Common Core

It’s not everyday you hear a veteran teacher advise her colleagues to “Stop telling students that reading is fun.”  However, in her article Opening the Literature Window, Carol Jago does just that.  Jago argues that under the category of “fun,” reading stands a shaky chance against its flashy competitors, namely video games and television.  Besides, she argues, the job of the teacher is not to make reading fun.  Instead, it is the teacher’s responsibility to employ reading as a vehicle for deeper learning.  Jago writes, “Literature study…offers students windows onto other worlds, other cultures, other times.”  The act of reading itself does not have to be enjoyable, but the content students learn from reading should be meaningful and stimulating. High-quality and challenging texts are an integral part of a rich education, and teachers are charged with the task of helping students to navigate and glean meaning from such texts.  Thus, Jago implores educators to amend the “reading is fun” mantra, and re-frame reading as a challenging and intellectually edifying activity that is deserving of students’ time, effort, and persistence.  We wholeheartedly agree.

Emily Dodd & Hillary Marder

On Thursday, March 15, Common Core hosted a panel discussion titled “Truant from School: History, Science, and Art”.  Among the topics discussed were the results of Common Core’s national survey of public school teachers titled “Learning Less“.  Common Core also announced that we will be creating CCSS-based curriculum maps in history and geography.

Full video of the discussion will be available soon.  Here are some outtakes from the event:

David Coleman, a founding partner of Student Achievement Partners and a lead writer of the CCSS in ELA.

[CCSS co-author] Sue Pimentel and I think if fundamental changes are not made to the quality of curriculum, and the quality of assessment, following the [CCSS], they will not have been worthy of the work that was put into them.  Period.

There is no such thing as doing the nuts and bolts of reading in Kindergarten through 5th grade without coherently developing knowledge in science, and history, and the arts.  Period.  It is false.  It is a fiction.  And that is why NAEP scores in early grades can improve slightly but collapse as students grow older. Because it is the deep foundation in rich knowledge and vocabulary depth that allows you to access more complex text.

Let’s not get confused here that [the CCSS] are adding back nice things [history, arts, science] that are an addendum to literacy.  We are adding the cornerstones of literacy, which are the foundations of knowledge, that make literacy happen.

There is no greater threat to literary study in this country than false imitations of  literature which do not deserve to be read.

States in this first year of [CCSS] implementation, we beg you, to turn back mediocre or low-rate materials, rather than buy them stamped “Common Core.” If we must wait, it is better than to misrepresent the Standards with second-rate stuff.  Please support states and districts in being brave and holding the line on excellence and giving time for a better generation of materials to take hold.

Lynne Munson, President and Executive Director of Common Core.

A sea change has occurred, largely unintended, that has stripped public education in America down to merely its nuts and bolts. We know students need a full education, particularly those who are perhaps unlikely to acquire knowledge of history, or the arts, or the wider world outside of the classroom. How can we use the levers of change available to educators right now, to bring some of these key subjects back into the curriculum?

Common Core is very happy to announce that – with the support of the Louis Calder Foundation – we will be creating a series of curriculum maps in history and geography.  These maps will be based on content drawn from the best existing state social studies standards and they will address the new CCSS literacy standards in history and social studies.  They will be a guide that elementary and middle school teachers can use to build their students’ knowledge in history andgeography as they address and reinforce standards.  These new maps are another concrete step CC is taking toward addressing the problem of curriculum narrowing.

Carol Jago, a veteran teacher who has taught English in middle and high school for 32 years and directs the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA.  She is currently past president of the National Council of Teacher of English.

Across the nation, teachers say “I don’t have time to teach literature and literary nonfiction anymore”  Why?  Because the focus turns to the behaviors that students need to perform on assessments.  What’s wrongheaded about this is that, with every fiber of my body, I know that the best prep for any kind of assessment in reading is to read and that students who read 20, 30, 40 books a year are probably going to have a pretty good vocabulary, understand complex syntax, and know what to do when they meet challenges in text.

The real heart breaking part of this though, is that the students who find themselves most often in the classes that are literature lite [and] reading lite, are those students who are most disengaged from school.  So what are they experiencing? They experience a content-free curriculum. And the result is that instead of what we hope is a meaningful day in education, it’s meaning-less. And so it reaffirms these students’ belief that school is about nothing. English– that’s about commas and stuff– and that is the opposite of what those of us who love literature, love teaching students about literature, and love engendering those rich conversations about literature, would love to happen.

Lewis Huffman, Education Associate for Social Studies at the South Carolina Department of Education.

(Referring to Learning Less survey statistics) 71% of high school teachers surveyed said that students will have rad the Constitution by the time they graduate.  My question is, but will they understand it?  Another statistic, 92% of those teachers said students will know who fought whom in WWII.  My question: But will they know why?  And I think those are critical things.

Social Studies classes especially in Elementary schools have been reduced or eliminated.  In [South Carolina] a couple of years ago we were talking about the possibility of eliminating social studies assessments.  Within a week, I had teachers calling me, telling me that their school administrators werealready telling them “you don’t have to teach as much social studies” or “you maybe don’t have to teach social studies at all.”

Emily Dodd

A study released today shows that students made significant achievement gains in reading when they were taught with a content-rich curriculum.  The data comes from a 3-year pilot study of Kindergarten through 2nd grade students taught with a curriculum created by the Core Knowledge Foundation (CK), founded by Cultural Literacy author E.D. Hirsch, Jr.  The pilot involved 1000 students across 20 New York City public schools.  Half of those students were taught with CK’s curriculum, half with some version of “balanced literacy,” a hybrid, whole language-inspired approach to teaching reading that is used in most NYC public schools.

According to the New York Times, “The study found that for each of the three years, students in the Core Knowledge program had greater one-year gains on a brief reading test than their peers in the
comparison schools.  The difference was most pronounced in kindergarten, when the scores of children following Dr. Hirsch’s method showed increases that were five times those of their peers.”

As CC watchers know, we’ve long been fans of CK’s curriculum materials, which put core subjects including history, science, and art, at the heart of the process of learning to read.  Core Knowledge’s sequence was one of many sources of inspiration for the teachers who wrote our CCSS-based Common Core Curriculum Maps in ELA.

Lynne Munson

This past January, the Virginia State Senate passed a bill (SB185) that would end state history and science testing for all 3^rd graders.  In response, Common Core posted this blog, in which we expressed our concern that this bill could cause these two critically important core subjects to be granted less prominence in Virginia’s school curriculums. Common Core shared this post with every state legislator in Virginia, in the hopes that the delegates would heed our arguments and abandon any effort to move forward with the bill.

Today, Common Core is excited to report that we have just received an update on the status of SB185 from the offices of Virginia delegate Bob Tata.  We were informed that the Virginia House Committee on Rules has voted to table the bill and that SB185 will not be passed in the 2012 legislative season.  We are extremely grateful to Delegate Tata for this update, and are pleased that Virginia’s lawmakers have taken this step to ensure that the teaching of essential core curriculum content remains a priority in Virginia’s public schools.

Emily Dodd