Lately, I've been travelling in the world of the educational policy makers--a strange and alien place to this children's nonfiction author. Recently, within a week, I had breakfast with Dr. John King, Commissioner of Education for the State of New York, and dinner with Diane Ravitch, educational historian and activist on behalf of public education. Don't get me wrong; these were not tête à têtes. Hundreds of others joined in the festivities. But I had a chance to listen and speak to each of them (two skills mandated by the CCSS). It is not possible to find two more well-intentioned, passionate advocates for effective education than these two. But they are not exactly in the same camp. Diane's group is opposed to the Common Core State Standards. New York State is obligated by law to implement them.
As a children's nonfiction author, I welcome the standards. They require that at least 50% of the reading in elementary schools and 75% of high school reading be nonfiction. There are only two rules that set nonfiction apart from fiction:
In nonfiction, nothing is made up. Period. No invented dialogue. Primary sources are cited. Procedures and instructions are explicit and replicable.
It is accurate and vetted (which might be a subset of rule 1).
But there is another distinction that is not obvious in the standards: the difference between high quality nonfiction literature and what many educators think of as nonfiction for kids - the flat, boring, uninspiring writing that is in textbooks. Many teachers are unaware of the riches nonfiction literature can bring to content. And since the CCSS says nothing about curriculum, implementing the standards means that educators are now free to insert wonderful books -of which there is a huge selection--into their science, social studies, history, math, art, music, and physical education classes. Teachers can continue to teach their favorite fictional literature but now the door is open to using nonfiction literature across the curriculum. So, to the teacher who told me that she didn't like the arbitrary quota of 50%, I say that when you add high-quality reading across all disciplines, even if you keep all the fiction you like in ELA, this quota is more than met. The CCSS definitely don't mean that you should substitute deadly prose about the real world for those magical moments in ELA classes when great stories come to life. In anticipation of the CCSS, I have formed an organization of about 30 of the top children's nonfiction authors so that teachers can discover their wonderful books in our FREE database on our website and bring the joy of learning back into the classroom.
I learned from John King that the CCSS came out of a governors' meeting several years ago. Governors want to attract businesses to their states. Before relocating, businesses want to know about the quality of each state's labor pool. The question for each governor was: What can your state's workers be trained to do? This generated a conversation about the skill sets needed by businesses and how well each state was doing in producing capable workers. The standards and measures for the different states was all over the waterfront. Rather than compete with each other, the governors agreed to work together to establish common standards for college and career readiness. And so the Common Core State Standards came to be. John King said: "The organization of CEOs for Cities did a study that showed if you added a single percentage rate for college achievement in NY you would add 17.5 billion dollars of economic activity." Hmmm...there's nothing wrong with that.
If you read the Common Core State Standards, you will see that they are quite benign. There is nothing in there about curriculum, what books are to be read, just a shift to reading a lot more complex text about the real world. I see it as an opening for us authors and a defeat for the textbook manufacturers (although they seem to be buying rights to books like mine.) That's why I was startled at the dinner when I heard the vitriolic hatred of the CCSS. And when I asked the speaker, a veteran teacher of 35 years, if he had read them, he allowed that he had not. The fly in the ointment is the testing. More particularly the high-stakes placed on the tests and the absurd notion that a teacher's value added comes from the way his/her students perform on the assessment tests. There is nothing wrong with testing. We've always tested. When I was a teacher almost 50 years ago my students took tests. There were three possible outcomes.
The student test performance was about the same as their performance in my class.
The student performed poorly on the test but well in my class.
The student performed well on the test but poorly in my class.
As a teacher, the only result I paid attention to was number 3. If the student aced the test but was doing sub-standard work in my class, I knew there was something wrong and I worked to correct it.
When I taught back in those days, I had autonomy to teach creatively. I didn't use the textbook but found other more interesting science reading material for my students on curriculum content. I worked to make sure that they understood the basics and gave them all kinds of fun details to make the basics memorable. We spent a less than a week practicing test questions just before they took the tests. They did just fine.
I agree with Diane Ravitch's criticism of the testing. Test prep, in my opinion, is a form of child abuse. Schools lose almost two months of instruction between the time spent on test prep and the tests themselves. The new tests, based on the CCSS, are predicted to produce dismal failure across the board. So what! Let's use the CCSS to teach the best way we know how. Give the tests with minimal test prep, use the data internally along with other measures of school effectiveness, and let the chips fall where they may. And, at least for the next few years, sever the connection between test results and real estate values. In 1986, I wrote an article for Parents Magazine called "A,B,C, or F: Test Your Child's School." In it, I said: "Taking these tests too seriously can be a big red flag. If a school gears teaching to these tests by drilling students on the bits of knowledge needed to fill in the blanks, bored, turned-off kids are a certain outcome. Ask what the school's policy is on standardized testing. Do teachers end up teaching to the test? Know that the best schools take testing in stride and have faith that good educational practices produce fine results on tests."
As a scientist, when I didn't get the results from an experiment that I expected or wanted, I figured that the problem lay in my experimental design, not in the natural phenomenon I was exploring. (Nature doesn't lie!) The test makers need to find other ways of measuring student achievement rather than a single yearly snapshot where teachers are given instructions on how to handle tests that have vomit on them so that the results can be tabulated. And the educational community and the public need to stop giving the test outcomes so much power.
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