Teachers: Becoming Our Worst Enemies

It’s possible that I’m entirely in the wrong; that I don’t grasp what the Common Core State Standards are actually asking of me as a professional teacher. I write this because every time I open the newspaper, I see another article about how the CCSS expects teachers to give up all their creative abilities and work in lock-step to follow scripted lessons.

This perception began with an emotionally driven op-ed piece by a Connecticut teacher. In the article, “Why I Want to Give up Teaching”, Ms. Elizabeth Natale explained that the CCSS was taking the joy out of teaching. To paraphrase: she noted being forced to teach in lock-step to others, being forced to give up teaching Tuck Everlasting, and being expected to teach non-fiction to her Language Arts students. These CCSS demands proved too much for her and she voiced her frustrations.

Feeling confused by Ms. Natale's claims, not at all by her sentiments, I turned to the CCSS website in search of their mission statement and goals looking for exactly where they’d written that everyone was to work in lock-step, stop teaching the moral issues of Tuck Everlasting, and focus heavily on non-fiction reading. I found the last item. Yes, the CCSS asks for Language Arts Teachers (those who are best equipped to teach reading) to incorporate more non-fiction in their classroom instruction. But, they are not expected to carry this water alone. All the middle-school-and-up disciplines are supposed to help students read and write from non-fiction sources. The other two items on Ms. Natale’s list were missing.

Perplexed by the matter, I wrote "Common Core, Commonly Misunderstood" in response to what appeared to me to be an incorrect set of assumptions and then figured that’d be that.

Well, this morning, in addition to several inches of icy snow, I was greeted with an article from The Hartford Courant titled “Turning School into Testing Boot Camps” by Robert Koehler via the Tribune Content Agency. [Note: The Courant article is titled differently than the original article in the Tribune. Click here for “Asphyxiating Education”.] Mr. Koehler writes for the Chicago Tribune and is “a nationally recognized award-winning journalist, fiction writer and poet whose essays and columns have appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines and on public radio and the Internet.” Ah, I thought, if anyone is going to have clarity on what the Common Core State Standards are, it’d be a professional journalist from the Chicago Tribune.  

Here’s his article in paraphrased form. The CCSS “defines and scripts the lessons to be taught, the micromanagement of teaching -- and learning – [it] has reached a new extreme.” He continues with a quote from Nicholas Tampio, an assistant professor of Political Science at Fordham University, and an article he authored. The quote follows: Teachers are not allowed to use their own methods to introduce the material, manage the classroom, or share their own wisdom. Students are not encouraged to connect the material to their own lives, events in the world, or things that may interest them. The script tells the teachers and students, at all times, what to say and do.

I don’t disbelieve these events, as recorded by Mr. Tampio.  Having taught for many years, you do see and hear of instances when schools go a little crazy trying to prep their kids for their State’s common assessment. It’s very possible that the school Mr. Tampio wrote about has scripted as much as they could and laid out as many lessons as possible for their staff to follow. Reading this, I got to thinking that maybe I really have been wrong all along. Maybe there’s some fine print on the CCSS website that links all of the scripts and lesson plans teachers are expected to foist onto kids and I just plumb missed it. I am a bit of an error machine. Just those who know me even a little well.

Well… I looked. And nope. No such thing. Not a single item delineating what teachers are to do to help students meet the standards as listed within the disciplines of the CCSS.

This leads me to one conclusion. Teachers and schools made a choice to shackle themselves to scripts and lessons and lock-step approaches to instructing students. They’ve done that of their own volition –not because it’s required by the CCSS; and thus have become their own worst enemies.

What’s remarkable is how quickly schools turn to the scripted approach, when confronted with something new. They get nervous and they want a plan, scripted or not. It doesn’t help that schools are inundated with literature from companies churning out new and/or merely relabeled workbooks of exercises aimed at the CCSS.

This may seem like a small hair to split, and yet it is remains one that needs splitting. We’re trying to teach our students to read dissenting views and then make thoughtful sense of it. That’s the world we’ve always been in. It doesn’t seem correct to begin the discussion of whether or not the CCSS is a good next step in teaching reform if everyone is stepping off from an incorrect point of understanding.

I realize, this being my second article on the topic of the CCSS and what it purports to ask of teachers, makes me seem like a cheerleader for the CCSS. I am not. Like many teachers and administrators, I see problems with the CCSS. Chief among them are the expectations set forth by grade level. It seems to me that each set of standards is being introduced nearly a full school year ahead of where it should be. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe students will rise to these new bars, these higher outcomes of learning. We are asked to slow down our curriculums and go deeper. So, I’m open to seeing if we can meet the Core Standards by changing our ways. But, I have no misconceptions. It will be painful and slow going. Change in schools is always slow. It would be nice if everyone involved from the inside out could at least have some reasonable understanding of the CCSS. 

From everything I’m reading in print these days, we’re off to a poor start. As always, do not hesitate to email me and show me where I'm wrong. I'm always second guessing myself. It doesn't help that the media and I are not in lock-step on this topic. Oops! Bad choice of words?