ABSTRACT
Like mushrooms after a rainstorm, myths about the Common Core flourish and reappear insistently. Most of these myths amount to exaggerations of the instructional shifts, and these exaggerations result from the tendency to oversimplify. Let's clean house.
Bathwater: Because of the Common Core, there is to be very little traditional literature, such as poetry, stories, and drama. It's all about nonfiction now.
Baby: The Common Core recommends a 50%–50% ratio of literary and informational text on the elementary level, gradually tipping that balance to 70% of informational text by the time students are in grades 9–12. However, the 70% of informational text includes the entire school day, not just English class. When you consider that most of what is read in subjects other than English class is informational, you realize that English teachers are not expected to jettison half of their novels, poetry, and plays. All the English teachers need to do to make things balance out is to include a bit more informational text, and that informational text can (and should) be related to the literature already in place. English teachers may have to let go of a novel or two—or, teach only the highlights of some of the longer works.
Myth: Memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies count as nonfiction. We do that, so we don’t have to change anything to meet the Common Core requirements.
Baby: Well, not really. While it is true that stories of real lives in real places are nonfiction, they are written in a narrative-type structure and with literary-type language. If you look at the text samples on the Common Core website in Appendix B, you’ll find that most of the samples of informational text do not have that literary style. Rather, they are primary source documents from history (Supreme Court decisions, great speeches, excerpts from the United States Constitution); essays about social issues arguing a point of view; scientific and technical reports that often use charts and graphs in addition to paragraphs. The Common Core requires that students amass substantial experience in a true range of text types and purposes for reading. While we can certainly continue to give students those wonderful choices of memoir and life stories, we can’t in good conscience check off “done” in the informational text column just on that basis alone.
Bathwater: The Common Core really doesn’t require very much change.
Baby: The amount of instructional shifting you and your school need to do depends on how much you have already been teaching in a way that develops (not just expects—not just assesses) literacy skills as a means to learn about the world. Educators who have already been making decisions based on formative assessments and backward design (teaching towards known competencies) may be able to transition easily into the Common Core. On the other hand, if your school looks the way it might have looked in the 1960s or before—with the teacher dispensing knowledge like worms to a nest full of hungry baby birds—then Common Core teaching will be much more student-centered and skills-driven than the work you’ve done until now. Disappointed in your school's scores on the new Common Core assessments? That's your barometer as to the extent to which you and your colleagues need to change.
Bathwater: The assessments for the Common Core are (will be) unfair.
Baby: The Common Core assessments for literacy—whether they are created by SBAC (Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium), PARCC (Partnership for Readiness for College and Careers), or by your state education department—will emanate from the Reading and Writing Standards, and blended into those, the Language Standards. You will not be able to “worksheet” or “test prep” your way into these assessments because you cannot predict the content of the reading passages. You can only give students routine practice—not for the test—but for improving their skills as readers. The more they read, the more background knowledge they will amass, the more vocabulary they will know, the more word groups they will be able to chunk, the faster they will be able to make sense of text at increasingly complex levels. The more genres they read, the better they will be able to write in those genres. And the more you share the Reading Standards with them and show them how your comprehension questions align to them, the better they will become at handling the types of questions they will encounter on the Common Core assessments. The assessments will be challenging and reflective of the Standards, particularly the Reading Standards. I’m going right out on that limb here and asserting that the assessments will not be unfair if your instruction has been aligned to the Literacy Standards, even the ones (Speaking and Listening) that are not (directly) assessed.
Bathwater: The Common Core is another passing fad in education.
Baby: Given the vast amount of funding, publicity, and preparation— not to mention the underlying need to have more rigor in literacy and math in American schools—it is highly unlikely that the Common Core is “another educational fad.” I know that education is notorious for being faddish, that we’re often saying “Oh, ______ is really just like _____ with another name.” Granted, trends come and go, and we are often renaming things. I write this in my fortieth year as an educator, not counting the sixteen—eighteen, if you count nursery school.
