The U.S. Department of Education's Race to the Top grant competition, announced in 2009, set off a flurry of legislative action from cash-starved state governments ready to do whatever it took to preserve school funding. In an ever-expanding economic recession, state after state adopted the government-favored common core state standards, hoping to gain a competitive edge for the millions of dollars in federal funds that were at stake. In a development that had been previously unthinkable, national standards alignment was suddenly born, neatly side-stepping both the U.S. Constitution and federal law.
For the hopeful, the new common core state standards promise a vision of unity—"out of many, one." But for other observers, both Race to the Top and the new standards represent a troubling departure from an expansive vision of liberal arts education stretching from its origins in antiquity to the founding of 19th century public schools and continuing through the present. In this view, education should immerse students in the continuum of ideas of a democratic society. Students should be broadly educated in the traditions, documents, literature, history, and understandings imparted by their forebears.
If you were educated in the United States in the last 160 years, this is likely how you were schooled. The K–12 foundations in math, science, English, and social studies, honoring the accumulated knowledge of our history, have stood as a Mt. Rushmore–like monument. They have served not only to pass common knowledge from one generation to the next, but also to preserve (to the displeasure of many) a largely tamper-proof formula for teaching our young.
In recent times, we must recognize that this formula has not brought our nation's students to the level of achievement they need if we are to succeed as a 21st century society in the throes of economic reinvention. For those of us in English language arts and reading, it has seemed an especially steep uphill battle. No matter how hard we prepare, push, script, test, and push some more, we have barely kept even.
These impressions were confirmed by the results of the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Assessments administered every two years since 1992 confirm that student performance in 4th and 8th grade reading has remained virtually flat for the last 20 years. At present, just 8 percent of 4th graders can read at an advanced level of proficiency. Among 8th graders, that figure drops to 3 percent, suggesting that students become less engaged as they advance through the grades (National Center for Education Statistics, 2011).
But the question is, Will the newly minted common core state standards set us on the right path? Or will they become the kind of failed school reinvention legacy that historian Diane Ravitch (1985) once characterized as a "troubled crusade"?
Forty-four states, the District of Columbia, and five U.S. territories have now adopted the common core standards, which will replace each adopting state's previous standards and determine the academic content for students at each grade level. By 2015, as curriculum frameworks, materials, assessments, and policy take root, a clearer picture will begin to emerge of what benefits, if any, this most recent attempt to mend U.S. education has conferred. Until then, time remains to make the forthcoming standards-based curriculum a study in success rather than a misguided effort that lacks insight into what the future of teaching and learning ought to be.
A Troubling Shift
The common core was developed with the idea that schools must prepare students to compete in a global economy. Because a grounding in the traditional curriculum will not necessarily enable students to later make the jump into industry in a world of specialized information and subject-specific vocabulary, skills are now considered most important.
In the area of English language arts, the common core places applications—identifying main ideas, writing clearly, understanding text and sentence structure, knowing vocabulary and mechanics, and so on—squarely in the center ring to drive analytic and written communication skills taught across the curriculum in science, social studies, and technical subjects.
The emphasis of English language arts at all grade levels, but particularly in secondary school, will likely continue to move away from the traditional approach of concentrated study in literature and essay writing and toward increasing emphasis on developing a critical understanding of informational texts. Students will be expected to write analytically and convincingly about their expository readings across the curriculum in a way that demonstrates their mastery of inductive and deductive reasoning. The argumentative essay could begin to eclipse literary analysis and even the standard book report. Identifying primary ideas, contextualizing what is read, and producing the appropriate written response will become increasingly central.
A close reading of the common core language arts standards reveals increased emphasis in each advancing grade on reading for the purpose of being able to "do" and writing for the purpose of explaining to others. New York State, an early winner of Race to the Top money, has posted the expectations that its K–12 language arts teachers should prepare for as they shift to the common core (see fig. 1, p. 84).
Figure 1. Six Common Core Instructional Shifts in English Language Arts/Literacy
Figure 1. Six Common Core Instructional Shifts in English Language Arts/Literacy
| Shift 1 | PK–5, Balancing Informational and Literary Texts | Students read a true balance of informational and literary texts. Elementary school classrooms are, therefore, places where students access the world—science, social studies, the arts and literature—through text. At least 50 percent of what students read is informational. |
| Shift 2 | 6–12, Knowledge in the Disciplines | Content-area teachers outside the English language arts classroom emphasize literacy experiences in their planning and instruction. Students learn through domain-specific texts in science and social studies classrooms–rather than referring to the text, they are expected to learn from what they read. |
| Shift 3 | Staircase of Complexity | To prepare students for the complexity of college- and career-ready texts, each grade level requires a "step" of growth on the "staircase." Students read the central, grade-appropriate text around which instruction is centered. Teachers are patient, create more time and space in the curriculum for this close and careful reading, and provide appropriate and necessary scaffolding and supports for students reading below grade level. |
| Shift 4 | Text-Based Answers | Students have rich and rigorous conversations that depend on a common text. Teachers insist that classroom experiences stay deeply connected to the text on the page and that students develop habits for making evidentiary arguments both in conversation and in writing to assess comprehension of a text. |
| Shift 5 | Writing from Sources | Writing needs to emphasize use of evidence to inform or make an argument rather than the personal narrative and other forms of decontextualized prompts. Although the narrative still has an important role, students develop skills through written arguments that respond to the ideas, events, facts, and arguments presented in the texts they read. |
| Shift 6 | Academic Vocabulary | Students build the vocabulary they need to access grade-level complex texts. By focusing strategically on comprehension of pivotal and commonly found words (such as discourse, generation, theory, and principled) and less on esoteric literary terms (such as onomatopoeia or homonym), teachers constantly build students' ability to access more complex texts across the content areas. |
Source: Adapted from Common Core Instructional Shifts, by New York State Education Department, 2011. Retrieved from EngageNY at http://engageny.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/common-core-shifts.pdf. Used with permission.
On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B
As curriculum writers follow the guideposts that the common core has established, the likely result will be classrooms built on the idea of English as communication—of text with a sender, a message, and a receiver. Likely to recede is the traditional focus reflecting the classical ideal that through literature we come to understand the patterns and truths within ourselves and about our world. As Albert Einstein once noted, the value of a liberal arts education is not to memorize facts but to train the mind to think in ways that cannot be acquired from textbooks alone (Frank, 2002). Nor from immersion in informational or procedural texts, it could be added.
Defenders of the career-oriented common core will argue that there will still be abundant curriculum devoted to literature and the arts. On paper, this will be true; the common core endorses the study of literature. But as any practitioner can tell you, there are rarely enough hours in the day to cover what needs to be taught. Choices must be made.
In the end, the assessments and accountability sewn into the covenant of Race to the Top—and likely into other initiatives that will follow—will drive what is taught unless we take care to protect the teaching of more traditional and creative expressions of English. As Race to the Top is currently written (Race to the Top Fund, 2009), there is little doubt that the place of poetry, literature, drama, and the arts can only be vastly reduced as teachers and principals prepare for greater professional scrutiny, more test-based evaluations of their judgment and efficacy, and continued talk of tying job security and merit pay to summative test performance.
Almost 40 years ago, management professor Steven Kerr (1975) published a classic article on the subject of organizational behavior titled On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B. In it, Kerr describes the disconnect that occurs when rewards are tied to official performance outcomes rather than to the unspecified—and greatly desired—behaviors we hope will blossom along the way to the goal post.
Rewarding A while hoping for B is exactly what schools have been doing under the continuing drill-and-test climate of No Child Left Behind, as we reward annual yearly progress achieved by whatever draconian means it takes, while hoping that students and their teachers are engaged in a mutual love of learning. Once this approach is applied to an unrestrained common core curriculum, it is only a slight exaggeration to say that we could see technically themed lessons flood the curriculum—while hoping that students will somehow develop an appreciation of the beauty and tragedy of our humanity and their own place in this world.
Changing Direction
In the desire of politicians to ensure a technologically competitive 21st century workforce, will English be reinvented as the utilitarian vehicle to push along other subject areas on the road to a technically centered school system? Those who express concern about this danger are not Luddites; technology long ago entered the English classroom door. Simulations, script writing, video productions, mashups, website planning and building, desktop publishing of school newspapers and poetry journals, podcasts, online research projects, electronic bibliographing, classroom reports delivered through online animations—these are just a few ways the traditional English curriculum has successfully evolved to change with the times. English does not need to be remade; it is under constant pedagogical refinement at the hands of an able and often technologically savvy teaching force.
Amid the coming decades of continuing change, however, our students will need to be equipped with not only technical know-how but also creativity, insight, adaptability, and the capacity for expansive thinking to make and remake their professional identities. Curriculum writers must be attentive to what most people outside the neighborhood school have long forgotten—that students must be dynamically engaged, see relevance in the work they do at their level of understanding, and discover the connectivity of new knowledge to what they already know.
The value of literature study, challenging us as it does to explore the pushing of boundaries, may lie less in the answers it provides than in questions it raises. "The bird doesn't sing because it has an answer," Maya Angelou has written. "It sings because it has a song." To diminish the place of literature and other creative arts in the schools is to risk silencing the song that emanates from student engagement and inquiry.
No one could wish for the common core state standards initiative to fail. If it does, the United States' spiritual and material poverty as a nation will grow. Yet if educators are to preserve English instruction that does not merely serve the gods of industry, we must not be silent in the crucial curriculum-development and text-adoption period now upon us as the common core moves forward.
We stand at a juncture where English education as we know it could easily pass into oblivion as quietly as the corner bookstore. English teachers and their supporters must act quickly to exert influence on the direction of their future, or find themselves following rather than leading the way forward.
