You and your educational leadership have been lead down the garden path. ALL of the foreign nations we trail in terms of academic achievement include a commitment to literature and the arts–ALL of them. I suggest you folks read around here a bit and educate yourselves because only naive American politicians lead around by private industry would call the gutting of English instruction in America’s public schools an improvement.
Let me tell you this, too: once real teachers discover the content of these standards–99% of them don’t know a thing about this and you all know that–you folks will have lost the genuine support of every professional educator who actually values quality content. I know you lost this one. There is no way that I, as a high school English teacher with a Master of Arts in English Literature, am going to be either interested or particularly successful in teaching kids to read primary documents in American history or assessing the content of Physics II papers (after I’ve had my intensive five-year retraining program). The idea is simply preposterous. You all should know by now that effective teaching requires, even demands, that teachers be excited and invested in their subjects. I want you all to think about that for a second because this is where the rubber meets your results-oriented road: you will NEVER get a professional middle or high school English teacher to concede that the teaching of literature should be replaced by the reading of informational text. You will never get a talented English teacher to do what you want them to do in the classroom. Why? Because you have performed some creative surgery on what English instruction is and cobbled together something akin to Frankenstein’s monster. Looks a little like an English classroom, but in the ways that count, both ethically and substantively, your “creation” is an abomination. (As an aside, you know there’s a problem when there are embedded assertions in the Common Core State Standards document itself that attempt to mitigate the negative reaction every English teacher and educated individual is having while reading it: what happened to the study of literature for its own sake?)
So now, what little literature I can teach appears to have been subjected to a spectacularly silly “complexity formula” before it is added to the pre-approved list of works worthy of the little time devoted to the actual study of fiction. Gone is the wonderful list of authors suggested by the current Mass. frameworks that allows English TEACHERS to tailor their instruction to the needs of the students in front of them. Gone is the opportunity to enable students to explore other cultures and other human experiences so that they can become thoughtful, well-rounded citizens of the world. Now we have The List from which I can pick an 18th and 19th century novel to go with my ONE work of Shakespeare (if I can fit it in after we’ve read all those “informational” texts). Jane Austen, baby, all the way. You are all daft.
English teachers of the species you describe do not exist. People who love writing and literature do not want to spend their days teaching history or grading science papers. No “real” English teacher will WANT to teach English in this brave new world, and the result will be that you will NOT have the caliber of teacher you have now. Guaranteed. Of course, there’s always the little problem of generating a citizenry that is culturally ignorant and pathologically bereft of the ability to use their imaginations in ways that motivate and satisfy them.
No child left behind? How about half of all children left behind–the ones who like to read, imagine, and write creatively. The ones who historically propelled this nation to the apex of intellectual and artistic creativity. Guess their progeny should cozy up to their Weekly Readers in ways they never have before. Check your imaginations at the door, kids, and open your informational texts to page 32.
I thought the MTA bribed Gov Patrick to accept the Common Core standards?
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p>Are you sure you’re not just a lackey of the MTA posting this to cover up the bribe?
In high schools, “English” classes cover what in college are two different subjects” “English Writing” and “English Literature”. There are two different AP exams in English, and two different general education requirements at UMass Amherst, where I teach.
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p>It sounds like the national standards focus on only the “writing” component, and I would guess that this is a response to the perceived crisis of students being incompetent to use the English language. In my own area, mathematics, there is a similar split — math is considered important by the public at large because of its utility in business and science, and only a minority of teachers, much less students, really understand it and love it on its own terms. Lightiris’ manifesto for the importance of literature is a powerful one, and I will concede that literature is more important than math-for-its-own-sake.
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p>But from the point of view of the public, should literature be given a priority equal to competence in reading and writing English, or basic competence in mathematics? The idea of the back-to-basics movement is that those last two things have to be put above everything else, so that even science and history don’t into the MCAS (and history is not yet there, as I understand). Of course a decent high school will teach everyone literature, along with history, science, a foreign language, and arts. But if you strip to a core of literacy and math, literature only gets there by accident.
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p>I’m interested to hear from the other side — there is the assertion out there that the new standards do not force Massachusetts to relax its existing standards, which lightiris clearly disputes. Anyone want to defend that assertion? Is she right that there are new demands in the literacy area that will force her to do less with literature? Or, if studying literature has enough collateral benefit in the way of literacy, can she keep doing what she’s doing?
They don’t force any relaxing of standards. But focusing more time on meeting the standards results in less time spent on non-mandatory activites.
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p>90% of the standards are the same as or higher than MA’s current standards. states have flexibility to set up to 15% of their standards higher than the common core, so it’s not really about whether the standards are high enough. It’s about whether the standards take away from other important parts of education that can’t be measured as easily.
According to the website:
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p>
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p>The Bard and others can rest easy knowing they will not be forgotten.
At least in English, the curriculum standards don’t mean much. The 10th Grade MCAS ELA test only addresses a small portion of them. Some of these standards are so broadly written that there is no concrete way to see them reflected in a test question.
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p>From an classroom teacher and school point of view, what matters is the test, not the standards. I’ve taught sophomores English for the last 18 years, the only time I look at curriculum standards is when I have to do something bureaucratic or prepare a school document for my department. I prepare kids for the test by using previous tests. That’s it. When the new test eventually comes out, I’ll figure that test out too, and I’ll prepare kids by teaching those question. Then, I’ll spend my time doing what I do best and what I–not the DESE or the Pioneer Institute or Sandra Stotsky–think benefits my students most.
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p>P.S. It’s fashionable to bash teachers unions, but the MTA has been relatively compliant on ed reform.
The only part of Obama’s state of the union address where my friends and I booed was the part where he promised more money and focus on ‘science and technology’ education. I am sorry the humanities are not optional, and too many of my friends seem to forget that. You can’t have good doctors if they do not understand ethics, and you can only truly appreciate ethics if you are stepped in the philosophical classics, the ancient epics, and the real debate about what makes a man a citizen. You will not have civic participation if no class teaches anyone about civics and if we raise a generation of children that have no understanding of how their government works. We need creative and talented minds and we will only see that if people are exposed to reading for pleasure and are able to understand literature, poetry, go to a real life theatrical performance, paint, draw, sing, act and truly appreciate life. These are not luxuries or niceties but the key to creating whole human persons. Bloom was right, our mind is being shut, and it is being shut out to the things that allow us to really develop and grow as whole persons. The liberal arts are not irrelevant to education-THEY ARE ESSENTIAL TO IT. In fact the very act of learning for its won sake is the definition of true education. If all our education system is doing is ‘teaching the fundamentals’ and ‘training students to have gainful employment’ than it is an education system that is leading us down the road to failure, time, and time again.
I appreciate your comments and agree with you 100 percent.
While all students should be well rounded I would prefer the engineer designing the building I’m working in or the doctor checking me up understands the science behind their decisions.
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p>Both science and liberal arts are essential to a good education.
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This need not and should not be a zero-sum game among the various academic disciplines.
.. yeah,… but the sum of hours in an educational day means there are definitely zero-sum elements to curriculum.
…but there’s always the novel idea of extending the school day/year. I believe we’re behind most other industrialized nations in that regard.
… my understanding is that systems that dispense with long summer vacation don’t necessarily have many more days of school overall, but spread the time off more evenly throughout the year. This is better for retention anyway, of course, but I lament what would happen to DCI.
…but many other countries have 200+ days, and yes, retention is vitally important.
We need to get the crops ready for fall harvest, thus the long vacation. Plus teachers would want more money.
They are a PROFESSION and as such should be making high 5 figures, which I realize some do, but not all.
How about merit pay? You want it both ways.
However, I think of teachers as professionals in much the same way doctors and lawyers are. More and more districts are requiring Master’s Degrees, so yes both in terms of attracting quality people AND the principle of how much what they do is worth to society (way more than professional athletes with multimillion dollar contracts for example) they need to be paid more.
They make money based on their ability to attract clients. Teachers make money based on time served. 🙂
… are exactly known for altruistic disinterested benevolence, operating adversely to the financial interests of their membership.
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p>What are you smoking?
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p>Is it legal?
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p>Can I get some?
It’s easy to ignore the current curriculum frameworks because they basically cover all things English from soup to nuts. I “ignore” them, too, because when I teach my classes, I’m teaching my best to teach real English that focuses on the value of literature, a close reading of text and authentic writing in response to that text. I then focus my instruction on the demonstrated weaknesses of the actual students in front of me.
My approach is replicated around the Commonwealth in hundreds of classrooms.
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p>But that’s not the point.
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p>The current frameworks are a reasonable reflection of a well-rounded English experience for all students. The breadth of the frameworks is so vast that they encompass every conceivable approach, which, btw, is also its shortcoming. Not so with the new standards, which suck the life out of an English experience as we know it and currently value it.
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p>You may be able to do your own thing and teach whatever you want, but that’s not a reasoned response to a codified set of standards that the rest of the English teaching world just might conform to.
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p>Will I do my best to compensate for the shortcomings of the new standards? Of course. Will I likely have more latitude than many English teachers? Yup, I will. But the fact remains that we now have a document that is akin to a dessicate. And that is in no one’s best interest, even with a teaching staff loaded with mavericky mavericks willing to push the envelope.
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p>That should read “trying my best to teach….”
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p>I should try harder. lol.
on proofreading.
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p>I can’t speak for the rest of the English teaching world conforming to these standards, but in my experience at a suburban school, if test scores are good, everyone’s happy. (My school’s scores ranked at the top). That’s the beauty of Campbell’s Law.
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p>At urban high schools, where surveillance and supervisory control are more important than education, life will unfortunately continue to suck for teachers who have to teach to the standards. Teachers will be forced to write the standards into their plans (and maybe on the board) so the administration can tell the state their schools are addressing the standards even though their kids aren’t doing well on the tests. Meanwhile, good teachers will continue to flee urban school systems because the working conditions suck, and we will continue to hire them. We just hired a new teacher for my department. Two of the three finalists had taught in Springfield. Half my department came from urban school systems. I know there are still a lot of good teachers in urban school systems, but they lose so many (and not because of the kids).
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p>I don’t know about the rest of the schools, but my guess is that either one or the other of these narratives (or a mixture) is the status quo for Massachusetts schools. As far as the test goes, we might be looking at a few changes in questions, maybe one open-response, but I expect the new test will end up at least a little easier–or all the states that aren’t as smart as we are will end up looking a lot dumber–and we can get on with our work.
I wouldn’t require teachers to teach any books in particular. They should teach the books they are passionate about, even if that’s six Shakespeare plays a year.
I have seen on BMG and elsewhere there reference to the ability to 15% of the Commonwealth’s standards be higher than the common core.
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p>If this is indeed true, why would anyone want to sign up for a system where you cannot shoot to have higher standards in all of the curriculum? Would we agree to a set of CAFE standards where only 15% of the cars produced could exceed the targeted MPG standard? Absolutely not. However, here we are adopting a set of standards that states we cannot have our own standards that exceed the common core in more than 15% of the curriculum.
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p>If this is truly what we are looking to achieve in our schools then let’s be honest and call it Race to the Middle as 15% exceeds is not my idea of TOP.
standards thing is a deeply flawed proposition. They aren’t concrete, and they just aren’t that precise.
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p>You can measure mileage. There’s a concrete testing process. You can test individual cars, etc. You can take a random sample of say, all 2010 Malibus that are manufactured, test them, and with some degree of confidence state their mileage.
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p>Learning can’t be concretely measured. Testing only allows us to draw inferences about learning. MCAS tries to measure so much in so few questions, it’s even hard to draw legitimate inferences.
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p>If I remember correctly, there are 36 multiple choice questions on the Grade 10 English Languages Arts MCAS Test. There are 4 open-response questions for which students read some sort of text (story, poem, play, etc.) and write a short essay about it. There is 1 long composition essay, typically 5 paragraphs or more. There are not enough questions on the test to make other than some very cursory conclusions about what students have learned.
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p>MCAS doesn’t really test vocabulary directly, but let’s use it as an example. You want to know how large a student’s vocabulary. If you used ALL the multiple choice questions on the MCAS test, you’d have 36 questions to do it. The average high school senior knows 45,000 words, say the average sophomore knows 40,000 words. How many questions do you have ask a kid to draw a valid inference about his vocabulary? Unlike fuel efficiency, vocabulary isn’t a known quantity.
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p>The problem with standards in general are illustrated in this example. Measuring learning is almost always making an inference; measuring mechanics and physical properties is not. The dirty little secret of standards-based reform is the poverty of many standards themselves and the inability to measure adherence to them with precision.
I just got back from a week away and saw this. Thank you for writing it. It’s about time teachers were seen as people of some intellectual depth and as the carriers of civilization. I hope more people write posts and articles like this.
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p>One thought I had while reading it: I used to teach junior high and high school mathematics, and it was clear to me that to virtually all parents and administrators, mathematics consisted of performing rote computations. The role of mathematics and science in enabling us to understand the marvelous complexity and beauty of the world we live in was not even on the horizon for these people.
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p>And similarly, I noticed that no one really took literature seriously either. The idea that Shakespeare might be worth reading for its own sake was not an idea that I ever heard voiced — other than by teachers.
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p>Instead, what came across again and again was that the proper role of education was to serve as a narrow form of job training. And that was pretty much it.
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p>I remember an incident many years ago in which the joint legislative committee on education was holding some public hearings. I don’t even remember what the topic was, but it was inevitably described as “education reform”, and one of the leaders of the committee was consumed with the goal of having public education serve the needs of industry. I managed to speak for a few minutes, and one of the points I made was this: “It’s true that industry needs public education, and may even have something to contribute in this area. But our goals are not precisely the same. Industry wants to turn out employees. We are trying to turn out citizens.”
I concur that the goal of an education first and foremost is to teach students how to think. Applying the ability to think to be able to complete complex tasks, i.e. work, comes later.
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p>I realize my viewpoint is clouded by a liberal arts education where professors motivated us to learn to think and reason and worry about jobs later. I think it worked out well for most of my contemporaries.
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p>The concern with “producing” students that meet the needs of industry is that over the course of a student’s education the dynamics of industry will result in potentially vast changes in what constitutes “industry” and if the students are not “educated” properly, the will not meet the needs of industry, nor will the be educated. Therefore, I will continue to advocate for strong standards that challenge students to learn to think. Once they have that skill, they can be trained to support industry in whatever needs may arise.
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p>Again, thanks for a great comment.
…especially the part about turning out citizens, but I must push back a bit on your mathematics paragraph. At least at the elementary level there MUST be rote computations involved if a student hopes to do anything further with math. As a substitute teacher I’ve lost count of how many times in grades 5-6 I would try to walk through a problem with a student and ask, “OK, first step, what’s 4×8?” only to get a blank stare in response. There should be no hesitation at that age with the answer, but I can’t teach math facts; they just have to be studies like vocabularly and spelling. Kids need flash cards, peer tutoring, timed quizzes to get to the point where this no longer takes any mental effort. Yes, it is tedious in the extreme, but it’s the only way I can see to get to the more abstract and challenging concepts.
Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. I realize, reading what you wrote, that echos of the recent “math wars” are still in the air. I wasn’t making an argument that computational skills were unnecessary. Of course our students need to be computationally fluent, just as they need to be fluent readers. (And at a somewhat higher level, I currently moonlight as a Computer Science instructor at the college and graduate level, and I’m often astonished and frustrated by the blank looks I get when some of my students encounter some very elementary algebra.) But just as English deals with rather more than spelling and punctuation and vocabulary words, so too mathematics is a lot more than the algorithms of elementary arithmetic. That’s the point I was trying to make, and it’s a point that in my experience eludes most people.
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p>This whole thing reminds me of the “back-to-basics” movement of the late 1970’s. I had thought that the so-called “new math” books were poorly written and fundamentally misguided. And I thought that the back-to-basics movement which followed — beginning and ending with flash cards and rote learning — was just reactionary politically and at least as unsound educationally. (And I was teaching junior high school at the time, and believe me, I spent a lot of time on computation.) I wrote an article in the March 1978 issue (Volume 71, Number 3) of the Mathematics Teacher titled “Back-to-Basics in Mathematics: An Educational Fraud”. It was a long time ago, and if I had to write it again, I’d say some things a bit differently. (And a copy editor mangled one sentence by changing “materialist” to “materialistic”.) But I think the points I was making then are still ones I’d want to make today. You might enjoy looking it up. I’d be interested in your reactions.
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p>And just to make it clear that I’m not trying to hijack this thread, it does seem to me that similar forces are at work at all levels and areas of the curriculum, certainly including English.
The full text of the e-mail message from state Education Secretary Paul Reville to state Education Commissioner Mitchell D. Chester regarding the Gloucester charter school application, as obtained by the Times.
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p>From: Reville, Paul
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p>Sent: Thursday, February 5, 2009, 11:54 p.m.
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p>To: Chester, Mitchell D. (DOE)
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p>Subject: charters
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p>Mitchell,
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p>Hope all’s well and warm in AZ. I appreciated our talk today and your openness and flexibility. This situation presents one of those painful dilemmas. In addition to being a no-win situation, it forces us into a political cul de sac where we could be permanently trapped. Our reality is that we have to show some sympathy in this group of charters or we’ll get permanently labeled as hostile and they will cripple us with a number of key moderate allies like the Globe and the Boston Foundation. Frankly, I’d rather fight for the kids in the Waltham situation, but it sounds like you can’t find a solid basis for standing behind that one. I’m not inclined to push Worcester, so that leaves Gloucester. My inclination is to think that you, I and the Governor all need to send at least one positive signal in this batch, and I gather that you think the best candidate is Gloucester. Can you see your way clear to supporting it? Would you want to do the financial trigger even in light of likely stimulus aid?
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p>Thanks for not seeing this as an independence issue. It really is a matter of positioning ourselves so that we can be viable to implement the rest of our agenda. It’s a tough but I think necessary pill to swallow. Let’s discuss some more tomorrow.
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p>Paul
Priceless.
I would first like to say that I am incredibly lucky, as an educator, to not have to be beholden to the bureaucracy of the state system. As a private non-profit, though, my organization is frequently brought in to give kids some creative and critical thinking outlet after days of MCAS exam taking. Despite my issues with the MCAS, I have always found the frameworks to be the product of a long, thoughtful multi-stakeholder process and I am disheartened that we’re so quick to fork them over for a pittance from the feds. This administration’s Ed Department is a pro-corporate control nightmare. Thank you for sharing your perspective.