#SOL17: Reading and Readers

Devon reading as a child.

I.

I'm reading The End of Your Life Book Club and the author, Will Schwalbe, is describing an exchange he and his mother had regarding Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach.

He writes,

...I talked about the book's fascinating and melancholy coda, which explains what will happen to each of the two main characters. On Chesil Beach had moved me so much that I didn't want to pick up a new book for awhile" (p.15).

I know just how he feels.


II.

Sometimes when I have read a really good novel--I don't want to pick up a new book for awhile, too. Sometimes it's about the ambiguity.  I need time to think. Other times, it's simply that I am not ready to push those characters who are living in my mind--out, just yet. I don't want to chance having them leave as new characters, settings, and plots from the next book show up.

I think about this desire to not read just yet and how it contrasts with the pace of school reading. There the push to read one text after the next--like eating a steady stream of after-dinner mints, is more often what gets privileged.

And that's a shame.


III.

Where do children learn that there are some books that we savor so much even after we stop reading that we need time to cleanse our pallet before partaking again? Where do children learn that we need time for the characters, the setting, plot, and ambiguities to slip from our daily thoughts?


IV.

I'm a mom. When the Common Core was first published and I read that children would be taught to read texts via the close reading approach for 13 years, I cringed. I remember saying to Rob that if this was the definition of being a proficient reader, I'd prefer Devon not be one. We also were not interested in him being 'college-ready' as determined by a 2-hour test given across three days in May.

We wanted him to savor, reject, argue with, pause, stop, reread, and determine the course of his reading, as he does his life.  We wanted him to be a thoughtful, emotional, confused, and reactionary reader.

Reading well is more about agency, than it is about genre knowledge, plot, theme and the like.

Being, Becoming: Ed Standards in 2015, Oh My!

Coming through the Rye (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

I. Being Well Educated

When we ask, "What does it mean to be well educated in 2015?" there is an underlying belief that being is inherently valuable.  But is it?  Is your understanding of being well educated synonymous with being well informed about present events that are always emerging?  Is becoming knowledgeable a laudable disposition to engender at school?  Given the current push for all things Common Core, is there even time available for such knowing?  Is being well educated a matter of passing the state reading, writing and mathematics high stakes assessment your state and/or country procures and provides to schools to administer to children and teens?  After all the folks who gave us the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and its accompanying tests make a rather bold and one might be tempted to say, laughable, claim. They write:

The standards were created to ensure that all students graduate from high school with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college, career, and life, regardless of where they live.  (from official site, found here)

Really? Can success at college, career, and life be based on the acquisition of a determined set of skills and 'knowledge'?  Can the complexity of becoming be rendered simple and if so, can one actually still be becoming?  Is success ever predictable based on a single set of test results?

II. Becoming

Okay, such claims are easy to debunk.  So, let's shift our focus for a moment. What happens to your thinking if the word, being is deleted and instead becoming is substituted? Instead of being well educated, we wonder how we are becoming and what that means now and now and now...

Every moment unfolding is the learning. 

Does such a shift in time alter your focus or occasion your revaluation of what is privileged when we think about learning?  Becoming does not deny content, intent, or happenstance.  I think of this shift as an invitation to reevaluate the logic of naming what is to be known, of relying on predetermined bits of knowledge that come from a static list of educational standards proffered by a group of people.

Folks, it's the Committee of Ten all over again.

Is this what we want for our children?  Is this the stuff that leads to informed citizenry, that is representative of learning?  Is such a process really going to ensure our kids' life-long success as the CCSS writers insist?

Does the shift from being to becoming open intellectual, social, or spiritual spaces?  Does such a shift help you linger in possibilities, as opposed to being rooted in named and known certainties?

These are not small questions and they are ones we do not entertain when we offer commentary about what it means to know at school.  For all our bravado, we rarely talk about what must be talked about when we talk about learning at school.

The logic of education standards has no place in this century.  They belong to a time when information was scarce and procurement was the only expression of power.


III. Who's Edward Snowden?

What prompted this bit of inquiry was a retweet I viewed this morning by Will Richardson of  link to a video of John Oliver's 'insanely brilliant' interview with Edward Snowden that Gary Stager initially posted.  I was able to watch the video this afternoon and I hope you do too.  I then sent the link to my 16 year-old-son who I'm pleased to say knows a whole lot more about Edward Snowden and US surveillance via the Patriot Act than those depicted in Oliver's show.

What caught my eye initially after the mention of Snowden,  was the bracketed comment, "Not on the #ccss however." This language gave me pause as I heard the sassiness of it.

But it goes well beyond sassy.

Is it school-worthy for students to be able to contemplate what the US government has allowed itself to do with regard to domestic and foreign surveillance via the Patriot Act?  Is becoming an informed citizenry an apt educational outcome? Why would we ever want to limit such definitions of knowing ahead of time? Whose interest are being served by constructing school as places where children demonstrate that they too can name what has been named for them, most often by a slim elite group of others?

Here in the US, we are spending billions to implement and assess student learning based on a set of reading, writing and mathematics standards that still insist in 2015 on limiting naming what must be learned at each grade level across 13-years (K-12) by every child to what a few people who met in 2009 thought to be important.  Is such naming logical or does the very method of a group of privileged people naming--limit learning to what was perhaps profitable when information was scarce?

The logic of education standards as de facto expressions of what MUST be learned by all students across 13 years as measured by a single set of assessments is faulty and we should reject it and reject those elected officials who support such a paltry stance of learning.

Noticing What Tugs at Your Sleeve (#SOL15, Day14)

American Bus Stop: No Child Left Behind (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

I.

I was thinking about teaching children to write and how very different our expectations are for them as opposed to the expectations writers set for themselves. I was reading an interview with Ian McEwan and in response to the question--'How does a germ of an idea evolve into a novel?"-- McEwan said he's "a great believer in hesitation." 

Hesitation?

Yes, hesitation.

He added:

I think there’s nothing wrong with pausing when you’re not sure how to proceed. And in that rather dreamy, floating kind of mental state (one which I long for once I’ve started a book and can no longer have it) I go where my reading and thoughts and travels take me. 

II.




The ELA Common Core State Standards is rooted in certainty. And that's a problem as life--yours, mine and our children--is clearly not rooted in certainty. For the next few weeks, 900,000 students in NJ will take the PARCC--the single measure touted to be a next generation (whatever that means) examination that will let us know (perhaps by next October) how ready our children are for some imagined future. 

There will be no hesitating on the PARCC.  It's all about extracting information quickly, perhaps even thoughtlessly. 

When I read the Standards and notice how its being implemented in schools, especially with younger children, I cringe. It's ironic that with all the references to being college and career ready, there's no mention in the CCSS of privileging a "dreamy, floating kind of mental state" that McEwan alludes to. 


None.

Nada.

I'm not trying for humor here. I know this is serious. How time is allotted at school and who does the allotting matter, especially if we want children to develop into thinkers, doers, makers.  For  it is often in that dreamy floating mental state, McEwan alludes to, that thinking happens. Equally important, it's the agency to choose that matters too. 

Take a moment and think about schools and how writing is taught. There's often little time, if any, dedicated to floating when the end products have already been determined before young writers have even had a moment to consider words, interests, or notice the phrase that tugs at their sleeve.

Noticing, attending to what tugs at our sleeves ought to be a measure worth a writer's time.

Our Use of Education Standards Limits Learning: We Negate the Anomalous by Being Ready

A child following a hunch... (Reilly 2010)

I.

"We strive toward knowledge, always more knowledge, but must understand that we are, and will remain, surrounded by mystery." - Marcelo Gleiser, 2014

Building a public education system on the belief in knowledge-certainty represents a seismic error--one we continue to make and remake. Even as we know more than we can say, our knowledge is largely (in)formed by our guesses, our hunches, our theory-making and unmaking. We ought to celebrate these stances, not shun them. Tentative theory making represents a main purpose of education and yet, against the narrow world of educational standards the room necessary to think, err, reconsider, fail better is largely absent for the individual learner. We are driven by a logic that says school learning is knowable and testable. We fail to see such logic as damning. In favor of logic, we have forgotten mystery.

Douglas Hofstadter in his foreword to Gödel's Proof recognized this when he wrote, "We now understand that the human mind is fundamentally not a logic engine but an analogy engine, a guessing engine, an esthetics-driven engine, a self-correcting engine." Where in schools do we embrace this understanding of knowing or of our beautiful limitations? How are teachers and children penalized in this high-stakes narrow world of testing and evaluation for embracing such notions?

I would argue that much of what is privileged today in public school education has been built upon a construct of a stable universe, where the borders between teachers and students are permanent, and whereby the signs, signifiers, and signified are linear and stable—resulting in the belief that there are raw materials like stones and timber that can be collected and distributed in order to enact specific commodities called knowledge. Knowledge in this schema is not to be constructed, but rather discovered from a set of knowable and predetermined things.  Further, the stability between effect and cause is seen as constant. 

Consider that "Newton’s first law of motion states, objects at rest stay that way—as do objects in motion—until an outside force inflicts itself.  The cause-effect relationship implied here is an apt metaphor for the modernist concept of teaching and learning: One precedes and causes the other. Teaching becomes didactic, directing; not aiding, helping, stimulating, or challenging natural, self-organizing processes. Machines do not self organize, compensate, grow” (Doll, 63-64). The logic supporting a belief in standards with specified outcomes as measured by high stakes testing can be tied to a Newtonian understanding of knowledge as discovery. In such schema, the builder, as corporate knowledge-holder and the inhabitants, as teachers and students are bodiless entities who can be improved and acted upon by the introduction of different stones and timber. 

We are endlessly substitutable. 

A child following a hunch ... (Reilly, 2013)

II.

“Gaps, breaks, punctures are not only absent from the curriculum, they are seen only in negative terms.  Time itself is seen exclusively in cumulative terms, as a co-relation with what is learned: the longer the time, the more learning accumulated.  Time is not seen as an active ingredient, necessary for developing the creative possibilities inherent in any situation” (Doll, 37).

It is these disruptures that we ought to be courting, rather then the smooth face of certainty. Kurt Gödel's theorems about incompleteness might well inform our reform efforts. Through Gödel’s two incompleteness theorems we can recognize the fallacy of the standards-testing movement we are buried beneath and the freedoms we sacrifice to remain buried. Gödel theorized (1931/1992) that no set of finite axioms could represent absolute truth because an undecidability exists in closed systems. Within such systems, the logic necessary to negate a particular axiom is not present within the system. To know a contextual “truth” requires a metalanguage.  And yet, in public education we are forced to trust the 'truth' produced about our children's knowledge via a closed set.  The same corporations that name what must be 'learned' have design what will be tested and how.  Then the results of these tests that only the test makers and test takers are allowed to see are used to report how students and their teachers faired. Yes, against the judgment of nearly the entire psychometric and education researcher communities (Newton, Darling-Hammond, Haertel, & Thomas, 2010) we use these narrow results to measure the effectiveness of teachers.

from here 

PARCC has indicated that we can now use their closed system that they purport to be a truthful representation of children's learning to gauge how well our child did against other children from "PARCC states."

Do you see how closed this system is?  By purporting to be able to provide you with a comparative view of your child's performance vs. those in Arkansas or Colorado the assertion that these scores actually report some academic truth of importance is assumed.

But what do these tests measure? They measure only what is common, never what is singular or anomalous. And this is a problem.

Children following a hunch... (Reilly, 2012)

III.

Gilles Deleuze notes, "[beneath the general operation of laws, however, there always remains the play of singularities" (1994, p. 25). It is this play of singularities that we must attend to. This is where hunches, guesses, trial and error rises. Yet, there is little room for such musing is the input-output world of standards and testing. Our inability to occasion the anomalous, to celebrate its presence in the utterances of our children and of their teachers--speaks to our lack of vision and commitment to unfettered learning. Allegiance to one set of educational standards and the tests they produce leads us to directly ignore anomalies.

Instead of having open-ended outcomes in eduction where we do not worry about pre-naming what a child will learn, but rather use our energies and talents to co-name with the child what he or she is theorizing, we have a list of things all learners must know and do.

A list is cheap. A list can only be common.

Check 'em off is infinitely less complex than a map one makes. We ought not to sell out our children this way. The talents of students and teachers are being squandered, repressed and ignored in favor of having everyone produce like answers to closed tests. Now, what career or college readiness does that speak to?

A child following a hunch... (Reilly, 2014)

IV.

We know tentatively.

Where in the new models of educational reform is guessing represented? Where in these reforms is self-correction privileged? Where do we allow learners, or their teachers, to follow a hunch?  In what ways do we embrace aestheticism? Are the arts nothing more than fodder for reading materials so that we can teach directly the skills outlined in the Standards?

Multiple ways of (un)knowing are largely missing from the certainty that 'the new generation' of educational standards represents.

We are teaching you and testing you on what you most need to know are the largest of lies we tell our children and we do so daily. We have been fabricating truths about the completeness of knowing since at least Sputnik and in these new times of the Common Core we continue to lie. We know this completeness myth as educational standards--the narrow interpretation of what some now say learners need to know in order to be college and career ready. I find it improbable that a nation could even believe such fantasies, let alone act on them.

Who are these soothsayers who know what it means to be ready?

But, what if being ready is itself the largest of myths? What if being ready represents our attempts to stay complexity and to substitute a poor version of knowing? What if being ready lessens the scope and depth of learning? What if catering to being ready actually undermines learning?

We only need to read the introduction to the ELA Common Core State Standards to notice the belief in a finite world of knowing that privileges being ready:

The Standards define what all students are expected to know and be able to do (p. 6, 2010).

Really? 

Imagine the arrogance that such knowing was even possible, let alone desirable. Can Standards represent what needs to be known?  By whom? For what purpose? Is it even rational to suggest such a list that can be reproduced is worth our interest? Yet, our schools are limited by and driven to ensure that all students know emphatically a closed set of nameable reading, writing and mathematical skills that can be measured cheaply and profitably for corporations. Driven by the limitations of our allegiance to high stakes testing, we measure what is convenient--what can be cheaply known by the masses--negating the anomalous, missing the singularity. We then say that these results represent a truth about the value of what children know and can do and the quality of work their teachers have done.

It is this closed system of standards, student testing, and teacher evaluation that we must disassemble and do so quickly.

Cited

Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition. (P. Patton, Trans.). New York Columbia

University Press.

Doll, William E. Jr. (1993). A postmodernperspective on curriculum. New York: Teachers College Press.

Gleiser, Marcelo (2014). The island of knowledge: The limits of science and the search for meaning. New York: Basic Books.

Newton, Xiaoxia A., Darling-Hammond, Linda, Haertel, Edward,  & Thomas, Ewart. (2010). Value-Added Modeling of teacher effectiveness: An exploration of stability across models and contexts. Educational Policy Analysis Archives, 18(23). 

This is What Education Reform Looks Like

I. Choice

The other day a 9-year old boy reminded why we do not need to provide children with a steady diet of writing prompts we create/pass out in lieu of teaching them how to generate potential topics of interest. The boy generated this point on his life map:

from a boy's life map.

The child selected to write about his remembrance of learning that his mom had breast cancer.  This is a text he is struggling to write. As I worked with him that first day he got teary-eyed, went for a drink of water and returned.  I told him that his work was brave writing and that he should know that he could quit it at will.

If it hurts too much to write this, you can step back from it as you need.
He sighed.

My comment to the child was challenged because 'allowing' a student to not complete the topic does not engender grit. Implied in the statement, I suspect, is a belief grit is somehow more important than kindness, agency, and wisdom.

Let me say here, I'm not sure I even know what grit means as it is so overly (mis)used.  I do understand, even appreciate, the necessity (at times) of persevering and goal setting. I've read Duckworth, know there's a Ted Talk, and well before either of these, I too had read Aristotle. So the idea of grit isn't lost on me. Nonetheless, children ought to maintain the right to choose which costs they bear while persevering and which costs may just be too dear. Is this not an essential life skill? Is this not the bedrock of a democracy?

Before I began this work a colleague at the school told me that an 'expert' from central office was skeptical of the co-teaching work I would be doing. Apparently, writing about the fear you lived with at 7 when you learn your mom might die isn't part of the Common Core.  I kid you not.

I'm told the expert said that there's no need to teach anything other than what is in the CCSS (as she understands it). Teach them to write responses to literature like the people in Vermont do (the only approved model of writing it seems). In her schema there's no need for notebooks, seed ideas, choice, topic creation, art making, technology use (not for testing), or unsanctioned genres. There's no need for expression.  Give the children a prompt a day and a formula they can memorize in order to answer "correctly'.

Correct.
Be correct.

Folks, this is what education reform really looks like, especially in places where the children are economically poor, and the schools toil under central office and/or state control. 

Fortunately for this class, their teacher, assistant principal and principal are brave. Kids need brave adults given the education reform foisted upon them and their communities.

Reservoir in January (M.A. Reilly, 2015)

II. Absence

Choice.

Agency.

The absence of choice for children, teachers, and some administrators, in lieu of others knowing best, may well be what plagues U.S. pubic education the most.




III. Only an Expert

Many of the teachers I work with are routinely subjected to 'unannounced' central office 'expert' visits.  These are often 'education experts' who have never actually taught with the constraints of the curriculum products that school districts procure and insist be used--often as written with no alterations. It doesn't matter if the products make sense or not.  It doesn't matter who the students are, or who the teacher is.

Schools are part of an epic world where the present has no influence for there is faith in products, not in learners or teachers. Physical reality is shunned, not valued.  For the work at hand is not to teach children, but rather to enact 'correctly' the products exactly as they have been rendered by other people who are neither present, nor have they ever even visited. This is what our tax dollars are purchasing.

If these situations weren't so serious one might see a similar absurdity to those old Monty Python skits that began with the high-pitched voice of Cardinal Ximénez (Michael Palin) yelling, "Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition."  But, alas, humor is not the outcome sought by such educational inquisitions. Rather, the goal to these visits is mostly about enacting correctness.  Cardinal Ximénez has nothing on the new ed experts.

IV. This is the New Teaching

Teaching is not a transaction made among people who learn as they create meaning.  Education reform insists upon a preferred and correct way to teach. For example, no lesson seems to be able to be conducted without stated learning targets that all students must repeat.  I can do this... I can do that...  Don't worry if children cannot actually decode the texts used each day from the program. Just "chunk it" and magically they will comprehend. The level of error is so high.

Education reform in the United states is a closed set of materials that are issued to schools for use every day.
There is no room for interpretation.
There is no room for thinking.
There is no room for positive deviance.

This is a colony.
And we are footing the bill.

I wish this was hyperbole, but I have seen this played out repeatedly and we are the worse for it.

Readiness is the Language of Servitude

The learning in school should be continuous with that out of school. There should be a free interplay between the two (John Dewey. Democracy & Education, p. 288).

I.

I was reading the post, Social Media and the Law: The Future of Online Defamation, by Aron Solomon and Jason Moyse and it got me thinking about the current aim of public education in the US to make all students college and career ready. Aron writes:

As 1Ls (first-year law students), both Jason and I learned about defamation law. We might as well have learned nothing, as the explosion of technology is about to result in an even larger boom in this area of the law.

Aron and Jason are writing about the changing (and emerging) understanding of defamation as it is being applied to social media based situations.  What interests me here is their claim that their former education lacks significantly in preparation for the new twists in understanding defamation. Applying the law to potential defamation cases that occur as a result of social media renders their former education as incomplete.

This makes me wonder about the efficacy of trying to ensure that all high school graduates are college and career ready. Might such an aim be off track?  Perhaps even, foolish?

II.

The CCSS makes a pretty large claim--a claim that is bold and hopeful as it is sophomoric and delusional.

The standards were created to ensure that all students graduate from high school with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college, career, and life, regardless of where they live. 

I do not imagine many can actually believe this claim when they study it, especially given the impossibly narrow focus of the CCSS on school-based math and English language arts. How can the skills and knowledge most needed for children who will be graduating high school in 2028 be known? Consider Aron and Jason's assertion that the highly specialized post-graduate work of legal studies each took did not readily prepare them for the litigious world that has been disrupted by social media. Our world never stands still. The world we partially name from our skewed points of view today cannot be the world we will name in 2028. Getting millions of children ready for a future we cannot know is a fool's errand.

• Is there a set of skills and knowledge that are most important?  And for whom?  In what context? 
• Is there causality between the skills/knowledge selected by a handful of college educated people in 2009 and college, career, and life success in 2028?  
• What are the meanings of success? Which of these matter most?  For whom?
• Was it even possible for this small coterie to know what is most essential for your child to know? For mine? For the Athabaskan child living in an Interior Alaska Athabaskan community? For the child who hears music as a language and uses this as self-definition? For the dancer? For the child in living in El Paso, Texas? For the artist? For the child being held in a detention center? For the child living in Lost Springs, Wyoming? For the tinkerer? For the lost one?  For the prodigy?
• Is there a set of educational standards that can be the key to equity in an increasingly inequitable country? 
• Is learning a matter of what we know? Unknow? Relearn? Not know?

What are we being sold here?  And perhaps most important: What is escaping our notice while we pander to this bill of goods?

III.

The last few weeks have found me teaching at a public high school in the South Bronx, a K-8 public school in the central ward of Newark, NJ, and at a public school in a wealthy suburb of New York City. The economic and safety issues and assets that frame each of these places is not without influence on what is learned, unlearned, and not learned by the students who attend school at each of these sites.

What is essential are often matters of geography and time.

The CCSS claim reminds me of the earlier school outcome via No Child Left Behind Act that 100% of the tested children in the United States would demonstrate school based math and reading proficiency by 2014. Even though such a claim was idiotic, an entire country swayed to its power for the better part of a decade.

What did we stop paying attention to in order to pay attention to this end goal that could never have been realized?

IV.

John Dewey in Democracy and Education told us that "the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth" (p. 85).  Continued capacity for growth. Further he warned that it is critical that the aims of education arise freely from one's experiences or else the aims will be "ulterior aims of others" (p. 85).

And this is the centrality of what I am writing about here and what I have written in too many posts to count. Agency is at the center of learning and the desire to learn.  Doing unto others via impositions of uniformed standards and annual standardized testing distracts us from learning by encouraging our active and/or passive resistance. This happens at the pupil and teacher levels.

We are always staring at something that is at best a distraction, chasing with dollars that which cannot be realized.  Standardized visions of learning pay homage to sameness--to readiness. Dewey warned us:

Exorbitant desire for uniformity of procedure and for prompt external results are the chief foes which the open-minded attitude meets in school. The teacher who does not permit and encourage diversity of operation in dealing with questions is imposing intellectual blinders upon pupils--restricting their vision to the one path the teacher's mind happens to approve. Probably the chief cause of devotion to rigidity of method is, however, that it seems to promise speedy, accurately measurable correct results. The zeal for 'answers' is the explanation of much of the zeal for rigid and mechanical methods. Forcing and overpressure have the same origin, and the same result upon alert and varied intellectual interest (p.145).

Kneel down before standards and find yourself unable to see the larger picture. Your vision is boot high. Readiness has always been the language of servitude.

Changing The Current Narratives About Teaching and Learning

Repetition (M.A. Reilly, 2008)

I. A Son Imagines

My son plans to shave off a year of high school and graduate in three so that he can get on with what he wants to do. For him school is not preparation for life.

What are you thinking about doing? I ask.

He tells me he wants to redesign computer chips, shifting from the current reliance on silicon to some other element. He adds quickly, that he plans to do this if these issues remain a problem by the time he's able to engage more fully in this type of work.  

If not that, there will be another problem to solve, he says.

And as I listen to him, I think: Problem solving as a way of defining one's work is different than having a career. 

My son is less concerned about being career-ready as that lexicon may be borrowed from an earlier generation when a career defined one's adult life. My father worked for AT&T his whole life.  He was a Bell man, as was his father.  My son does not see his life as a company man. I think about this difference in self-definition and the tag line that accompanies the Common Core State Standards: college and career-ready. This phrase seems less than honest, disingenuous even when I think about the distance between my son's imagined adult life as one who frames and solves problems of interest and that of one who has a career.  

Do we often ask young people what they plan for, dream about, wonder? We are limited by the discourse of standards and accountability. Infusing some youthful perspectives into our understanding might help to at least make us contemporary and not hold overs from our fathers' generation.

The narratives we tell and are taught to repeat matter. 

II. Standards and Accountability: Twin Narratives 

In 2014, public education in the US is largely valued for how well teachers teach a particular set of prescribed English language arts and mathematics standards and how well students demonstrate learning those standards via sanctioned methods of accountability that are controlled by corporations and reported by corporations. (And we wonder why dystopias are so popular?) 

We can say that our thinking won't be overly influenced by the results from a single measure as that would be a definition of lunacy, but that rhetoric is quickly forgotten when state test results are reported in the news. Just a week ago, the New York Times ran a story about the outcomes of New York teacher evaluation scores versus New York students' performance on a single measure from 2012 under the headline: Critics Question High Ratings on New York State Teacher Evaluations Amid Poor Test Scores. Stripped from the equation was the understanding that these two elements can't and ought not to be compared. But, the education narrative we live with says that it is logical to expect the evaluation scores of teachers to be similar to the performance rate of students as measured by a single test. The logic, if extended, suggests that the sum of learning at school can be encapsulated by the scores on the single English language arts test and math test and that those scores 'should be' equivalent to the performance of teachers via evaluations. If 31% of students are not proficient as measured by a single state test, then 31% of the teachers who teach in the same state should be evaluated as ineffective. Forget that there is no research that will make these two disparate things equivalent. Master narratives rarely deal in such details. They are stories that get repeated and repeated until they become your truth.  Scores on teacher evaluations and students' performances on a state test get connected.

We need to ask who benefits from the repeat of these narratives? 

Now recall our young man at the start of this post.  He is not represented in this conflated world of standards and tests. Rather, he is at best a thing to be acted upon. This is the underbelly to the master narrative that has been used to build momentum during the last three decades so that we can eventually learn that career teachers and their troublesome unions are unnecessary in a democracy. In a market-policy driven country, not a democracy, corporations can replace teachers with digital tools or temporary workers who drop in to schools for two-year stints on their way to other work. The narrative works something like:  Everyone knows that a digital tool or a teacher with no experience are better than an experienced teacher (with pension benefits). 

Is it an wonder that our young man has less faith in American democracy and tells us so. But are we listening?

III. Standards are Designed by Testing Companies and The Narrative is that Standards = Knowledge

It's all about numbers and measures, not people as numbers represent truth, especially when used to audit adults and children or so the narrative goes. Peter Taubman (2010) in Teaching By Numbers tells us:

The transformation that has proceeded under the twin banners of “standards” and “accountability,” has over the last decade profoundly affected all aspects of teaching, schooling, and teacher education in the United States, and now threatens public education itself.

Taubman's right. The threat from standards and accountability is sizable--especially to boys and girls whose voices we have not only stopped listening to, but have insured have no place in what officially gets learned at school.  What do kids know? 

A key issue with national and state standards is that the voices of actual educators, parents, and especially the millions of students are missing and cannot be added as standards are an epic construct (Bakhtin,1981) handed down to states and schools by ubiquitous committees who later are revealed to be made up largely by testing company executives such as the case with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). We have been told and retold that teachers were involved in writing the CCSS.  Not true. The majority of the 24 people who wrote the CCSS worked for testing companies, like ACT, Inc. and the College Board (See Mercedes Schneider's post for particulars. Here's the list of 24).  David Coleman (who now heads the College Board) and Bill Gates like to talk about teachers' involvement in the development of the Common Core, but actual teachers seem to be sorely missing from the 24. It's like a bad Where's Waldo--see if you can find the teacher.

This is servitude in action. The narrative still requires the presence of teachers as the public expects teachers and so teachers are referred from time to time as needed.  Think of them as stock players pulled out when required. 

Henry Giroux (2014) in The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America's Disimagination Machine tells us:

Education and pedagogy cannot be reduced to the dictates of an audit culture with its rendering of critical thought nil and void, and its elevation of mindless test taking as the ultimate pedagogical practice and the final arbiter of what constitutes quality teaching and learning. (Henry Giroux, 2014. Location 2089 of 4014).

And yet in 2014 "mindless test taking" is "the ultimate pedagogical practice and the final arbiter" of educational quality.  Recall again the August article in the Times equating effective teachers to a single test measure. During the 30 years I've been an educator the questions: What does it mean to be educated? What are our aims? have been replaced with: How do we know students have learned this set of information that has been deemed important by these test companies?  We've moved from the wisdom of John Dewey to the arrogance of David Coleman and we are none the better. These questions are not interchangeable. The first set focuses on the democratic aims of education. The latter skips democracy and substitutes a determined end that can be cheaply audited by the very people who have established the set and repeated the narrative until many believe these connected narratives of standards and accountability represent an essential truth. 

IV. Deconstructing the Narrative of Standards and Accountability

In a Twitter exchange the other day the idea that if there were no standards then teachers would need to "start from scratch" each year was forwarded.  I responded, Yeah! as this seems to me to be a far better place to start--although it is pure hyperbole to ever say that any one teacher begins the school year with nothing. To me this is akin to that rubbish about students being empty vessels. The notion of starting new is a fabrication--part of the narrative we've been sold: Teachers cannot to be trusted with critical, intellectual-decision making as they are unable or ill-prepared to think deeply, broadly, concisely, etc.  So our corporate fathers have some digital tools that they can sell us that will get the job done (better test scores) or some temporary workers to fill classrooms... In these stories teachers are not capable of thinking and not capable of learning. 

The idea that teachers cannot teach effectively without standards to guide the work reveals critical beliefs about what the work of teaching is, as well as what learning and knowledge are and are not. This is a large part of the narrative we have been fed.  Teachers are too incompetent to actually do that job and we know this based on student performance on single measures of school reading and math. That's the whole field of influence.

Those promoting standards often conflate knowledge with lists of the stated stuff to be taught, teachers as mere vehicles who convey the sanctioned 'knowledge' and can easily be replaced, and students as pet performers who demonstrate what's been recalled via the set of sanctioned corporate-made tests. The narrative suggests that we can safely and aptly substitute the word, knowledge, for standards.  This is a critical and costly mistake.

Listen as Bill Gates explains what the Common Core is. Notice how he conflates CCSS with knowledge. Notice that he also fibs about who authored the CCSS: "A bunch of teachers got together with..."



Did you notice how Gates was adamant in March, 2014 to make clear that the CCSS is not a curriculum.  This is an important talking point that Gates repeats.  We also see this point made in the CCSS Myths vs. Facts:

from here. 

Local control is a touchy subject here in the States.  And yet, by July 2014 the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has funded via a $300,000 grant to Constitutional Rights Foundation  in order "to provide professional development opportunities for teachers to further hardwire the Common Core curriculum." Note the last three words: Common Core curriculum. Further Laura Slover, CEO of PARCC in monthly newsletter (August 2014) explained:

“High quality assessments go hand-in-hand with high quality instruction based, on high quality standards,” said Laura Slover, the Chief Executive Officer of the PARCC nonprofit. “You cannot have one without the other. The PARCC states see quality assessments as a part of instruction, not a break from instruction.”

Notice in Slover's comment that standards are the substitute for curriculum. That's no small omission. Notice also that teachers and students are not cast as agents doing. They have been deleted. They are missing in her statement completely. Again, this is not a slight omission. 

The release of sample test questions by New York State in August 2014 clearly shows that it is the Common Core that is the actor, the only curriculum to be attended to.   

The released questions are intended to help educators, students, families, and the public understand how the Common Core is different. The annotated questions demonstrate the way the Common Core should drive instruction and how tests have changed to better assess student performance in accordance with the instructional shifts demanded by the Common Core. (from here)

Can you hear the narrative being fed to you in these lines--telling you how to think?  Notice that the value of releasing test items is to better ensure that the public learns how the Common Core is different.  Here, the Common Core is the actor, more so than teachers, children, or parents.  We should be worried that a set of documents written by test executives should drive instruction for millions of children more so than the actual people involved in teaching and learning. The testing brochure is filled with examples of how to 'master' standards as if such routines represented the whole of learning. 

Now add to all of this that the actual juried research (evidence?) to support the Common Core advocated ELA shifts in learning seems to be absent. For example whose research did Coleman and Susan Pimentel rely in order to determine the precise percentages of narrative and informational texts to be read/taught from K- 12?  (See Peter Greene's post here.) 

Our young man has clearly left the house and perhaps some of us as well.


V.  A Mother Imagines

As I write this my son is at play on his computer alongside a friend who has come to spend the night.  They have big dreams that are fed and nourished by the affinity groups they align themselves to on and off line. These boys have been friends since 1st grade and are each now in high school, edging towards completion and their academic interest in school can at best be summarized as an obligation to be met and then dismissed. This is not to say that they don't enjoy school or enjoy the social time with peers and teachers, for they do.  

But their dreams have less and less place at school and it is increasingly challenging for their teachers to nourish and help them to refine/revise/reimagine their dreams especially at schools where state test performance rates need to increase. The important learning has been pre-determined without them and in many cases without their teachers. Let us recall those 24 people who have set the course of what matters at school via the standards. (Imagine the arrogance it takes to think you know what is necessary for millions of people to know across time.)

These acts of omission are cuts into democracy and its public institutions. And these are not academic concerns alone.  My child and yours are sorely misrepresented in the current narratives about teaching and learning. They are not situated as active determiners of their learning, but rather as things that get acted upon based on how well they perform on sanctioned tests. Their merit is defined by this performance and it drives their advancement or derailment.  (See Loy Gross in a guest post on The Chalk Face recounts this narrow focus of what counts at school well in A Tale of Two Students.)

Our children's imaginations have been forgotten in lieu of things that can be cheaply tested. So what might we do?  Giroux (2014) urges us to 

confront the urgent need to invent modes of pedagogy that release the imagination, connect learning to social change, and create social relations in which people assume responsibility for each other. Such a pedagogy is not about methods or prepping students to learn how to take tests. Nor is such an education about imposing harsh disciplinary behaviors in the service of the surveillance state. On the contrary, it is about a moral and political practice capable of energizing students and others to become more knowledgeable, while creating the conditions for generating a new vision of the future in which people can recognize themselves— a vision that resonates with the desires, dreams, and hopes of all those who are willing to fight for and participate in a community-driven democracy. (Kindle Locations 2390-2396). 

We need to notice the language we use and repeat about education and democracy and ask who benefits from this rhetoric?  We need to replace the teachers can't teach and we know better than you rhetoric with a more inclusive one that addresses clearly the aims for education we have in this republic. Let's lean on one another and stop dealing in absolutes and let's remember to ensure the voices of youth are prominent in these discussions. 

James Gee and Elizabeth Hayes (2011) explain that:

Other people’s language is inside my head whether I know it or not. Looked at this way, language is a communal resource from which we all beg, borrow, and steal. People talk like others and still each of us has our own unique style (Bakhtin 1981, 1986). ( p. 7).

We need to recant the narratives that situate excellence as schools that produce good test takers and teachers as being dispensable. They are not. They never have been. For a democracy to flourish, much more is needed.  We can (re)inform the education narratives by rewriting them. It begins by deconstructing what we are being told and then offering our own voice, our own insights.  It requires us to listen to our children, to listen and appreciate voices that differ from our own.  We can court the silent and in doing so we can generate a discourse of inclusion. 

Recall James Baldwin (1971) who boldly told us in An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis : 

"Since we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can..."

I'll stop here, waiting to hear your voice.



Works Cited

Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Gee, James Paul & Hayes, Elisabeth R. (2011). Language and Learning in the Digital Age, (p. 7). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition. 

Giroux, Henry A. (2014). The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America's Disimagination Machine (City Lights Open Media) (Kindle Locations 2107-2109). City Lights Publishers. Kindle Edition. 

Maas Taubman, Peter (2010). Teaching By Numbers: Deconstructing the Discourse of Standards and Accountability in Education (Studies in Curriculum Theory Series) (Kindle Locations 490-492). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition. 

There is No Complex Text Without a Reader: Parsing the Common Core & Mass Testing

 I. Down the Rabbit Hole - What Is Complex Text?

In the Common Core's  40-page Appendix A, the word complex appears 153 times, the word complexity appears 109 times, and the phrase, complex text, appears 16 times. The idea of text being complex is a central tenet to the Standards and I argue here is foundational for the logic that says mass testing of every public school child in the nation every year is appropriate, doable, equitable, and necessary.  The CCSS authors assert that during the last 50 years the texts used in K-12 schooling are in decline with regard to 'complexity' and that it is necessary to read 'complex text' in order to become college and career ready. The subtext to this might well be: "Truly those managing schools cannot be trusted to get this right. Look what they've been doing for the last 50 years." They contend all of this without clearly defining the central phrase, complex text.  If it's so critical then why don't they define it clearly? Here's what they do say.

So, what exactly does the phrase, complex text, mean? What are the CCSS authors ascribing? They begin Appendix A by writing:

One of the key requirements of the Common Core State Standards for Reading is that all students must be able to comprehend texts of steadily increasing complexity as they progress through school. By the time they complete the core, students must be able to read and comprehend independently and proficiently the kinds of complex texts commonly found in college and careers... In brief, while reading demands in college, workforce training programs, and life in general have held steady or increased over the last half century, K–12 texts have actually declined in sophistication, and relatively little attention has been paid to students’ ability to read complex texts independently (p. 3).

Ok. So the writers conflate a few terms without actually defining the phrase and it is important to note that comprehending texts of steadily increasing complexity is not the same thing as complex texts.  The first references a reader--someone is comprehending while the latter does not. Saying that complex texts are like the ones adults read at college or in their careers is ambiguous.  For example, undergraduates studying with me read the opening chapter to Bakhtin's Art and Answerability. Certainly not common reading material for K-12--nor should it be.  Next is the reference to sophisticated texts.  Should we assume that these are the same thing as complex texts?  What is meant by sophisticated and by whose standard?  Why such obfuscation?

So without establishing a clear explanation of what is meant by the phrase, complex text, the focus shifts to citing a 2006 report from ACT, Inc. (Reading Between the Lines: What the ACT Reveals About College Readiness in Reading). ACT, Inc. is a nonprofit organization that generates revenue by selling tests and testing programs to students, schools, states and companies.

In the report, the authors write: 

Texts used in the ACT Reading Test reflect three degrees of complexity: uncomplicated, more challenging, and complex (p.14).

Act modifies the word complexity by stating that the texts used in their test can be arranged along a continuum.  They add (see chart below from page 14) and then follow up with an explanation:

As shown in Table 1, the three types of texts represent a continuum of increasing complexity with respect to the following six aspects (which can be abbreviated to “RSVP”):

• Relationships (interactions among ideas or characters)

• Richness (amount and sophistication of information conveyed through data or literary devices)

• Structure (how the text is organized and how it progresses)

• Style (author’s tone and use of language)

• Vocabulary (author’s word choice)

• Purpose (author’s intent in writing the text) (p. 15)

So how is the presentation of text analysis from ACT, Inc. different than labeling texts complex by CCSS? ACT references specific, known texts  for a specific audience: high school seniors taking the assessment. From a known field of selected test passages they sorted these into three different categories based on their RSVP method and named those categories: Uncomplicated, More Challenging, and Complex. This represents a method and establishes a context in which that method will be used. Further, there is an implied reader: the high school senior taking the test. They could and did make a case to say: Within the testing passages, these differences among the texts based on our six aspects (RSVP) could be applied and one could argue that these are examples of complex text can be seen. They also provide detailed annotation of two passages to illustrate their schema. The CCSS authors adapted the ACT work by removing the context (specific testing passages for high school seniors) and applied the result to K-12 education. 

Next the CCSS authors reference a quote from Marilyn Adams (2009) and offer it  as an explanation for what complex text (from this text). They write:

"As Adams (2009) puts it, 'There may one day be modes and methods of information delivery that are as efficient and powerful as text, but for now there is no contest. To grow, our students must read lots, and more specifically they must read lots of ‘complex’ texts—texts that offer them new language, new knowledge, and new modes of thought' (p. 182)" (p. 4).

Adams makes the connection between the reader and the text insomuch as the word, new signals a reader and a context.  Again, the idea of complexity is connected to human activity. In contrast, the CCSS authors tend to situate complex text as autonomous--something one could point to that is independent of reader or context.  Brian Street (2000) explains that the autonomous model of literacy "disguises the cultural and ideological assumptions that underpin it and that can then be presented as though they are neutral and universal"( p. 7). 

Autonomous text is situated as being ideologically-whole--something ready to be used alongside the logic of mass testing.  So if complex text exists independent of context, and being able to read such texts as measured by tests produced by PARCC, Smarter Balance, ACT, ETS, or Pearson (who know what complex text is because they say so) then validation of ELA performance becomes limited to those who sanction what's complex text and not.   The test measures the algorithm not the reader. The writers state:

Being able to read complex text independently and proficiently is essential for high achievement in college and the workplace and important in numerous life tasks (p.4).

How can we know if students can read complex text independently and proficiently?  That is left unanswered directly.  However, there's a logic here that says if schools could not select the right texts during the last 50 years--years in which the text selection got worse and worse, than can educators now be trusted to do so? Can we risk this?  How can we know children and young adults are proficient readers if this is left to local hands?  Enter mass testing at national levels. In a parent handout from NY State (EngageNY) they explain to parents when asked if the CCSS will mean more test by responding:

No. The Common Core State Standards do not mean more tests. But there will be different, and better, tests. 

If local educators cannot be trusted to select the right texts that are complex enough, can they be trusted to measure learner's reading? And so it is not surprising that alongside the CCSS, PARCC, and Smarter Balance is the rhetoric that supports the use of Automated Essay Scoring (AES) --a fancy phrase for machine-scored writing.  This too takes the measurement out of  imperfect human hands. (Note NCTE's objection here.)  Alongside the publishing of the CCSS, a joint paper by ETS, Pearson, and College Board heralding the use of AES was published.  The authors state:

One possible mechanism for scoring the CR items is with human graders. However, years of research and practical experience with human graders reveal a number of challenges. There is a substantial and expensive logistical effort in supporting human scoring through recruiting, training, monitoring, and paying human graders. The process also takes considerable time to accomplish and can make it difficult to report scores quickly. Finally, even under the best conditions, there can be limits to the objectivity and consistency of human scores, despite using multiple human graders for each response.  

Human scoring is not the only option for scoring CR items. Recent advances in artificial intelligence and computing technology, paired with research over several decades, have yielded a number of systems in which computers assign scores to CR items. Both the availability and acceptance of automated scoring systems have grown substantially in recent years, with year-over-year expansion of operational use in both high- and low-stakes assessments. 

Last, the CCSS writers situate static print as primary and privileged. They write:

"In particular, if students cannot read complex expository text to gain information, they will likely turn to text-free or text-light sources, such as video, podcasts, and tweets. These sources, while not without value, cannot capture the nuance, subtlety, depth, or breadth of ideas developed through complex text" (p. 4).

The underlying (and I would contend faulty) assumptions here are legion, but beyond the limited scope of the word, text, and the act of reading, it does offer us an understanding that the CCSS authors understand worthy-for-students-to-read-text as being static print. Further, we can see again the CCSS authors situate such worthy text as autonomous--ideologically-whole. 

I  want to contend that there are no complex texts without readers.  It is the relationships between reader and text that allows for definition of simple and complex to be applied.  In the world of text, sans reader, we'll find simple (one way through) and complicated literary works, such a hypertexts, as they offer a reader multiple pathways through.  Complexity occurs in the transactions made by a reader and a text.  

Let's delve a bit.


II. An Interlude. A Quick Experiment (for you)

Take a minute to look through these screen shots taken while I was reading Michael Joyce's Twelve Blue.  I chronicled my first opening reading moves in this hypertext novel below.

I read the word, BEGIN, and I felt a lot like Alice. I recalled a book I scribbled in as a young child and thought for a few seconds about the marks I made with crayon and then I clicked, BEGIN and tumbled into this next screen. 

I was captivated by the visual graph and then read the William Gass quote which had me thinking about what I've read by Gass. With a little help from a google search of Gass, I recall the story, "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" and get sidetracked by a review of the book from 1968 in the NY Times. I read the review recalling the title story too. I'm not sure I read anything else. I check to see if there's a pdf of the text available and find mostly reviews and study guides. Amazon has the book and an ebook of it will be available October 7 of this year. Do I want to wait that long? Is this a book I want to hold and turn physical pages?  Hmm. I'll wait on this. Back to the story.

I'm scan the page and I'm feeling impulsive, thinking about the randomness of meaning and how things gather around lint and go with number 2, a favorite number, I think. I click on 2.

I'm immediately seduced by the opening words and pay scant attention to anything else. 

Each river flows two ways for at least an instant, whether a gasp at the source, the spring half lapsing before going on, or a watery wavering at the uncertain edge which joins her to sister or the sea. Nonetheless the long sigh of the estuary is something different, the Hudson easing swollen and recumbent upward halfway to Albany, plumping in her banks like the bluish flesh of an oyster, pregnant with pearl sheen even when no stone forms. 

Huh?  I love what I don't immediately grasp. I read on and finally latch on to a subject--a she, feeling like I'm no longer in that river moving two ways without aim.  A subject. I reread the paragraph.

Instead she gazes on the samples with a neutral eye, labwise and detached as a river in December. In the microscope there is no difference between the birth of an infant savior or the death of a crone at year's end. Life is a river that flows both ways, it doesn't do to get caught up in the threads the water weaves. So the men taught who tutored her in these alchemies. Even so she sees dreams in algae, lotus blossoms in saline solution, a sister in the oyster.

Who is she?
Why are these men who have tutored her?
What alchemies? Alchemies are more about magic and yet she sits at a microscope.  There's so much tension here (in the text and in me). I'm loving the uncertainty (well, sometimes). I'm forming tentative theories.  Okay back to reread and I tackle what I don't get:

The violet stain is like no color in nature. Alkali. Kali. Queen. 

I query Alkali. Kali. Queen and I find it is a reference is to the book The Queen's Printers' Aids to the Student of the Holy Bible and I'm piecing together that what she sees (as I now there is a she) is a violet stain on the slide that is unnatural and yet it has been taken from the river. Yes?  Here's what I find in that book on page 51:

This is unrelated but earlier this evening Rob and I mentioned Richard Powers' novel, Gain--a book we each have loved and taught.  And I'm connecting that novel to this screen and wondering about those lifeforms the girl/woman could spy on the slide.  Thinking about chemicals from factories and rivers that carry so much along its currents.

 I press on the hyperlink and am taken to this screen:

Hmm. Okay I can recall photographing shorelines of the Hudson River in summer. Up near Bear Mountain. One afternoon, I'd taken a bumpy road  on my way north to Newburgh, NY and found lots of places to stop and make images. This reminds me of what I recall seeing. I want to enlarge the image and press on it and I get taken to this screen:

I'm falling in. River. Text. Self. The language is so much more than I had imagined I would find.  It's a poem.  I say aloud:  "Yes, everything can be read." (and I say this in the voice I imagine to be like Molly Bloom's. (Think breathy for is this passage nothing less than a full declaration of living?) This is the written poem.  The image, a visual poem. There's cohesion to that I think quickly and I select a colored line to the left of the words and click it loving how the image reminds me of my mother's knitting bag and the loose yarn that collected there and I am anticipating there will be some explanation to what I've read.


*****************************************

III. Meaning Making is Complex, Physical Texts May be Complicated

I stop here for now I want to take a few minutes to parse together what complicated text might be. Joyce's hypertext offers us a concrete example of a complicated text as it is co-made by the reader's decisions, impulses and fancies as s/he reads.  A complicated text has multiple ways through. This is physically evident in the Joyce text. Even though there are multiple ways through the Joyce text, the pathway(s) a reader constructs can be physically traced, but the reading cannot be duplicated.

The meaning a reader composes while reading a physical text is complex.  The physical text is complicated.  These are not minor differences. If you or I were to follow the screens I read, the meaning made would be different from what happened a little while ago.  

Wolfgang Iser (1974) writes that the literary text “activates our own faculties, enabling us to recreate the world it presents. The product of this creative activity is what we might call the virtual dimension of the text, which endows it with its reality... The virtual dimension is not the text itself, nor is it the imagination of the reader: it is the coming together of text and imagination” (p. 279, emphasis mine). 

Complexity refuses to be confined to a traceable path.  It's inherently nomadic. It cannot be tested using paper and pencil or the computer version of paper and pencil.