The hundred years' war

Ed's reaction to Paul Horton's column on the new CC history standards: "It's the counterrevolution, courtesy of Bill Gates."

This is something I don't think we've ever talked about on ktm: constructivists don't like history.

At all.

In fact, history was I think the first subject to fall to the progressives' school reforms. History was replaced by social studies nearly 100 years ago, in the 1920s and 30s.

Here's Diane Ravitch:

In the latter decades of the 20th century, many social studies professionals disparaged history with open disdain, suggesting that the study of the past was a useless exercise in obsolescence that attracted antiquarians and hopeless conservatives. (In the late 1980s, a president of the National Council for the Social Studies referred derisively to history as “pastology.”)

A Brief History of Social Studies by Diane Ravitch

In the 1990s Ravitch, Gary Nash, Christopher Lasch and others (including Ed) staged a successful counterrevolution against the social studies revolution, and history standards written by historians were adopted in a number of states.

Today Bill Gates is funding social studies (historical thinking for the 21st century!), so we have the counterrevolution to the counterrevolution, with the resulting theme-based, DBQ-mongering, 13-year students-will-examine fest you might expect. e.g.:

Students will examine the atrocities committed under Augusto Pinochet, Deng Xiaoping, and Slobodan Milosevic in light of the principles and articles within the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

That shouldn't take too long.

As far as I can see, there's not a single learning objective in the entire 13-year framework.

Just years and years of students examining this, that, and the other.

Punctuated by students comparing and contrasting this, that, and the other.

Terrence Moore is very funny on the subject of the Common Core's preoccupation with comparison & contrast. Will have to find a passage to post.

Way off-topic, but I'm passing this along

Twenty years ago, a friend of mine, a physician at UCLA, told me that artificial light at night is bad for you -- so bad that she had started turning out the lights in her house at dusk. (I've forgotten, now, what specific concern she had -- it may have been increased cancer risk.)

I've been tracking research on light after nightfall ever since, and just found this, which took me by surprise:

The Relationship Between Obesity and Exposure to Light at Night: Cross-Sectional Analyses of Over 100,000 Women in the Breakthrough Generations Study

Emily McFadden et al.
American Journal of Epidemiology, forthcoming

Abstract:
There has been a worldwide epidemic of obesity in recent decades. In animal studies, there is convincing evidence that light exposure causes weight gain, even when calorie intake and physical activity are held constant. Disruption of sleep and circadian rhythms by exposure to light at night (LAN) might be one mechanism contributing to the rise in obesity, but it has not been well-investigated in humans. Using multinomial logistic regression, we examined the association between exposure to LAN and obesity in questionnaire data from over 100,000 women in the Breakthrough Generations Study, a cohort study of women aged 16 years or older who were living in the United Kingdom and recruited during 2003–2012. The odds of obesity, measured using body mass index, waist:hip ratio, waist:height ratio, and waist circumference, increased with increasing levels of LAN exposure (P < 0.001), even after adjustment for potential confounders such as sleep duration, alcohol intake, physical activity, and current smoking. We found a significant association between LAN exposure and obesity which was not explained by potential confounders we could measure. While the possibility of residual confounding cannot be excluded, the pattern is intriguing, accords with the results of animal experiments, and warrants further investigation.

Boy.

Dollars to donuts there's going to be some kind of relationship with staring at LED screens all night, too.

I keep thinking I need to go back to (paper) books...then I keep not going back to paper books.

The civilizing mission

I found something funny in my travels yesterday.

From Paul Horton (Ed has now read Horton & says he's completely right), I discovered that the AAAS wrote standards for social studies that are based on social science. I had no idea. Seeing as how the AAAS also endorsed CMP, I question whether its social science standards would be embraced by social scientists, but who knows.

In any event, glancing through the site, I found this standard for teaching social change:

Peaceful efforts at social change are most successful when the affected people are included in the planning, when information is available from all relevant experts, and when the values and power struggles are clearly understood and incorporated into the decision-making process. 7D/H5** (SFAA)

That, in a nutshell, is the problem with Common Core as with nearly all reform efforts.

The policy elites who created and funded Common Core did not speak to parents, did not avail themselves of information "from all relevant experts," and did not trouble themselves to clearly understand and incorporate the existing values and power struggles into the "decision-making process."

So now they've got a parent uprising on their hands.

Parent and teacher.

(Which apparently is unnerving even to the richest man in the world.)

This reminds me of one of my favorite war stories. I'm sure I've told it before, but it bears repeating.

Back when the then-administration was trying to implement the "middle school model," Ed was leading the charge to head it off. I say 'leading the charge,' but in fact he was an army of one. (I was manning the Parents Forum.) All the other parents were upset, and rightly so, because the school was drastically shortening lunch break so students could attend "advisory" first thing in the morning.

In the end, the middle school model was delayed for one year -- Chris's last in the school -- and implemented the year after.

Anyway, during the board meeting at which that particular parent uprising took place, Ed sparred with our now-curriculum director^* on the question of teaching all subjects as one, which was the selling point of the middle school model as far as the administrators were concerned. Once we had the middle school model, subjects would no longer be taught in isolation.

At some point, Ed said: "I've been a disciplinary specialist for 25 years.

And RK said: "Have you ever thought maybe that's your problem?"

When Ed got home, he told me the administration was on a civilizing mission.


^*That particular story, in our school newsletter, is now inoperative. RK will remain as curriculum director. I'm very fond of RK, btw. I disagree with her on most things educational, but she's smart, determined, and often funny. Plus she's a survivor. I like survivors.

Under the radar: NY Common Core history standards

While I was sleeping, New York wrote and adopted new Common Core-aligned social science standards that appear to replace narrative history with "themes."

Thematic history isn't history. It's social studies. Which is not a discipline.

Social studies has no disciplinary standards, no body of knowledge, no research questions, no formal and agreed-upon method of evaluating evidence or determining what evidence is and is not. The only professors teaching social studies are education professors teaching students how to teach social studies.

If the Chalkboard story is correct, AP courses are now thematic as well.

Pearson shmearson

Ardsley is the district whose Cambridge Pre-U class I visited:

ARDSLEY -- The group of seventh-graders is hunched around a MacBook in English teacher Cameron Brindise’s classroom, calling out rapid-fire directions to the boy wielding the keyboard with the intensity of any tech startup entrepreneur.

Using the video-editing software program iMovie, they’re piecing together a documentary called “Growing Up Digital,” which they will present to their “corporate bosses” at the Pearson Education company in a couple of weeks.

[snip]

Ardsley is one of five districts in the country that have signed on and pay a per-student fee to participate in a one-year iPad pilot program with Pearson Education Inc. Through the winter and spring, nine teachers at the high school, middle school and elementary level have been using iPads loaded with Pearson’s new app, the Common Core System of Courses.

The idea is to have the schools provide feedback to Pearson before the company makes the final version of the app available to the public. As the pilot year is nearing its end, educators say it’s been, for the most part, a valuable experience.

“What’s it done for the teachers who’ve been part of it, it’s shown how easy it is to push their curriculum outside the four walls of their classroom,” said Layne Hudes, the district’s director of curriculum and instruction.

Teachers modified the lesson plans to accommodate their students’ needs and have written their own iPad lessons along the way. They’ve also found new educational apps they can integrate into their teaching.

“I like the idea of grabbing onto what I can connect with and what I think my kids can connect with,” Brindise said.

[snip]

Pernicone and her group will measure students’ social media use in their favorite apps -- like Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter -- and display their findings on the iPhone replica in the “museum exhibit” Brindise has organized as the capstone of the iPad unit.

Class Notes: Ardsley's test drive of new Common Core app delivers mixed results
Mareesa Nicosia, mnicosia@lohud.com 1:51 p.m. EDT May 5, 2014

My district is joined at the hip with Ardsley (apparently in part because our curriculum director is close with an administrator there, who used to work here -- so I've been told).

In any event, our curriculum director is "passionate" about "technology" (which means iPads & Chromebooks), and the district's goal is to make technology as "ubiquitous as pencil and paper in our classrooms."

So I'm sure our central administrators are plotting to bring Pearson's Common Core app to the district, along with the requisite iPads and Chromebooks.

That said, it's possible parents are sufficiently alerted to the possibility that administrators will think twice. (I need to find out whether the board OK'ed that grant .... )

In fact, I hadn't seen this article until a parent posted it on Facebook this morning, accompanied by the observation that the program sounds like c***.

I second the emotion.

How much rote memorization do students do?

I was chatting-via-email with Allison yesterday re: rote learning .... which I'd been thinking about  again, in the wake of yet another reference to the horrors of brute memorization in the Times:

The Common Core, the most significant change to American public education in a generation, was hailed by the Obama administration as a way of lifting achievement at low-performing schools. After decades of rote learning, children would become nimble thinkers equipped for the modern age, capable of unraveling improper fractions and drawing connections between Lincoln and Pericles.

Common Core, in 9-Year-Old Eyes By JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ | JUNE 14, 2014

There it is again: the problem we don't have (decades of rote learning), being solved by the problem we do have (decades of thinking without knowing). Same old, same old, except they've upped the ante. Nimble thinkers, for pete's sake. At age 9.

For a while now, I've been planning to re-read Dan Willingham's "Inflexible Knowledge: The First Step to Expertise."

Haven't done so yet, but I did pull out his definition of rote learning:

In his book Anguished English, Richard Lederer reports that one student provided this definition of "equator": "A managerie lion running around the Earth through Africa." How has the student so grossly misunderstood the definition? And how fragmented and disjointed must the remainder of the student's knowledge of planetary science be if he or she doesn't notice that this "fact" doesn't seem to fit into the other material learned?

All teachers occasionally see this sort of answer, and they are probably fairly confident that they know what has happened. The definition of "equator" has been memorized as rote knowledge. An informal definition of rote knowledge might be "memorizing form in the absence of meaning." This student didn't even memorize words: The student took the memorization down to the level of sounds and so "imaginary line" became "managerie lion."

Re-reading this passage today, I feel less clarity than I did the first time around 10 years ago.

If rote learning is "memorizing form in the absence of meaning," then it's not clear to me that the words "menagerie lion" lack meaning, even as a definition of "equator."

"Menagerie lion" is the wrong meaning, of course, but it's a meaning, and if you didn't understand the words "imaginary line" when you heard your teacher speak them, but you did understand the words "running around the Earth through Africa," then "menagerie lion" is not a bad guess for the sound string ih-maj-in-air-ee-line.

Slightly off-topic, Jimmy (for passers-by, Jimmy is my oldest son & has autism) has always been echolalic. You would think that echolalia would be the hr-example of rote learning, but if you listen to him, you'll hear that the particularly phrases he's echoing are often directly related to what's going on. (Can't think of a good example at the moment - sorry.)

Now I'm wondering about the word "parroting" -- do we know for a fact that parrots have memorized form without meaning? Having once spent a day with a parrot who probably spoken English (including conjugated verbs), I don't think we do.

Memorizing pi

It strikes me that memorizing digits of pi is a good example of rote memorization, although the issue with pi isn't precisely that you're focusing on form in the absence of meaning. You can understand pi, or at least know what pi is, and still have to rote-memorize the digits. (Or do math people see this differently?)

Anyway, the point is: memorizing digits of pi is hard. Not easy. It's much easier to memorize material that has meaning.

Which raises the question: how much rote memorization -- memorization of form in the complete absence of meaning -- do students actually do?

How much rote memorization did students do in the past, when memorization was seen as a good thing (or at least an essential thing)?

And how much do students absolutely have to do?

I don't know how to answer that question. New vocabulary words in every subject have to be learned by rote because the link between form and meaning is arbitrary. Second language vocabulary has to be learned by rote.

Math, it seems to me, may actually require less rote memorization than any other subject. (Or is that wrong once you get past the elementary grades?)

So...how much does it all add up to?

"How Bill Gates pulled off the swift Common Core revolution" (& the free for all)

The man behind the curtain

Diane Ravitch: Time for Congress to investigate Bill Gates' role in Common Core

And here is William McCallum, lead writer of CC math standards, winning friends and influencing people.

Ed and I were talking about McCallum's post last night. People who know him say he's a nice guy, and I'm sure that's true. But his post is a lollapalooza of name-calling and nitpicking, both of which continue apace in the comments thread.

Which took me aback, because it's not the tone I'm used to hearing college professors take in public. (It's not the tone I'm used to hearing college professors take in private.)

I'm used to college professors sounding....you know, professorial.

I never hear college professors sounding furiously wronged and internet-y.

For me, this situation is something of a first. I'm accustomed to academic content coming from publishing houses, which have corporate leaders and marketing departments, and which, as a consequence, do not have textbook authors venting in public.

But with Common Core, there's no corporate parent and no marketing department. There's just Bill Gates and the many NGO's, state departments of education, and think tanks he bankrolls, plus the federal Department of Education (whose head was previously bankrolled by Gates), so there's no party discipline. Gates appears to see himself as CEO and absolute ruler of his foundation in the same way he was CEO and absolute ruler of Microsoft, but when push comes to shove, where Common Core is concerned, he can't actually fire anyone.

He can't order Common Core defenders to vet their posts with marketing.

The federal government can't step in, either, mostly because the federal government isn't supposed to be writing national standards in the first place (not mandatory ones), and because Arne Duncan's one foray into enlightening suburban parents as to the non-brilliant state of their schools & their children was a debacle of epic proportion. For months now, we've have silence from the top.

So...the defense of Common Core is turning into a free-for-all, and the story-line is getting lost in a bombardment of "process" stories and op-eds about the tea party (bad) and the Democratic Party's standardized-test-hating base (also bad).^*

Op eds about the tea party and the Democratic base are bad for Common Core. I'm pretty sure.

They're bad because nobody likes being told they're an idiot for not agreeing with David Brooks -- especially not being told they're an idiot for not agreeing with David Brooks by David Brooks. Being told that only tea partiers and members of the Democratic Party's standardized-test-hating base don't like Common Core makes me not like Common Core. Also, it makes me want to join the tea party and the Democratic base.

Point is: if the defense of Common Core is to be left to volunteers, then Common Core is going to die an unusually painful death.

Bill Gates "Letter to Our Partners" (the aforementioned NGO's, state departments of education, and think tanks plus the federal Department of Education) is just the start.

I think.


^* David Brooks, has yet another bad idea.

White House report on 'big data'

I have zero time to read this ... maybe not even to skim.

Passing it along.

Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values

2-bit lit crit and quality control

Terrence Moore's The Story-Killers was a revelation to me in any number of ways, one being the idea that English teachers should not spend their time teaching what Moore calls two-bit lit crit. (I'm sure Carol Jago has something intelligent to say on the subject -- will report once I finally get to her book.)

In the meantime, just a few minutes ago I came across the video below, which appears on the flipped learning network site's "Examples of Videos page." The lesson pretty much exemplifies two-bit lit crit, I think.

But the two-bit lit crit-ness is the least of it, which is why I'm posting.

Watch the first 30 seconds or so. See what you think.

The oddness of this flipped-classroom offering brings up an issue I've been wondering about: where is the quality control?

Here in New York, administrators are now required to make at least two visits to each teacher's classroom per school year (my district is doing four) -- but if teachers are recording their lessons, who's watching the videos?

Do the 'board members' and 'staff' of the flipped learning network watch lesson videos before posting them to their site?



Plot Structure at the IMA (7:08, Cockrum)

Massachusetts School Law of 1789

From Terrence Moore's The Story-Killers:

Whereas the Constitution of this Commonwealth hath declared it to be the duty of the General Court, to provide for the education of youth: and whereas a general dissemination of knowledge and virtue is necessary to the prosperity of every State, and the very existence of a Commonwealth:

     Section 1. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives, in General Court assembled . . . That every town or district within this Commonwealth . . . shall be provided with a School-Master or School-Masters, of good morals, to teach children to read and write, and to instruct them in the English language, as well as in arithmetic, orthography, and decent behavior . . . And every town or district containing two hundred families, or householders, shall be provided with a grammar School-Master, of good morals, well instructed in the Latin, Greek, and English languages . . .

     Section 4. Be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That it shall be and it is hereby made the duty of the President, Professors and Tutors of the University at Cambridge [Harvard], Preceptors and Teachers of Academies, and all other instructors of youth, to take diligent care, and to exert their best endeavors, to impress on the minds of children and youth, committed to their career and instruction, the principles of piety, justice, and a sacred regard to truth, love to their country, humanity, and universal benevolence, sobriety, industry and frugality, chastity, moderation and temperance, and those other virtues which are the ornament of human society, and the basis upon which the Republican Constitution is structured. And it shall be the duty of such instructors, to endeavor to lead those under their care (as their ages and capacities will admit) into a particular understanding of the tendency of the before mentioned virtues, to preserve and perfect a Republican Constitution, and to secure the blessings of liberty, as well as to promote their future happiness; and the tendency of the opposite vices to slavery and ruin.

Virtues are the ornament of human society and the basis upon which the Republican Constitution is structured.

Reading comprehension and knowledge and something else

I was finally reading Michael Goldstein's terrific blog when I came across this post:

E.D. Hirsch

If you teach English, or you're a school leader — and I'm particularly looking at you, friends in No Excuses charter schools, with our collective student gains in math that are 4x higher than those in English — I think a bare minimum threshold is that you can:

a. Explain E.D. Hirsch's arguments

b. Describe the degree to which your class/school adheres to or rejects his view

c. Justify why

I got turned onto re-reading Hirsch through Robert Pondiscio, who until recently worked for Hirsch's Core Knowledge Foundation as a blogger.

To the best of my knowledge, students at Morningside Academy make the same gains in reading they do in math: two years' progress in one year's time. That is the guarantee Morningside makes to parents. Their child will make two years' progress in one year's time or tuition is refunded.

More specifically, Morningside guarantees that each child will make two years' progress in one year's time in the child's most difficult subject. Since many of students there have diagnoses of dyslexia, presumably the worst subject is reading, often as not. Morningside's students are middle and upper-middle class, but Kent Johnson and his group have worked with disadvantaged populations, too. As far as I know, two-years-in-one applies to low-income students, too.

For (remedial) reading comprehension, Morningside uses Robert Dixon's Reading Success. Dixon's approach to teaching "main idea" is sui generis: his program teaches students to identify anaphora first. Dixon's definition of anaphora: "a pronoun or other words used to refer to some other word or name." (And here's a simple example of anaphora)

Morningside students become fluent at identifying anaphora and their referents in the text. As I recall, they then identify the main idea by counting the anaphora. The main idea has the most. (Still haven't read my Dixon handout...if I'm wrong about that, I'll correct.)

Once students have completed Dixon's curriculum, they continue to improve their reading within the subject areas.

We've talked about this before, so this is a repeat: the idea that you would teach reading comprehension by focusing very specifically on anaphora was a revelation to me. I've been teaching anaphora to my students ever since.

My experience at Morningside makes me skeptical of the claim that lack of background knowledge is the only meaningful explanation for the decline in reading comprehension in the U.S., or for the failure of the good charter schools to make much headway improving reading comprehension.

I was mulling this over, trying to think how one might separate background knowledge from some kind of 'textual knowledge' students also lack, when I remembered the fact that my students can have difficulty understanding fables.

One of my best students -- a bright, capable young woman -- did not understand this fable, which she had read out loud to the class:

A dispute arose between the North Wind and the Sun, each claiming that he was stronger than the other. At last they agreed to try their powers upon a traveller, to see which could soonest strip him of his cloak.

The North Wind had the first try; and, gathering up all his force for the attack, he came whirling furiously down upon the man, and caught up his cloak as though he would wrest it from him by one single effort: but the harder he blew, the more closely the man wrapped it round himself.

Then came the turn of the Sun. At first he beamed gently upon the traveller, who soon unclasped his cloak and walked on with it hanging loosely about his shoulders: then he shone forth in his full strength, and the man, before he had gone many steps, was glad to throw his cloak right off and complete his journey more lightly clad.

Moral: Persuasion is better than force.

When one of my students has trouble understanding a fable, the problem isn't background knowledge.

I'm not sure what the problem is, but the fact that Morningside Academy achieves such amazing results using a reading comprehension curriculum that teaches anaphora leads me to believe that, at a minimum, cohesion devices should be directly and explicitly taught in English class.

On that subject, here's Sally Hampton: The Importance of Writing Structures, Coherence, and Cohesion to Writing and Reading.

Liberals and Pearson...(thinking out loud)

After my musings about "real conservatives" versus "real liberals" and their respective (and hypothesized) reactions to Pearson, Hainish's comment  cracked me up:

Liberals hate Pearson. Teachers hate Pearson. Anything that ties Pearson with CC is going to result in those groups of people hating CC.

True!

So, quick follow-up: I have no business talking about "true conservatives" and "true liberals"!

But since I did....

The feeling that political conservatives 'have to leave public schools' came over me so forcefully, as I read Moore's chapter on The American Experience, that I sallied forth.

What I was trying to say but not saying (because I was beating around the bush) was that I think Pearson's American Experience textbook would be offensive to conservatives in an immediate and visceral way that it would not be to liberals -- except for liberals who are much better educated than most Americans, including me.

That is: an American like E.D. Hirsch. E.D. Hirsch, a political liberal, would find The American Experience appalling.

I'm not saying conservatives are better educated than liberals!

I'm saying that the values informing The American Experience (assuming Moore's analysis is accurate, which I do) are pretty much anathema to conservatives but not to liberals.

(A lot of liberals I know would find the values annoying. But annoying is not anathema.)

Liberals are going to dislike the content (Hainish is right on that one!), but conservatives are going to dislike the content and the values -- and at some point people reach a tipping point.

That said, the fact that I had such an intense, visceral reaction reading Moore on Pearson tells you more about the quality of Moore's book than it does about conservatives and liberals. The book is a tour de force.


Disciplinary specalists redux

Public education would be a lot less fraught if disciplinary standards were written by disciplinary specialists.

Here's an example.

Terrence Moore, a political conservative, has a Ph.D. in history from the University of Edinburgh.

My husband, a liberal, is a historian at NYU.

Moore's explanation of why it's wrong to base an entire discussion of the Declaration of Independence on the observation that when Thomas Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal" he really meant "all white men are created equal" was pretty much a revelation to me. It was a revelation to me because I know next to nothing about the debates and politics that surrounded the founding of our country.

The next morning I mentioned Moore's chapter to Ed, who proceeded to give me the same reasons why it's wrong to base an entire discussion of the Declaration of Independence on the observation that when Thomas Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal" he really meant "all white men are created equal."

History is a discipline. You can be conservative, you can be liberal, doesn't matter. If you're a historian, you're against anachronism and presentism. You also possess -- and remember -- knowledge about the specific circumstances surrounding the finding of our country.

I do realize that politics can affect scholarship. (And I can't tell whether literary studies are or are not a proper discipline at all these days).

Nevertheless, not only do I personally want my disciplinary standards written by disciplinary specialists, I think that if disciplinary specialists wrote disciplinary standards, we'd have less education wrangling than we do now.

Kai Musing on Common Core

Comment left by Kai Musing (I added the passage from CC):

I haven't read the Moore book, but as a teacher in a major metropolitan school district I have had to read the common core.

I also used to teach at a Core Knowledge (E.D. Hirsch) charter. I think the problem is more that educationalists and progressives see what they want in the common core.

Hirsch has actually quoted from the common core and expressed tentative support for it:

Why I'm for the Common Core

He quotes from this part specifically in the common core as well (last paragraph on the page):

English Language Arts Standards » Anchor Standards » College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Reading

To build a foundation for college and career readiness, students must read widely and deeply from among a broad range of high-quality, increasingly challenging literary and informational texts. Through extensive reading of stories, dramas, poems, and myths from diverse cultures and different time periods, students gain literary and cultural knowledge as well as familiarity with various text structures and elements. By reading texts in history/social studies, science, and other disciplines, students build a foundation of knowledge in these fields that will also give them the background to be better readers in all content areas. Students can only gain this foundation when the curriculum is intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades. Students also acquire the habits of reading independently and closely, which are essential to their future success.

The problem is, in my view, that progressive continue to co-opt whatever standards there are into reinforcing useless progressive pedagogy.

One more for the road:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.9
Demonstrate knowledge of eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century foundational works of American literature, including how two or more texts from the same period treat similar themes or topics.

(Unfortunately, it shows up in the 11-12th grade band. In fourth grade, where I teach, it asks students to:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.4.4
Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including those that allude to significant characters found in mythology (e.g., Herculean).

Hirsch makes the point that the people who made the standards could not dictate content knowledge to be taught, because no one would have adopted the standards.

Take that as you will.

Common Core going well in froggiemama's district

froggiemama writes:

I really like the Common Core standards. My district has dramatically improved instruction since they went to it 2 years ago. They have eliminated many (not enough, IMHO) of the time wasting arts and crafts projects. My youngest did not have to spend first grade math drawing pictures of math facts like 2+3. My oldest, in 8th grade, is now being held to a writing standard far above what my current college students are capable of. I am really hoping that I will see improvements in my college students skills as we move to a generation who has actually been taught to use evidence from the text when writing about it. I am hoping I might finally get students in my CS1 course who actually understand placevalue and have some number sense. We will see.

Terrence Moore on the twenty-first century global economy

To their credit, the authors of the Common Core, while they are not completely clear on their aims of education, certainly repeat the same phrases concerning their ends again and again. The principal phrase they use is "career and college readiness." On the first page of the introduction to the English Standards, they use that phrase or some variant at least six times in what cannot be more than seven hundred words. It appears throughout the rest of the document, too. Some people might say that the repetition of the phrase produces clarity. Others might say it makes the document sound like a broken record, or that the phrase is like a bad cough that won't go away. Either way, these are their end of education: career and college readiness.

The other phrase that is only slightly less important is "twenty-first century globally  competitive society." Anyone who pays attention to what is said about education today has heard this phrase countless times. In fact, it seems to be the only thing that most of the politicians and bureaucrats can say when addressing education. "We have to prepare our young men and women for a twenty-first-century global economy," say all the talking heads. The twenty-first-century global economy, you see, is a very scary thing. It is much carrier than the twentieth-century global economy that we grew up in (though there is no Soviet Union and no Cold War). So we need to do whatever it takes!

[snip]

Slyly but unmistakably, the phrase "twenty-first-century global society," whatever others may mean by it, is being used by the authors of the Common Core to bring about radical, progressive ends of education, ends that would not be supported by the majority of parents if they knew what was really going on in the schools. Thus the insufficient and radical ends of education pursued by the Common Core Standards will make the nation's public schools both less and more than they should be: inferior schools academically, and officious, overreaching schools politically and socially. The remedy to these shortsighted and radical ends is a traditional, classical, liberal education.

The Story-Killers by Terrence Moore

Thoughtworld

I had just dipped back into Hirsch's The Schools We Need: And Why We Don't Have Them when Lisa J. posted a link to a lecture by Terrence Moore, whose book The Story-Killers: A Common-Sense Case Against the Common Core turns out to be a barn burner: a barn burner and a tour de force, take your pick.

Reading Moore, I have the recurring perception that "real" conservatives, conservatives of the heart, simply have to leave the public schools because the gap between Pearson and a "conservative of the heart" can't be bridged. Not on the ELA side. (I say "Pearson" because the most appalling section of Moore's book is  Chapter 7, a lengthy analysis of Pearson's Common Core literature textbook for high school juniors.)

My sense of "liberals of the heart," at least where Pearson is concerned, is much less clear. Any liberal who is well-educated in history or literature would be appalled by The American Experience Common Core Edition, but how many Americans are well-educated in history and literature these days? Certainly not me. If you don't know anything about the Declaration of Independence, you also don't know why it's so wrong to base an entire discussion of the Declaration of Independence on the breezy assertion that when Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal," he really meant all white men are created equal. (I didn't know.)

So I'm guessing that, for many politically liberal parents, textbooks like Pearson's will seem not-completely-horrible, superficially at least.

Then again, Moore's sobriquet for the powers behind Common Core is "the arch testers." He is no slouch in the anti-testing department, which I had heretofore assumed was the province of parents voting for Democrats. And here in New York, of course, the parents who actually are "opting out" are largely left of center (I assume), if only because the population is largely left of center. The gap between liberal and conservative parents looks pretty small to me.

But who knows? I can't get a clear read on the politics of Common Core. But, more importantly, I can't get a read on what is happening inside the institution of public education. All I can come up with is that someone, at some level of decision making, has messed up very badly. Very badly.

Which brings me to the reason I opened up my Blogger window in the first place, which was to post a quote from sociologist Diane Vaughn in the Times video on the Challenger explosion:

"We can never resolve the problem of complexity, but you have to be sensitive to your organization and how it works. While a lot of us work in complex organizations, we don't really realize the way the organizations that we inhabit completely inhabit us."

Diane Vaunghn (The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA)
Major Malfunction: Revisiting Challenger | New York Times

"The way the organizations we inhabit completely inhabit us": Exactly!

She could be speaking of Hirsch's thoughtworld:

Why do educators persist in advocating the very artifact, anti-rote-learning, antiverbal practices that have led to poor results--persist in urging them, indeed, even more intensively than before?

The basic answer is this: Within the educational community, there is currently no thinkable alternative. Part of essential American educational doctrine has consisted of the disparagement of so-called "traditional" education. The long dominance of antitraditional rhetoric in our teacher-training institutions has ensured that competing, nonprogressive principles are not readily available within their walls. No professor at an American education school is going to advocate pro-rote-learning, profact, or proverbal pedagogy. Since there is only one true belief, expressed in one constantly repeated catechism, the heretical suggestion that the creed itself might be faulty cannot be uttered. To question progressive doctrine would be to put in doubt the identity of the education profession itself. Its foundational premise is that progressive principles are right. Being right, they cannot possibly be the cause of educational ineffectiveness.

[snip]

In sum, since progressive doctrine cannot be at fault, the only proper cure for our ailing schools is homeopathic "reform," that is, even stronger doses of progressive principles administered even more intensely. E.D. Hirsch 

There it is. There is the explanation for why the Common Core reading standards, in spite of their references to the importance of knowledge, are turning English into social studies.

Review of The Challenger Launch Decision by Samudra Vijay

Allison and Palisadesk on high-SES versus low-SES kids and schools

ALLISON:

Here in the Twin Cities, we are experiencing multiple and opposing forces at the same time.

Hainish, I see some low-SES kids in private schools here that are worse off than if they were in high performing low SES schools. The rest of the school is barreling along doing discovery math, and these kids have no chance to learn. High SES kids are eventually tutored privately, but low SES kids aren't. It is more noticeable in reading, where these kids get no phonics instruction, but the high SES kids eventually get IEPs and massive services to support terrible reading comprehension.

But, they are better off than being in Minneapolis public schools, where they would get no phonics and TERC investigations.

Plenty of low SES charters here are a total disaster. they may not be quite "guide on the side" but the teachers largely have no idea content matters. So there are no drills in math, no sense of what must be known year to year. No urgency.

Another big factor I see here is the "school expects home to teach math facts, but forgets to tell home that." A typical example for me is parents are shocked to find out their 4th grader is not competent at multiplication, and teacher is recommending summer school. They come to me to ask what is going wrong, and how do they help their child. Among other things, I suggest they ask teacher "how many minutes a day is spent on math facts in class?" They do, and receive the response "none".

Meanwhile, I see other schools where the parents are involved but to negative effect. In another typical example, the parents provide a steady steam of complaints if their child is not getting an A. This encourages group work and discovery learning, rather than tests that can be graded.

PALISADESK:

HAINISH: "Palisadek, if you are correct, then low-SES students in high-SES-area schools should be worse off than those in low-SES schools."

I think this may well be true, for several reasons. As Allison explained, the low-SES kids don't have the outside tutoring/afterschooling etc. that higher-income families routinely provide, and they tend (this is a generalization) to respond poorly to unstructured learning situations, which much "group work" and "exploratory learning" seems to be. They haven't got the resources at home or school to do artsy projects, may not have access to a computer or the Internet (or even a telephone!) at home, may have other responsibilities after school, not be able to afford field trips and school clubs/sports etc.

A previous school I worked at was in a neighborhood separated by a large city park from a very wealthy area of manicured million-dollar homes. The school for that neighborhood served these very affluent families, who comprised most of the enrollment, but on the edge of the neighborhood, bordering a freeway, there was a smallish public housing project. The children there also attended this school. So you had the very poor and the extremely rich. The school got allocated some extra special education staff for the "project" kids, but both socially and academically those children were isolated and tended to be academically unsuccessful. A top teacher from my school transferred there a few years ago and tells me that the great divide is still present, and the school does not have the kind of supports low-SES kids need.

For example, at my school the library has been kept open after school for parents and children to come in and use the computers for research, skill practice, homework and so on. Even though math facts are taught, many children need much more practice than can be given in class; we recommend some online sites for practice and pay for some sites where children can practice reading skills online (about 40% of our students have internet at home). Teachers also provide tutoring and support over the lunch hour and run academic clubs like math clubs and spelling clubs to reinforce basics in an engaging way.

Upper-income schools don't, in my experience, provide this kind of thing. Their students are leaving after school for Little League, swimming, horseback riding and gymnastics. Our students are leaving to care for younger siblings or help mom and dad at the bakery.

Adding to the difficulty is the fact that the lower-SES parents feel uncomfortable in a milieu of affluence (less so if it is a mix of working poor and working class), so parents aren't as involved in the school as they would be in one that was more reflective of their own social station.

One benefit, we do get away with a lot of direct teaching (phonics included) even though it is less than optimal. I compared my school's test results with those of one near my home, which has a median family income of 250K (I live on the poor side of the highway, LOL). My school roundly trounced this school, despite being 60% ESL and 95% nonwhite. Test results are only one indicator, but it does show that our kids are learning and we hope they will have a chance to make their way in the world.

Palisadesk says discovery learning has disappeared from low-SES schools

palisadesk writes:

I haven't seen much if any "discovery learning" emphasis outside of Kindergarten for 15 years or so, and the primary approach is definitely teacher-centric. Not so much "lecture" -- attention spans of young children are limited, so an interactive direct teaching model is more effective -- but definitely not "guide on the side." I've been in 4 low-SES schools in that time, one of them high-performing, but have seen similar instructional emphases in all of them. The quality of the instruction certainly varies (my current colleagues are almost all very effective but in other schools there was a wider spread of teaching ability).

However, I've never seen the attitude that seems to prevail in upper-SES schools, even in my district, where responsibility for kids' learning the basics is offloaded to the home. It was hammered into me from the get-go that it was MY responsibility to teach kids the things they needed to learn, not the parents' responsibility (which in many cases they did not have the resources to do anyway). It helps that the families in general support a more instructivist stance and expect us to be hammering the foundation skills. We allocate 20 minutes daily across the grades to structured practice of math skills. Counting, math facts, metric conversions, fractions, formulae -- depending on the grade. Our math results are better than those in some of the middle-class schools, which I find interesting. We are doing something right.

Even so it is an uphill struggle because many kids need far more instructional time than we can provide, and issues like absenteeism, frequent moves, family crises and hunger do affect kids' learning no matter how well we can teach them. But I haven't seen the following in any of my schools for over a decade:

1) movies shown during instructional time

2) "art" projects in reading or math.No dioramas, foldables, posters etc.

3) "discovery" learning."Guided discovery" is a bit different -- in a science activity, students might be led through a series of steps to "discover" something (really, to observe it) and detail their observations, but they aren't turned loose with stuff and expected to "discover" something.

4)"group" work with the exception of leveled groups for reading and math; when not directly taught by the teacher the groups will have individualized seatwork or follow-up assignments.

I think it may be a very different ethos in the low-SES schools. Three of my four were schools (large, with around 600-700 kids) with NO middle-income families among them. The curriculum is, supposedly, the same, but how it is delivered is very, very different.

It's a matter of where the locus of responsibility is believed to be. I and many of my colleagues believe the kids' academic progress is OUR responsibility. Perhaps in better-off neighborhoods this "locus of responsibility" is not the same. Certainly many parents here (and on some of my listservs) have shared stories that suggest it is not.

Down the rabbit hole

The opt-out movement may become a force to be reckoned with, if and when it organizes effectively. What has to happen, it seems to me, is that the movement must also be FOR something. I suggest a straight trade: two weeks of project-based learning for every day of testing AND test-prep! In other words, don’t just stay home; fight for positive changes.

The Common Core Brouhaha by JOHN MERROW on 24. APR, 2014 in 2014 BLOGS

I was sitting here mulling what a terrible fate this would be when it came to me: "two weeks of project-based learning for every day of testing AND test-prep" probably isn't a bad  description of what's happening in my district now.

That along with insane homework loads in the run-up to the tests. Parents here were complaining a couple of months ago about having to drive their kids through hours of HW every night because the middle-school teachers were worried about their evaluations.

I've seen the same thing in a neighboring district, where middle-school kids seem to spend their time either doing group projects and group discussions OR test-prep.

At least some of the time, teachers who've been trained only in constructivism equate direct instruction with cramming.

Common Core is doomed: dreaming sophomore edition

Just got off the phone with Chris, who is in Venice with his best friend D. They are hunkered inside a youth hostel tent or some such with a thunderstorm raging outside. The thunderclaps were loud even across FaceTime.

Chris says D. dreamed last night that he was taking a Common Core test. The test had math and English, and D. couldn't understand any of it -- nothing at all. The teacher giving the exam told him he had to feel the exam, "like carbon dioxide."

Here's my take: when you've got sophomores in college having nightmares about Common Core, you're in trouble.

Plus which, Hillary Clinton has never allowed the words "Common Core" to pass her lips (as far as I can tell), which tells me that if H.C. is elected Common Core is going away.

Jeb Bush is another story, of course.

Speaking of J.B., he was the subject of a glowing profile in the New York Times last week -- glowing. (The title was "Jeb Bush Gives His Party Something to Think About," but stripped of the paragraphs contrasting Bush favorably with the Republican Party, the article was still glowing.)

Back to Chris and his friend hunkered down in their youth hostel tent. D. is a proponent of the view that charter schools are bad because they take resources away from public schools. He and Chris had a one-hour argument about charter schools the other night.

I told Chris, this morning, to tell D. that if all public schools were charter schools, we wouldn't have Common Core.

D., who is not enjoying the experience of living through a violent thunderstorm INSIDE A TENT, replied that he's in a death trap and in no mood to argue about charter schools.

Chris said 'I believe in charter schools, so I'm not going to get struck by lightening.'