Common Core, Commonly Misunderstood

I came across the following op-ed article “Why I Want to Give Up Teaching” in The Hartford Courant this Sunday. The author, Ms. Elizabeth Natale, is a middle school Language Arts teacher who feels that Connecticut’s move toward adopting the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is so discouraging as to have her seriously contemplating quitting her teaching career.   

In reading her article, I’ll admit, a small part of me thought that this fellow educator may be on to something, that the Common Core when paired with the new State demands for accountability may have taken a lot of joy out of going to work. However, that was only a small part of me that felt this way; and fleetingly at that. Mostly, I couldn’t help but wonder how well Ms. Natale understands the goals and requirements of the Common Core State Standards and if she simply isn’t overreacting, much in the same way our students sometimes do when feeling overwhelmed by new and unfamiliar learning.

As interesting to me have been the comments and reactions more than a few people have given in support of her op-ed article. For the record, I haven’t bothered to follow up on these accounts myself. I learned about the support the article received on Facebook and in face-to-face conversations from my wife. Still, it doesn’t surprise me that many a teacher would rally around an article and stance such as this one, as misguided it may be.

Below is my reply to Ms. Natale’s op-ed article. I have submitted it to the Hartford Courant in the hopes that it will reach the same audience Ms. Natale’s article reached because I believe her article to be damaging to peoples’ perception of the Common Core. Her article lacks accuracy and plays too strongly on emotional, rather than factual, appeal. My modest explanation of why such an article, while passionate, needs some counterbalancing follows:

Common Core, Commonly Misunderstood

In reading Ms. Natale’s op-ed piece, “Why I Want to Give Up Teaching”, I found myself wondering if her reaction to the changing winds isn’t a bit extreme, or at least misguided. Yes, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are both different and more demanding than the focuses and assessments of the Connecticut Mastery Test (CMT) and the Connecticut Academic Performance Test (CAPT), but in examining her article closely, it appears that at best she misunderstands the CCSS, and, at worst, holds a skewed interpretation of them. 

Natale writes “The Common Core standards require teachers to march lockstep in arming students with ‘21st-century skills.’". I can understand how it may appear that teachers are to move in “lock-step”, but that isn’t correct. The standards are the final outcome all students must be able to demonstrate; and how you, as a proven and effective educator, work to get them to that point is up to you and your district. 

By way of example, consider the commonly done science activity of dropping an egg from a two-story building so as to have it survive the fall unscathed. Students, for this activity, are given the same materials and the exact same goal (help Humpty Dumpty survive his fall). However, how they cobble together their materials to accomplish this feat is entirely up to their clever minds as paired to their grasp of the laws of motion, velocity, air resistance, and so on. That is not “lock-step” education, as she’s painted it, because only the outcome is the same, everything leading up to it is on the teacher to implement –however she deems it best to do so. (Interestingly, one could actually make the case that because the CCSS only provides teachers with student goals, and not the body of knowledge, skills, and materials needed to meet the goal, it is actually too vague and open to teacher creativity to be useful to a teacher.)

In the same paragraph, Ms. Natale continues with: “In English, emphasis on technology and nonfiction reading makes it more important for students to prepare an electronic presentation on how to make a paper airplane than to learn about moral dilemmas from Natalie Babbitt's beloved novel ‘Tuck Everlasting.’" True, the CCSS asks that teachers help students become more proficient with technology. Again, this seems to make sense in our technologically growing and dependent world; and, frankly, most of our children embrace technology as their preferred means of learning and communicating, but where Natale strays too far for my sensibilities is with her claim that it is more important for students to share their understanding of the paper airplane over the moral dilemmas presented in Natalie Babbitt’s wonderful classic Tuck Everlasting. It just isn’t so. 

Time spent studying the issues that can be culled from Tuck Everlasting -and any other moral dilemma presented in written fiction and non-fiction- is completely welcome within the realm of the CCSS. The CCSS devotes one of its three forms of writing and discussion to helping students learn to interpret and write in the argumentative style. Indeed, it is highly prized by the CCSS, as helping students pull complex ideas and issues like those from a text, then guiding them through discussion of them, and finally leading them to form their own well-supported opinions of them is part of the Common Core standards. As example: the key dilemma in Tuck Everlasting is one of immortality. The idea of living forever sounds great, but as students read Babbitt’s book, they begin to really wrangle with the idea of it, the pros and cons of immortality. The CCSS is very much okay with this and might only ask that a teacher bring in some real-world examples where living a long life is both good and bad: Japan’s aging population and the incredible medical advancements that are extending our lives would be two relevant and interesting examples to pair up with Tuck Everlasting, not supplant it.

This idea that the Common Core is asking teachers to stop teaching a particular book is well off base. The Common Core is blind to the specific books and articles a school or teacher uses. It wants critical thinkers that can read and write well by using any of today’s technologies as tools. 

On Natale’s comment that the CCSS emphasizes non-fiction reading and writing over fiction. This is essentially true, in part because it is the most prevalent type of reading done in college. Even in a Liberal Arts program, students will read a great deal from non-fiction. It makes entire sense to help prepare our students for this setting since we want our students to attend and graduate from a college. “College readiness” is frequently used in the CCSS documentation as rationale for the goals is has set.

Also worth considering, though it is not directly written by the architects of the CCSS as a reason for pushing more non-fiction reading into classrooms, non-fiction reading and writing are often given short-shrift by Language Arts teachers. Many a Language Arts teacher presumes their main responsibility rests in developing a love of stories, novels, plays, poetry and other fiction-focused materials with their students. On this, I completely understand where Ms. Natale is coming from, because I also hold that same framework in my head: Language Arts teacher equals reading classic stories, plays, poetry, et al., Where Natale appears to misunderstand the call for more non-fiction reading and writing in our classrooms is in her supposition that it is the sole responsibility of a Language Arts teacher to develop it. 

Nowhere is something like that written in the CCSS. In fact, the opposite is true. Reading and writing non-fiction is to be a share load, shared with the sciences, mathematics, foreign languages, technologies, and arts departments in her middle school setting. This is clearly borne out when one examines the standards for each of the disciplines covered in the CCSS. Everyone is responsible for helping our young leaners read and write well from non-fiction sources. When that notion sinks in and becomes common practice across a district, a Language Arts teacher’s work load should actually lessen.  

I can, of course, only surmise as to why Ms. Natale believes she needs to throw out much of her fiction-focused reading for non-fiction reading. Maybe she suffers from what many Language Arts teachers suffer from: the affliction of believing that all reading and writing, whether fiction or non-fiction, falls to an English teacher to develop with students, that no teacher of science could teach writing. As written already, that isn’t to be the case. Maybe she feels it won’t be addressed by the other subject-specific departments in her school? It’s a fair concern, but good leadership within her district will ensure that this charge is shared.

  

I happen to know one of West Hartford’s two Language Arts directors quite well, a former director of mine, Mrs. Catherine Buchholz, and have great trust in her ability to help Ms. Natale and similarly worried educators in West Hartford understand that all is not lost because education is taking a different tact. I’m confident that she understands that every department has a hand in meeting the CCSS goals. And, in reading another Courant article, “Learning Curve in the Schools”, (regarding how teachers, parents, and administrators are all working to understand what moving to the CCSS entails) I see that West Hartford’s other Language Arts Director, Mr. Tom Paleologopoulos, understands that the shift to the CCSS doesn’t mean fiction is dead. "We will still be reading Hamlet. We're not going to stop reading The Great Gatsby in 11th grade or To Kill a Mockingbird," said Tom Paleologopoulos, English department supervisor at Conard High School….” 

The CCSS is only asking that a little more focus be directed to developing non-fiction reading and writing than fiction. Is that worth walking away from a profession you love, and, from what I’ve read, seem to be quite dedicated to?

I suspect that Ms. Natale is dealing with a situation many of her students find themselves in when confronted with something new and daunting, the stress and fear of trying to absorb something quite foreign and novel. Teachers call that scary moment, when trying to get a handle on new instruction feels like trying to speak a language you’ve never heard before, cognitive dissonance, really just a fancy phrase for being unsettled by what isn’t immediately understood. 

Again, she is nowhere near being alone on this front. I work for the Glastonbury School system and have heard similar notes of concern and frustration from colleagues. Within our Language Arts department, which I am privileged to be a part of, many of us on the other side of the river have wondered a great deal too about how our students will perform on the CCSS assessment known as Smarter Balanced, SBAC for short. We’ve taken the practice assessments and laughed and gnashed teeth over the unfamiliar vocabulary and complex steps our students will need to work through just to complete various parts of the assessment. We’ve raised eyebrows of doubt that the results will be valid, empathized with the challenges students will face as they attempt to negotiate the test online with its small writing windows and need to move this way and that to locate questions, and we’ve even wondered a whole lot about how we’re expected to help prepare our students for an assessment that is literally being built and refined as we head into taking it this year, our pilot year. 

So, while we are as frustrated as the next Language Arts educator out there, we are also learning to step back and understand that this is new for us too. That part of our angst comes from its newness. Glastonbury teachers and administrators are also working to keep a perspective by realizing that as the next few years come to pass and all the different grades levels before and after us make changes toward implementing approaches that help our students to meet the CCSS standards, we’ll wonder how we ever taught another way. Nothing is second nature at this point, eventually it will be and the stress will lessen. (Stress never really disappears in education.)

I know that I try to maintain my focus on this change by remembering that the Connecticut Mastery Test went through four generations of changes over a period of twenty years before settling on a final assessment method that it deemed valid and reliable. SBAC will be no different. 

Ms. Natale, as a colleague across the river, know that you’re not alone in your frustrations; and, as a resident of West Hartford, please consider re-evaluating your stance regarding your professional career in light of these clarifications.

Ralph Lagana is a reading specialist for the Glastonbury School system. He works at Gideon Welles School and sometimes writes for his “semi-professional” blog Reading Teacher (CT). You can contact him at laganar@glastonburyus.org.