Coleman's CCSS Writing Style

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.

What Has Arne Learned?

Over at the official blog of the Department of Education, Secretary Arne Duncan shares "What I've Learned in Fifty States." Spoiler alert: nothing.

Arne can be excused. Many people are unclear about the meaning of "learn." Learning implies a change of state, a movement from not-knowing to knowing, from not-understanding to understanding. The world has a large supply of people who are not interested in a change of state, and so their interactions with the world around them are not about understanding or grasping or discovering, but about confirmation. They are not looking for a change of state, but of a more solid, comfortable settling into their status quo.

Politics are not conducive to learning. You don't get many political points for saying, "Hey, I've look at some facts, talked to some people, examined the issue, and I've come to a different understanding." In life, we aspire to be, find, foster life-long learners. In politics, learning just gets you a "flip-flopper" label.

So it's not particularly surprising that in traveling through fifty states, Arne "learned" that he's always been right about everything. Not once in fifty states did he encounter something that made him say, "Damn. I need to rethink this."

Can Arne learn? It's a tough call to make from out here in the cheap seats. NEA president Lily Eskelsen-Garcia once declared that he was well-intentioned and sincere, but just wrong. Many folks suggest that he's corrupt and in the pocket of business interests, but I think that's facile. That kind of corruption comes in various shades, few of them simple quid pro quo pay-to-play. I think it's more common that you spend time with rich, important people and they are charismatic and they seem to make a of sense and so, hey, you adopt their view because it just seems so right. I look at things like the last Pearson essay about testing and, man, it looks and sounds like the work of really important people who really know what they're doing, and if I weren't inclined to be a skeptical asshole, I might find it pretty convincing. Maybe Arne's just in way over his head and he's naturally attracted to the cutest lifeguard that fishes him out of the water. Maybe he just doesn't know any better. This is a mystery I still to solve with the clues that make it out to the cheap seats because as it turns out, Arne and I just haven't had a face-to-face conversation yet.

Arne wants us to believe that he's really been listening, but poking through his map of visits reveals very few actual encounters with actual teachers in actual public school settings.

During the past five years, whether my visit was to a conference, a community center, a business, an early childhood center, a university, or one of the more than 340 schools I’ve stopped by, I’ve come away with new insight and knowledge into the challenges local communities face, and the creative ways people are addressing them. I know that in order to do this job well, it’s vital to never stop listening, especially to those in the classroom each day.

Except that most of those 340 schools were backdrops for political business, settings for conferences or announcements that allowed for good eyewash for department business as usual. And when Arne tells me that he's come away with new insights and knowledge, I challenge him to cite a specific example. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting; can anybody remember a single moment in his career that Arne has said, "Hey, from seeing how this looks on the ground, I've learned this thing that I didn't previously understand/know/believe"?

Duncan goes on to cite some specific visits in which he was excited to discover that he has been right all along and that his policies are awesome. This is not learning. By the end of this piece of puffery, it's clear that Arne has learned nothing in five years, but he has collected confirmations of his pre-existing beliefs.

He's had the chance. Say what you want about the people in the Resistance opposing the reformster policies and programs-- we aren't very hard to find. Find just one of our blogs, and the links will open up a whole world of differing opinions and spirited discourse. LEG reported a fairly direct conversation with him. And to his credit, he once actually sat in a room with some BATs. At this point Arne really has no excuse for not being at least familiar with the real arguments against his policies. He could learn about the data that shows how VAM is a failed useless tool, or that his testing program is disastrous, or that modern charters are an unregulated theft-fest. And yet somehow, even a simple "We don't all agree on how best to serve students in America's public schools" doesn't make his list.

I go back to the department blog because it is a striking example of writing at its absolute worst. It fails first in voice. There really isn't anything here to indicate that the post was written by a real person; it could as easily have been written by an intern with Arne's itinerary and a list of department talking points open in front of him. It's seemingly meant to be a personal reflection, and yet there is nothing personal about it, no trace of personality in it. This adds to the cumulative impression I've formed of Arne; he seems to bring nothing personal to his job, but seems to view it as the business of implementing ideas, policies and talking points that he has no personal investment in. When you can take it, try looking for a clip of Arne talking about basketball, and compare it to one of his official secretarial duties. Only one of those activities seems to awaken any personal passion in him (spoiler alert: it's not the one that involves your tax dollars at work).

But this is also the sort of writing that makes me scratch my head and look around for an audience. It's like a man on a soapbox delivering a desultory sermon to nobody. Who did he imagine reading this? Are his critics supposed to be reading it  and thinking, "Damn, I've had this guy all wrong. I am now convinced of his rightitude!" Are his supporters (I imagine there must be a few) suppose to take heart from a rousing pep speech, because I don't think this is that. Is it supposed to give journalists something to cover? Because there's nothing either new or strikingly quotable here. I will bet you dollars to donuts that I am at this moment writing the longest response to the piece that is ever going to be written.

The basic point of writing is that you have something you want to say and somebody you want to say it to. Arne's essay appears to fail on both points.

I take it as the intersection of Arne in particular and politics in general-- a pointless, empty exercise in talking to the air to signify, at a minimum, that you are still doing something, and that nothing has changed (just in case anybody was wondering). Devoid of personality, purpose or passion, it hints at a bureaucrat who has simply lost his moorings and any particular contact with actual human beings and the world they live in, but who may not realize that he's even adrift.

Arne opens with the observation that the best ideas come from outside Washington, DC, which is of course the kind of thing said only by people soaked in DC culture (or its outposts in places like, say, Chicago). Just add that to list of things that Arne hasn't learned. As a summative self-assessment, this is not top notch work. Perhaps, rather than trying to advance on merit, Arne is counting on one more social promotion.

Meaning and Standardized Writing

One of the most unsuccessful initiatives of the Great Education Makeover is the attempt to reduce writing to a skill set that can be assessed by a standardized test.

Making language is like making music-- there is definitely a technical component, but at the end of the day, technical mastery is not enough. I can play all the notes on the page and still be boring, lifeless, and unlikely to engage any audience. I can write something that fits the technical definition of an essay, and it can still be a terrible piece of writing.

All writing is problem solving, and like any problem solving activity, the most important step is defining the problem that you intend to solve.

The vast majority of student writing failures are not actually composition failures, but thinking failures. I often tell my students that they are having trouble with an assignment because they are starting with the wrong question. They are asking "what can I write to satisfy this assignment" or "how can I fill up this piece of paper" or "what can I use to fill in five paragraph-sized blanks," and these are all the wrong question to start with.

The correct problem that writing should solve is "How can I communicate what I want to communicate in a meaningful way?"

I choose "meaningful" because it's a fuzzy word. We may find meaning in being moved emotionally or challenged intellectually. Whatever meaning may be, our goal is to create an experience for another human (and because writing is also time travel, that other human might even be our future self).

There are certainly technical aspects to this operation. In fact, much of the history of literature is the history of writers inventing new techniques and forms to better communicate meaningfully. But technical skills by themselves are not only meaningless, but have no purpose if not used for some meaningful pursuit. That's why you don't pay money to sit in a concert hall and watch great musicians run scales and warm-up exercises.

The standardized testing approach to writing, both in "writing" assessments and in the open-ended response format now creeping into other tests, gets virtually nothing right at all. Nothing. The goal is itself a meager one-- let's just measure student technical skill-- and even that is not measured particularly well. Test writing is the opposite of good writing. The problem the student is trying to solve is not "How do I create a meaningful expression" but "How do I provide what the test scorer wants to see" or "What words can I use to fill up this space."

Students are supposed to react to the prompt or stimulus (yes, I've seen that word used, as if students are lab rats) with the appropriate response, and their response should not be side tracked by any attempt on their part to make the response meaningful. It is literally meant to be meaningless, as if stripping meaning from writing somehow leaves us with pure, measurable technique. This is like somehow sucking the bones from a human being on the theory that without the skeleton in place, we can get a better pure measurement of muscle tone.

Every teacher of writing has been saying the same thing for years-- standardized writing tests encourage and reward bad writing. "So what?" comes my least favorite response. "If they're really good writers, they ought to be able to fake the testing stuff, right?" Wrong on two counts.

First, while great writers may be able to "fake it," less great writers may not, and all writers run the risk of becoming hornswoggled into believing that Bad Writing is really the ideal. "Faking it" assumes some understanding that we're imitating something bogus. I'm concerned about students who don't recognized the bogus nature of test writing.

Second-- even if they can fake it, that's not a good thing. This is like saying that people who are really good at kissing their spouses would probably be equally good at kissing any random stranger. And, well-- do we really want anybody to be good at that? If the best kiss is one filled with meaning and significance, then why would we want to send the message that good kissing is just a matter of the right pucker and moisture and what it actually means is not even on the table. Who cares whose lips you're smooshing up against as long as your technique is good? Who cares about context or purpose or intent or any of the rest of it? Just pucker up and smoosh facial areas.

Sure, there are technical minimums that have to be reached. "Don't smoosh your lips against your partner's eyeball" is probably good technical kissing advice. "Don't write sentences composed entirely of prepositions" is also good advice. But as the ever-awesome Les Perelman has repeatedly demonstrated, standardized tests have a huge tolerance for meaningless gibberish that is technically proficient.

I remained convinced that it is absolutely impossible to create a useful cheap standardized test for writing. The repeated attempts to do so are a destructive expression of a nearly nihilistic impulse, the thinking of people who believe a picture of a bear rug is as good as a bear.

Essay-Grading Software & Peripatetic Penguins

Education Week has just run an article by Caralee J. Adams announcing (again) the rise of essay-grading software. There are so many things wrong with this that I literally do not know where to begin, so I will use the device of subheadings to create the illusion of order and organization even though I promise none. But before I begin, I just want to mention the image of a plethora of peripatetic penguins using flamethrowers to attack an army of iron-clad gerbils. It's a striking image using big words that I may want later. Also, look at what nice long sentences I worked into this paragraph.

Look! Here's My First Subheading!

Speaking for the software will be Mr. Jeff Pence, who apparently teaches middle school English to 140 students. God bless you, Mr. Pence. He says that grading a set of essays may take him two weeks, and while that seems only a hair slow to me, I would certainly agree that nobody is taking 140 7th grade essays home to read overnight.

But Mr. Pence is fortunate to have the use of Pearson WriteToLearn, a product with the catchy slogan "Grade less. Teach more. Improve scores." Which is certainly a finely tuned set of catchy non-sequitors. Pearson's ad copy further says, "WriteToLearn—our web-based literacy tool—aligns with the Common Core State Standards by placing strong emphasis on the comprehension and analysis of information texts while building reading and writing skills across genres." So you know this is good stuff.

Pearson White Papers Are Cool!

Pearson actually released a white paper "Pearson's Automated Scoring of Writing, Speaking, and Mathematics" back in May of 2011 (authors were Lynn Streeter, Jared Bernstein, Peter Foltz, and Donald DeLand-- all PhD's except DeLand).

The paper wears its CCSS love on its sleeve, leading with an assertion that the CCSS "advocate that students be taught 21st century skills, using authentic tasks and assessments." Because what is more authentic than writing for an automated audience? The paper deals with everything from writing samples of constructed response answers (I skipped the math parts) and in all cases finds the computer better, faster, and cheaper than the humans.

Also, Webinar!

The Pearson website also includes a link to a webinar about formative assessment which heavily emphasizes the role of timely, specific feedback, followed by targeted instruction, in improving student writing. Then we move on to why automated assessment is good for all these things (in this portion we get to hear about the work of Peter Foltz and Jeff Pence, who is apparently Pearson's go-to guy for pitching this stuff). This leads to a demo week in Pence's class to show how this works, and much of this looks usable. Look-- the 6+1 traits are assessed. Specific feedback. Helps.

And we know it works because the students who have used the Pearson software get better scores on the Pearson assessment of writing!! Magical!! Awesome!! We have successfully taught the lab rats how to push down the lever and serve themselves pellets.

Wait! What? Not Miraculous??

"Critics," Adams notes drily, "contend the software doesn't do much more than count words and therefor can't replace human readers." They contend a great deal more, and you can read about their contending at the website humanreaders.org, and God bless the internet that is a real thing.

"Let's face the realities of automated essay scoring," says the site. "Computers cannot 'read'." They have plenty of research findings and literature to back them up, but they also have a snappy list of one-word reasons that automated assessors are inadequate. Computerized essay grading is:
            trivial
            reductive
            inaccurate
            undiagnostic
            unfair
            secretive

Unlike Pearson, the folks at this website do not have snappy ad copy and slick production values to back them up. They are forced to resort to research and facts and stuff, but their conclusion is pretty clear. Computer grading is indefensible.

There's History

Adams gets into the history. I'm going to summarize.

Computer grading has been around for about forty years, and yet somehow it never quite catches on.

Why do you suppose that is?

That Was A Rhetorical Question

Computer grading of essays is the very enshrinement of Bad Writing Instruction. Like most standardized writing assessment in which humans score the essays based on rubrics so basic and mindless that a computer really could do the same job, this form of assessment teaches students to do an activity that looks like writing, but is not.

Just as reading without comprehension or purpose becomes simply word calling, writing without purpose becomes simply making word marks on a piece of paper or a screen.

Authentic writing is about the writer communicating something that he has to say with an audience. It's about sharing something she wants to say with people she wants to say it to. Authentic writing is not writing created for the purpose of being assessed.

If I've told my students once, I've told them a hundred times--good writing starts with the right question. The right question is not "What can I write to satisfy this assignment?" The right question is "What do I want to say about this?"

Computer-assessed writing has no more place in the world of humans than computer-assessed kissing or computer-assessed singing or computer-assessed joke delivery. These are all performance tasks, and they all have one other thing in common-- if you need a computer to help you assess them, you have no business assessing them at all.

And There's The Sucking Thing

Adams wraps up from some quotes from Les Perelman, former director of the MIT Writing Across the Curriculum program. He wrote an awesome must-read take-down of standardized writing for Slate, in which, among other things, he characterized standardized test writing as a test of "the ability to bullshit on demand." He was also an outspoken critic of the SAT essay portion when it first appeared, noting that length, big wordiness, and a disregard for factual accuracy were the only requirements. And if you have any illusions about the world of human test essay scoring, reread this classic peek inside the industry.

His point about computer-assessed writing is simple. "My main concern is that it doesn't work." Perelman is the guy who coached two students to submit an absolutely execrable essay to the SAT. The essay included gem sentences such as:

American president Franklin Delenor Roosevelt advocated for civil unity despite the communist threat of success by quoting, "the only thing we need to fear is itself," which disdained competition as an alternative to cooperation for success.

That essay scored a five. So when Pearson et al tell you they've come up with a computer program that assesses essays just as well as a human, what they mean is "just as well as a human who is using a crappy set of standardized test essay assessment tools." In that regard, I believe they are probably correct.

To Conclude

Computer-assessed grading remains a faster, cheaper way to enshrine the same hallmarks of bad writing that standardized tests were already promoting. Just, you know, faster and cheaper, ergo better. The good news is that the system is easy to game.  Recycle the prompt. Write lots and lots of words. Make some of them big. And use a variety of sentence lengths and patterns, although you should err on the side of really long sentences because those will convince the program that you have expressed a really complicated thought and not just I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of Estonia; therefor, a bicycle, because a vest has no plethora of sleeves. And now I will conclude by bring up the peripatetic penguins with flamethrowers again, to tie everything up. Am I a great writer, or what?