Deus Ex Scholia Redux: Is Education the Biggest Social Justice Issue?

Someone I know and respect tweeted out yesterday the following: "The biggest social justice issue is education."

This is an interesting contention. As a teacher, I would like it to be true. When I do a good job as a teacher, I like to feel that I am making the world better, that I am helping people. As an American, I want to believe that our schools, arguably our largest communal endeavor, can be a force for good. And as someone who loves ideas, conversations and books, I want education to help everyone love those things.

But I'm not sure what follows from thinking that school is important. The tweet that I saw went on to say that "it has nothing to do with who gets into Yale or Stanford. It's what's happening in the early grades. Always shocking to me how little activists outside of the ed world talk about this." The presumption here seems to be that one really good way to work for social justice would be to do something to change the structure or implementation of early grade education. Again, that feels reasonable, even important. But I don't know what it means in practice, and whatever it means I am skeptical about its impact. 

It's hard to improve society by improving schools, mainly because it's hard to improve schools

In the years I've been a teacher, NCLB failed, the Common Core failed, and the Gates foundation spent billions of dollars on various initiatives (small schools, measuring teacher effectiveness, hyping the Common Core, etc.) and, by its own account, failed. And these recent failures are not surprising, since education reform basically always fails.

And yet, we keep trying to change our society by changing our education system. Partly, perhaps, because hope springs eternal in the human breast, but also because making direct, material changes to our society would cost material resources (i.e. money and power), and we want to make changes that are about changing techniques, not about shifting resources. In other words, we want to fix poverty by doing a better job of teaching poor people how to fish, even though their local streams have few fish in them, rather than by changing the ecosystem so that there are more fish everywhere, and/or (especially in the meantime), just giving them some fish directly. 

Effective Ed Reform might actually cost a lot of money

Arguably, one ed reform measure that didn't fail was my own state's much-lauded 1993 Education Reform Act. This is interesting history, and I want to think about it more, but my working hypothesis (and I'm sure lots of people have made this argument) is that while the 1993 law is remembered (even in its wikipedia page) as being mainly about introducing new state standards, new charter schools, and new standardized testing, in fact the most important thing it did was dramatically increase state funding for poor school districts. Unfortunately, these funding levels weren't maintained, and some of the improvement (in testing gaps, for instance) seems to have been lost.

What about the Science of Reading?

I'm not sure (because it's Twitter, the argument wan't spelled out), but I think the tweet that prompted my musings about Ed Reform may actually have been about reading instruction. There are a lot of people out there who believe very strongly that the early-grade reading instruction in US schools is almost universally terrible--that kids simply are not being taught the fundamental relationship between letters and sounds. There is probably some real truth to this. While my own children's schools certainly seemed to put a fair amount of focus, in the K-2 years, on grapheme-phoneme relationships, there also do seem to be some crazy ideas circulating widely (e.g., three-cueing). The questions, for me, are: (a) How much would a switch to best practices in K-2 reading instruction improve reading ability in, say, 10th grade? and (b) How much would an improvement in reading ability make a difference in social justice?

I am not super optimistic on either point, partly because large-scale ed reform has a history of not living up to its hype (see above) and partly because I don't see much evidence of shifts in reading scores either at the school level (when I've asked for examples of districts that have adopted science of reading practices and seen significant score improvement, the examples I've been offered have been few and, in my view, not super impressive) or at the national level (for example, both England and California have tried to make some changes systemwide, to very little noticeable effect, though I'm sure it's true, as always, that implementation has not been great).

But I hope to look into the reading question a bit more deeply over the next few weeks, and maybe what I will learn will change my mind. It would be great if we could change some stuff in our schools and make our society better and more humane. Unfortunately, I think our best hope is to try in a more direct way to make the society better. (In the same way, while I am not against anti-racist education, and I am even on my English department's anti-racist committee, I think it's much more promising, if we want to reduce the harmful effects of historical and structural racism, to try to make some structural changes in our society--e.g. do some things that less unequal societies do, like higher minimum wages, stronger unions, easier voting, national health care, anti-pollution regulation, etc.)

In the meantime, if anyone has good stories about ed reform or SoR success stories, I'm looking for good reading material.  On SoR, I've read books or many long pieces by Gillingham, Stanovich, Seidenberg, and Hanford, but I know there's more stuff out there...

Evidence shows that reading informational text more frequently is correlated with lower reading scores

I have another little story about non-evidence-based BS.  I'm getting kind of tired of this topic, but I'm going to write it up anyway, just for the record, while my students are writing an in-class essay on Song of Solomon.

Is there evidence that reading more informational text is important?
Because it's being pushed by the Common Core, "informational text" is all the rage these days.  Lesson plans for high school English classes are looking more and more like SAT prep--read a brief passage and answer some factual questions about it--except that the passages and questions I've seen in lesson plans have been less interesting than the ones I used to see on the SAT, back when I used to work as a tutor. One of the people promoting the Common Core these days is literacy titan Tim Shanahan. Some of Shanahan's work on CCSS matters is pretty good--he has a decent take on how to handle close reading in the classroom that is much better than a lot of the dreck I have seen--but like DAvid Coleman he has, I think, too little to say about reading volume, and he has jumped on the informational text bandwagon too wholeheartedly.  In his most recent blog post, Shanahan writes, "CCSS is emphasizing the reading of literary and informational text to ensure that students are proficient with a wide variety of text."

I am skeptical of this claim, since my working hypothesis is that what's really important is overall reading ability, which is increased by reading a lot of whatever kind of text interests you. So I wrote a comment on Shanahan's blog post asking if he knew of any evidence for his assertion.  I wrote, "I have not seen any evidence that trying to make students read more informational text will lead to greater proficiency with informational text.

Shanahan quickly replied to my comment, saying that there was lots of evidence: "Actually there is quite a bit of research showing that if you want students to be able to read expository text, you have to have them read (or write) expository text"

I wrote back asking for specifics, which he didn't give (I understand--he's a busy guy), and then I spent a bit of time poking around.  What I found shouldn't have surprised me.  Here's the upshot: not only does there seem to be no hard evidence that reading informational text makes you a better reader of informational text, there is actually, oddly, some hard evidence that the very opposite is true: that the more regularly students read informational text, the worse they do on reading tests.

A leading scholar makes the case for informational reading, but has no evidence
Nell Duke is a Michigan professor who has spent much of her career pushing to get more informational text in U.S. classrooms; she also edits the "Research-Informed Classroom" book series. Duke has tried to make the case for more informational text in many articles over many years, and her efforts may be paying off: both of my children have been exposed to more informational text in the course of their schooling than I was. This is not necessarily bad, but it's not necessarily good, either.

For what Nell Duke has not done is provide empirical evidence that reading more informational text will make you better at reading informational text.  She is upfront about this: "While there is a great deal of agreement about the necessity of substantial or ongoing  experience with a genre (e.g.,  New London Group, 1996), there is currently no empirical research available to speak to the question of how  much experience  with a given form of written text is necessary for a particular level of acquisition" (Duke, "3.6 Minutes a Day," RRQ, 2000, p.207)  In other words, there is "agreement" among some researchers, but they don't have any hard evidence.

Do U.S. children "need" to read informational text?
In 2010 Nell Duke published an article in The Phi Beta Kappan called "The Real World Writing U.S. Children Need."  The article begins by citing an international test that shows US children doing slightly better on standardized test questions about literary text than those on informational text. The article goes on to make Duke's usual argument that students need to read more informational text.

Because I am skeptical of this claim, I looked up the international test Duke mentions, the PIRLS. As Duke reported, U.S. children, like those in many other countries, did a bit better on questions about literary text than informational text--but the scores were not very far apart.  What Duke did not report, however, was that the 2006 PIRLS study had actually done a bit of empirical research on the very question of whether more exposure to informational text is associated with higher scores on informational text.

The PIRLS study asked students how frequently they read literary texts, and how frequently they read informational texts.  It turns out, counterintuitively perhaps, that students who reported reading informational texts more frequently actually did worse on the reading test than students who reported reading informational texts less frequently.  Here's the relevant section of the US Government report on the 2006 PIRLS:

"The average score on the combined reading literacy scale for U.S. students who read stories or novels every day or almost every day (558) was higher than the average score for students who read stories or novels once or twice a week (541), once or twice a month (539), and never or almost never (509). In contrast, the average score for students who read for information every day or almost every day (519) was lower than the average score for students who read for information once or twice a week (538), once or twice a month (553), and never or almost never (546).

"The higher performance of U.S. students who read for information less frequently relative to U.S. students who read for information more frequently was also observed internationally." (http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2008/2008017.pdf, page 16-17))

So, to clarify, the very study that was cited as evidence of U.S. students not reading enough informational text turns out to show that frequent reading of informational text is associated with lower reading scores.

What to conclude?
First, while those PIRLS data are weird and counterintuitive, and almost certainly don't mean that reading informational text actually harms one's reading level, one thing is clear: this is not a study that offers any support for the idea that U.S. students "need" to read more informational text.  The evidence for this assertion, like the evidence for explicit vocabulary instruction, for charter schools, for VAM teacher evaluation, for larger class size, for explicitly teaching reading "strategies" rather than focusing on meaningful, content-based reading and discussion--the evidence is simply very weak, if not outright negative.

Second, we are again confronted with the spectacle of very eminent scholars (Shanahan is a real bigwig, and Duke is a professor at a very good university who is quite well-established) making strong assertions in the practical and policy realms that don't seem backed up by evidence in the scholarship realm.  There is a striking contrast between the careful language ("may," "currently no empirical research available," etc.) used in scholarly papers and the bold, authoritative tone of articles aimed at teachers and the public about what children "need" to be doing, and what practices will "ensure" a particular result.

The takeaway for me, once again, is that we simply cannot trust any assertion that we have not ourselves looked into carefully--even, or perhaps especially, if it is accompanied by the label "research-based", or as Nell Duke's book series has it, "Research-Informed." Instead, we must rely mostly on our own common sense and our sense of humanity.  At the heart of our work should be: meaningful reading, meaningful writing, and meaningful discussion.

$150 million of Gates money later, we're still clueless

Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post reports that Bill Gates has given over $150,000,000 to promote and develop curriculum for the CCSS.  This is a lot of money. But we are still mostly clueless.

Yesterday my curriculum coordinator was asked what our department was doing to align our curriculum to the Common Core, and she didn't have a quick and easy answer, because there is no quick and easy answer. The Common Core English Standards demand an ability to read complex texts, ability to make coherent arguments grounded in evidence from text, and an increased familiarity with academic language and "content-rich non-fiction."  The most important things students need to be doing, in other words, is meaningful reading and writing--just what we should have been doing before.  The only new thing here is the emphasis on "informational texts," but the best way to learn to read non-fiction is to read a lot of any old text: I am pretty good at reading informational texts, but I read hardly any non-fiction as an adolescent; Malcolm Gladwell is a master of reading, synthesizing and writing informational texts, but the main thing he reads now, just as, no doubt, when he was in high school, is junky airport fiction. Again, the main job of English teachers should be ensuring that their students are doing as much meaningful reading and writing as possible.

Things may look different in other subjects.  The math department at Leafstrewn has apparently done all sorts of work on Common Core "implementation."  This is probably appropriate; in math, you have to decide which skills to teach when. In English, we should be doing similar things over and over again, just with different texts, and different types of writing.  Trying to teach to the Common Core's "Shifts" (yes, the word is capitalized--it is, in the eyes of the Common Core people, that important) is, as I have tried to show, very likely a mistake, since it will lead to a narrow focus, boring curriculum, and not enough reading.  What we need is reading and writing--provide kids with books, time, and a humane, caring community in which they can do their work.

The Common Core's Supposed Emphasis on Close Reading is a Joke (not much reading, and not very close)

In the curriculum materials developed by the Common Core authors' own company, there is very little time available for high-volume reading, and the close reading questions lack depth or complexity.  Poor readers will not read enough to improve; good readers will be bored and very likely contemptuous.

Resources from the Standards' authors' own company
The Common Core standards are supposed to promote increased complexity of text, but they offer very little guidance on how to do it. Since the standards don't say much about what teachers should actually do, I couldn't be sure, but I have long been skeptical that the standards would do much to improve students' ability to read more complex texts, since the most important factor is how much students read, and the standards say very little about reading volume. Nevertheless, ready to be proved wrong, I decided to look at some curriculum that was developed with the Common Core in mind by an organization founded by the some of the authors of the standards.

Both Bill Gates and some corporations (I think GE gave 18 million dollars) have supported an organization called "Student Achievement Partners," which describes itself, awkwardly, as a "nonprofit organization that assembles educators and researchers to design actions based on evidence that substantially improve student achievement." (With tens of millions of dollars, you'd think they could have substantially improved their own writing!)  This organization has established a website called "achievethecore.org," which offers "free, high-quality resources for educators to implement the Common Core Standards."  When I visited the site, I was surprised not only by the paucity of resources, but also by their relatively low intellectual level.

What about "literary texts" in high school? What about independent reading?
From a none too extensive list of lessons on close reading, I clicked on an eighth grade unit on Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken and Jeanne Watasuki Houston's Farewell to Manzanar--partly because I was surprised that Hillenbrand's book would be taught in the eighth grade (a strong student in one of my Honors Junior classes is reading the book and fnding it challenging because of the length, complexity and the unfamiliar historical content), but also because I wanted to look at a lesson plan on a "literary text", not on an "instructional text," and the site offered not a single lesson plan at the high school level for use with a "literary text." This omission, no doubt related to CCSS's infamous call for 80% of kids' reading in high school to be of informational texts, was disappointing enough--but then I dug into the lesson plan.

The lesson plan only focuses on a few passages from each book.   Each day of the five-day lesson plan has the kids reading one passage from each book, then hearing it aloud, then writing about it, then discussing it.   This would not be terrible--if time were built in for extensive reading beyond these few paragraphs--but the writing and discussion prompts strike me as tedious and shallow, and I am very skeptical that a class doing this lesson plan would have kids actually reading more than a page or two a day.

"Close Reading": Boring Writing Prompts and Discussion Questions

The lesson is prefaced by a warning that since this is close reading, the teacher should not offer students any introduction, background or context for the texts.  This strikes me as truly bizarre advice (the weakness of New Criticism with none of its strengths), especially when the texts in question are brief excerpts from much longer works.  The instructions read:

It is critical to cultivating independence and creating a culture of close reading   that students initially grapple with rich texts without the aid of prefatory material, extensive notes, or even teacher explanations.

These instructions are comically ironic, since this entire teacher-selected, teacher-directed, non-open-ended lesson plan seems designed rather to stifle independence.

Here is the first passage, from Unbroken:

“The men had been adrift for twenty-seven days. Borne by an equatorial current, they had floated at least one thousand miles, deep into Japanese-controlled waters. The rafts were beginning to deteriorate into jelly, and gave of a sour, burning odor. The men’s bodies were pocked with salt sores, and their lips were so swollen that they pressed into their nostrils and chins. They spent their days with their eyes fixed on the  sky, singing “White Christmas,” muttering about food. No one was even looking for them any more. They were alone on sixty-four million square miles of ocean. A month earlier, twenty-six-year-old [Louie] Zamperini had been one of the greatest runners in the world, expected by many to   be the first to break the four-minute mile, one of the most celebrated barriers in sport. Now his Olympian’s body had wasted to less than one hundred pounds and his famous legs could no longer lift him. Almost everyone outside his family had given him up for dead.”

The writing prompt is:

In one or two sentences, briefly describe the condition of Louie Zamperini and the other men who were "adrift" in Japanese-controlled waters.

Then there are three discussion questions, one about how the author establishes "time and geographic location," one about the mental and physical condition of the men on the boat, and one about why the author writes about Louie Zamperini's past life and experiences.

For a good reader, these are boring questions.  They are neither very difficult--it is pretty obvious that the men are in poor shape--nor, just as important, are they open-ended.  These are not questions that could have more than one answer (in case the teacher is not himself a good reader, the lesson plan helpfully gives the answer; for example: "Hillenbrand describes Louie Zamperini's former condition as an Olympic athlete to show how, within a very short period of time, a popular star-athlete could quickly find himself weak, emaciated, and near death while floating aimlessly on a rescue raft in the South Pacific. This portion of text helps students establish a sense of how far Louie was from his former life before the war.")

It's hard to imagine a good discussion coming out of questions like the ones in this unit. There are things in the passage that seem interesting to me, either because I wasn't familiar with the phenomena (rafts turning to jelly, salt sores, etc.) or because I was curious about why (the looking at the sky, the singing of "White Christmas," etc.), or because the logical continuity of the writing seemed tenuous (in the last two sentences, there seems to be an implied connection between Louie's famous legs wasting away and his being given up for dead by folks back home, even mthough you wouldn't know his legs were wasting away unless you were on the raft).  But the questions in the unit just don't get at these strange and interesting elements of the passage, and if I were a student in the class I would feel like I was mostly wasting my time.

It seems to me that it would be much more worthwhile to have students mark up and make comments directly on the passage and then have a more open-ended discussion, beginning perhaps with a pretty broad question like "What didn't you understand in the passage?" or "What do you think the author is doing in this passage?" Open-ended questions will lead to real discussion, and real discussion will help students get better at answering even the boring questions like these.  But answering boring questions won't help kids learn anything, except to dislike school and reading.

Kids need to read a lot, and this lesson plan doesn't encourage that

If this were run as a five-day unit, the students would read a total of four pages in class, and at most another three pages at home.  An appendix does present the possibility of doing a three-week unit in which students would read one of the texts in full, but this possibility would require, for kids reading Unbroken, an average of over thirty pages per night, a pace which, for this demanding text, would lead nearly all students to cheat on the reading, pushing some into the arms of study guides, others into desperate skimming, and all into frustration and contempt.

Assuming that the unit is done as a one-week unit, students would get well-organized lesson plans on interesting, but very brief texts with boring tasks and very, very little reading.  This is not a good way to learn to be a good reader.  Students need to read a lot, and the discussions they have about what they read need to be based on interesting, open-ended questions to which the teacher or lesson-planner does not already know the right answer.

It might be tempting to think that this lesson plan is just a lemon, but it's not.  The Common Core sets an expectation that students will be "given frequent opportunities to read a high volume of
texts independently and be held accountable for this reading", but nothing in the Standards, or in the materials I've seen developed for them, or in presentations I've watched by David Coleman or others, offers any hint as to how this could be accomplished, especially in the context of all the other stuff students are supposed to be doing.  I know from experience, and from the very, very consistent literature on fostering higher-volume reading (by Mary Leonhardt, Nancie Atwell, Stephen Krashen, Richard Allington, Penny Kittle, Kelly Gallagher, and others) that teachers must make a concerted effort to provide students with high-interest books, and with time to read them.  The Common Core just doesn't do this; therefore, unless we teachers take matters into our own hands, students will not advance on the "staircase of text complexity."

The high school lesson plans are no better

For the high school grades, there are no sample lessons on fiction or literature, only on "informational text," and for grades 11 and 12 there are only two sample lesson plans.  The first is a three-day lesson on a two-paragraph speech by the great jurist Learned Hand about America and freedom; the second unit takes "several days" to read and re-read Andrew Carnegie's four-page article,  "The Gospel of Wealth," about how wonderful inequality is, and how poor people should be grateful for it, since it allows rich people to spend some their wealth on philanthropic endeavors.  

Leaving aside the fact that these texts, especially the Carnegie essay, are of dubious literary quality and are essentially propaganda, there are again two major problems with these lesson plans:  (1) the questions and prompts are not not very interesting, and any good reader would hardly have to do any "close reading" in order to answer them; (2) they are together less than five pages long, and yet would seem, along with the "text-dependent questions" and the culminating essays, to be all that was intended to occupy the students for over a week of class time.  This is not a curriculum that is prioritizing reading.

Conclusion
The Common Core's supposed emphasis on close reading is a joke.  Again: in the curriculum materials developed by the Common Core authors' own company, there is very little time available for high-volume reading, and the close reading questions lack depth or complexity. Poor readers will not read enough to improve; good readers will be bored and very likely contemptuous. Of course, a good teacher could probably make these lesson plans work--but then, a good teacher wouldn't need them in the first place.

Although I am more and more sure that the CCSS effort is basically a stalking horse for standardized tests and for-profit curriculum, and that the authors are mostly clueless about how to help students develop into good readers, I do think it would be possible to develop a CCSS curriculum that would work very well.  That curriculum would involve large amounts of independent reading at the students' own reading level, along with focused close reading and instruction in how to read closely.  You might say, Well, that's just what Student Achievement Partners is trying to do!  Perhaps, but they are ignoring the independent reading side of it and doing the close reading side poorly.

In the future, I'm going to put up some curriculum I think would be better--and I'll also have to write about those lesson plans on how great America and inequality are...

Getting kids to read complex texts: challenge, not difficulty; engagement before challenge

I've been thinking about complex texts recently, not only because there's been a lot of talk about the Common Core's call for increasing text complexity, but also because my ninth grade classes are reading To Kill a Mockingbird and my Juniors are reading Song of Solomon. Both texts are pretty complex, and too difficult for some of my students (most, in the case of my ninth graders) to read comfortably.  I've been dealing with the problem by doing a lot of reading aloud--which has been great--but I've also been mulling over a kind of reverse Jane Fonda principle: Less pain, more gain.

Engagement, not difficulty
Learning should be challenging and interesting, and our students should be engaged, but we should not be giving them reading that is difficult for them.  Here's a rule of thumb: the more difficult the task, the more engagement is required.  The first thing we teachers should be thinking about, then, is engagement and interest--not difficulty.  The more students are engaged, the more they will be able to tackle difficult tasks.  This principle--of putting engagement before difficulty--is very important when you're thinking about reading.

The heart of the Common Core ELA standards is the requirement that students be able to read complex (i.e. difficult) texts independently.  This is a wonderful goal, but school tends to go about it in the wrong way. If we want kids to read texts of increasing complexity, it is important that they (1) be able to read them, and (2) be interested in what they are reading--and if a text is so difficult that the student finds it painful, it is very important that they not try to persevere with that text.  Too often, students get the worst of both worlds: they are not very interested in what they are told to read, and the reading is too hard.

The first thing we need to do is get kids reading a lot
Less skilled readers do not need "challenging" texts.  Less skilled readers do not need to be pushed, as so much discussion around the Common Core implies, to read more complex and difficult texts.  What they need is what all kids need: to read a lot of books they are interested in, books they can read, over many, many years.

The way readers become able to read complex text is by reading a lot of text that is not difficult for them.  My son is a very good reader, and he reads quite a lot, but he has never forced himself--or been forced by anyone else--to read books that were difficult for him.  He is lucky, but he is like most of our highly skilled readers.  Most highly skilled readers grew up hearing lots of adult talk, were provided with lots of high-interest books from an early age, and were not forced to read books that were too difficult for them.  In school, kids like my son never encounter text that is painfully difficult.  His Science textbook may be kind of boring to him, but for him, unlike many other students in his class, it is not too difficult.  When he gets to ninth grade, he may be somewhat bored when he is asked to reread books he's already read (To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, etc.), but those books will not be for him, as they are for so many others, too difficult for him to read comfortably.  Good readers get better not only because they choose to read more in their spare time, but because the assigned reading they receive is at their level.  Forcing kids to read difficult text will not work.

Books that are hard may be manageable if kids are really interested
Good readers often try books that are diificult for them.  If the books are too hard, they drop them.  That's what I do, that's what you do--and it's what my son does.  My son has, for a long time, been really interested in books about Black athletes; when he was nine or so he started reading the new biography of Willie Mays, a book written for adults.  It was tough, but he kept at it, off and on, for nearly a year, and finally he finished it.  No one forced him, but he did it.

In the same way, one of my ninth-grade students has spent the last month very slowly getting through the first two hundred pages of Wasted, by Marya Hornbacher, a painful memoir about anorexia and bulimia.  My student usually races through books she's interested in, but this one is moving very slowly.  That's okay; she's enjoying it, and she's very proud of being able to read it.

But if the kids want to drop them, or aren't reading them steadily, they should drop them
Again, isn't this what we all do?  Sure, sometimes it's good to push yourself, but you need to want to push yourself.  If you don't want to, you'll do what I did when I was assigned Proust in a college French literature class: you won't read it.  That' wasn't terrible (I read Remembrance of Things Past in English, and I loved it), but I certainly would have gotten better at reading French literature if instead of being assigned Proust, I had been allowed to read easier books.

Over the past several months, my son has tried lots of books that sounded really interesting to him but that ended up being too hard for him to read comfortably.  The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Guns Germs and Steel, and David Remnick's book about Muhammad Ali, King of the World, are a few examples. He loves history, and he's been very interested in the lives of Black athletes, but these books were just too hard.  He could read them, but only with difficulty, and he felt he wasn't getting enough out of them to continue, so he dropped them.  That's okay; he'll read them some other time, and, more importantly, dropping Jared Diamond allows him to read Walter Dean Myers.

Challenge, not difficulty
In a sense, difficulty is always bad.  We learn best when we are in the zone, in the flow, whatever you want to call it.  You can't experience flow when something is difficult. Challenging, yes, interesting, yes, complex, sure--but not difficult.

[In my next post I'm going to look at some of the curriculum that's being developed for the Common Core Standards, to see how that curriculum looks in terms of text complexity, likely student engagement, and reading volume.  Stay tuned.]

Common Core baloney from the New York Times

I missed this NYT editorial from a few days ago on the Common Core, which the editorial calls "clearly the most important education reform in the country’s history."  That may be debatable, but what comes next is mostly just outright falsehood.

"The Common Core standards were the product of a heavily researched, bipartisan effort pioneered by the National Governors Association in collaboration with the Council of Chief State School Officers. The effort arose from a broad recognition that the United States was losing ground to many of its competitors abroad because the learning standards as applied in most states were pathetically weak."

The parts I've bolded are, I believe, simply false. The Common Core is, as far as I can tell by reading its own literature, very thinly researched.  Also, the US is not losing ground to its competitors, and it is far from clear that student achievement has anything to do with "learning standards."

The Common Core is not "research-based" and its "efficacy" is unproven

In poking around looking at PARCC (the new testing associated with the Common Core) I stumbled onto an interesting document: the "publishers' criteria" set out by the two lead authors (Coleman and Pimentel) of the ELA Common Core "State" Standards. These criteria are intended to guide publishers in their development of curricular materials for teaching under the Common Core regime. (Although I don't actually know any teachers who use a publisher's curriculum materials, many must do so, since producing these materials seems to be a huge industry.)
 
Here's the conclusion--again, this is Coleman and Pimentel telling publishers how to create materials for teaching to the Common Core standards:

CONCLUSION: EFFICACY OF ALIGNED MATERIALS
Curriculum materials must have a clear and documented research base. The most important evidence is that the curriculum accelerates student progress toward career and college readiness. It can be surprising which questions, tasks, and instructions provoke the most productive engagement with text, accelerate student growth, and deepen instructor facility with the materials. A great deal of the material designed for the standards will by necessity be new, but as much as possible the work should be based on research and developed and refined through actual testing in classrooms. Publishers should provide a clear research plan for how the efficacy of their materials will be assessed and improved over time. Revisions should be based on evidence of actual use and results with a wide range of students, including English language learners.

This paragraph may seem fairly reasonable on its face; nevertheless, I have two thoughts about it.

I. The Common Core does not, itself, "have a clear and documented research base"

My first thought is that what Coleman and Pimentel say about publishers' Common Core-aligned materials seems quite relevant for the Common Core itself.  It is as if Coleman and Pimentel had realized all the things that should have been done, but that they didn't do, in writing up educational standards for the entire country.

The Common Core is hardly "research-based"; the research base on which it rests is incredibly flimsy.  The authors of the Common Core make their case, such as it is, in an appendix purporting to offer, among other things, "research supporting key elements of the standards."  The relevant section of this appendix is only three pages long and offers "research" worthy of an undergraduate paper or a blog post, not of a major national endeavor.  Its three pages make roughly the following case:

1) College performance correlates with the ability to read and understand difficult texts, and especially expository texts. (This is probably true.)

2) Complexity of texts assigned in high school has declined over the last 50 years, and high school students read relatively little expository text. (This may be true.) 

3) Therefore, students need to be assigned more difficult texts, and more of those texts should be expository. (This third part neither follows logically nor is supported by empirical data.)

As I noted, the first part of this argument seems very likely, and the second is plausible, but the third part is very problematic, neither seeming logical nor being supported by the historical record or empirical research. The gap in logic is obvious: just because kids who are better at reading complex expository texts do better in college does not mean that most of the reading kids do in high school should be of complex expository texts, and just because the complexity of texts assigned in high school has declined somewhat over the past several decades does not mean that assigning more complex texts is the right remedy.  For these conclusions to be valid, there would have to be empirical support either of the historical or experimental variety.  There is neither.

First, the historical fallacy.  Robert Hass tells us that all poetry is about loss.  The same is true of the stories Ed reformers tell—we have lost the good old days when teachers taught more rigorously and even poor students could achieve like the rich kids.  The problem with this story is that it is by no means clear that students were more college-ready 50 years ago.  The only historical evidence the Common Core authors cite is what they call a "statistically significant" decline in adult reading proficiency.  What is the actual decline? From 15% in 1992 to 13% in 2007.  This hardly seems precipitous, it covers fifteen years, not fifty, and is belied by (slightly) rising reading scores on the NAEP.  The historical record does not provide a clear argument for making students read more difficult texts or having more of those texts be expository--and Ed reformers, unlike poets, don't have the excuse of poetic license. (For a longer analysis of this historical fallacy in the stories Ed reformers tell, see here.)


Second, there is a shocking lack of experimental data.  As usual in writing about education, the discussion in this Common Core appendix is a mish-mash of much unfounded assertion and some offhand citations of actual empirical research; also as usual, even when there are references, the articles cited often fail to support the assertion.  I'll discuss just one example--the first specific citation I looked at--but they are almost all equally embarrassing.

     References that don't support what they are cited to support

I am skeptical of the idea that students need to read a lot of specifically expository text; my suspicion, based on my own and others' experience, is that the key thing is to simply to read a lot, and that a high volume of reading even of trashy airport thrillers will lead, with only a bit of specific practice, to skillful reading of expository text.  The Common Core document states that "students need sustained exposure to expository text to develop important reading strategies." Now, I doubt this very much, but while I only have anecdotal evidence (me, Malcolm Gladwell, and everyone else of our generation, who learned to read before reading strategy instruction was current) to support my skepticism, the Common Core folks seem to have more: they cite several articles to support their statement.  I looked at the first citation (Afflerbach, Pearson and Paris, 2008), a 2008 overview from "The Reading Teacher" about the difference between strategies and skills (unsurprisingly, the article suggests that skills are unconscious, strategies are conscious, and you need both; I agree, but I'm skeptical that these things can be explicitly taught or usefully assessed)--the article does not support the assertion it is cited to support.  

I have now read the article three times looking for evidence that "students need sustained exposure to expository text to develop important reading strategies," and I have so far failed to find any evidence at all.  Thinking maybe I'd missed it, I searched for "expository," for "exposure" and for "sustained".  None of those words appears in the text.  Neither does "non-fiction."  Looking through again, the closest I could come to anything supporting the claim that you need to read a lot of expository text in order to develop reading strategies is the following very general assertion about practicing strategies, which is completely untethered to any actual data:
  
"The scope and complexity of these strategies are large, and there is ample variety of text difficulty and genre variety to practice so that the skills become automatic. The general rule is, teach children many strategies, teach them early, reteach them often, and connect assessment with reteaching." 

First of all, we should note that this "general rule" is, like most general rules in writing about education, totally unproven and highly dubious. Many people, like me, like Ben Franklin, like Frederick Douglass, received virtually no formal instruction, and absolutely no assessment, in reading strategies, and yet learned to be highly skilled readers and writers.  Second, this brief, unfounded passage bears little relation to the Common Core's assertion that you need to read a lot of expository text in order to get better at it. If this-- "there is ample ... genre variety to practice so that the skills become automatic"--is supposed to mean this--"students need sustained exposure to expository text to develop important reading strategies"-- then either I am a bad reader, David Coleman is a bad reader, or he simply has no idea what a "clear and documented research base" would mean in a field that was, unlike education, actually scientific.

Again, the first citation offered by Coleman and Pimentel to support one of their central claims provides absolutely no support; far from reporting research or empirical data, the article never even mentions the matter at hand.  This is still amazing to me, despite my having found this to be the case with so many other supposedly "research-based" recommendations to teachers.

II. Books and (maybe) a teacher are all students really need

The other thing to notice about the Common Core’s recommendation to publishers is although the authors say that most of the materials "will by necessity be new", this is probably untrue. In fact, developing new materials may be unnecessary, since books alone would seem to fit most of their requirements.  Books support student "readiness for college."  Books have "a clear and documented research base."  Books have a long history of "actual use" with a "wide range of students."

The best ELA program for infants is simply a lot of natural adult talking and reading aloud, and the best college ELA curriculum is simply good books and an engaging professor, but somehow schools have fallen into a muddy puddle of "instruction" and "curriculum materials." Also, one of the major stated purposes of the whole Common Core/PARCC effort is to make sure young people are prepared for college.  I wonder why, then, the best private high schools and the best private colleges aren't using publisher-created curriculum.  Is it possible that Andover and Harvard are delivering a sub-par product.  Perhaps--but far more likely is that either their curriculum is better or that the curriculum really doesn't matter all that much. 

The Common Core anticipates that the questions, tasks and instructions used with readings will be created by publishing companies.  This begs the question of what role, if any, we teachers are supposed to play.  I suppose eventually we will be replaced by computer programs.  That might be okay...

Conclusion

Except that it's not okay. Children need human connection, and the best thing that we do every day is provide that connection.  If scholars and bureaucrats with zero teaching experience can tell us what we can do that will help us connect better, great!  But all too often--that is, almost all the time--their recommendations are shockingly unfounded on any empirical data.

On the one hand, many of the CC's specific recommendations—like the suggestion that students focus on close reading, or the observation that “it can be surprising which questions, tasks, and instructions provoke the most productive engagement with text”—seem reasonable, but the hypocrisy and hubris of the whole enterprise give off a very questionable smell.