No, NYT, Common Core Is Not About Knowledge

In today's New York Times, Natalie Wexler offers an op-ed from some parallel universe in which Common Core and reformsterism are-- well, maybe Opposites Day is today and I missed the memo.

She opens by arguing that the Big Standardized Test is not narrowing the curriculum, claiming that it's narrow anyway, and right off the bat she establishes herself as someone who doesn't understand how schools work. Heck, back in 1977 elementary teachers only spent 50 minutes per day on science and social studies, and that has only dropped by ten minutes. Some quick math tells us that over 180 days, that's a loss of 30 hours of instruction. I know in the private sector, ten minutes is nothing, but in a classroom, ten minutes is plenty of time to Get Some Stuff Done-- and it adds up quickly.

But that's just the overture. Wexler then launches into a full-blown opera about the romance between Common Core and Rich Content, the kind of knowledge-heavy education championed by guys like E. D. Hirsch. This shows a profound mis-understanding of the Common Core.

While critics blame the Common Core for further narrowing curriculums, the authors of the standards actually saw them as a tool to counteract that trend. They even included language stressing the importance of “building knowledge systematically.”

... Most educators, guided by the standards alone, have continued to focus on skills.

So Wexler's theory is that we're supposed to close read the standards and see, buried somewhere between a gerund phrase and optional appendices, a mandate to include rich content.

Like the rest of the rich content crowd, Wexler is so sure that rich content knowledge has to be there, she has convinced herself that it is.

She is wrong.

The standards are clearly focused on "skills" (whether the "skills" are really skills or not is another debate). David Coleman, the writer of the ELA standards, has given plenty of detailed and hugely clear demonstrations that in his standards, content is unimportant and literature is simply a conduit, a bucket, a paper cup for transmitting the skills to students. And the standards are written in the language of behavioral objectives-- students will "cite," demonstrate," "analyze." The quote that Wexler pins her "they even included language" hopes on is simply part of a tacked-on introduction to the standards-- not the standards themselves.

She gets the criticism of Common Core correct, quoting cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham to show that you can't improve reading skills without attaching them to content, and you can't test those skills without actually testing the students' prior knowledge. Her mistake is in reasoning that since you can't do those things, clearly Common Core and BS Testing are not trying to do those things. In this, she is incorrect.

Not only did Coleman intend ELA standards to be focused strictly on skills, but test manufacturers have gone out of their way to make prior knowledge irrelevant to the BS Tests, selecting passages that are obscure, strange, and just plain bizarre in an attempt to select items about which students are likely to have no prior knowledge. As Coleman loves to say, the idea is to stay within the four corners of the text, and to bring nothing into those four corners with you.

Wexler goes on to sing the praises of knowledge-rich curriculum, but she doesn't understand that knowledge-rich curriculum is irrelevant to Common Core, and that her explanation of why CCSS must include knowledge-rich curriculum is really an explanation of why Common Core stinks-- because it eschews knowledge-rich content.

Wexler is in a high state of denial here; what Common Core actually says is so wrong, she's convinced herself that it must actually mean something else.

But Common Core in general and the high stakes BS Tests in particular do not require, want, ask for or favor rich content. Tools like Depth of Knowledge are predicated on the very idea that the proper mental skills can be taught with any level of content.  I could spend an entire year having my students reading and answering practice questions about nothing but articles from the National Enquirer and still get them fully prepared to rank "proficient" on the BS Test.

Her finish is a fine symbol of the confusion in this piece. First:

While standardized tests didn’t cause the curriculum to narrow, they’re a useful reminder that some students have acquired a lot less knowledge than others.

Wrong. Of course the tests caused the curriculum to narrow. And no, they don't tell us a single solitary thing about what knowledge the students possess. On the other hand:

 But if we want to finally begin to remedy that, we can’t just teach the skills the tests seem to call for.

That's exactly right. It's a good argument against the Core, against the BS Testing, against the high stakes attached to those tests, and also an excellent argument in favor of the opt out movement. Even if Wexler didn't understand what argument she was actually making.

Note: For a more thorough and scholarly treatment of this issue, I highly recommend this piece from Johann N. Neem

Nicholas Kristof's Tourist Balls

When a tourist is visiting a place, just passing through, but they feel that they must share their infinite wisdom with the natives and tell the natives How Things Should Be Done-- that takes big balls. Big tourist balls.

Your second cousin Fred who came to stay for a long weekend and wanted to re-arrange your entire kitchen? Tourist balls. The summer people who want to re-arrange the downtown of that quaint village in which they live one month out of twelve? Tourist balls. The European colonizers who wanted to remake all African civilization in their own image? Huge tourist balls.

Nicholas Kristof was in the New York Times yesterday announcing that it's time for reformsters to move on.

The zillionaires are bruised. The idealists are dispirited. The number of young people applying for Teach for America, after 15 years of growth, has dropped for the last two years. The Common Core curriculum is now an orphan, with politicians vigorously denying paternity.

K-12 education is an exhausted, bloodsoaked battlefield. It’s Agincourt, the day after. So a suggestion: Refocus some reformist passions on early childhood.

And at this point I was already steaming. My most immediate response was, "Ooooh! Iddums all tuckered out?? Poor iddle iddums." But I pressed on.

He offers three reasons that early childhood will be the new black next season.

First, tiny minds are malleable, so we can better shape them into what we want. All we have to do is "coach" parents to "stimulate" their children. And, without naming it, he uses Raj Chetty's totally bogus research that suggests that even though it looks like the results of early childhood boosts disappear in the teens, they actually reappear in the twenties in the form of cash. [Update: Kristof asserts, via Twitter, that I've missed the reference here. Fair enough. Doesn't make me any more convinced. ]

@fredbartels @palan57 If he thinks that I'm citing Chetty, he doesn't know the literature on ece at all. More Heckman, Deming & others
— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) April 24, 2015

Second,  he cites all the research and anecdotal evidence that charters make magical gains appear with poor kids. Well, he doesn't so much cite it or examine it so much as he waves his hand and suggests its over there. 

Third, early childhood would be easier to work on because it's not so politically charged. So getting bipartisan money for early childhood ed should be easier.

There's a whole discussion to be had about how to do early childhood right (spoiler alert: it doesn't involve formal instruction and Pearson standardized tests). But I'm too angry about Kristof's giant tourist balls to have that discussion right now.

Kristof manages to say one or two things that aren't stupid-- like this:

Education inequity is America’s original sin. A majority of American children in public schools are eligible for free or reduced price lunches, and they often get second-rate teachers in second-rate schools — even as privileged kids get superb teachers. This perpetuates class and racial inequity and arises in part from a failed system of local school financing.

But then he immediately goes on to say this:

But fixing K-12 education will be a long slog, so let’s redirect some energy to children aged 0 to 5 (including prenatal interventions, such as discouraging alcohol and drug use among pregnant women)

This is the theme of his piece. He opened by noting that education reformers have been working at this for twelve whole years! Twelve!! Think of it. But now it's just oh so hard and it turns out that you can't just breeze in like some miraculous drive-by do-gooder and just fix things. There are real problems! And some of them are hard to solve! Gosh, those of us who work in education had no idea.

So clearly it's time to pack up and move on.

Look, I believe there are a handful of reformsters who know better, and I'm sure plenty of them mean well. But this is just too much. I'm pretty sure that I read Kristof more often than he reads me. But I have a message for him anyway.

Dear Mr. Kristof:

Does a decade seem like a long time to work at education? Does working at education seem hard? While we're at it, have you noticed that water is wet?

This-- this "well this has been difficult, it's time to move on"-- THIS is why from the first moment reformsters showed up on the scene, teachers across America rolled our eyes, squared our shoulders, and turned away. Because we knew that the day would come when the tourists decided they wanted to pack up and leave. Because you were not in it to get the job done.

Reformsters were never the white knights or the saviors of education. The vast majority of reformsters were the people who swept into a home, pulled all the furniture out from the wall, burned the drapes (because you don't want these old things) and started to tear the floor up. Then somewhere around day three, you declare, "Man this is hard, and this couch doesn't fit against that wall (which we had told you all along)" and so you pack up, drive away, and leave the residents to put things back together.

You think twelve years was a long time? I've been at this for thirty-six, and I have plenty more to go because there's still work to do, and as long as I can do it, I will. Plenty of my colleagues have done and will do the same. You think educating in the face of poverty and lack of resources and systemic inequity is difficult? Many of my colleagues have been doing it for decades. But reformsters have been so sure that they didn't need to listen to the locals. They and their giant balls knew better than any stupid teachers.

Doing the education thing takes a lifetime. In fact, it takes more than a lifetime-- that's why we've constructed an institution that provides continuity above and beyond what we could get from any single human being.

You think that the education thing is hard, "a slog," after just a decade! You amateur. You dabbler! You tourist! Has the education reform movement "peaked"? Well, guess what! Education has not. We are still working at it, still striving, still doing our damnedest. When reformsters have moved on because it's hard and challenging and a slog and not just as fun as it was a whole ten years ago, we will still be here, doing the job, educating students and doing it all in the midst of the mess created by a bunch of wealthy well-connected hubristic tourists with gigantic balls.

You think education is hard? What the hell do you think dedicated teachers across this country are doing with their entire adult lives?!!

So get out. Go. Move on to the next big opportunity and screw around with that until you're all distracted by the next shiny object. Education is not the better for your passing through.

Education needs people who will commit, people who are in it for the marathon, not the sprint, people who are willing to dedicate their whole lives to teaching because that's the minimum that it takes. Students and communities need schools that are permanent stable fixtures, not temporary structures built to long as a reformster's attention span.

It's hard? You've peaked? You want to move on to other things?

Get the hell out, sonny. The grown-ups have work to do.