and said so many things that they would later try to pretend they'd never uttered at all.
So today's featured video is "Writing To Inform and Make Arguments." I should explain right up front that this is not one in a series of videos showing the many different types of writing required by the Common Core; this one video covers all the writing you'll ever need to be Common Core Compliant. I'll just go ahead and put the video here before I talk about it-- just so you know that I'm not making any of this up.
Yes, this video features our old buddy David Coleman and his sidekick Susan Pimentel. Let's go.
Pimentel is up first. You know she's the kind of expert you want writing language standards because she's a lawyer who has done tons of consulting work at schools, plus all sorts of edu-ronin work for the Waltons.
Pimentel lets us know there are three types of writing expected by the Core-- "to argue, to inform and explain, and to tell a story."
"Narrative writing is given early prominence, as it should, in elementary school" because narrative writing is, apparently , for small children. But eventually it "gives way" to the other types, the "analytical types" of writing so that by high school, analytical writing should take up 80% of their assigned writing. Not a shock coming from the folks who believe in 75% "informative" texts. I suppose poetry is completely off the table.
In mid-sentence, we fade over to Coleman, wearing what I've come to think of as his thoughtful, serious face. He does his best to avoid any of those unctuous self-satisfied expressions he uses in interviews, tilts his head to one side, and uses the soft, soothing tone of voice one uses with slow children and volatile crazy persons.
At any rate, he's here to earnestly tell us that this analytical writing "is much more closely connected to the demands of college and career." I have nothing against analytical writing, but I have to say that among my many students who have gone on to successful welding careers I have rarely heard of a regular demand for analytical papers.
The two important things in college and career, says Coleman, is to be able to argue using evidence and to be able to inform and take complex information and make it clear. Okay, that might be three things. Coleman's construction is such that it renders his informing a little unclear. See, for the first time, there will be a sequence from K through 12 to get students used to providing evidence for things they write to support and argument or to support clear informative writing. And "of course narrative has a marvelous role in narrative as well." Really.
Coleman tells us that the Core focuses on "short, focused research projects," which is yet another of those "the Core says X" formulations that has no actual basis in what's actually written in the Core. I actually agree with Coleman that several short projects can be preferable to the old One Big Project a Year approach, but he delivers this with an eyebrow parched expression that seems to say, "How you could possibly think about giving back my ring and killing our puppy?" Then Coleman goes a step further to say that such short, focused research is essential to college and career readiness.
Now comes the real fun.
"Good writing comes from good reading," says Coleman (and a graphic). Gathering evidence from the reading becomes the basis for excellent writing, says Coleman. This is not really a surprise-- Coleman seems to believe that students should read texts with the goal of being able to write college papers about them, so it only makes sense that the purpose of writing would be to show what details you can transfer out of a text. Now, he does want you to know that narrative writing is still in there, and that it helps with the core concepts of creativity and precision (wait-- was creativity in the standards somewhere? because that would be news).
Coleman drives to the finish by saying that when you talk to authors, whether authors of literature, polemics or clear informative pieces, "that precision and command of evidence is at the heart of their work and craft." And it's also at the heart of college and career readiness. Boy, is he earnest. It's hard to believe that this is the same guy who smirked when he said that when you grow up, you learn that nobody gives a shit what you think or feel.
And Pimentel's back, to say that the Core asks students to learn many ways to present data and information (which I guess is meant to underline how the Core embraces the whole world of human expression from A to B). She tries to say something about how student writing in different classes might be different, but that point comes out as a sort of muddled mess. Almost as if she doesn't really know exactly what she's talking about.
We can get the easy criticism out of the way first. In this piece about the importance of using details and evidence to support writing, the presenters include zero detail and evidence to support their assertions about writing, including their bold assertion that the techniques they require are the essential element of all college and career success. But this not news; Coleman's MO has always been to present his ideas without evidence or support. One of the most remarkable features about his work as a public education policy scholar is that he never cites the work of another authority-- Coleman's ideas presumably spring full-blown from his own fertile mind without the need for any other scholars, writers, thought leaders, or researchers.
What the video has to say about writing is not wrong. It's just not the whole picture.
It's certainly not wrong to find a link between good writing and good reading. But it shows an astonishingly narrow focus to suggest that the entire purpose of writing is to convey evidence that you have gathered from a piece of reading. In Coleman's universe, you read so that you can write a good paper for class, and you write a paper so that you can show how well you read. It's like suggesting that the purpose of an automobile is to go get groceries; that's certainly a good and worthwhile purpose, but is that really the only reason you're ever going to get the Buick out of the garage?
We write to express something that we have to say, that we want to say. I often tell my students that their writing problems are based in asking the wrong question-- instead of asking "What do I want to say about this" they ask "what can I write to fulfill this assignment." Do I expect them to include support and evidence that helps them say what they have to say? Sure. But support and evidence are just one of many hows, and for Coleman they seem to be the only how, or even the what. Coleman continually reminds me of students I've had who didn't really want to say anything-- they just wanted the teacher to praise them for being Really Smart.
Recently, Maria Popova at the indispensable Brain Pickings wrote a piece about William Faulkner and the question of why write. She includes a list of links to many authors' answer to the question, but she offers a hefty quote from Faulkner himself. It's long, but I'm including it anyway.
You’re alive in the world. You see man. You have an
insatiable curiosity about him, but more than that you have an
admiration for him. He is frail and fragile, a web of flesh and bone and
mostly water. He’s flung willy nilly into a ramshackle universe stuck
together with electricity. The problems he faces are always a little
bigger than he is, and yet, amazingly enough, he copes with them — not
individually but as a race.
He endures.
He’s outlasted dinosaurs. He’s outlasted atom bombs. He’ll outlast
communism. Simply because there’s some part in him that keeps him from
ever knowing that he’s whipped, I suppose; that as frail as he is, he
lives up to his codes of behavior. He shows compassion when there’s no
reason why he should. He’s braver than he should be. He’s more honest.
The writer is so interested — he sees this as so amazing and you
might say so beautiful… It’s so moving to him that he wants to put it
down on paper or in music or on canvas, that he simply wants to isolate
one of these instances in which man — frail, foolish man — has acted
miles above his head in some amusing or dramatic or tragic way… some
gallant way.
That, I suppose, is the incentive to write, apart from it being fun. I
sort of believe that is the reason that people are artists. It’s the
most satisfying occupation man has discovered yet, because you never can
quite do it as well as you want to, so there’s always something to wake
up tomorrow morning to do. You’re never bored. You never reach
satiation.
Some people are going to say, well, yeah, right, that's a motivation if you are going to be an author of great literature. I disagree.
The answer to "Why read" or "Why write" is not "To get a really good grade in class." It is not even "to succeed in college and in my career," because that just transfers the "why" down the line. I believe the answer is to better grasp what it means to be human and alive and here on this planet. I believe the answer is that we try to better understand ourselves and the people around us so that we can better serve and aid and support each other, and come one step closer to being the best version of ourselves we can become in the short time we have here on the planet. At the very least, we are here to take joy in what makes us human whenever we can, and to help others embrace the opportunity to experience that joy.
Coleman and Pimentel offer a Common Core vision that is small and cramped and stunted. They have found an elephant's toe nail clipping and think it represents the entire animal.
NPR just ran a piece courtesy of the Hechinger report profiling Jason Zimba. If David Coleman is widely known as the Architect of Common Core, Zimba is That Other Guy who worked on Common Core, handling the math side of things. He never quite achieved the profile of David Coleman, but he's been right there every step of the way.
Zimba has always seemed to me (and I should note that all of my impressions of reformsters are based on twelfth-hand information from reading and youtubing and who knows, if I were actually to sit in a room with David Coleman, I might find him pleasant and personable and not at all possessed of a huge helping of hubris) to be somewhat more human than Coleman, but I've paid less attention to him because math is not my area of expertise. It's hard to sort these guys out; some, like Coleman, seem to have sought out the work propelled by sheer ego, while others seem to have just blundered into the reform biz without really understanding what they were doing.
The profile by Sarah Garland really wants us to see Zimba as a human being. It opens with a scene to remind us that he has children, and that the older one attends a public school, where Common Core is used. "I would be sleeping in if I weren't frustrated," says Zimba, speaking of his Saturday morning extra math lessons for his daughter to make up for what's lacking in the public school. He is apparently also frustrated by how Common Core is playing out in schools across the country.
Common Core was supposed to fuel a revolution. It was supposed to drive improvements in curricula and materials. It would push for excellence and provide the yardstick to measure progress toward that mountain of math awesometude. That was all its creators wanted, and while they knew it would be tough, they were surprised by the pushback.
"The creation of the standards is enshrouded in mystery for people,"
Zimba says. "I wish people understood what a massive process it was, and
how many people were involved. It was a lot of work."
Well, yes. It was shrouded in mystery on purpose. In fact, it was shrouded in mysteries that were wrapped in lies about the involvement of classroom teachers and international benchmarks.But Garland says that the math standards were essentially written by three guys, and not for the first time, I'm reading an account that echoes those SF movies where scientists don't realize that their purely scientific experiment is actually going to be used as a weapon for evil.
"It was a design project, not a political project," says Phil Daro, a
former high school algebra teacher who was on the three-man writing team
with Zimba and William McCallum, head of the math department at the
University of Arizona. "It was not our job to do the politics while we
were writing."
I've written about McCallum before, a sad scientist who simply didn't and doesn't grasp the context of CCSS, the way it plays out in the real world, and the motivation of the people powering it. We just built the bomb for good. We never intended it to be used against humans, so humans should not be upset when they get blown up.
Zimba's humble early trajectory wouldn't suggest that he was headed for this kind of government work, but when at Oxford, he "befriended" David Coleman, and in 1999 the two hooked up again to tinker with the idea of an education consulting firm. They started Grow Network, a company that produced reports to help districts and states make sense of the new NCLB test results. "Zimba had a genius for creating reports that were mathematically precise but also humanely phrased, Coleman says." That's striking all by itself; I can't tell you how much of Coleman I've read, and how very rarely he acknowledges the value of any other person's work. Grow was bought out by McGraw-Hill and Coleman and Zimba headed in semi-separate directions. Zimba ended up teaching at Bennington (in Vermont-- there's a great monument there worth visiting) where Coleman's mother was president.
Together they wrote a paper in 2007 addressing the issue of many (maybe too many) standards for math across the states. It was the right paper at the right time. Shortly thereafter, in this squeaky-clean NPR version of history, when the CCSSO and NGA decided to tackle standards, "Coleman and Zimba were picked to help lead the effort." Can't help feeling we've skipped an awful lot of insider history right there. But Student Achievement Partners were formed and given a mountain of money to get to work.
"We were looking for a skill set that was fairly unique," says Chris
Minnich, executive director of CCSSO. "We needed individuals that would
know the mathematics — Jason and the other writers obviously know the
mathematics — but would also be able to work with the states, and a
bunch of teachers who would be involved."
That's a fun quote. Particularly the "bunch of teachers" part. Does it suggest that Coleman was on board primarily for his shmoozing abilities?
At this point, Garland's grasp of history gets even slipperier. We do get the inspiring story of Zimba and McCallum working long hours, slaving over the standards in the garage (just like Bill Gates starting Microsoft). She notes again that he was human, with a life and a family and a day job, spiced up with a story of some colleague telling him to stop texting about standards stuff while his second daughter was being born. During the course of the next year, they consulted with state officials,
mathematicians and teachers, including a union group. Draft after draft
was passed back and forth over email.
"Consulting." Great word. Then the final standards were released in 2010. Garland notes that "by the following year" forty states adopted them; she does not note that many adopted them before they were written, though she does note that adoption happened "thanks in part to financial incentives dangled by the Obama administration" which is kind of like saying I paid my mortgage payments thanks in part to a Keeping My House incentive dangled by my bank.
Garland's timeline for the resistance to CCSS is even more...um... debatable. She marks the pushback to 2013 and the wave of CCSS test results. She says resistance didn't enter the mainstream until this year, when a father's posting about CCSS homework went viral and Glen Beck picked it up, followed by ridicule from Louis C. K. and Stephen Colbert. Which is about the most truncated history of Common Core opposition I've ever read.
Now CCSS allies are trying to salvage the cause by calling for testing delays. But the writers are just puzzled by all the fuss. "When I see some of those problems posted on Facebook, I think I
would have been mad, too," McCallum says. Daro tells a story about his
grandson, who brought home a math worksheet labeled "Common Core," with a
copyright date of 1999. They argue there's actually very
little fuzziness to the math in the Common Core. Students have to
memorize their times tables by third grade and be able to do the kind of
meat-and-potatoes problems Zimba asks of his daughter during their
Saturday tutoring sessions, requirements he believes the so-called
Common Core curriculum at her school essentially ignored.
In other words, they wrote it right, but everybody is reading it incorrectly.We built the bomb for Good. We do not understand why people are being blown up with it. Even as Zimba and his colleagues defend the standards against cries of
federal overreach, they are helpless when it comes to making sure
textbook publishers, test makers, superintendents, principals and
teachers interpret the standards in ways that will actually improve
American public education, not make it worse.
All of this has pushed Zimba to a new conclusion, a new crusade, a new battle. These days, Zimba and his colleagues acknowledge better standards aren't enough. "I
used to think if you got the assessments right, it would virtually be
enough," he says. "In the No Child Left Behind world, everything follows
from the test." Now, he says, "I think it's curriculum."
Yes, the problem is that we didn't build a powerful enough bomb. If we built a bigger bomb, then it would be used the correct way.
It is hard not to see these guys as hopelessly naive about How Things Work, about the implications of the work they were doing. I sympathize in part-- when he claims that publishers are mucking up the works by using CCSS to market any old crap lying around the warehouse, I don't disagree, but at the same time, dude, what did you think they were going to do with the bomb once you had finished building it?? You may have thought you were building an instrument of peace and wisdom and growth, but you should have paid better attention to the people who were signing your checks and collecting your work, because this is exactly what they wanted it for.
All three are trying to fix it. McCallum has some little start-up you've never heard of to make math apps. Daro is writing a complete math curriculum for Pearson, presumably because, you know, the politics and business are not his problem. Zimba's trying to work on it, too. None of them seem to see their own hand in the mess that is now choking public education. Granted, I see all of these characters through the smudgy lens of various journalists, but I keep feeling as if Coleman knows exactly what he's doing, but The Other Guys don't really get it. They don't see the battlefield because they are only focused on the bomb.
Zimba does not pick up the lesson that he now realizes that he was wrong back when he thought the standards would fix everything, so maybe he's wrong again now that he thinks national curriculum is the answer. And he doesn't seem to have any sense of the moral or ethical implications of trying to rewrite the education system for everybody part time in his garage-- did nobody at any point say, "Gee, for a project this massive, maybe there's a better way and other people who should be involved." While he seems to lack the strutting ballsiness of Coleman, he still must have the hubris required to think, "Yeah, I could write the math guidelines for every student in the country."
This is why I love the blogosphere. Ideas get bounced back and forth and become shiny and polished, like stones in a polishing drum.
A week or so ago, several of us picked up and responded to a David Coleman piece about how to teach reading the Common Core way with Nifty Questions. But the cherry on top of the sundae that was that conversation comes today from Daniel Katz. The post is entitled "On the twelfth day of Common Core, David Coleman gave to me..." and it is A) not a hilarious rewrite of the Twelve Days of Christmas and it is B) long but C) you should read it anyway.
Because, after all the many ways we have tried to explain and distill what's wrong and lacking and Less Than about Coleman's approach to reading, Katz brings us to the simplest, clearest explanation yet.
Coleman thinks the reason to read a work of literature is to prepare to write an English 101 paper about it.
There are a million useful ways to interact with literature. And I would not be an English teacher if I did not believe that there are many benefits to be derived from reading great literature even if you're not going to be an English teacher when you grow up and even if you are not going to be an English major and even if you are not going to go to college at all.
I believe the point of reading and wading into and wrestling with and experiencing literature is to become more fully human, to become (excuse the cheesy cliche) a better person. Coleman believes that the reason to read literature is to write a better term paper.
It's as clear a way as any to capture how Coleman's vision of language education is cramped and small and limited and meager. But you should click on over to Katz's blog and check it out. Because his piece, like many other pieces of writing in the world, is well worth reading even if you aren't going to have to write a paper about it.
Thanks to Nicholas Tampio at Aljazeera America, I discovered a special piece of work from David Coleman, architect of the Common Core and Master of the College Board, a man who has singlehandedly tried to redefine what it means to be an educated human being.
In a fairly massive essay entitled "Cultivating Wonder " (published with an austere cover featuring a giant question mark, so maybe it's "Cultivating Wonder?"), Coleman lays out in great detail what's wrong with his ideas about how, exactly, literature should be taught. Okay, yes, that wasn't his intention, exactly, but then sometimes authors reveal things beyond their actual intentions. The essay may not have changed my mind about how to teach literature, but it gave me a clearer picture of what's going on in Coleman's hubris-engorged melon.
So much depends on a good question. A question invites students into a text or turns them away. A question provokes surprise or tedium. Some questions open up a text, and if followed never let you see it the same way again.
That's the cold open, followed by a restatement of the aged old baloney-- that efforts to improve reading in this country have hit a wall as proven by flat reading scores. Nothing in that premise is correct, including the idea that 8th grade reading scores tell us how well reading is going in this country. But Coleman wants us to understand that we need him and his insights not just as educators, but as a nation. Two paragraphs in, and Coleman has established a familiar tone-- he is not here to share some ideas and techniques teacher to teacher, but is here to give his superior insights to the nation full of lesser beings who are hopelessly lost and failing. Some reformsters may pay lip service to the accumulated wisdom of the vast army of professional educators; Coleman never does.
Coleman says that the Core "challenges students to read like a detective and write like an investigative reporter" (though he doesn't illuminate this with specific examples of either-- one of the things that remains striking about Coleman is that he never acknowledges or expresses respect for the expertise of anyone who's not a dead author). You may think I'm being picky, but I'm just trying to read like a detective.
At any rate, Coleman is going to show us how it's done by using five awesome questions connected to five reading standards to open up five texts. I am not going to walk you through all five, but we'll take a close look at a couple just to see what this genius is up to.
Hamlet
Coleman decodes to aim high right off the bat, and his first question is this:
In what tone of voice does Bernardo ask "Who's there?" and how do you know?
As anyone who has taught Hamlet knows, this is not a bad question. Shakespeare sets a mood of dread and anxiety in the first few pages of the play by giving us two castle guards who are on edge. Coleman wants us to know that he has taught Hamlet to Yale students and inner city New Haven high schoolers, and he wants us to know that students don't always catch the importance of that exchange. Thank goodness he was there to help.
After breaking down the whole scene in what qualifies as a legitimate reading, Coleman calls it "extraordinary" that Shakespeare doesn't just have Bernardo come out and say, "I'm scared." But if we were allowed to look beyond the four corners of the page, we'd know it's not extraordinary at all. Shakespeare is a huge fan of Opening Exposition Via Minor Character. In Romeo and Juliet we learn of the violent feud from a set of passing servants. In Julius Caesar, we learn about the current political unease of Rome from two unimportant citizens. And the notion of showing rather than telling is fundamental to drama.
Coleman's lesson misses much. He notes that Shakespeare doesn't give much in the way of stage directions, but, trapped between the four corners, he doesn't move into a discussion of why-- that the playwright was there to give the directions himself-- or what that might mean to us in terms of what has and has not been handed down (in fact, he also does not address that we don't really have an absolutely authoritative version of the text we are so closely examining).
Coleman's lesson also ignores the nature of drama. "Rarely when we read a script does it explicitly state how one might say the word or direct the action. But by examining exactly what the script says and then making inferences from this evidence, the playwright's art comes to light." (Watch those dangling modifiers there, Mr. Coleman). Well, duh. Every acting and directing student ever has learned that. I explain it to my students like this: A novel is done, complete. The text is finished. But a play is not finished until it is performed. Hamlet is much-beloved precisely because it is not only rich in what's there, but it is rich in possible choices for the actors who perform it (just how crazy, or not, is Hamlet, and how does that madness or not-madness progress; and what can we figure out about Gertrude; how do we settle on a version of Ophelia who is not too weak and not too strong).
Coleman does not claim that his question is the be-all and end-all, but he still comes across like a man who has discovered how to use a can opener and now believes he has found the secret to being a five-star chef.
An Athlete of God
Coleman next works his way into Martha Graham's essay "An Athlete of God." I'm not going to wade too far into this except to note just a couple of Colemanisms.
Most notably, he has selected a work in which Graham has laid out what she thinks and feels about practice and dance, so I guess sometimes when you grow up, people do give a shit about what you think and feel after all.
The other is the inability to distinguish between his own experience and the possibility of any other. At one point he says, "The mystery of what Graham means can be illuminated only by further reading." He walks us through his own progression of understanding as he reads, but he does so as if his own response to the work unfolds in the only way that anyone's response can. This is a repeated problem of Colemanism-- in David Coleman's world, the only way smart people think is the way David Coleman thinks, not just in conclusions, but in process. There is only one path to the truth, and David Coleman is on it.
Huck Finn
What is the role of Tom Sawyer in the first chapter of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?
If Coleman had wanted to illustrate the limits of Colemanism, he could not have picked a better work with which to do so.
First, the sheer volume of critical writing about the novel is huge. If ever there were a moment for Coleman to drop a "as critic Smarty McThinksalot says..." quote in here, this would be it. At the very least, he might acknowledge there are continuing debates about many of the conclusions that he presents as settled and decided.
Coleman does, for instance, tackle the end of Huck Finn, one of the most contentious literary puzzles in American letters. Hemingway said that Huck Finn is the source of all American literature, but he also said, "If you read it you must stop where... Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating." Many critics have written extensively about whether or not the ending fits or works or is genius or suckage. If we could step outside of the four corners, we would probably observe that Twain himself stopped after chapter 18 and walked away from the book for about two years.
But Coleman simply observes that "one of the most striking developments of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the final diminished stature of Tom Sawyer. Tom enters awkwardly near the end of the novel and offers very little-- he is merely childish. The smallness of Tom at the end of the book shows how much Huck has grown." He observes this as if this is not a point on which critics from big-time PhD's down to students in my class disagree with vehemently. And his view is a hard one to sell, since the ending sees Huck give Tom complete control of Jim's escape, losing his own hard-won agency and self-direction.
Huck Finn is a work that can provide an opportunity for rich debate in a class, but in Mr. Coleman's class there is no need for debate, because there's only one correct answer.
Gettysburg Address
Props to Coleman for his willingness to return to the scene of the most famous critical crime perpetrated in the name of Common Core, but whatever else we can say about Coleman, there's never been any question about his gigantic brass balls.
This is not any real improvement over earlier CCSS advice about the address. Coleman wants us to ask about the use of "dedicate" in the text. This is (though he doesn't say so) Coleman's response to the question of how one can teach the Gettysburg Address without teaching what it's about. In Colemanism, it's about the use of a vocabulary word. It's about playing compositional tricks with the word "dedicate." The Address is a writing exercise and Lincoln is a very clever boy-- he is presenting "a master class in vocabulary."
Coleman takes a moment to reject questions like "What is Lincoln's purpose in the speech?" It is "generic" and does not "arise from a specific encounter with the text." It's "more complicated, less reading" and "more open to cliché and canned response."
This is Coleman exhibiting (yet again) his lack of teaching background. Because, let's talk about canned response. If I have Mr. Coleman for class, and for every literature question there is only one answer that shows I have thought properly about the work, and that answer is always the same, and I want to Do Well in that class, I will spit that answer quickly straight out of the can. Coleman claims that general questions "just don't work. Generic questions that may seem deep often put teachers and students into automatic pilot rather than the alert attentiveness that real reading requires." Not like, you know, the REALLY deep questions that Coleman wants to ask. I don't suppose Colemanism allows for the possibility that how the question is asked, how the follow-ups are asked, the context of where the students are in interest and understanding-- that any of those factors might matter.
Do Not Go Gently into That Good Night and One Art
Coleman wants to compare and contrast the poets' use of a repeated line with and without variations. Once again we are more concerned with structure than content, though Coleman again allows himself the luxury of packaging his own responses as critical absolutes. Finals stanzas behind with "breathtaking direct address" and "both of these lines take your head off." I'm going to breeze past this one because Coleman would now like to tell us
Seven Things Worth Bearing in Mind
When it comes to this question stuff.
1) Beginning matter and are often worthy of sustained attention As with many Coleman insights, I want to say, "No, duh. Do you think you're offering something bold and new here?"
2) Great questions follow the author's lead. Coleman writes, and I am not making this up, "Good questions begin in humility." What he means is that what's within the four corners of the text is more important than the best gesture of our brains.
3) The text is the star. Again, stay within those four corners.
4) Great questions have a simplicity that allows students to get started by observing and gathering evidence and gradually to earn larger insights and ideas. In other words, there is only one true path to understanding.
5) Great questions provoke a sense of mystery and provided a payoff in insight that makes the word of reading carefully worth it. This one deserves some extra attention, because it reveals a level of Colemanism not always noted. Not only does Coleman assume there is only one pathway to truth, but he assumes there is only one motivation for traveling it. There's only one way to feel as if reading a work carefully was worth the trouble, only one reason that people dive into complex texts and come out the other side being glad they did. Only some works are really worth reading, says Coleman, and there's only one reason to engage them.
6) Great questions draw on advantages of students reading together by sharing what they have noticed and seen. Unless of course, there's only one correct answer that proves they've been noticing and seeing properly, in which case the only group discussion will be centered on the question "What do you think he wants us to say is the answer?"
7) Some great questions do not follow these principals and may even break them. Well, there's something I can actually agree with.
Is The Whole Thing Crap
Ironically, Coleman's question ideas are not in and of themselves terrible, and many of us use them in limited and appropriate ways. But this is definitely one of those "if your only tool is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail" situations.
Coleman repeatedly fails to distinguish between his own experience of the text and Universal Truth. This leads him both to believe apparently that if he just figured something out about Bernardo, he must be the first person ever to see it, that his own reaction to a line is the universal one, that his path into the text is the only one, and that things that do not matter to him should not matter to anybody. Of all the reformsters, he is the one least likely to ever acknowledge contributions of any other living human being. For someone who famously said that nobody gives a shit about your thoughts and feelings, Coleman is enormously fascinated by and has great faith in his own thoughts and feelings.
The frequent rap on Coleman's reading approach is that it is test prep, a technique designed to prepare students to take standardized tests. But the more Coleman I read, the more I suspect it's the other way around-- that Coleman thinks a standardized test is really a great model of life, where there's always just one correct answer, one correct path, one correct reading, and life is about showing that you have it (or telling other people to have it).
Sadly, it often seems that what David Coleman doesn't know about literature is what David Coleman doesn't know about being human in the world. Life is not a bubble test. There is a richness and variety in human experience that Coleman simply does not recognize nor allow for. His view of knowledge, learning, understanding, and experience is cramped and tiny. It's unfortunate that circumstances have allowed him such unfettered power over the very idea of what an educated person should be. It's like making a person who sees only black and white the High Minister of National Art.
