Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bathwater!

Look past the CCSS funding to determine their real value.

In an October article entitled “The Crocodile in the Common Core Standards,” Susan Ohanian writes that the room feel silent following David Coleman’s now infamous line: “[A]s you grow up in this world you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.” Some questioned whether he had really made such a remark, especially to that audience–educators gathered at the New York State Department of Education. But I can personally assure you that David Coleman made that statement not only in April during the New York speech, but also in July during an appearance in San Francisco of much smaller merit. I know this because I was among the thirty-five educators who exchanged glances upon hearing those words–students need to learn that “…people really don’t give a shit about what you feel….”

Ohanian describes the New York “hall as silent” following Coleman’s declaration and wonders if their silence was the result of “educrats who don’t know how to voice dissent” or symptomatic of shock. I suggest another alternative: the audience was quiet because he said what many people already know. On the whole, people don’t give a shit about how teens feel–about a text, about a piece of knowledge, about a skill. However, teachers are smarter than David Coleman. We know how kids feel affects how and what they learn. When it comes to doing the job of teaching–a job Coleman has never held–teachers are better than the writer of the CCSS to deliver the goods.

I agree with Ohanian and the many others who take issue with the way the Common Core Standards were written, by whom they were written, and how that work was funded. But that is another issue. The CCSS as a document of expectations is not pernicious because of its origin just as an illegitimate child is not evil by virtue of birth. Educators need to conduct a close reading, look deeper into the standards, and determine what knowledge, skills, and practices are implicit in the document. Educators need to deconstruct the CCSS to understand that even if David Coleman doesn’t give a shit about what young people think or feel, embedded in his own writing of the standards are opportunities to inquire about personal reflection and experience. Let me provide a brief example.

Standard 1 (Literature & Informational Text) at grade 2 reads:

Ask and answer such questions as who, what, where, when, why, and how to demonstrate understanding of key details in a text.

The grade 2 standard implies that teachers will instruct, model, conduct ongoing assessment to measure student knowledge and application of all aspects of journalistic questioning: the 5Ws and the H. To deconstruct this standard, educators would need to look at further implications of the standard. Students would need to know what a question look likes, what a question sounds like, how a question is syntactically structured. Furthermore, the standard implies that students know the difference between significant or key details and insignificant details, that students know and can verbalize questions that demonstrate all aspects of the deconstructed standard. In both teaching and assessing whether students grasp the knowledge and skills explicit and implicit to the standard is room for questions and reflections both about the reader’s personal feeling. These are worthy who, what, when, where, why, and how questions:

• What emotion does the text evoke in a reader and how does the author evoke emotion in the reader?
• Who is the most sympathetic individual caught up in the series of events?
• Why does the author describe the person using these words: ____, ____, ____?
• When have you read or experienced a similar incident?
• Why does the author take that point of view about ____?
• How do the people involved in this experience feel? How do you know?

Standard 1 (Literature & Informational Text) at grade 5 reads:

Quote accurately from a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.

Using close reading techniques, we can target the grade level 5 standard. The standard is based on a reader’s ability to make inferences and therefore implies that the readers distinguish between the literal, the figurative, the implicit and the explicit. Furthermore, since inference is a function of cognitive thought or reasoning, it requires that readers make connections between the referenced texts, personal experience, and background knowledge (the latter two which may include feelings). All of these terms and the cognitive skills that ground reasoning must be explicitly taught if all students or most of them are going to be proficient in this standard.

The grade 5 standard requires that readers think on their own, make a connection, and provide an inference that comes from how the mind puts literally stated or implied ideas together. Inferences are not made by the text. This standard could further be targeted or deconstructed by explicitly teaching the types of questions that result in inference making, such as an “If…then” question. And though I won’t belabor the point with further targets, I hope you see what I mean. In this blog alone, as a reader, you could use the very questions that are posed at grade 2 and reference quotations from this blog to support your responses. In so doing, you have an opportunity to express your feelings, analyze the feelings of others, and connect to text and to experience. For an excellent blog on how to deconstruct standards and resources to use, visit Christina Hank’s excellent blog. Brain

I’m not defending David Coleman. He is a big boy who chooses his own words. Perhaps he should be more thoughtful and consider the implications of his words–how those who are more sensitive feel about him and what he says. However, what I am proposing…or more strongly, what I am pleading with educators to do is to read the standards and determine what they mean for their instruction, their content, their students, and their schools. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.