Читать книгу The Education Invasion - Joy Pullmann - Страница 8
ОглавлениеExperience — The Common Core Classroom
IN FALL 2013 it took inquiries at nine schools in various districts across three states to find someone willing to show an outsider what Common Core looks like.
An English teacher at a classical charter school in Indianapolis initially welcomed a school visit; she had testified before Indiana’s legislature in support of the national curriculum and testing standards. Then she emailed to say she could not invite people into her classroom to see the standards in action. “My principal told me that I am not allowed to engage with you on this,” she wrote. “It is frustrating that something that should not be political is. I apologize that I could not be more helpful.”
No one that she recommended I talk to would even reply to my repeated inquiries. I got the same brushoff from several districts in nearby states. But staff from the Metropolitan School District of Warren Township, in southeast Indianapolis, were quite willing to have me visit.
Warren was one of sixteen school districts nationwide to win a federal Race to the Top grant directly, rather than through the state, in 2012. Its application stressed the district’s embrace of Common Core, and in less than a year the resulting $28.5 million had already produced detailed curriculum maps and teacher training programs. The Warren schools’ eagerness to welcome my visit in autumn 2013 suggested I would see a well-organized local rollout of the national initiative, assisted by federal funds.
Of the roughly twelve thousand students in Warren schools, 58 percent qualify for federal free or reduced-price lunch, a proxy for low-income status, and 59 percent are ethnic minorities. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Warren students rank in about the 50th percentile in math and reading.1 The district’s spending per pupil, $11,600 a year, is close to the state average.2 The RTT grant has amounted to about 5.6 percent of Warren’s annual $128 million budget in each of its four years. (When RTT grants go to states as opposed to districts, the funds typically make up 1 to 3 percent of the state’s education spending.) To have a better chance of receiving those funds, again, districts and states committed themselves to Common Core.3
President Obama did indeed leverage a relatively minuscule amount of money into huge political and educational changes, just as he boasted in his 2012 State of the Union address, saying: “For less than 1 percent of what our nation spends on education each year, we’ve convinced nearly every state in the country to raise their standards for teaching and learning — the first time that’s happened in a generation.”4 This line was a rerun from his 2011 State of the Union,5 and the 1 percent bargain appeared again in 2013.6 By 2014, however, opposition from Americans on all sides of the political spectrum had made Common Core no longer an applause line, so Obama’s speechwriters dropped it.
When I visited Warren schools, Indiana was one of some sixteen states that were formally reconsidering Common Core. Under public pressure, Governor Mike Pence and legislative leaders had come out in favor of submitting the standards to review, and that spring the legislature had passed a law suspending Common Core implementation during the 2013–14 academic year while the review proceeded. The grassroots furor that was building against Common Core in Indiana and nationwide explained why many teachers and administrators feared to discuss the standards. But not those in Warren Township. They were proud of what they had already done to align their teaching with the new curriculum mandates. Expecting that Common Core would survive the political challenge, they saw no reason to backtrack.
It was a rainy October afternoon when I spoke with Ryan Russell, the director of teacher effectiveness for the Warren district. He flicked through a series of documents and apps on his iPad in a few smooth motions, displaying some results of the twenty thousand man-hours that forty or so teachers and administrators had put into redesigning staff evaluations. Approximately three-quarters of Indiana districts were using the state template for teacher evaluations, but Warren chose to design its own. Russell then pulled up the curriculum maps that district teachers had written over the summer, a project the federal grant supported.
The maps would have made many a teacher drool. Teachers everywhere were scrambling to align their classrooms with Common Core. A Scholastic poll of twenty thousand teachers conducted in autumn 2013, around the same time as my Warren visit, found 48 percent saying that integrating Common Core into their classrooms had just begun, three years after their states had signed on to the standards. About three-quarters of teachers polled said they needed more planning time and training.7 A follow-up poll a year later found that a full 78 percent of teachers said they still needed more planning time, and over 80 percent said they needed more training and materials.8
The Warren district seemed to be ahead of the game. Its curriculum maps arranged Common Core’s learning goals into an instructional calendar, giving date ranges for teaching specific math and English concepts. For example, second-grade teachers might spend October 16–27 on counting to a hundred by twos, working with triangles, and so on. Each date range in the map contained links to the corresponding sections of the district’s online textbooks from Pearson, the world’s largest education publisher (and a Common Core testing contractor), and to related resources such as explanatory videos and suggested class activities. Teachers could access those resources instantly, as Russell did, by touching the link on their iPad or Chromebook. (The RTT grant also funded a raft of iPads for kindergarteners and Chromebooks for the other students.)
Asked if other districts were this organized, Russell emitted a little puff of air: “No,” he said emphatically. Warren planned to make its curriculum maps public since they were created with federal funds, he said, though he added an important caveat: “I could give them to a district and they wouldn’t have the same success because it was the work on this and our teachers doing it that made us so prepared.”
Fuzzy Math Makes a Comeback
Liberty Park Elementary School is a spacious building erected in 2002 beside a leafy middle school and an aquatics center. With Russell, I visit a classroom where Sarah Latdrik is working with six first graders who scored low on the district tests she gives every three weeks. The children are sitting in front of a smartboard, taking turns jumping up to touch two-digit numbers displayed on melons and strawberries bouncing about the screen. They win points if they match the fruit number to the sum of “ten-sticks” and “one-cubes” displayed in a corner.
Ten-sticks and one-cubes reappear in the math lesson Latdrik begins when her other sixteen students bound into the room, accompanied by an aide. The sticks and cubes resemble a sort of Tetris set. Ten small cubes, each representing the number one, can stack up in a column (or stick) to represent ten. The sticks lined up in a row of ten would form a large square, which represents one hundred.
Russell’s first-grade daughter gasps when she notices him in her classroom and trots over to hug him. Then, slightly embarrassed, she quickly returns to one of several irregular trapezoidal tables that take the place of desks. The children wear collared shirts, mostly polos, and no jeans — a loosely defined uniform the Warren district requires.
Latdrik gathers all the children in front of the smartboard. “I’m ready to teach,” she announces. “I’m ready to learn,” the kids chorus.
She walks them through several ways to write the day’s date on a smartboard-projected calendar, writing directly on the screen. Then they clap and slap their legs, chanting in unison as they move through a series of simple addition problems: “Three plus three is six — kicks! Four plus four is eight — great!”
Latdrik switches over to a large paper pad on an easel, with more ten-stick and one-cube groupings, and calls on kids to tell her what number each represents. A girl gives a correct answer, and Latdrik asks her, “Raven, what strategy did you use to find out what number that is?” Raven responds, “First I counted by tens, then by ones.”
The teacher then discusses two good answers to the previous day’s homework problem. Finally she says: “If you want to help me solve my math problem, give me a wink.”
Liberty Elementary has four first-grade classes. The smartboard displays the names of each class’s teachers, and below each the number of students in that class: 22, 22, 21, and 23. Latdrik wants to bring a treat to school for all the first graders next week, she says. So how many should she make? This is a “real-world problem” of the kind that many teachers are emphasizing thanks to Common Core, whose math benchmarks use the term “real-world” fifty-one times.9 She tells the children to return to their desks and take out their math manipulatives — foam versions of the ten-sticks and one-cubes on the screen. The children cluster in twos and threes, pulling out their “math journals” to help solve the problem. Latdrik moves among the tables, giving suggestions and answering questions.
Two little girls sitting at a table nearby are working independently. One with pigtails gathered all over her head by colorful plastic bobbles draws on her paper a stick-and-cube diagram that matches her manipulatives, which in turn correspond to the numbers on the board:
She counts up the sticks and writes down the results: 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 = 70. She missed one. Finally, she counts the cubes, and writes her answer to the problem: 78.
Her partner, a girl in a yellow polo shirt, with hair in thin braids, writes in her math journal:
Instead of proceeding to add these numbers in the traditional way, beginning with the right-hand column, the girl counts up the tens from the left column and takes out eight ten-sticks. She does the same for the ones column using the little cubes, and then counts up all the manipulatives. On her paper she writes “86.” She has counted the one-cubes incorrectly. But she doesn’t know it yet, so she plays with the remaining foam blocks until Latdrik tells the children to put away the manipulatives and discuss their answers. It has taken the group approximately eight minutes to work this problem. To answer it the traditional way would take an average first grader about fifteen seconds.
On the wall are two posters suggesting different ways to add and subtract. They include tally marks, drawing a picture, a number line, and a number sentence: 7 +4 =11. What’s missing is the standard algorithms for addition and subtraction: stacking the numbers and computing them by columns, starting with the ones column. Common Core doesn’t call for this procedure until the fourth grade. For first graders, it prescribes exactly what Latdrik has done: using “a variety of models, including discrete objects and length-based models (e.g., cubes connected to form lengths,) to model add-to, take-from, put-together, take-apart”; teaching children to compare “a variety of solution strategies”; and the like.10
Activities like those practiced in Sarah Latdrik’s class have appeared in stories about Common Core’s “new way of school” in newspapers across the country. These methods have actually been around for decades, variously dubbed “new math,” “reform math,” and even “fuzzy math.” As critics point out, multiplying the things that children must keep track of leads to simple errors like those made by the two girls trying to add up two-digit numbers with a detour through sticks and cubes. Moreover, the amount of time eaten up by such convoluted methods means less time for calculating practice. Children are then hampered when they reach algebra, where success requires having routine math procedures down cold.
Most high-achieving countries call for fluency in three-digit addition and subtraction in third grade, says Ze’ev Wurman, a former U.S. Department of Education official who helped write California’s well-regarded math standards. Those countries also typically introduce standard algorithms immediately, the way many of today’s parents learned math. In Wurman’s view, “The rubbish that fills [Common Core] in earlier grades about ‘strategies’ ‘relationships’ and ‘properties’ . . . is not truly ‘rubbish’ — and one can find some good explanation for a little bit of need of them — but it is repeated ad nauseam.” Thus the curriculum “opens itself up for easy interpretation of fuzz and invented algorithms, which most implementations and textbooks gleefully (or ignorantly) proceed to make.”
Parents have raised many complaints about the time-devouring Common Core math processes and the incomprehensible problems their young children are assigned. Many examples of confusing math homework have gone viral.
Jeff Sevart, an electrical engineer who lives in Indiana, posted his second-grade son’s Common Core math homework on Facebook. The instruction for the assignment read: “Jack used the number line below to solve 427 –326. Find his error. Then write a letter to Jack telling him what he did right, and what he should do to fix his mistake.” After spending two hours trying to help his son figure out the answer, Sevart himself wrote the letter:
Dear Jack,
Don’t feel bad. I have a Bachelor of Science Degree in Electronics Engineering which included extensive study in differential equations and other higher math applications. Even I cannot explain the Common Core Mathematics approach, nor get the answer correct. In the real world, simplification is valued over complication.
Sevart then demonstrated the traditional, straightforward method of subtraction. “The answer is solved in under 5 seconds,” he wrote, whereas the process that “Jack” used was “ridiculous and would result in termination” in the workplace. He signed his letter “Frustrated Parent” and put it online. Sevart’s outraged post soon appeared on Yahoo! News, Glenn Beck’s radio program, the Huffington Post, and Time online, among other media outlets.
Another angry dad was the comedian Louis C.K., who took to Twitter to express his vexation over his daughter’s third-grade math homework.
My kids used to love math. Now it makes them cry. Thanks standardized testing and common core!
— Louis C.K. (@louisck) April 28, 201411
He then repeated his complaints on the Late Show with David Letterman.
The usual response from Common Core supporters to such complaints is: Common Core is not a curriculum; it’s only a set of standards for curriculum and testing, which publishers and teachers then use as the basis for writing math problems and other assignments. Imagine a recipe book that lists ingredients but doesn’t specify quantities or processes; the cook can figure that out. So if the dish isn’t tasty, blame the cook, not the recipe book.
But if all the cooks are turning out similarly unpalatable dishes, that means the recipes deserve some criticism. Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution observed that Common Core tells curriculum publishers and teachers to write math problems like the one Sevart posted on Facebook — but not directly. In a Brookings podcast where Loveless discussed Sevart’s post, he noted that it came from a textbook published before Common Core came out. Bad math instruction has been around forever. On the other hand, parents aren’t crazy to see a connection between bad math and Common Core, because “in school districts, and in schools, and in classrooms, people hear a certain message from Common Core. And one of the messages is: kids need to be doing this kind of ‘deeper learning, deeper thinking, higher-order thinking’ in mathematics. . . . It gives local educators license to adopt a lot of this garbage, this really bad curriculum. And they do it under the shield of the Common Core.” When teachers have no choice but to use Common Core, it’s harder to hold them accountable for bad instruction.
Terms like “deeper learning” and “real-world problems” mean special things in the education world. Loveless calls this terminology “a dog whistle to a certain way of approaching mathematics that has never worked in the past.” It was tried nationally in the 1960s and again in the 1990s. “It failed both times. And we are seeing a resurrection of some of these bad materials and these bad practices again. And it’s partially the Common Core’s fault.”12
Common Core English
Not far from Liberty Elementary School, with the one-cubes and ten-sticks, Tessa Bohonos is giving an English lesson to her class of advanced freshmen at Warren Central High School. It’s the last lesson of the day, and the kids are quiet. That’s partly because they spend about half of the class time using their Chromebooks. Bohonos has just earned her master’s degree in education technology from Ball State University, and she’s eager to apply her new skills.
Her long ponytail swings as she walks about the room. The desks are arranged traditionally, facing the front in rows. The walls are not aflutter with a kaleidoscope of color like the first-grade room. In the back, dramatic black and white posters of Greek gods from classical mythology brush the ceiling in a neat row, but otherwise the room is subdued and focused.
The students hunch over their Chromebooks, squinting at the screens. They spend a few minutes entering new “academic vocabulary” into Google spreadsheets, then several minutes on a short lesson. Common Core says high schoolers should “use technology, including the Internet, to produce, publish, and update individual or shared writing products.”13
Bohonos tells students to cluster around the whiteboard and write any story elements they can think of, because “I don’t like to spend time on things you already know. That’s boring.” They write words like conflict, protagonist, thesis in deliberately random, multicolored verbal fragments across the board. One young man writes sideways. Then Bohonos hands the students a page filled with vocabulary terms, many of which have just been written on the whiteboard. They run through the list together. Anything a student doesn’t know well, she says, should go into his academic vocabulary spreadsheet.
“I’m not saying this will for sure happen,” she says, tilting her head and sounding secretive, “but these words just might show up on a future quiz.”
Students spend the rest of class working on an essay due in four days, before they read To Kill a Mockingbird. Their “pre-reading” essay must be on one of three topics: race relations, banning books, or “the N-word in literature.”
Bohonos reminds students to turn in a bibliography with their essay. She has put several articles related to each topic on an online pinboard for students to use as sources, including articles on the Scottsboro Boys and Plessy v. Ferguson. Bohonos tells me she’s adding historical documents to her instruction because of Common Core’s requirement that students read progressively more nonfiction. Warren’s RTT application says that eighth-grade teachers in the district will assign readings that are 45 percent “literacy” and 55 percent “informational” passages, as Common Core directs, with the ratio shifting to 30/70 by twelfth grade.14
Common Core also mandates assigning books at the students’ grade level rather than their reading level, so now Bohonos’s nonadvanced students will read the actual book To Kill a Mockingbird instead of the simpler screenplay, as they did before. A Fordham Institute survey of 1,154 English teachers nationwide in October 2013 found that more than one-third of the high school teachers assigned To Kill a Mockingbird, the most commonly used book.15 While this book’s themes are appropriate for middle school or later, the reading level of the language is rated for elementary schoolers; one Common Core–approved scale says it’s a good fit for a midyear fifth grader.16 In other words, it’s thematically but not linguistically complex, although Common Core claims to emphasize the latter.
Bohonos walks around, conferring with students individually as they write. Once the essay is finished, students must post it online and respond to at least three of their classmates’ essays “with at least 75 words in your response,” Bohonos says. There’s a hitch: the Chromebooks won’t allow cutting and pasting into the discussion board, so students have to upload their essays as attachments. But overall, Bohonos likes the online board: “It’s what college students are using,” she tells her students.
Bohonos is excited about helping students practice “collaboration” and “twenty-first-century skills” with another assignment based on To Kill a Mockingbird: they will choose approximately two pages of “descriptive text” from the book and add images to create a short YouTube video. The Common Core standards ask high school kids to “make strategic use of digital media” and “integrate and evaluate information presented in diverse media and formats.” Since it’s a new lesson for Bohonos this year, she’ll try it out on the advanced students first, and then use their videos as examples in her other classes.
“Authentic, Collaborative” Teaching
Bohonos and Latdrik were among the teachers paid with RTT grant money to attend several Common Core seminars put on by the district in summer 2013. Teachers who participated in the Common Core planning committee, also compensated with grant funds, spent a week and a half thinking through the standards and writing them “in kid-friendly language,” Bohonos said.
The standards document itself is heavy reading, laden with jargon. Here’s a general standard for language arts: “Acquire and use accurately a range of general academic and domain-specific words and phrases sufficient for reading, writing, speaking, and listening at the college and career readiness level; demonstrate independence in gathering vocabulary knowledge when encountering an unknown term important to comprehension or expression.”17 Translation: Learn a lot of words, and look up words you don’t know.
“The Common Core can be vague if there isn’t an administrator saying ‘This is how we take this,’” Latdrik acknowledged. The Warren district was methodical in helping teachers apply the mandates in their classrooms. Teachers met regularly with a Common Core coach. Every Wednesday morning, they met in groups both within and across grade levels to discuss a specified topic, such as the collaborative aspects of Common Core, or workshop approaches to math and writing. Warren’s high school English teachers held a close-reading workshop for faculty in other departments; Bohonos worked with art teachers, explaining how close reading is “like analyzing art.”
Latdrik said the first two years of Common Core were “rough,” but she came to like it. “Rather than me standing up and teaching [students] a skill, it’s me coordinating experiences where they can authentically engage in that on their own,” she explained. “I’ve never felt more like what I’m teaching them in kindergarten and first grade is truly important.”
Warren’s professional development program highlights materials from self-described “constructivist” educators, who promote you’re-on-your-own techniques rather than traditional teaching styles based on giving explicit instruction and imparting knowledge. In one Teaching Channel video, for example, a middle school math teacher has his students find the formula for the surface area of a cylinder without assistance.18 The progressive educators who control teacher training tend to favor constructivist methods. Research has shown that this approach may be effective with well-off students, but is likely to be detrimental to poorer children whose families are less equipped to fill in the gaps left by self-led instruction.19
Ryan Russell said that the Warren district, from administrators to teachers and parents, greatly preferred Common Core, although there were scattered complaints from parents. Critics often mention teachers who are scared to object to the new curriculum and tests, but Russell had not heard any Warren teacher say that Common Core was less challenging than the old curriculum. As the state of Indiana considered reverting to its previous standards, his district’s biggest worry was that students would then perform poorly on the SAT and ACT college entrance exams, which had been changed to fit Common Core. “I don’t want kids to lose opportunities because of a political battle,” Russell said. An often overlooked part of the standards debate is that school leaders and teachers cannot choose which standards they will use, no matter how strongly they prefer a particular set.
While national reviewers such as those at the Fordham Institute have rated Indiana’s previous standards higher than Common Core — among the best in the nation, in fact20 — Russell thought the state tests had set expectations too low. Indiana’s tenth-grade English test measured an eighth-grade reading level, for example. As for complaints about diluted math instruction (remember the Furtado twins in Massachusetts?), he noted that Warren still offered advanced classes to students who wanted to go beyond the Algebra II that Common Core prescribes as a final math course, so they could enter college with calculus under their belts, ready for a science or math major.
As it turned out, Indiana largely retained Common Core with some minor changes, including a new name: Indiana Academic Standards.21 The Warren district has continued to use its Common Core materials and practices, referring to Indiana’s standards and Common Core as essentially a unit.22 Recall that the district was lucky enough to get extra funding from the nation’s taxpayers to support the revamping of its curriculum and the retraining of teachers — an advantage most districts cannot expect. So how have Warren students performed with their new and improved education?
Data on the Indiana state test results released in August 2014 showed that Warren was one of only two districts in Marion County (the state’s most populous county) to see a decline in passing rates over the previous year. It just barely beat out the state’s worst-performing district, Indianapolis Public Schools. The superintendent, Dena Cushenberry, blamed the Warren district’s comparatively poor performance in part on the burdens of meeting the requirements for curricular changes and other mandates that the U.S. Department of Education attached to the RTT grant.23 So much for that.
Hoping for the Best
In late June 2014, when teachers ought to be out sunning themselves, a trio of them perched on bright purple block chairs inside a Frank Lloyd Wright–looking new elementary school in Bensenville, a suburb of Chicago. They’re enjoying a snack break at a teacher training conference, and discussing whether they can emulate a model Common Core lesson they’ve just seen.
“Most of my kids are not on grade level,” says a youthful teacher in gray slacks, with black hair piled into a high bun. “Lots have no dads or moms, and are being raised by whoever. They’ve got their own problems.”
A teacher sitting across from her, in a purple boyfriend cardigan and jeans, notes that her school isn’t bright and airy like the one they’re sitting in: “It’s dark, and old. I think the kids pick up that feeling when they’re inside.” Teachers get two reams of paper per month for copies, she says with a sigh, so they buy more themselves. The other two teachers nod in empathy.
“I like how they told the kids first what they would learn, then they learned it” in the model lesson, says a wavy-haired blond teacher whose nametag reads “Angelique.”
“How did they get the kids to be so quiet?” the gray-slacked teacher wonders. Probably because the model classroom had two teachers for fifteen students, she guesses. She doesn’t have a teaching assistant or co-teacher, so “I got to keep my students from jumping out the window.” And besides, “some parents you can’t call [for help] because you know the kid is going to get a beating.”
Teachers and staff in Bensenville School District spent two months putting together a three-day conference for nearby school districts on how to teach Common Core. Illinois agreed in 2010 to replace its state curriculum mandates and tests with Common Core, but in the summer of 2014, Bensenville was still one of only a few Illinois school districts already all-in.
It certainly helped that Bensenville, a bitty district of only three schools next to O’Hare Airport, received federal money to support its Common Core implementation, like Warren in Indiana. Bensenville got $20,644 out of a $43 million Race to the Top grant to Illinois in 2011.24 In exchange for this RTT money, 35 of the 866 school districts in Illinois, including Bensenville, agreed to comply with new federal mandates in advance of the other districts. The money-getting policies included rating teachers at least partly on their students’ scores on standardized tests, increasing science and math initiatives, and reorienting instruction around Common Core — all Obama administration priorities. Bensenville also volunteered to run trial versions of Common Core’s federally funded national tests before all schools had to use them in place of their existing state tests in 2015. That gave them more time to align their teaching with the test format.
The $20,644 didn’t cover the cost of making all these changes, but Bensenville wanted to be one of Illinois’s few “reform exemplars,”25 willing to strike out into a thicket of education policies that the Obama administration planted. The RTT provision to use standardized test results as the main basis for rating teachers and schools was expected to change teacher training nationwide in line with the new curriculum and its associated tests, but that process was going slowly. Bensenville’s instructional leader, Kay Dugan, had just interviewed “a bright teacher candidate from a good school” and asked her what she knew about Common Core. The candidate replied, “I never heard of that.”
Dugan, a petite lady with bright gray eyes, also co-chaired Illinois’s Educator Leader Cadre,26 a group of teachers and administrators who led workshops on Common Core for PARCC, one of its national testing organizations. She spoke of “pushback” against Common Core from teachers and administrators in other school districts on the ground that it’s “too hard” for the students. That training conference with its model lessons in the summer of 2014 was designed to help other districts feel as confident in their new set of curricular clothes as Bensenville.
A Look at “Close Reading”
The Bensenville teachers leading the workshops are enthusiastic, if perhaps a bit nervous at having groups of outside teachers observe their summer-school lessons. The buzzword of the day is “close reading,” a technique of literary interpretation that was popular in universities some time ago and entered K–12 classrooms along with Common Core. Adapted for younger children, it seems to mean anchoring their observations about a text (the teachers never speak of a “book” or an “article,” but always of a “text”) in direct quotations from the material.
In her second-grade classroom, Kristi Mullen pivots from child to child, handing out highlighters. The tykes have just read Pop’s Bridge by Eve Bunting, a fiction picture book about two young San Franciscans whose fathers — one Asian and one Caucasian — are helping build the Golden Gate Bridge. Young Robert, the white boy, thinks his father has a more important bridge-building job than his friend Charlie’s dad, who is a painter. But one day the two boys see several workers die in a fall, and Robert realizes that constructing the bridge endangers all the workers equally. Scholastic, the book’s publisher, says the book is appropriate for readers in kindergarten through second grade.27 Summer-school students, of course, are behind their peers. That’s why they’re in summer school.
“I’m going to ask some text-dependent questions,” Mullen says to the children, emphasizing the last three words and flipping to a “warm-up” on a giant pad of paper stuck to an easel. It tells the children to underline, on copies of the book’s first few pages: “Who are the important characters in the story? Why are they important?” The children’s desks are arranged in three clusters of five, and Mullen walks among them repeating those two questions. “Charlie’s father is important because he builds the bridge,” one student offers. Mullen repeats the answer, then adds, “I like your text evidence.”
After a few minutes of this, there’s a “challenge question”: “What are Robert’s feelings about his pop and Charlie’s father?” A girl raises her hand.
“Yes, ma’am,” Mullen responds.
“He’s proud.”
“How do we know he’s proud?”
“The book said that.”
“Let’s go to our book and highlight evidence that he’s proud: ‘He has an important job.’ What does he keep calling the bridge?”
Another child: “The Golden Gate Bridge.”
That isn’t what the teacher is looking for. “At the beginning, what does it say? ‘The impossible bridge.’ If it’s impossible and you do it, are you proud?” A few kids say, “No.” Mullen looks at them and says firmly, “Yes.”
Close-reading theory has told Mullen to stick to the text. Following that dictate costs her and the kids an opportunity to talk about the reasons for their “incorrect” answers, which would have made their discussion far more interesting and fruitful. Perhaps the teacher was just off her game, with fifteen grownups watching from the back of the room.
Mullen then tells the children to pair up and look for more evidence to help answer the challenge question. As they rearrange themselves, she sends about five who need extra attention off to a semicircle in the corner with the assistant (the object of envy among visiting teachers).
In another part of the school building in Bensenville, a pair of teachers are leading an eighth-grade class in close reading. For most of these students, English is a new language, so they are also using a picture book. Grandfather’s Journey, by Allen Say, tells the story of a Japanese man who emigrates to the United States but keeps traveling between the two countries, in each place longing for the other. The prose is simple and spare, with just one sentence per page, but the watercolor illustrations are exquisite. Grandfather’s Journey won the 1994 Caldecott Medal for American picture books, which emphasizes illustrations over language. Its publisher says the book is suitable for children ages four through eight, but Scholastic rates it at a third- through fifth-grade reading level.28
This classroom too has desks arranged in clusters of five. A bulletin board in the back displays “Grandfather’s Journey Vocabulary”: evoked, homesick, towering, exchange. In the front, a projector beams questions about the book onto a screen. After each question is a reference to a corresponding Common Core standard: “Why do you think grandfather surrounds himself with songbirds? RL.8.4.” (The code means Reading: Literature, Grade 8, standard 4.)29
The eighth graders are much quieter than the second graders. They keep their answers short and low. The two teachers — Nick Georgopoulos, a young man with tousled hair, and Argiro Vranas, a petite woman in tall heels — energetically work the room, circling the students, pointing to their open books, querying. As students sequentially answer the questions on the screen, the teachers say to the class: “Do you guys agree...? Write down your text evidence.” The teachers are clearly working hard, but it’s difficult to tell whether the students are. Maybe visitors make them bashful, too.
The twenty-four visiting teachers watch several different lessons of this kind, and then gather in the school’s music room, around seven folding tables topped with brightly colored plastic tablecloths and strewn with highlighters. The walls are covered in sound-absorbing pads and lined with a string of small American flags. The teachers who gave the model lessons, plus several of the district’s instruction and curriculum coaches, sit around the room in canvas director’s chairs. First, they answer questions.
An early one: “Where did you learn to do this?”
Caitlin Hare, a first-year Bensenville teacher with a kind, open face, takes that one on. “All through college we learned about Common Core, so I do feel comfortable with it,” she says. Her third- through fifth-grade class will finish out summer school with another five-day close reading of one main fiction book about the Oregon Trail, accompanied by a number of nonfiction “texts” such as travelers’ journal entries and historical accounts, to meet Common Core’s nonfiction requirements.
Leah Gauthier, the district’s instructional services director, then speaks up: “When we started, there was no textbook for Common Core. This did not happen overnight. We’ve taken baby steps the whole way.”
Those baby steps included ditching textbooks, except for continuing to use Everyday Math curriculum as Bensenville’s main resource for math. (Everyday Math is regularly pilloried as one of the “fuzzy math” textbook series.) A curriculum committee now pulls together all the materials each Bensenville grade uses, and integrates all the subjects. So an “English” class might use historical or science-based materials, and a science class might include math concepts.
“Because we jumped in, we’re not flailing now and can add more,” Gauthier says. “We were a textbook district, doing the same thing in every room on the same day. Now standards are ingredients.”
Argiro Vranas chimes in: “Before, I didn’t know how I could spend five days on one text. Now, this is how we do it in Bensenville.”
Common Core supporters insist that the program doesn’t restrict or control teachers. That claim conflicts with common sense and with what teachers hear in their districts. Quite plainly, Common Core is an instructional overhaul. It is intended to change what and how kids learn, which requires changing what and how teachers teach. There’s no reason to go through all this trouble if it doesn’t change much of anything. That’s why teachers have to get in line and implement the required “instructional shifts.”
In Bensenville’s Q&A, the visiting teachers sound much like the summer-school students: willing but unsure; struggling to grasp the new paradigm. “What is a good resource for informational text?” asks a gum-chewing teacher with flipped blond hair. “How do you have time for this?” wonders another, with a pale pink manicure.
A Bensenville principal says he did practice lessons in close reading in order to understand how to give teachers feedback, and the first one was like “one of the rings of hell. If I were evaluating my [own] lesson, there would have been some hard conversations afterward.”
After the Q&A, the conference participants dive into a practice set. The workshop facilitators hand everyone a one-page set of four excerpts from Bud, Not Buddy, a Newbery Award–winning book by Christopher Paul Curtis about a ten-year-old African American orphan boy who runs away from an unkind foster family during the Great Depression to search for his musician father. Scholastic rates it at a fifth-grade reading level.30
“We read full novels all the time,” Kay Dugan says. “That we don’t is a Common Core myth.”
The teachers review some specific Common Core requirements, including the instruction to “annotate along the way” as the students did in the model lesson, and then work in groups to develop their own “text-dependent questions” about the book. Finally, they share their results with everyone.
The teachers at one table have it down. One sample question they came up with: “When it says, ‘Jerry looked like he’d just found out they were going to dip him in a pot of boiling milk,’ what does that mean?”
Teachers at another table are still confused. They twirl their pens and talk to each other in fragmentary fashion. “I don’t get this,” says one, pursing her lipsticked mouth and leaning her head on her hand. “What kind of questions are we supposed to ask? ‘Where are Bud and Jerry going?’”
The idea, Gauthier explains, is to have children cite a source for their answers and steer them away from emotional responses, because their feelings are not the point of reading literature. After all, “You don’t have to read Jack and the Beanstalk to answer, ‘How would you feel if you were chased by a giant?’”
Is Close Reading Effective Teaching?
If one looks at supporting materials for Common Core, the time that Bensenville teachers spent instructing others in the close-reading method may seem warranted. An instructional guide from the PARCC testing organization, for example, says that close reading is “a key component of college and career readiness” and will be included in its exams.31 David Coleman, a main architect of Common Core who now heads the College Board, gave a model lesson employing the technique to analyze Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” He did the lesson in spring 2011 on behalf of the New York State Education Department, and the fifteen-minute video is featured in an extensive online collection of Common Core materials.32 At a conference in summer 2013, Coleman argued strenuously that curriculum and tests should focus on specific reading assignments and that children should not rely on background information: “Let’s just be very careful that we don’t . . . rob the text as the source of information, and pleasure, and excitement.”33
A key reason given for stressing this approach to reading is that children in poorer homes typically read far fewer books, hear far less complex spoken language, and have far less exposure to varied experiences such as travel, or visiting a farm or a museum, a local music festival or a zoo. These deficiencies limit their knowledge of the world, which in turn limits their reading ability, because the ability to read fluently on any particular subject depends heavily on prior knowledge of that subject. A baseball fanatic will read various team statistics with ease, but people with little knowledge of baseball will have a hard time getting through articles littered with unfamiliar terms such as “RBI” and “closer,” as I learned after taking on the baseball beat for my college newspaper. This is true of any subject, as the linguist E. D. Hirsch has demonstrated.34
Hirsch advocates that all children therefore be taught an explicitly defined core of knowledge in school, and he established his Core Knowledge Foundation for that purpose. Schools affiliated with this organization boast significantly higher student achievement than others.35 Common Core seemingly nods to Hirsch’s findings by saying in the introduction that the mandates need to be accompanied by a curriculum that is “intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades.” Hirsch officially endorsed Common Core for that reason in 2013, writing that the authors “break the fearful silence about the critical importance of specific content.” In the very same endorsement, however, he noted that the mandates contain no “specific historical, scientific, and other knowledge that is required for mature literacy.”36 After giving a little nod to Hirsch, Common Core runs contrary to the substance of his work.
Common Core requires little content whatsoever for English language arts. The mandates are mostly a set of procedures that can be applied to just about anything. That’s why organizations completely unrelated to teaching English, such as the Girl Scouts or the Future of Sex Education Project, can claim their materials are “aligned to Common Core.” Instead of giving specifics on what children must know about the English language and literature in order to be educated adults, Common Core mostly tells teachers what to do with content-bearing material, whether it’s “text” or conversation. It does recommend some books in an appendix (including Bud, Not Buddy, though not Pop’s Bridge or Grandfather’s Journey).37 One likely reason for not specifying content is to avoid curriculum wars. So while Common Core’s introduction says a few positive things about “content knowledge,” the mandates remain mostly silent on what such knowledge ought to be. It’s a little like requiring schools to provide vitamins every day, but not specifying which ones or at what dosage.
But Common Core doesn’t merely remain open-ended on content. It actually undermines the teaching of specific core knowledge by promoting classroom methods that emphasize academic skills or practices instead, supposedly to help eliminate the environmental advantage that better-off children bring with them. That’s why “close reading” calls for answers drawn strictly from the text at hand, not from the wider store of knowledge that children may have amassed. It’s an attempt to level the playing field.
Trying to separate skills from knowledge in this way is a fool’s errand, according to Robert Pondiscio, a former teacher turned pundit.38 To illustrate the point: you can’t learn how to build a house without knowing about materials or the use of tools; and conversely, using the tools and materials deepens your knowledge of them. Reading about baseball or the phases of the moon or the Oregon Trail increases your knowledge of those subjects, and the acquired knowledge then improves your ability to read about related topics, in a kind of feedback. When you read the daily news, you will comprehend it more thoroughly if you start from a solid base of civic and cultural literacy — something that too many citizens do not have.
A survey in 2011 found that only half of Americans could name the three branches of government, and just one in five could identify the origin of the phrase “a wall of separation” between church and state from among four options.39 The remedy for this problem does not lie in the content-light standards of Common Core, with all its emphasis on “informational text” but no coherent principles for selecting and organizing it. If children read only a haphazard list of materials their teachers happen to like, compiled with no thought to building a focused and delineated core of cultural literacy, their knowledge level will be laughable and their reading fluency will be underdeveloped, too.
