Common Core, Informational Text, and Reading

There's an overt belief in the Common Core State Standards (ELA) that reading a lot of informational text is the way one learns how to comprehend such text.  To that end, the Standards specify the percentage of text types that learners must annually read:

                                   Literary                        Informational

By Grade 4                 50%                                    50%
By Grade 8                 45%                                    55%
By Grade 12               30%                                    70%

The authors of the Standards write:

The Standards aim to align instruction with this framework so that many more students than at present can meet the requirements of college and career readiness. In K–5, the Standards follow NAEP’s lead in balancing the reading of literature with the reading of informational texts, including texts in history/ social studies, science, and technical subjects...the Standards demand that a significant amount of reading of informational texts take place in and outside the ELA classroom.

So I was thinking about how I read and what informs the ways I make meaning from text, be it a literary work or an informational text, or a hybrid of both. This led me to think about several related questions:

1. Does the mandatory increase in reading informational text so that it becomes the majority of text type read by the age of 11 for all students in public schools actually help these learners better comprehend informational text?
2. Does the decrease in literary works at the secondary level influence reader capacity to comprehend complex texts of any type?
3. What effect might the mandate of the percentages of text types have on readers, pedagogy, and textbook development?
4. What happens to learners when central control replaces local decision making?

A lot to think about and I'm of course curious as to what you think and hope you will weigh in on this.  A colleague and I are writing an article about the Common Core and I would appreciate including your insights.  As I think about these questions I want to offer a few observations, beginning with the first two questions.

On Reading
I don't recall having any direct instruction about ways to read informational text as I made my way through elementary and high school.  Now to be sure I am not advocating we ignore informational text. I favor teaching text structure and unique features of informational text as ways to enhance understanding, as well as teaching learners ways to comprehend and evaluate digital texts (regardless of type).  I think all of these can be important, as well as being mindful about the accuracy and value of information.  As I was writing this, the tweet below appeared.

A timely reminder.

My question though remains rather unanswered: Does mandated amounts of a specific text type lead to better comprehension? I wonder about this as I know that reading literary works, especially poetry, continues to enhance how I read as it requires me to actively attend to vocabulary, syntax, tone, symbol, meter, form, and diction. This attention to language directly helps me to comprehend complex philosophical texts. Different genres, yet I borrow from the reading experiences I have had and continue to have with poetry to inform ways of reading and making meaning. Now poets won't be too surprised by this.  William Carlos Williams in "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," writes:


                                             It is difficult
             to get the news from poems
                   yet men die miserably every day
                            for lack
             of what is found there.


There's an irony to Williams's words as I not only found what is essential within poems, but I also grapple with contemporary issues too.  For example, it was not an informational text that spurred my interest in El Salvador in the early 1980s, but rather it was poetry.  30 years later I can still recall Carolyn Forche's poem, "The Colonel."(Click the link and you can hear her read it.)

Now, I am not suggesting that poetry reading be mandated. I suspect that there will be different pathways to reading for different learners. And that leads me to the last two questions.

Autonomy
I don't think making students read a certain amount of a particular type of text is going to actually help develop life-long readers or more critical readers, especially among the more fragile reader. I know mandated practices decrease the responsiveness necessary to teach the hard to teach learner.  Had I been limited in this manner and had been force to operate with specified percentages of text types, several of the learners I taught would not have become the fine readers that they did.  If you have faced the challenge of teaching the learner who is struggling to make meaning from text, limiting options doesn't make a whole lot of sense.  I can still recall Kyle, a sandy haired boy of 14, who spent several weeks in 8th grade slumped behind a book he clearly was not reading.  Kyle tried a range of books and it wasn't until he hit on Avi that he began to build, rather quickly, lots and lots of reading muscle.  Kyle must have read a dozen Avi novels before venturing into other authors and types of texts.   Kyle had little faith in his capacity "to read" and for a time thought "the magic" rested in the author.  This is the same child who by December of that school year recommended we form a club in class dedicated to reading really long novels.  Kyle ran that club.  In the same class with Kyle, there were Jamal, Peter, and Anton who I affectionately dubbed, the disaster boys.  You may know the type: they read endless books about disasters and each piece of writing somehow featured a disaster.  That year I learned a lot about F5 tornadoes and the like.  My point here, is that I used any and every method I knew to help my learners come to love reading: to find pleasure in it and then I could nudge them into deepening and broadening their reading repertoires.

In those days, I was not hampered by a national document that specified by percentage what each learner had to read. Nor was I influenced by any administrator who felt obligated to ensure that the percentages were honored, regardless of outcome.  My selection of texts that I helped to place into my learners' hands came from a library I honed with more than 1,500 discrete titles.  I had no mandated textbook that reflected the distribution of text type by percentage that I had to use.  The issue here is not about informational text, but is more about mandates and power.

Local decision making matters when teaching and learning.  My students and I had expertise that today would be discounted by the Common Core folk.  It is as if the two people who authored the document in 2010 were somehow situated as being omnipotent, for only a self-determined god could know what the Kyles of the world need and want to do in 2011, 2013 or next week.  A mandate strips local decision-making and replaces it over time with a learned subservience.  We do x because we have been told to do so. 

Such action is dangerous. A republic requires far more autonomy, far more thinking.