Within a few years of their 2010 rollout, the Common Core State Standards for math and English became a popular scapegoat for a host of perceived ills in K–12 education. (And yet, despite all the vitriol, the Common Core lives on in most states, even if it goes by different names.) Just earlier this month, in a New York Times op-ed, Pamela Paul took a new line of attack, charging the Common Core with draining the joy from high school English by focusing on skills and cutting traditional reading assignments. The decline in English majors, Paul concluded, must be partly attributable to the Common Core.
As a millennial who attended high school in the early aughts and taught high school English during the Common Core’s early years, I found that some of Paul’s points resonated with my experiences:
- English classes have indeed tended toward assigning shorter texts and excerpts, and this is a real problem. Poems and short stories belong in the curriculum, too, but developing stamina by reading longer texts remains critical.
- Various political pressures are increasingly limiting what can be taught in English classrooms.
- Schools are, by and large, underestimating students’ ability to grapple with challenging material.
But these and others of Paul’s concerns aren’t the fault of the Common Core.
First, she blames the Common Core for kids’ lack of interest in actually reading the texts assigned for English class. As a colleague of mine pointed out, the invention of Cliffs Notes in 1958 would indicate that this is no new phenomenon. A retired teacher with whom I spoke described scenes from fifty years ago that were identical to those in my own high school, decades and states away: kids huddled together before class, the ones who had done the reading whispering summaries of the previous night’s chapters to the kids who hadn’t. I can’t imagine that these were the only two schools where this happened prior to 2010.
Paul also denounces the Common Core’s emphasis on skills. Of course, there are teachers who can make literary analysis dry. (By the way, didn’t kids have to diagram sentences back in the day? Was that what made literature “soar” for them?) But by putting “literary devices” in scare quotes, Paul seems to imply that English class shouldn’t be teaching such essential concepts at all. The Common Core standards don’t mandate mindless annotation with colored pencils, as in her caricature; they state that students should “demonstrate understanding of figurative language, word relationships, and nuances in word meanings.” Doesn’t that seem like exactly what English is for—and has been for generations? And teaching key skills using great books (notice how the two are complementary!) makes English seem more relevant to many students.
Another concern cited is the Common Core’s supposed de-emphasis on literature. There’s Paul’s misleading line: “By high school, 70 percent of assigned texts are meant to be nonfiction.” That guidance is specifically for twelfth grade, and more to the point, that 70 percent is across all subjects. In other words, the intent of the standards’ creators is to build students’ literacy in history, science, and other fields—not to strip English class of literature.
Paul also implies that the Common Core encouraged the “dumbing down” of content. But it’s hard to fault those standards for whatever dumbing down is occurring when they call for grade-level texts and explicitly include Shakespeare. A decade ago, in fact, Common Core opponents argued that its reading expectations were too challenging. The push for “just-right” or “leveled” books, on the other hand, has been around since at least 1946.
Perhaps most offensive—and least related to the Common Core—is her insinuation that the authors capable of “open[ing] mind[s] and test[ing] abilities of comprehension and interpretation” are, by necessity, almost exclusively white men. This ought to go without saying, but since it apparently doesn’t: Women and people of color have written plenty of challenging and important books. If James Joyce can teach American high schoolers about Irish culture and modernism, as Paul recalls fondly from her own experience, then Chinua Achebe can teach them about Nigerian history and anticolonialism. If students can learn from William Faulkner’s themes of fate and adversity—another of Paul’s suggestions—then they can learn from Zora Neale Hurston’s novels, also set in the American South and with similar themes no less universal.
Diversifying English curricula does not require tossing aside every classic by a white male author. Rather, it means adding more pages to students’ reading loads (a point, again, on which Paul and I agree) and exposing them to a greater variety of authors. Doing so will engage more students and broaden their intellectual horizons—goals toward which Paul and I would both love to see progress.
To go after the Common Core is to misdiagnose what’s at issue in English classrooms. To ensure that students read challenging books and develop as readers and writers, however, is to ensure they will be informed, critical thinkers prepared for college, career, and citizenship—regardless of what major they choose.
