CTU Common Core Position Paper
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Common Core Mission Statement:
The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.[1]
John Dewey:
With the advent of democracy and modern industrial conditions, it is impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now. Hence it is impossible to prepare the child for any precise set of conditions. To prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities; that his eye and ear and hand may be tools ready to command, that his judgment may be capable of grasping the conditions under which it has to work, and the executive forces be trained to act economically and efficiently.[2]
Martin Luther King:
We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character--that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate.
If we are not careful, our colleges will produce a group of close-minded, unscientific, illogical propagandists, consumed with immoral acts. Be careful, "brethren!" Be careful, teachers! [3]
INTRODUCTION
The Chicago Teachers Union is committed to helping members do their best work and, since the Common Core Standards (CCS) are required to be taught in Chicago public schools, the CTU supports teachers in this work through professional development and curriculum development. However, as educators, we are also obligated to question the true purpose of CCS, and expose flaws in the standards themselves, their developmental appropriateness, the testing requirements, uses of test results, equity of opportunity, their roll-out time frame, and their implementation. As the preceding quotations indicate, the CCS reflect a far narrower vision of education than that of Dewey or King.
This paper’s purpose is to stimulate thought and discussion about the context of CCS roll out across the country, specifically in Illinois and Chicago. The standards themselves may or may not turn out to be useful frameworks for teachers and appropriate for students; however, this paper is not mainly an appraisal of the standards themselves, but a critique of the idea that common standards across all states and district contexts are the solution for education’s woes. On the contrary, research and careful study reveal that the CCS are likely to increase the opportunity gap experienced by students of color and low-income students; exacerbate the over-use of standardized tests; and increase the influence and market share of vendors, private consultants, and other education profiteers in the public schools.
Study after study (e.g., Rothstein, 2012[4], Ladd, 2012[5]) has documented that the root cause of educational failings is poverty and racism. Common Core Standards, like other “reforms” promoted by the corporate elite, ignore these vital issues entirely. U.S. education could benefit from a dose of Finland’s approach. Students there regularly achieve high scores on the international PISA test, but not because they emphasize standards or standardized testing. Instead, the idea that every child should have the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background or income, has been Finland’s primary education policy driver for the last thirty years. Education there is seen first and foremost as an instrument to even out social inequality.[6]
The rhetoric of the education reform movement champions CCS as a tool to create civil rights opportunities for Black and Latino students, but the reality is that new CCS-aligned assessments are used to unfairly label students, punish teachers, and close schools. For example, when New York City students took the CCS –aligned state test in 2013, general pass rates were low--below 30 percent. However, Black and Latino students passed at lower rates than White and Asian students. In math, for example, 15 percent of Black students and 19 percent of Latino students passed, compared to 50 percent of White students and 61 percent of Asian students. On the English Language Arts exam, only 3 percent of non-native speakers and 6 percent of students with disabilities were deemed proficient.[7] Rhetoric about “failing schools,” justified largely by these test scores, enabled the New York state Department of Education to close or phase out 50 schools and cut education spending by 14%, leading to larger classes and fewer textbooks. While money, time, and other resources pour into (and go out of) school districts all over the country in support of anything labeled Common Core, little if anything is being done on a national scale to guarantee educational equity.
CLOSE READING
A look at the standards themselves reveals troubling features as well. The strategy of “close reading” is a central focus of the English Language Arts Standards. As explained by Timothy Shanahan (2013) inAmerican Educator,[8] “These standards will likely lead to the greatest changes in reading instruction seen for generations.” (p. 5) Students are expected to read the text three times. The first time, students read to understand key ideas and details; the second, to understand the craft and structure of the text; the third, to “critically evaluate the text and compare its ideas and approach with those of other texts.” (p. 10)
Close Reading is a useful strategy, one commonly used by book reviewers and others, but the emphasis given to this technique in the CCS is disproportionate to its usefulness and pushes out other important purposes for reading. For example, reading for pleasure leads students to develop imagination, worldliness, and vocabulary skills, as well as an appreciation for literature. Isn’t it important to help children develop a love of reading and literature, and not just read for information or to critique, evaluate, and compare? The best way for children to develop their reading abilities is to read.
Proponents of CCS-style close reading argue that reading should be decontextualized. For example, David Coleman, a chief author of the standards, and now President of The College Board, created a video on the close reading of Martin Luther King’s famous Letter from Birmingham Jail.[9] Coleman (2012) emphasizes the need for students to pay attention only to “what lies within the four corners of the text”. King’s letter was written in response to white clergy, who disapproved of the campaign he led against segregation by downtown businesses and for which he was jailed. It is particularly disturbing that Coleman would emphasize non-contextual reading of a text so rich in historical background and one still relevant to the lives of many CPS (and other) students. It is an example of how the Common Core idea of close reading, in dismissing the relevancy of students’ thoughts and experiences, undermines students’ potential to connect with the material and learn more from it.
As Rethinking Schools author Daniel E. Ferguson (2013) points out,[10]
There is a grand irony in the last few minutes of the video when Coleman praises King for not just responding to what was in the clergymen's letter, “but pointing out how critical is what's not in the letter.” Why then, is it problematic to let students do the same, to let their world inform their reading? …What if King had done only a close reading of the letter from the Southern clergymen he was addressing? What if he did not allow his own reading of the world to inform his understanding of the white clergymen's words? What leadership and wisdom would have been lost?
Close reading replaces the “text to self” strategy, which has been taught for years and values learning from relatives or members of students’ immediate communities. Close reading contrasts with critical reading, which incorporates close reading but emphasizes what is not in the text as well as what is in it. Critical reading allows students the opportunity to relate what they are reading to both personal experiences and other texts (the “text to text” strategy). Context allows the reader to make personal connections and build on previous reading or knowledge. Common Core gives undo emphasis to learning from isolated pockets of text.
Insisting that teachers focus on “text dependent” questions narrows the scope of classroom discussion. The primary (perhaps the only) place that students encounter text they must read out of context is on standardized tests. Coleman (2012) implied this in his recommendations to curriculum publishers, stating that since “80 to 90 percent of the reading standards require text-dependent analysis, aligned curriculum materials should have a similar percentage of text-dependent questions” (p. 6).[11]The narrow view of close reading emphasized by Coleman and other Common Core authors may make students better test takers, but it is unlikely to make them better readers or more learned individuals.
DEVELOPMENTAL APPROPRIATENESS
The early childhood CCS were designed by working backward from College and Career Readiness at the senior high school level, without taking into account developmental appropriateness. More than 500 early childhood professionals, including prominent members of the field, made this clear in the Joint Statement of Early Childhood Health and Education Professionals on the Common Core Standards Initiative(2010). The statement points to the need for support, encouragement, active hands-on learning, and play at the early childhood level. They describe the long hours of didactic instruction, scripted teaching, narrowing of the curriculum, and overuse of standardized tests with young children that have already resulted from current state standards, and call for the withdrawal of CCS for children in grades K-3.[12]
The CCS require Kindergarten children to master more than 90 skills. Yet, research reveals[13] that early skill development, such as “Recognize and name all upper- and lowercase letters of the alphabet” does not correlate to later reading proficiency. Instead, research supports a nurturing environment, project based interdisciplinary learning, and guided play to develop executive functioning (staying on task, problem solving, working collaboratively, planning, conflict resolution, organizing and delaying gratification). This nurturing environment needs to be devoid of the stress related to discreet skill mastery. The social and emotional skills appropriately developed in the early years of school lay the basis for students’ learning behaviors in ELA, Mathematics, and other subjects.
The basis for love of literature should, in formal schooling, begin in the pre-primary through early elementary grades. It is therefore crucial that the study of literary text (fiction) be valued at least as much as the study of non-fiction texts in these grades. Common Core Standards, however, under-emphasize reading for pleasure. For example, CCS emphasize the reading of folk and fairy tales for skill mastery purposes such as identifying story element, patterning, rhyming, main idea, and character study. While mastery skills are important, at the early childhood level reading should primarily be for pleasure (Learning to Read) rather than a chore or process for gathering information (Reading to Learn).
TESTING and CCS
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) failed to significantly increase academic performance or positively affect the education of underserved Black and Latino students[14], and had a negative impact on curricula and instructional practices. This bodes ill for CCS. The experience of NCLB suggests that the students most likely to be behind—those who are poor, African-American, Latino, and/or go to segregated Chicago Teachers Union | CTU Common Core Position Paper: