Borderland

This post is tangential to a series of posts that Tom Hoffman has done recently, in which he eviscerates the new Common Core(porate) English Language Arts Standards. I don’t see category links on his blog, so maybe the best place to look for them all at this point is in the monthly archive. He summarized his objections today with 10 Reasons you should care about the Common Core State Standards Initiative’s Draft English Language Arts Standards. Tom’s close reading of the proposed standards leads him to conclude that these standards are an effort to narrow the field of English Language Arts to a set of “cross disciplinary literacy skills,” and may ultimately be used to hold content area teachers, as well as English teachers, accountable for their students’ test score performances.

These standards have been written mainly by a small cadre of test-publishing company reps and ivory tower, think tank, academic types, one of whom defended the validity of the process from an accusation by David Marshak, published in a letter to edweek.org, that the standards authors were nothing more than “bureaucrats and paper-pushers [who] wouldn’t know how to engage a child if their ample salaries depended on it.” In their defense, William McCallum, Distinguished Professor and Head Department of Mathematics, The University of Arizona, responded that “One member of the group is a former high school teacher, and many have been involved with teachers and schools,” as evidence the standards authors included representation from the field. Adding injury to insult, the supposed “benchmarking” of the standards to those of other high-achieving countries does not hold up to careful scrutiny, as Tom demonstrates, comparing the new standards with the exemplars cited in the document’s bibliography.

I haven’t had a lot of time to conduct investigations lately, but I did take a few minutes the other day to look at the bibliography of this standards document, since that is usually the first thing I look at in a research paper. Bibliographies reveal a lot about the philosophical orientation of a research document. I was pretty shocked when I saw that the Common Core(porate) people listed only SIX articles in their “Disciplinary Research” section. What is this – eighth grade? I wondered.

People took the standards-writing business pretty seriously back when this all started, despite claims from critics that we were “dumbing down” the disciplines. Professional teaching organizations and state departments of education all got involved. People argued for and against inclusion of various disciplinary topics and subtopics as they tried to decide what might constitute a “basic” education. I remember reading that, here in Alaska, ‘irony’ drew a lot of heat from English teachers, which is kind of funny now, looking back.

Standards are built on a set of values, spelled out in detail. They aren’t handed down by God, or carved in stone. And even if they were, there’s no guarantee that people would be any better off on their account, as events over the course of the last few thousand years have repeatedly demonstrated.

One of the problems that is constantly dredged up in these discussions is that too many kids are dropping out of school. It may be too great a stretch of the imagination for some people to recognize, but a set of standards that demands rigid adherence will inevitably produce failures. That is part of their function. If everything was all good and fine to begin with, there’d be no call for the standards to make things right. What the standards say is Shape Up, Or Else. And there are plenty of people willing to say, “Or else, what?”

…And then God created Standardized Tests.

But about the Common Core(porate) English Language Arts bibliography, the other interesting thing, besides its pathetic philosophical and theoretical thinness, is that it focuses on adolescent literacy. I guess the beginning reading teachers were sufficiently messed with by the National Reading Panel and Reading First, so now it’s someone else’s turn. I was intrigued by the inclusion of Elizabeth Moje’s article, Reinventing adolescent literacy for new tmes: A commentary on perennial and millennial issues in adolescent literacy. Moje makes an argument in favor of an “ecology of adolescent literacy” in which “The focus on adolescents takes the study of literacy beyond the constraints associated with secondary reading and content reading to a broad generative view.” I traced the phrase, “ecology of literacy,” to David Barton’s book, Literacy, in which Barton lays out an integrated view of literacy in which the social, the psychological, and the historical are all considered vital and inseparable.

Elizabeth Moje’s article is well worth a look. The irony of finding it in this wretched standards document is an added bonus. She and her co-authors write, “Critical consumers situate recommendations, determining where they are coming from and where they would like us to go. Critical consumers continually question claims, analyzing, comparing, and evaluating what is said.” They ask us to think about who says a practice is best, and what is the philosophical orientation of the author; what is the basis for a claim, and how its effectiveness is determined. They also recommend, among other things, that we think about who a practice benefits, when a practice is appropriate, and whether educators are treated as professional decision makers or assembly line workers.

Seeing this bit of blue sky at the end of the dreary Standards statemtent reminds me that there is still plenty of irony out there, and I’d argue in favor of its inclusion in any set of English Language Arts standards if I was ever asked for input. We’ll want kids to recognize irony when they see it to help them stay sane through the duration of this sh@t storm.

Updated: Minor wording change there at the end, along with a quick text search of the new core(porate) standards doc, as well as the Alaska Standards fourth edition, for irony. It does not appear to have been intentionally included in either document. Too bad – we do need it.