The Education Gadfly Weekly

Though the occasional political firecracker still flares across the night sky, as of mid-2014 it seems likely that most of the forty-six jurisdictions that originally embraced the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) will stick with them.

That’s a seismic development for American public education, but whether it produces a 1.0 or an 8.0 on the Richter scale remains to be seen. It depends on (1) the thoroughness of implementation, (2) the selection (and scoring) of assessments, and (3) perhaps most of all, the ways in which results revealed by those assessments affect the lives of real people and their schools.

Today, all three are up for grabs.

The most important thing to know about the Common Core standards is that learning what they say you should learn is supposed to make you ready for both college and career, i.e., for a seamless move from twelfth grade into the freshman year at a standard-issue college, where you will be welcomed into credit-bearing courses that you will be ready to master.

That’s the concept. It’s a really important one and the main justification for the heavy lifting and disruption that these standards will occasion.

Today, far less than half of U.S. twelfth graders are “college ready.” (Never mind those who have already dropped out of high school.) The National Assessment Governing Board estimates that not quite 40 percent are college ready. The ACT folks estimate 26 percent are college ready across the four subjects that comprise their suite of questions.

Literally millions of others go on to college anyway, generally into remedial—the polite term is “developmental”—classes and, often, to fall by the wayside and never earn a degree.

The Common Core is supposed to solve that problem by producing generations of high school graduates who are truly college ready. How can that happen unless the K–12 system radically alters what high school diplomas signify?

Today, those prized documents are won every year by enormous numbers of young people who aren’t anywhere near college ready but have met their states’ and districts’ course requirements with passing grades. In about half the states, graduates have also made it through statewide graduation tests that are typically pegged to an eighth-, ninth-, or at most tenth-grade standard of actual performance. Not even Massachusetts, our highest-achieving state on myriad measures, was so bold as to make the passing score on its celebrated MCAS test equate to true college readiness. That would have meant denying diplomas to far too many teens, lots of them from poor and minority families.

As the Common Core and its new assessments kick in, how will states handle high school graduation? True college (and career) readiness would mean that hundreds of thousands of today’s—and tomorrow’s—twelfth graders won’t receive diplomas. Politically, that’s simply untenable. Yet lower those expectations and there’s no reason for colleges to accept these high school credentials—and the main point of the painful CCSS shift will be rendered moot. That outcome one might term educationally untenable.

What to do? In my view, states have no alternative, for the foreseeable future, to issuing (at least) two kinds of diplomas. The one with the gold star will signal college readiness, Common Core–style. The other one will signal much the same as today’s conventional diploma, mainly that one has passed a set of mandatory courses to the satisfaction of those teaching them.

This is akin to the practice for many decades (until 2012) in New York State, where a Regents Diploma denoted a markedly higher level of academic attainment than a local diploma, and it’s somewhat similar to the practice in today’s England, where you can complete your schooling with a General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), but if you’re bent on university, you stick around to earn a more demanding A-level certificate.

New York scrapped the local diploma for a reason: They didn’t want a double standard or a two-level society. They didn’t want schools to split kids into separate tracks. They wanted everyone to get a proper—and equal—education.

That’s surely the right impulse. But is it a realistic education policy if the single standard that everyone must meet is really, really demanding?

I don’t think so, at least not for quite a while. It’s possible that, over time, as young Americans work their way from CCSS-aligned kindergarten classes up through the grades and end up with thirteen years of CCSS-level education, provided that their year-to-year promotions are faithful to the expectations of the standards, a state may be able to do away with the lower-level diploma and give everyone the kind with a gold star.

It’s politically correct to say, “I hope it works out that way.” But I’m unpersuaded that college readiness is the proper goal of everybody’s high-school education, and it remains to be proven that the Common Core’s academic standards are truly needed for success in myriad careers. That doesn’t mean we should water down the standards. It doesn’t mean we must deny diplomas to countless thousands. It does mean that we should, more like England, think of different ways of completing—and being credentialed for completing—one’s primary and secondary education.

I expect howls of protest from those who cannot accept anything more than a “single standard for all.” But much as I admire the Common Core standards and hope that they gain enormous traction across the land, I have never seen, in any line of endeavor, a standard that was both truly high and universally attained.

This first appeared at Education Next and is part of a forum on rethinking the high school diploma. For additional takes, please see “Hold Students Accountable and Support Them," by Richard D. Kahlenberg, or “Diplomas Must Recognize College and Career Readiness,” by Sandy Kress.

photo credit: soundman1024 via photopin cc

Call it the Iron Law of Pedagogy: Every good teaching idea becomes a bad idea the moment it hardens into orthodoxy.

The latest example might be “close reading,” which has become yet another hot-button issue among Common Core critics. But complaints about it bother me less than its potential overuse, or the creeping notion that close reading is what all reading instruction should look like under Common Core. That would be bad for the standards, and even worse for reading achievement in the U.S.

Close reading is “an intensive analysis of a piece of text, in order to come to terms with what it says, how it says it, and what it means,” writes literacy expert Tim Shanahan of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Common Core expects students to “read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.”

Sounds simple, benign, even obvious. Would anyone not want students to be able to do this? Close reading for evidence and to support inferences is a far more rigorous and academically useful standard to meet than, for example, expecting student to produce a “personal response” to literature—the kind of content-free literacy practice Common Core is intended to supplant. The mischief comes in translating “reading closely” into sound classroom practice. Some of the guidance teachers have been getting has been, frankly, terrible.

In a recent piece on RealClearEducation, University of Virginia cognitive scientist Dan Willingham rightly takes exception to a common interpretation of close reading. “We will read the text as though we know nothing about the subject at hand; the author’s words will be not only necessary for our interpretation, we’ll consider them sufficient.” Says Willingham, “That seems crazy to me.”

It doesn’t just seem crazy. It is crazy. It’s impossible not to bring your prior knowledge to reading. It’s like being told, “Don’t think of a pink elephant!” It’s suddenly hard to think of anything else.

Writing is not interpretive dance. When authors commit words to paper, they do so expressly to create associations in the reader’s mind. As Willingham notes, “Writers count on their audience to bring knowledge to bear on the text.” Students may lack background knowledge to fully appreciate a work of literature or an historical document. But it does no good whatsoever to keep them in a state of ignorance on purpose, let alone make a virtue of it. If teachers are being told that close reading means telling students to disregard all their prior knowledge, they’re being given bad advice.

It’s also not what the standards intend. I have, in other forums, made much of the singular virtue of Common Core and its call for a content-rich curriculum “intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades.” This is the critical backdrop against which all reading takes place in Common Core. Background knowledge is intended to be built systematically over time and across subjects—neither disregarded or backfilled in the minutes before students begin reading a complex text.

Seen through this lens, close reading is not a workaround for a student’s lack of background knowledge and vocabulary; it’s a way of getting more by engaging kids in challenging works that stretch their abilities. That requires supporting students via multiple readings, providing vocabulary, working in pairs or groups, and posing questions designed to lead students to understand the text, among other techniques. None of these is tantamount to handing kids Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and saying, “Here you go, kid, figure it out.”

“When close reading is done well, you have weak readers who never would never have had the chance to deal with rich, complex text in the ballgame, grasping it, learning from it, and feeling good about it,” notes reading specialist David Liben of Student Achievement Partners. You’re not just giving them a steady diet of dumbed-down, content-free books at their “just right” reading level. “A part of every day, it’s good for kids to bear down on a text,” says Liben. But, critically, this is not to suggest that all—or even most—reading should be close reading. Kids also need a high volume of text they can read independently to build knowledge, vocabulary, stamina, and more. It’s indispensable.

Close reading also means something different—or should—in different classes. “The conception of close reading that is embodied in the Common Core standards is the one drawn from literature,” notes Shanahan. “However, it is not a particularly doctrinaire version of the concept, so it really can be applied across the curriculum.” Historians read very differently than literary critics, he notes. It’s a critical point.

I teach a civics and citizenship class to high school seniors at Democracy Prep in Harlem, New York. My students are reading Aristotle, Locke, Montesquieu, and others before we study foundational American documents in the second semester. I could have asked my students to dive cold into the Declaration of Independence, but why would I want to? Bringing your background knowledge about Enlightenment thought to a close reading of the Declaration is not a problem, it’s the point.

There’s little to be gained in “practicing” close reading on any ol’ text as long as it’s sufficiently difficult. The works we put in front of kids should be worth the time it takes to read them repeatedly and thoughtfully. If the work isn’t stimulating, it’s unlikely to stick.

If I worry about close reading being done badly, I’m even more concerned about its overuse. If close reading becomes de facto reading instruction—if it becomes just another iteration of the knowledge-free, mind-numbing skills-and-strategies approach of the past several decades—it will be fatal not just to Common Core, but to reading itself. If students lack the vocabulary and background knowledge to make sense of complex text—if schools aren’t honoring their responsibility to build knowledge coherently, across subjects and over time—“there’s no amount of experience with close reading that will enable them to read complex text independently,” Liben concludes.

Now please read that last sentence again. Closely.

photo credit: Librarian In Black via photopin cc cc

• Donald Kagan, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, argues that democracy requires patriotism. “In the long and deadly battle against those who hate Western ideals, and hate America in particular, we must be powerfully armed, morally as well as materially,” he writes. Love of, support for, and defense of one’s country necessitates unity—a connection to one’s fellow citizens. But connectedness in America seems fleeting. Call it what you want—the marriage crisis, bowling alone, free-agent nation—we are living in the age of autonomy, and our bonds to other people and to our nation just aren't what they used to be. Schools can counteract this by instilling civic devotion, and they ought to because down the path of total autonomy lies chaos and anarchy.
• Puzzlingly, the AFT Local 958 in Providence, R.I. just endorsed a mayoral candidate who has twice been forced to resign from the very office for which he’s running due to felony convictions. In 1984, “he pleaded no contest to charges of assault with a dangerous weapon and assault on and battery of” a local contractor named Ray DeLeo. Mayor Cianci “burned Mr. DeLeo with a cigarette, threw an ashtray at him and assaulted him with a fireplace log during a three-hour altercation at Mr. Cianci's rented carriage house,” the New York Times reported. After a five-year suspended sentence, he was reelected, only for history to repeat itself in 2001, when “Cianci and eight others were indicted on federal racketeering charges, for pocketing $1.5 million in bribes on city contracts. He was convicted of racketeering conspiracy and sentenced to five years in prison” reported the Daily News. Making this endorsement even odder is the union’s rejection of Jorge Elorza, the leading Democratic candidate, who happens to be a respected former judge with good poll numbers. Odd, that is, until we learn that Elorza supports charter schools. Thanks for the character lesson, AFT. 
• Last week, former President Bill Clinton said that we ought to close charter schools that fail to outperform the public model—which he called the “original bargain.” We emphatically agree. And so do others. Aside from some strange comments about how three tests are enough over a kid’s K–12 career and how Bill de Blasio is doing a good job regulating charters, the comments are quite welcome. So we applaud the former head of state, even if he’s merely echoing what charter advocates have been saying for twenty-odd years. 

Common Core reading wars, union endorsements of convicted felons, schools that encourage patriotism, and the health of the charter movement.

Amber's Research Minute

"Examining the Relationship Between Teachers' Instructional Practices and Students' Mathematics Achievement," by Janine M. Firmender, M. Katherine Gavin, and D. Betsy McCoach, Journal of Advanced Academics vol. 25, no. 3 (August 2014).

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and the Fordham Institute discuss the health of the public charter school movement, and National Alliance presents their twenty-six state-by-state rankings that examine factors such as charter school quality, growth, and innovation.

PANELISTS
	Kenneth Campbell President, Black Alliance for Educational Options  @KenCampbell65
	Scott Pearson Executive Director, D.C. Public Charter School Board  @SDPearson
	Todd Ziebarth Senior Vice President of State Advocacy and Support, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools  @charteralliance

MODERATOR
	Michael Petrilli President, Thomas B. Fordham Institute  @MichaelPetrilli

A new report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools assesses the health of the public charter school movement by examining its progression and performance in twenty-five states and Washington, D.C. To qualify, states had to participate in the 2013 CREDO study and have at least 1 percent of public school students served by charters. They ranked the strength of each locale using fifteen indicators in three categories: growth, or the overall number of schools available and students served; innovation, defined as the “use of various innovative practices,” such as an extended school year; and quality, measured in additional days of learning for both reading and math. Washington, D.C. and Louisiana came in first and second, respectively, earning high marks for offering multiple charter school options for families, serving high numbers of economically disadvantaged youth, and showing strong student achievement gains. Nevertheless, the report suggests that both ought to make efforts to secure equitable operational funding. At the other end of the spectrum, Oregon and Nevada occupied the bottom two spots because they serve a low percentage of the state’s population of public school children, and their charters aren’t producing gains in reading and math. For these low performers, the report suggests changes in law that would allow for more in-school autonomy and more accountability for authorizers. The Alliance acknowledges that improvement can be made in identifying and collecting comprehensive data on public charter schools. Indeed. But, in the meantime, this debut analysis offers clarity to a movement that is too often plagued by misunderstanding.

SOURCE: “The Health of the Public Charter School Movement: A State-By-State Analysis,” National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (October 2014).

This study does exactly what its title promises. Specifically, analysts study two instructional practices in mathematics: (1) engaging students in discourse with the teacher and their peers to make sense of problems and explain answers and (2) using appropriate mathematical vocabulary. Importantly, these practices also reflect the Mathematical Practices of the Common Core math standards, specifically those that require students to construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others and those that require students to attend to precision, including the use of appropriate mathematical vocabulary. The study occurs as part of a larger evaluation of Project M², an advanced math curriculum (i.e., it includes content that typically appears at higher grade levels or content studied in depth with challenging task and problems) covering geometry and measurement in grades K–2. The final sample includes thirty-four K–2 teachers and their 560 students who participated in a field test from 2008–11. Teachers were randomly assigned to the intervention and control groups. The former attended roughly ten days of professional development, after which they were observed weekly and rated on fidelity of implementation to the content and the two instructional strategies of interest. Students were administered the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) as a pretest and control measure. Bottom line: Teachers’ implementation scores for verbal communication and encouraging use of math language—the two strategies—significantly predicted math achievement as gauged by the students’ percentage gain scores on an outcome measure known as the Open Response assessment. For example, if a kindergarten student with an average ITBS standard score on the pretest had a teacher who was rated as “always” implementing the math vocabulary practices, that student would be predicted to gain an additional 72 percentage points pre- to post-test on the Open Response Assessment. On the face of it, this appears to be useful data bolstering the evidentiary claims of the CCSS math standards. But the observation and outcome measures are questionable because both were developed by the analysts specifically for the Project M² evaluation; no good standardized measures existed at the early grades to assess achievement in geometry and measurement, so they had to create their own. In other words, this step was necessary—but unfortunately, customizing measures for a particular intervention casts doubt on the credibility of the findings.

SOURCE: Janine M. Firmender, M. Katherine Gavin, and D. Betsy McCoach, “Examining the Relationship Between Teachers’ Instructional Practices and Students’ Mathematics Achievement,” Journal of Advanced Academics, Volume 25, Number 3 (August 2014).