Coal in the Stocking for Bill de Blasio: Point by Point Case How His DOE is as Heartless as Any Reformy Mayor

How different is Bill from Mike?

De Blasio: which side are you on? Your education record shows that you are on the same side as Bloomberg, Cuomo, Tisch and Coleman

De Blasio to sick and injured teachers: Drop dead

FACT:

The New York City Department of Education is still as heartless as ever, denying injured people their due days off. People with iron-clad doctor's documentation of valid sick claims are being denied their days off. After their return to work, the DOE comes after them for AWOL issues. Yet, the DOE is at fault, its modus operandi is to drag its feet on medical claims, and then after the injured teachers exceed their ten annual sick days, it targets them.
The NYC DOE is suddenly finding fault in the teaching acumen of a veteran teacher. He so happened to have taken a medical leave, yet in a likely case of retaliation for disputes over his leave and for his years of activism he is being targeted with repeat observations.

Interpretation: the DOE is being very tight-fisted with its budgeting, and that's why it is nickel and dime denying granting sick time to the injured or chronically ill.

De Blasio to teachers exercising free speech: our Stasi is still active

FACT:

The DOE still has people dedicated to monitoring teachers' use of social media, such as Facebook. The DOE still has an alphabet soup of agencies with trench-coat men that administrators use against teachers over the flimsiest of accusations. From the number of 3020a's that the city is pursuing, it is doubtful that the city has dismissed its huge posse of attorneys in its teacher performance unit. The TPU works hand in glove with vindictive principals to target teachers on the most spurious of charges. This is continuing unabated under de Blasio/Farina.

De Blasio to teachers: we're coming after your pensions

FACT:

As the Chaz School Daze and the NYC Rubber Room Reporter have been documenting for years, the DOE has particularly set its sights on terminating senior teachers. (See previous section for the TPU's role here.) This is continuing at full strength and it includes the DOE's program to “thin the herd,” and terminate ATR's.

Harassment until teachers quit serves the same tight-fisted budget mentality: when the administrators harass teachers until they quit the DOE will be spared paying unemployment pay to these teachers.

Interpretation:

Bill de Blasio is just as much dedicated to prematurely ending careers as the previous mayor.

De Blasio to teachers: we could care less as to whether technology distracts students

FACT:

De Blasio and chancellor Carmen Farina lifted the cell phone ban and they lifted the DOE filters on YouTube videos and other highly distracting sites. It is very ironic that one cannot do certain legitimate searches on DOE computers (yet, in continuation from the Bloomberg/Klein/Walcott years, the DOE allows floods of commercial spam on DOE emails); and meanwhile filters on certain searches in place four years ago have vanished. Students are using the cell phones in schools and in class rampantly. Police are suspecting that gangs at the Lehman high school complex are using them to coordinate fights and in the Westchester Square section of the Bronx this has led to weeks of mayhem, jeopardizing the neighborhood's commercial viability.

Interpretation:

On distractive technology Bloomberg actually had the better policy than de Blasio. Either the new mayor is just coddling the students or he is intentionally adding to factors that will distract students and thus bring down teachers' productivity.

De Blasio to teachers: just dare to evade Common Core and you'll be sanctioned for defying its mandate
FACT:

Common Core was drafted by people with no K-12 teaching experience; it fits perfectly into plans for standardized testing. These tests had alienated students across the country as hundreds of thousands refused to cooperate.
Common Core channels narrow interpretation of texts. It conceives of limited interpretations of text. Its methods mitigate against critical thinking. It demands the marginalization of literature. Its mathematical methods are highly unusual and profoundly alienate parents, thus disenfranchising parents from helping with their children's homework.
In contrast to de Blasio's public fights with New York governor Andrew Cuomo, he has said nothing on Common Core. As of this December 28, 2015 writing Common Core has virtual force of law in New York State and New York City. Administrators continue to insist that teachers follow it. 
Thus, it is inappropriate that the media have interpreted recent federal ESEA legislation and NYSED Common Core pronouncements as meaning there is a New York state shift away from Common Core. As any NYS or NYC teacher will tell you, administrators are still using Common Core to evaluate lessons.

The New York City Department of Education's own house sub-agency of standards refinement continues to adopt and enthusiastically refine New York state's version of Common Core. The NYC DOE, despite the widespread popular rejection of Common Core still cooperates with plans to further impose Common Core's focus on textual analysis on science, social studies and even physical education, dislodging the conventional agendas of those subjects. It continues to indoctrinate and train administrators and teachers in the methods of Common Core. 

Teachers have cited the CCSS-related tests' inappropriateness and their negative emotional impacts on many students. Parents have objected to the CCSS-based high stakes tests fundamental purpose in stack-ranking evaluations of teachers. Parents, and some teachers, have created a massive statewide movement against these tests, citing cooperating with the tests as educationally inappropriate and morally compromising. 

Your morals or you job:
NYC imposes a gag order on teachers and principals, forcing them to not advocate opting out; this mirrors NYS mandates that these professionals cannot even quote questions or answer choices from the tests. The NYC DOE under de Blasio and Farina is sticking by these stances against test opt-out just as tenaciously as the DOE under Bloomberg and Walcott, and just as tenaciously as the NYS under Cuomo and state regents chancellor Merryl Tisch.

Interpretation:
NYC mayor Bill de Blasio is cooperating with the most insidious aspect of the education reform movement: the turning education into an experience restrained from critical reflection and centered around teaching for standardized tests. NYC mayor by his complete cooperation with Cuomo and his perpetuation of the Bloomberg Common Core commitment is on the wrong side of the education's central conflict in our era; he is on the same side as David Coleman, Arne Duncan, John King and so on.

De Blasio to students of color and low income students: we're a Jim Crow system and we're not going to sincerely move to correct it -- Teachers, we'll punish you if you openly criticize it

FACT:

New York City as of Spring, 2014, ranked as the most segregated school system in thecountry. In just two years it moved from position of being reported as the third most segregated school system, behind Chicago.  Yet, not only does the city maintain different standards of school tone, curriculum offerings, sports offerings, library, P.E. resources for different ethnic populations, it maintains this by a class dynamic as well. Note that it was under de Blasio that the citytargeted a Bronx teacher for daring to speak out on behalf of student-athletes, on how their options were inferior to those in more privileged schools. 

Driving the caste system that the DOE maintains is a competitive application system. Students not only have to apply and compete for a high school slot, they must apply to intermediate and other lower level schools. Sickeningly, parents must apply to have their child enroll in pre-Kindergarten programs. As the subway ads emphasize, there are deadlines, much as colleges have deadlines. And the program itself is plagued by problems of failing to adequately serve the neediest populations.

The Atlantic wrote of de Blasio's program:

What Fuller and his team found is that the preschool seats are more prevalent in the city’s most affluent neighborhoods than they are in the poorest ones. Whereas 41 percent of the slots are located in the most affluent one-fifth of the city’s zip codes, just 30 percent of them are in the poorest one-fifth—a dynamic that researchers in part attribute to New York’s real-estate limitations. Upper-middle-class areas appear to have gotten about as many new pre-k seats as have the poorest ones. And roughly 11,000 4-year-olds living in those poorest neighborhoods aren’t even enrolled in the program, according Fuller.

 .   .   .

But the study finds that, though de Blasio’s office insists that the new program is benefitting lower-income parts of the city, that claim fails to take into account the much higher numbers of 4-year-olds living in poor neighborhoods than in more affluent ones. Following up on the administration's response, Fuller said the percentages reveal that de Blasio is "evenly spreading new seats across the city, rich and poor ... and this fails to move the system toward equitable access."

The high school placement program, in fact, was developed by the same developer that developed a medical school resident placement program. 

With the new competitive school choice model, the system concentrates level 1 (in English Language Arts or Math) students into “troubled schools,” and it concentrates levels 3 and 4 into “successful schools.” Thus, it is no wonder that the city's underperforming students are concentrated in the city's most segregated schools. Even the New York Post recognizes this fact. Yet, de Blasio, who is supposed to be a better, more compassionate mayor than Bloomberg cannot recognize this fact.

Also, as a New School study documents in great detail, with accessible maps to illustrate the point, New York City's school placement process actually creates schools that are far more segregated than the neighborhoods where they are located.

The fraud of school choice leading to school excellence has a huge infrastructure toll as well. In a city that is already strained to the limit with high population and a growing number of public transit users, school choice has forced thousands of students to commute, exacerbating the great

Gone are the days when a student could go to the school of his or her neighborhood, “school choice” means that students apply and that they are sent all over the city. This erodes the neighborhood-school connection for students to identify with. Also, if students must spend an hour on multiple transportation modes getting to school, you can be sure that parents have as hard a time getting to parent engagement nights.

Interpretation:

Bloomberg transposed the competitive model for education with his demolition of the traditional zone system in favor of school choice. Schools often realized their potential as spaces for social heterogeneity. Now, with the competitive model, the separation means that inequality worsens. De Blasio has perpetuated Bloomberg's caste-school system with no significant changes to eradicate the inequalities of opportunity.

Summative interpretation:

Bloomberg was on a mission to transform the teacher from a respectful profession to one which is demeaned and harassed. This means that this teaching force would be a transient one that did not know its rights. De Blasio has done hardly anything to lessen the severity of how the DOE despised teachers. 

The Bloomberg changes did not produce educational improvement. The proof of this is the widespread de facto policy of "just pass everybody," the credit recovery programs that give a semester's worth of credit for merely completing a single assignment. This is blatant cheating, used to desperately cover a tremendously failed record. This has given a poor lesson to New York City students: that they can pass, regardless of taking personal responsibility. This has meant that New York City students are poorly prepared for even CUNY community colleges. This has meant that the scholastic worth of a New York City diploma is rather contestable, particularly if the school is one that practices the intellectually dishonest practices just mentioned. Yet, all the trends of administrator lax standards, as documented on the Chaz School Daze blog, are continuing under de Blasio-Farina with no apparent change from the Bloomberg years.

If the 2013 mayoral election were to mean anything it would have meant correction of the many ways that the DOE had taken a wrong course since 2002. Yet, Farina failed to clean house and replace the principals that fostered a climate of fear. Farina and de Blasio failed to appoint Tweed (DOE headquarters) officials that would part from the destructive ways of the Bloomberg administration. 

The Narrow, Myopic Vision of the Solidarity Caucus

7/14 postscript on doublethink below.
A novice United Federation of Teachers (UFT) caucus, Solidarity, is making a premature run for the 2016 union election. Much attention has been given to related personal controversies. This article takes the opportunity to look at the caucus, its origins and its campaign program or platform.

The caucus had in its genesis an intense opposition to both the MORE Caucus and the Unity Caucus statements of empathy for Eric Garner, who was killed in a chokehold by New York Police Department officers. In the nearly one year since, deadly police brutality, particularly against people of color, has become the civil rights issue of the nation. People from across the political spectrum were shocked and quite disappointed when a grand jury issued no indictment against any of the officials involved in killing Garner. This is important to recall when considering the character and principles of the caucus.

In its founding it insisted on staying narrowly focusing on teacher issues and on eschewing any attention to any other concerns beyond teachers' issues. Yet, while it appropriates the images of Albert Shanker, Unity Caucus leader of the UFT, it ignores that more largely, the labor union movement has taken stances of solidarity with civil rights activists and anti-war activists. It ignores that in 1957 the American Federation of Teachers dismissed locals that refused to desegregate. It ignores that the United Auto Workers, the AFT and other unions marched in solidarity in the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington.  It ignores that strikes have had their greatest popularity when they had reached out to the community. Witness the work that the Lawrence 1912 Bread and Roses textile strikers did in reaching out to the community prior to their strike. Witness the parallel work that the Chicago Teachers Union has done when it took a year of community outreach in preparing for its 2012 strike. The CTU won widespread parent support after making sure to have a two-way dialog to understand the concerns of parents and students, instead of simply pursuing an employee-centered contract and strike campaign. Teacher-community partnership continues to this day in other examples such as St. Paul, Minnesota

Hypocritically, in the quest for allies for its caucus once it had an election in mind, it opportunistically parted from the caucus' founding principle to eschew larger issues or the community and solicited support from a community anti-high-stakes testing group, Change the Stakes.

Now, let us look at the Solidarity Caucus' platform and what is missing

While it gives attention to the special needs of Absent Teacher Reserve teachers (ATRs) where others are silent, this is almost where its issue attention ends. It does not look to the experiences of the regularly assigned teachers. One wonders if the authors even consulted regular classroom teachers. There is no specific discussion about the Danielson Framework, the New York State-dictated Measures of Student Learning (MOSLs) or other aspects of New York City's Advance teacher evaluation system. There is no attention to structural dynamics such as mayoral control, which determine the parameters of what the City Department of Education can do. There is no attention to the Common Core State Standards, which are alienating teachers from their profession and are alienating students from learning. There is no attention to the parent-student solidarity movement which is so essential for teachers who are suffering under the over-testing regimen, the opt-out movement. 

The caucus platform includes complaints about the use of tests in value-added metrics to evaluate teachers. However, the platform does not recognize how the testing emphasis is directly linked to other larger issues, some of which are issues that lead directly to the excessing of teachers into the ATR category: the DOE's testing focus narrows the latitude of what teachers can do in the classroom, the testing focus on core academic subjects crowds out attention to non-core subjects such as foreign language, the arts or physical education. Moreover, the platform studiously ignores larger social-economic-political realities. It ignores that there is a corporatist campaign by politicians in both major parties and an economic privatization campaign by privatizers that capitalize by the test-based stack ranking (rank ordering) of teachers and students and overall privatization of curricula, tests and schools.

Additionally, the caucus program's focus on the teacher involves an ignoring of the effect of the high-stakes tests on students themselves. It ignores the emotional stresses upon students and the attendant alienation from the schooling process in this overall climate of high-stakes testing and driving non-tested subjects out of the curriculum. Just as a decent doctor would care about a patient personally and their living and working conditions and how those impacted the person's health, one would hope that teachers would care about their student charges and the factors that impacted on their life. Just as one commenter on a blog in reaction to the formation of the caucus by saying that he cared about the living conditions of the students, I would echo those points. Teachers are choking under the attacks by corporatist politicians and by privatizatizers, and more rank and file teachers are recognizing this. Yet, Solidarity has made a big conceptual error to ignore this larger context in their program. In this sense, it is mirroring the conceptual errors that conventional, mainstream unions or caucuses, that Michael Mulgrew and the Unity Caucus makes.

Teachers ought to consider the larger social conditions impacting on students. As emphasized previously on this blog, income disparities are extreme in this nation and within the nation, income inequality is more extreme in New York city and state. (See this posting re inequality in the city; and regarding poverty impact on learning see introductory comments at this blog posting.) The stresses of race and class inequality impact on students' lives and negatively impact their educational performance. From issues of police mistreatment of youths of color to profound personal emotional stresses of poverty, these experiences inform the lived reality of the children that we teach in our classrooms. If we wish our students to have the best educational experience, we as teachers should not only attend to our own craft, our own performance, but we should also be concerned with recognizing the social inequality; we should work to change that inequality. This is why I am a social justice education unionist.

POSTSCRIPT:
There are many aspects about the organizing tactics of the key personalities in the caucus that are at once deceptive and deeply disturbing.  Most recently, a social media page connected with the group has been created. A Solidarity page headline boasts an army of 10,000. It turns out that the organizers of the page snatched up 10,000 names and made them --unwittingly, mind you-- into "supporters." This is putschist organizing at its basest.
New exploitative techniques in political deception on Facebook:
Just when you thought it could not get worse. The leader of Solidarity has taken the names of a few dozen well-known opponents of Michael Mulgrew and posted their names in Facebook postings. The risk is that the uninitiated would think that these persons endorse the Solidarity cult.
Doublethink alert:
The Solidarity leader ignores that the New Action caucus supports Michael Mulgrew in every election in NAC's quid pro quo for executive board seats, and he cries foul when Mulgrew and Unity opponents challenge his desire to ally with NAC, questioning whether they are truly an opposition caucus. Yet, Solidarity claims to oppose Mulgrew and Unity. Thus, this is a classic example of doublethink: the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time, especially used in political indoctrination. If you cannot be clear how Solidarity leaders think, can you be clear where their true convictions lie?

Meet MaryEllen Elia -- Another Meryll Tisch Kindred Spirit in Albany, as new NYS Education Commissioner

Here we go again?

For the recent years in New York State we were subjected to John King, recipient of a speedy Ed.D. degree, along with Merryl Tisch, THE grand doyenne of high stakes tests and the Common Core. King gave the whiny face to the hard sell of the Common Core across New York State. The problem was that he was totally tone-deaf to the people's (students, parents, teachers) pain over the Common Core States Standards Initiative, particularly evident in the 2013 to 2014 academic year.

Now we get MaryEllen Elia from Florida, fired just months ago from Hillsborough, Florida district (which includes Tampa), in a 4-3 vote, as their schools superintendent. Chancellor Tisch dismissed the flap (To her credit she has more classroom and schools leadership experience than King had.)

[Update: Tampa Tribune, September 19, 2013, on how she got an F.]

Yet, she got a unanimous nod from the New York State Board of Regents, from the Chancellor and the Vice Chancellor. As with NYC principals, you can fall on your face, and rise to the top. But for teachers? Once you slip, never forgiven.

The controversy with Elia? This piece today in the Diane Ravitch blog gives important clues, and her points of controversy put her very well in sync with NYSED chancellor Tisch (pro-high stakes tests, pro-Common Core, pro-test-based evaluations of teachers, pro-merit pay of teachers --see this profile by the Washington Post's Valerie Strauss):

Parent activists are wary of Elia because of her past support for high-stakes testing. To win their confidence, she must clarify her views about testing, about the Opt Out movement, about detaching test scores from teacher evaluations, about merit pay, and about Common Core.

And for the anxiety factor: the New York teachers unions are rumored to like her. But who exactly is that (UFT? also NYSUT?) and why do they like her? Ravitch says that Elia was in the rightist Gov. Rick Scott's transition team.

Tisch's puppet? Fall woman for Cuomo?

"I'm Your Puppet":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liKhLNY5GYI

Duncan Crosses Rubicon As He Threatens Opt-Out Districts With Sanctions

*Several Supreme Court decisions could supply bases for opposing Duncan's threats

In his Apr 21 statement that the federal government is obliged to intervene if states fail to address the growing number of students that are boycotting federally mandated annual exams. (Federal law in Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandate annulized testing. However, the form of the test is up to respective state authorities. New York has opted for a Common Core State Standards (CCSS) -based test that is outside of the SBAC or the PARCC test consortia.) It is estimated that over 184,000 students opted out of the CCSS based English tests in New York last week. (Essential Update: See also this issue covered at Diane Ravitch's blog, on 4/22/15, "State May Have Power to Withhold Federal Funding to Punish Opt-Outs." Talk about collective punishment!)

U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan is taking a disturbingly authoritarian course with his threat of sanctions against school districts that fail to achieve 95 percent compliance with high-stakes tests, as stemming from the ESEA. The hinted punishment by federal or state authorities would be withholding funds, the New York State Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE) denies the claim that districts will lose funding over low participation rates in high-stakes standardized tests.

Orders to be followed without question are in two places: in militaries, and in authoritarian regimes.

Duncan and the U.S. DOE is demanding compliance without question with his new statement.  

Duncan has truly crossed the line with his threat of sanctions for non-compliance. Further disturbing is his expectation that districts directly address the non-compliers. Of course, we must realize what this leads to. If districts must investigate and curtail opt-outing activity, they must find, document and punish non-complying students and their parents. And note below how he is attempting to enlist state authorities in addressing non-compliance this month with the Common Core tests.

A federal education department spokeswoman said last week that the agency could withhold funding from states if some of their districts have too few students take the exams, but that it has not yet done so because states have addressed the issue on their own.

State education department spokesman Jonathan Burman said in an email Tuesday that the “the feds are discussing the possibility of imposing penalties for failing to hit participation rate targets.” He added that the state is also expected to “consider imposing sanctions” on districts that fail to meet the 95 percent threshold, which could include withholding money “in the most egregious cases.” (Opt-out advocates have questioned the state’s interpretation of the testing law, and say that sanctions are only allowed after a district falls below the 95 percent level for three years.)

Duncan, unless he reverses his statements, is handing the 2016 election to Republicans. How could someone expect Democrats to continue to get popular support from liberals? And wouldn't Independents lean closer to Republicans after this threat?

*Supreme Court case precedence would make fighting Duncan easy

Duncan's demands for compliance, echoed by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, could be easily challenged in federal court. For, Supreme Court precedent maintains that parental rights are held highly, above concerns for other matters such as property rights. For example, see Hodgson v. Minnesota (1990) which notes that parental rights are protected under the Fourteenth Amendment. Parental rights figured in the decision, Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) which upheld the right of Amish parents not to send their children to public schools past eighth grade. And of course, Duncan's actions over the past six years have been riddled with Tenth Amendment violations.

Consider also the matter of compulsory student signing of silence oaths on state tests, which would seem to violate the First Amendment. Easily, precedential case law could render these mandates unconstitutional. West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943) established that it was unconstitutional to expect students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance; Engel v. Vitale (1962) barred state mandates that students recite prayers in school. Certainly, a lawyer could soundly argue that from these cases it can be argued that children cannot be compelled to sign oaths to be silent about test contents. Additionally, we have seen at least one well-known instance of the disciplining of a New Mexico student over informing other students of opt-out rights.

Easily, litigants could bring case against Duncan, Cuomo and any other government officials seeking to enforce cooperation with state tests and silence oaths on test contents.

How would Duncan achieve his goal of identifying and reprimanding opponents and opposition leaders? Existing staff would take on new investigative and police powers. 

This would give people an ugly taste in their mouth when hearing “Democrat.” If Hillary Clinton or other presidential contender of any political party have any sense of savvy they would run in the other direction from Duncan and Cuomo and their talk of sanctions over opt-outs.

Researchers: American Teens are More Stressed than Adults - Could Our Soul-Deadening Test-Prep Regime Have Something to Do with It?

Time magazine reported this month that U.S. teens are stressed out more than adults.

Could not the overwhelming education regime of deadening Common Core State Standards which elides literature and the heavy test and test-prep until you drop have something to do with this?

Could not the elimination of arts and extra-curricular athletics have something to do with alienation and particularly alienation from school have something to do with high adolescent stress?

American Teens Are Stressed and Bored. It’s Time to Talk About Feelings

by  Diana Divecha and Robin Stern

April 10, 2015, TIME magazine

Diana Divecha, Ph.D., is a developmental psychologist and research affiliate at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. Robin Stern, Ph.D., is associate director of the center and a psychoanalyst.

The kids are not alright

Every night, at dinner tables around the country, parents ask their kids the same question: “How was school?” We’re about to find out how millions of American youth feel about their school day. On April 9, the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and Born This Way Foundation invited high school students across the United States to go online to declare how they feel while they’re in school. And how they’d like to feel.

Why does it matter how kids feel during the school day? A child’s day is a roller coaster of emotions. And sadly, many of the feelings are unpleasant.

A growing body of research highlights the importance of how kids feel and how they manage those feelings, or not. Emotions drive attention, learning, memory, and decision-making. They affect relationships and psychological well-being. Learning to handle emotions well is especially important in adolescence, a time when neural networks are being sculpted that will influence behavior patterns for life.

But American youth, especially teens, are not in good emotional shape. They feel mostly “bored and checked out” at school, according to adolescence scholar Larry Steinberg. Academically, they are underachieving when compared to youth in other developed nations. And their mental health is declining. During the school year, their stress has edged beyond that of adults, according to a survey of the American Psychological Association last year. They rank in the bottom quarter among other developed nations on measures of well-being, life-satisfaction, and relationship quality, according to a recent UNICEF study.

Emotional skills can be taught, and some schools have adopted programs to do just that. The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, the nation’s leading organization advancing this cause, says that children should have five core emotion competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making. Teaching kids about their feelings can mean the difference between whether a personal setback becomes chronic failure or strengthens resolve, whether a disagreement with a friend festers into anger or is navigated gracefully, whether the intellectual insight is fanned or extinguished.

Schools that have adopted social-and-emotional-learning (SEL) programs are seeing the difference: An analysis of 213 such programs showed that, if evidence-based and well-taught, they can improve students’ emotional skills, prosocial behaviors and relationships with others, and attitudes about school. In addition, behavior problems are reduced, and students make modest gains in academic achievement. And 93% of teachers indicated in a survey that they want SEL training in their schools. Programs have been successful in diverse settings: rural and urban areas, independent and public schools, poor neighborhoods and affluent ones. A cost-benefit analysis released last month from Columbia University concluded that every dollar spent teaching an SEL program yielded an $11 savings through benefits such as reduced aggression and violence, substance abuse, delinquency, better mental health, and better academic performance.

But the funding to support SEL programs and the policies to guide them are slow to come. Several federal bills are pending that would mandate and provide the funding for SEL programs and teacher training. A few states, including Illinois, Kansas, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, are beginning to move ahead on their own.

 Read on, at the original TIME magazine article for more discussion of the issue. 

 

Opt-Out Wildfire Spreads: Ordinary NYS Parents & Students Speak Truth to Cuomo & Company's Lies

*Test opt-outs from Western New York to Suffolk County in Long Island
*Disproportionately low opt-out numbers in New York City --legacy of Bloomberg & Mulgrew

The people are speaking. They know education. They know worth of education, of children, of what is inappropriate testing. They realize spirit deadening high-stakes testing. They realize the inappropriateness of the Common Core. They recognize that the Common Core was imposed on the people without the people asking for it, without public hearings on the Common Core. They realize that the Common Core and its attendant test-prep regimen is deadening the spirit and joy of a generation of school children. THEY ARE SAYING "NO MORE!"

They remember when tests were cheaply produced, mainly in-house New York State affairs. They see the wholesale selling of the people's state schools to Pearson and Governor Cuomo's friends.

There was no public outcry for the selling of schools and children for corporations' gain. Yet, this is the incessant demand of Cuomo, State Education Department Chancellor Merryl Tisch (who has lied with claims that opting out will jeopardize millions in federal money), and those quisling superintendents that blindly follow the demand for the invalid tests. (Of course, kudos to Joseph Rella, a superintendent of strong conscience.)

Parents are seeing that their children are being exploited in being used as political footballs in a shallow battle against teachers. Parents see through the selling out of the schools to privateers. Parents are refusing to allow their children to be pawns in this education war.

Teachers tip their hat to parents, as in the opt-out movement parents are showing solidarity with teacher: they refusing to allow their children to be fodder against teachers.

So, we see test-opt outs across the state: Refusal rates from the 30s to 70s percent.
The Buffalo News reports: "Two thousand kids in West Seneca schools opt out," as students in the Buffalo Niagara district opt out.

The News' recent article reported:

The number of students refusing to participate is expected to grow significantly over the 60,000 statewide who refused to take the tests last year.

The rate reached 70 percent Tuesday in the West Seneca School District, where 2,074 of 2,976 eligible students refused testing. Rates at individual schools ranged from 50 percent at Northwood Elementary School to 83 percent at Allendale Elementary.

In lower Hudson Valley districts opt-out rates were high: "MAP: School districts seeing high opt-out rates"

In Nassau and Suffolk county, opt-outs were also high, with one town reaching an 82 percent opt-out rate. Headlines from the last 24 hours reverberate with resistance to the high-stakes tests.

Parents opt kids out of Common Core test --News 12 Long Island

Common Core Opponents Predict Record-Breaking Numbers Of Students Opting Out --Long Island Press

Some LI school districts showing record numbers of test opt-outs --Newsday

Long Island: This Will Be the Biggest Opt Out Ever --Diane Ravitch blog

Alas, with mayoral control, popular speech, popular expression by parents in an elected board of education, has been deligitimized in New York City.

Shamefully, the New York City media, the public radio station WNYC included, continually has pressed for mayoral control and its renewal. In this era, there is a paucity of parent activism and involvement. So, there has been proportionately very low resistance in New York City. The low level of resistance also has its roots in the repression of teachers over the past twelve years, and in the collaboration of the union, the United Federation of Teachers, whose leader, Michael Mulgrew, has supported the Common Core, and has opposed the opt-out movement. The UFT has defeated opt-out resolutions proposed by the Movement of Rank and File Educators caucus (MORE). Most recently, Monday, in the Mulgrew-dominated Executive Board, Unity aligned UFT leaders dug in their heels against the opt-out movement.

Of course, never forget that NYC opt-out began with two heroic teachers in a Brooklyn high school.

And, of course, "The revolution won't be televised": note that you cannot find this news covered in the New York Times. I will bet my paycheck that if WNYC runs a story they WILL put Merryl Tisch in the driver's seat and they will NOT interview anyone from Change the Stakes.

Common Core & History - CCSS Dangerously Distorts the Mission and Practice of the Discipline

David Coleman's video giving a prescription for how to teach history should send shudders through everyone concerned with teaching or understanding history.

Watch the video, "Bringing the Common Core to Life," in which Coleman delivered his dogma for how history should be taught in the United States, on June 7, 2011 at the PARCC Transition and Implementation Institute at a Maryland convention center. Namely, he speaks to how we should study Abraham Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" and Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." PARCC is one of the two interstate consortia to administer Common Core tests on a uniform basis across states, hardly a neutral venue for proselytizing the Common Core orthodoxy. Insidiously, the Common Core machine has finagled its way into getting the same message into a Public Broadcasting System (PBS) site.

(Note the language. The language of the various individuals carrying out Coleman's project, whether duped/or complicit politicians, business leaders, labor leaders or school level professional development facilitators is undergirded by the notion that the CCSS are something to be supported as though they were a respected cultural group in the community. The blind devotion to the Common Core's precepts smacks of fundamentalism. Never is it questioned that the CCSS drives a corporate testing agenda conceived and pressed forward by the Gates Foundation, Pearson LLC and others. Never is it raised that the CCSS was conceived in a secretive process that evaded the democratic avenues of policy creation. Note also that in all these Coleman videos, whether at Vimeo or at PBS, viewer comments are disabled. What kind of world are we in when the indoctrinators can speak to us, but we the people cannot speak of the new orthodoxy that they are creating? Certainly, we are charting a terrible direction for our society.)

He apparently confuses historical documents as things to fixate over as though holy texts, rather as artifacts by which to critically review to understand history.

The fixation on viewing text for itself and refusing to consider context strongly rings concordant with the New Criticism school of literary theory. Note that in its formative period it was developed and mainly followed in the pre-World War II Jim Crow U.S. South, a place in which the power elite kept the mass of the population down. Wouldn't it fit in the elite's interests for people not to question literature, to probe context or to reflectively draw parallels and contrasts between text and the real world? Indeed, Coleman's new New Criticism is dangerous stuff indeed. Note well that the Wikipedia article for New Criticism cited criticisms that this trend "treated literary texts as autonomous and divorced from historical context, and that its practitioners were 'uninterested in the human meaning, the social function and effect of literature.'"

Former Ardsley, New York history teacher, Craig Thurtell wrote a helpful critique that challenges head-on the Common Core's dislodging of the history discipline's craft.

Do the Common Core Standards Flunk History?

History News Network, George Mason University, April 8, 2013

By now, virtually every public school teacher has heard about the Common Core State Standards (referred to here as CCSS, the Standards, or the common core). Set forth in their final version in May of 2010, they claim ["Pressure Mounts in Some States Against Common Core," February 4, 2013] to “represent a synthesis of the best elements of standards-related work to date and an important advance over that previous work.” (p. 3 of the CCSS) The CCSS have been adopted by 46 states so far for English language arts (ELA) and 45 for mathematics. They primarily address those two fields, but they fold other subjects, including history, into the ELA standards. As the Standards took shape, the National Council for the Social Studies expressed an understandable concern that they include a meaningful presence for social studies, but made no objection to their basic approach to reading and writing. The National Council for History Education was similarly concerned [in "FAQs Common Core State Standards and History Education"] about the role of history, but concluded that “[t]he Literacy Standards for History/Social Studies focuses [sic] on deep and critical, discipline-specific reading, writing, and thinking at grades 6-12.” Rearguard resistance notwithstanding, in the states that have adopted them, school districts are advancing toward implementation, with testing set to begin in 2014-2015.

The ELA Standards do represent an improvement over most state standards in the rigor of their learning expectations. But in spite of the apparent inevitability of the standards, scholars and educators have raised a range of criticisms. In a series of critical essays on education reform in the New York Review of Books ["Schools We Can Envy"], Diane Ravitch has pointed out that the standards have never been field tested, making their effectiveness unknown and nation-wide implementation premature. Others have raised more specific objections, including the obvious role of poverty in diminishing student achievement, which challenges the putative need for new standards; the inevitable proliferation of new tests that will be needed to measure performance; the deceptively central role of the U.S. Department of Education; the insufficient rigor of the standards; the fallacies of the “career and college readiness” exit standard; and the problems with the emphasis on “informational texts,” as the CCSS has termed the non-fiction reading material it favors.

Aside from the NCHE’s praise, however, few critics have evaluated the impact of the CCSS on teaching the humanities, or more specifically, on the teaching of history. It is my contention that the CCSS express an antipathy to the humanities in general and insensitivity to the practice of history in particular, and that this problem is closely related to their nonhistorical approach to historical texts. This approach also permits the allocation of historical texts to English teachers, most of whom are untrained in the study of history, and leads to history standards that neglect the distinctiveness of the discipline. If implemented as their authors intend, the common core will damage history education.

At the outset, I must note a few limits to my critique. I will discuss the impact of the Standards on history specifically, not the various disciplines that comprise social studies. Among these disciplines, history lays the strongest claim to membership in the humanities, but the problems I raise regarding the Standards and history have clear applications to the social sciences. Examples of the harmful consequences of the common core for history education could be multiplied, but I will limit myself to one representative illustration.

Why study history? This pursuit serves many purposes, but surely one of its fundamental objectives is to make us more human. Sam Wineburg, in his essential book Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, argues that history both enables us to situate ourselves in the present by making sense of how we got here, while also acquainting us with the often jarring strangeness of the past. This encounter with bizarre, brutal, and peculiar behavior humanizes by encouraging us to understand historical events and actors in their own terms and by leading us to the humbling recognition that, generations hence, we, too, may be regarded as curious, primitive, and benighted. It is uniquely the job of the historian to engage with the frailties as well as the strengths of historical actors, and to render the limitless past into understandable terms. These are eminently humanizing enterprises.

Such historical understanding results from the practice, or discipline, of history. The study of history requires the use of specific concepts and cognitive skills that characterize the discipline -- concepts like evidence and causation and skills like contextualization, sourcing, and corroboration. These concepts and skills are largely distinct from those employed in literary analysis. Both disciplines engage in close readings of texts, for example, but with different purposes. The object of the literary critic is the text, or more broadly, the genre; for the historian it is, however limited or defined, a wider narrative of human history, which textual analysis serves. Historical thinking and humanizing outcomes are linked. As with literary skills, the more deeply history’s concepts and skills are grasped the more profound are the humanizing consequences. And like the intellectual skills called upon in the study of literature, historical thinking skills are enduring, even more so because they are applicable to a wider field of contemporary issues.

To what extent does the common core incorporate these purposes and practices into their proposed curriculum? The answer is very little; their intentions lie elsewhere. The Standards adopt an instrumental approach: Their ultimate objective is not the development of sensitive and discerning citizens but rather a career-and-college-ready high school graduate. They refer to “discipline specific content,” and “the norms and conventions of each discipline,” (60) but, the NCHE’s statement notwithstanding, the actual use of discipline-specific thinking must often be inferred, and suffers from telling absences. In fact, the Standards for ELA devote only a single, mostly non-discipline-specific page to reading in social history and social studies (61), and then apply their writing standards to social history/social studies, science and technical subjects in common, as if these diverse fields share the same modes of written analysis. (63-66) Their explanations of skills standards are abstract and remote from the specific practices of the historian.

The standards contained on page 61 of the ELA Standards suggest an author or authors un-versed in the practice of history. A close reading of the most advanced skills, for grades 11-12, reveals an uneven deployment of historical thinking skills, often to the point of disappearance. The first three standards, assembled under the vague heading “Key Ideas and Details,” are non-history specific. Number 1, for example, mentions the expectation that students will “Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources, connecting insights gained from specific details to an understanding of the text as a whole,” while numbers 2 and 3 ask students to “[d]etermine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary that makes clear the relationships among the key details and ideas” and “[e]valuate various explanations for actions or events and determine which explanation best accords with textual evidence, acknowledging where the text leaves matters uncertain,” respectively. These standards call for close reading and making connections, and refer to “primary and secondary” sources characteristic of history. But the first two skills suffer from an exclusion of sourcing and contextualization skills, typically the first cognitive actions taken by a historian examining a document. Number 3 focuses on the accuracy of a text, but not on how the text illuminates a broader question or narrative; there is no reciprocity between text and context. The standard is also not history-specific -- “actions or events” could be studied by political scientists, economists, or anthropologists.

Standard 4, under “Craft and Structure,” asks students to “[d]etermine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including analyzing how an author uses and refines the meaning of a key term over the course of a text (e.g., how Madison defines faction in Federalist No. 10).” Once again, an exclusive focus on text prevents the standard from expressing a historical skill. To illustrate, Madison’s understanding of “faction” in Federalist 10 was shaped by a shared discourse among the American political elite during and after the Revolution, culminating in the debate over ratifying the Constitution. Madison’s essay was a part of that discussion, and “faction” consequently has a meaning that transcends Madison’s use of the term in Federalist No. 10.1 Confining students to an examination of his use and refinement of the term in the text of Federalist No. 10 amounts to little more than an intellectual exercise without this essential context -- that is, without establishing its relationship to and significance for a larger narrative. The standard fails the “So what?” test.

Standard 5, under the same heading, asks for a similarly non-contextual, and therefore nonhistorical, reading, but standard 6 -- “Evaluate authors’ differing points of view on the same historical event or issue by assessing the authors’ claims, reasoning, and evidence” --= offers greater possibilities for historical analysis. There is a specific reference to history, and context appears to come into play. But how should a student go about evaluating the claims, reasoning, and evidence? The standard fails to mention the critical skills involved in such analysis: sourcing, corroboration, contextualization, inference, and others. Most fundamentally, what is the purpose of the exercise -- to develop a particular skill abstracted from historical content, or to develop that skill by applying it to a specific event in order to better grasp the event and the narrative of which it is a part? In other words, is the skill divorced from the content, in this case historical narrative, or integral to it? The standard prompts another “So what?”

The next three standards, under the heading “Integration of Knowledge and Ideas,” are better, though still not specific to history. Number 7 asks students to “[i]ntegrate and evaluate multiple sources of information presented in diverse formats and media (e.g., visually, quantitatively, as well as in words) in order to address a question or solve a problem.” This skill could apply to any discipline, though it is certainly useful to the study of history. But again, the specific skills called into play -- comparison, corroboration, and inference, for example, go unmentioned. Number 8 asks students to “[e]valuate an author’s premises, claims, and evidence by corroborating or challenging them with other information.” This standard calls most clearly on the historical skill of corroboration, but sourcing -- evaluation of the character and reliability of a source -- is an essential, but, for this standard, unacknowledged element of corroboration. Finally, number 9 asks students to “[i]ntegrate information from diverse sources, both primary and secondary, into a coherent understanding of an idea or event, noting discrepancies among sources.” This standard asks for synthesis, but one should hope that the discrepancies are evaluated and, if possible, resolved.2

The history standards state what students must do, but not how, because they do not engage the distinctive practices of the discipline of history. They require students to marshal evidence, engage in close reading, make connections, and corroborate evidence -- all important skills and all important to the discipline of history. But they are so text-focused that for most of them document analysis becomes hermetic. Sourcing is absent except by inference, as is the closely related practice of contextualization. Both require the application of knowledge external to the text under study in order to amplify its meaning, and both are indispensable to historical thinking. Concepts like causation and chronology and skills like periodization and assessing significance are all missing. Humanizing practices, like empathy, recognizing the limits of one’s knowledge, and understanding the past on its own terms are nowhere to be found, even by generous inference. Although the CCSS must be credited with recognition of the crisis in literacy in the United States, their solution for history emphasizes a blinkered form of reading comprehension.

Why have the authors of the Standards adopted this narrow approach? One of its sources may be found in the subject area designated for the page: “History/Social Studies.” The authors’ approach suggests a confusion of purpose. “Social Studies” does not constitute a discipline; rather, it is a grouping of social science disciplines for K-12 grade levels that is rarely found in higher education. The combination has its origins in the Progressive era, a time when many, though not all, professional educators favored downgrading traditional areas of study like classical literature and history, as mass immigration transformed the U.S. population and led to advocacy of a more “practical,” less academic curriculum. Unfortunate consequences ensued, and now the CCSS has provided one more example.

Why does the common core lift history out of the collection of disciplines of which it has been a prominent part and separate it with a slash mark from that time-honored but problematic “field” of social studies? The authors of the Standards seemingly hope to achieve two purposes: They want to address the practices of history while at the same time applying those practices to the other social sciences. This explains, at least in part, the abstract and non-specific character of the History/Social Studies skills, and their remoteness from the habits of mind that characterize the discipline of history.

There is probably more to it, however. The authors of the Standards have concluded that “Students must be able to read complex informational texts in these fields [social studies/history, science, and technical subjects] with independence and confidence because the vast majority of reading in college and workforce training programs will be sophisticated nonfiction." (60) This fixation on textual comprehension may have caused them to lose sight of crucial understandings that lie outside of, but exist in reciprocal relation to, an assigned text. Their failure to acknowledge, in this statement or elsewhere, any distinctive, intrinsic value in the various disciplines reflects their utilitarian approach. “Informational texts” may be the common core’s signature contribution to education jargon, but to justify the recommended preponderance of such texts by citing the demands of career and college begs the question of the purposes of college and career (not to mention the question of which college and which career). The CCSS do not entertain the question, but one may fairly surmise the authors’ response: to get a good job, and, perhaps, at a further remove, restore American prosperity. Good jobs are, of course, hard to find these days, and therefore to be prized, but to reduce education to job training will actually diminish the intellectual capacities of high school graduates by ignoring the value of the humanities and their characteristic critical thinking skills to a discerning citizenry.

The standards for social studies/history do compare unfavorably with the new historical thinking skills developed by the College Board for its Advanced Placement history courses, created as part of the AP history program’s new and welcome emphasis on historical thinking. Although the AP rubric concentrates on skills and neglects important historical concepts, it is firmly rooted in the practices of the historian. Four broad skills are given substance through the articulation of their components. For example, Skill 1, “Crafting Historical Arguments from Historical Evidence,” includes the components “Historical argumentation” and “Appropriate use of relevant historical evidence.” Regarding the use of evidence the rubric explains:

Historical thinking involves the ability to identify, describe and evaluate evidence about the past from diverse sources (including written documents, works of art, archaeological artifacts, oral traditions and other primary sources), with respect to content, authorship, purpose, format and audience. It involves the capacity to extract useful information, make supportable inferences and draw appropriate conclusions from historical evidence while also understanding such evidence in its context, recognizing its limitations and assessing the points of view that it reflects.

Unlike the standards for History/Social Studies, the AP expectations demonstrate familiarity with the work of historians and emphasize the importance of sourcing and contextualization. By noting the limitations on knowledge and interpretation and the irreducibility of conflicting views, the rubric also engages with the humanizing purposes of history. Skill 4, Historical Interpretation and Synthesis, confirms the integration of reading comprehension with historical understanding, at best a tenuous relationship in the CCSS treatment of history. The other two skills and subordinate components are similarly rich and integral to the study of history.

The common core’s history standards may not be irretrievably flawed, however. Teachers familiar with the discipline of history will be able to infer and extrapolate from the generic formulations on page 61 to justify a rich and stimulating curriculum. Unfortunately, such a favorable outcome is not assured; the CCSS text is open to more than one interpretation. To assess the potential consequences of the Standards for history education, it is illuminating to examine how an adopting state has gone about implementing them. In New York, a state-sponsored website called EngageNY.org offers “exemplar” lessons in ELA and math, and workshops have been organized across the state to assist in the implementation of the Standards. The ELA exemplars demonstrate a careful fidelity to the common core. In a piece published in the Washington Post last March ["Teacher: One (maddening) day working with the Common Core"], Jeremiah Chaffee, an English teacher in New York, explained his dissatisfaction with the lesson on the Gettysburg Address he and his colleagues were asked to develop using an EngageNY exemplar. [EngageNY has since removed this "exemplar" from the site.] His complaints included the exemplar’s scripted lessons and instructions to read the speech to students without affect, but his main objection was the exemplar’s insistence that teachers permit no contextual knowledge to enter into student consideration of the Address. Indeed, the exemplar advises teachers that “This close reading approach forces students to rely exclusively on the text instead of privileging background knowledge, and levels the playing field for all students as they seek to comprehend Lincoln’s address.”3 History teachers will quickly register several objections to this statement. Shouldn’t contextual knowledge be valued, not derogated as “privileged”? As Chaffee asked, can students really be expected to forget their outside knowledge? Wouldn’t student sharing of that knowledge “level the playing field”? And what if their contextual knowledge is inaccurate, in which case, shouldn’t it be explored and clarified at the outset?

All the “Guiding Questions” provided on Lincoln’s Address are “text-dependent,” and most of them demand a literal, as opposed to interpretive, understanding of the text. A few examples illustrate the approach:

“What does Lincoln mean by ‘four score and seven years ago?’”

“When Lincoln says the nation was ‘so conceived and so dedicated’ what is he referring to?

“What if Lincoln had used the verb ‘start’ instead of ‘conceive?’”

“What four specific ideas does Lincoln ask his listeners to commit themselves to at the end of his speech?”

“What does the word ‘dedicate,’ mean the first two times Lincoln uses it, and what other verb is closely linked to it the first two times it appears?”

These questions reveal an aversion to interpretation of the speech’s historical significance, consistent with the Standards’ emphasis on information extraction.

A page of the exemplar is devoted to explaining why “non-text dependent questions” like “Why did the North fight the Civil War?” and “Did Lincoln think that the North was going to ‘pass the test’ that the Civil War posed?” divert students from text comprehension:

Answering these sorts of questions require students to go outside the text, and indeed in this particular instance asking them these questions actually undermines what Lincoln is trying to say. Lincoln nowhere in the Gettysburg Address distinguishes between the North and South (or northern versus southern soldiers for that matter). Answering such questions take the student away from the actual point Lincoln is making in the text of the speech regarding equality and self-government.”

But the exemplar offers weak examples of “non-text dependent questions.” The first one is too broad to be effective in the context of a discussion of this speech, and, if taught in a history class, would already have been addressed. The second question is unanswerable. There are, however, many obvious and important “non-text dependent” questions that would enhance student appreciation of the speech. For example, how might contextualization help explain what Lincoln meant by “a new birth of freedom?” This question might elicit discussion of how the Emancipation Proclamation, issued nine months earlier, invested the phrase -- and the speech -- with indispensable meaning. Such an approach should be apparent to U.S. history teachers.

In fact, no historian or history teacher could read the Gettysburg Address in the manner insisted upon by the exemplar, which should, at minimum, remand it to the drawing board. Its admonitions against a historical approach reveal a disheartening ignorance of historical thinking. In the hands of the common core’s New York exemplarians, the Address is to be utilized as an “informational text.” Here we come to a portentous implication of that term: the divorce of reading comprehension from historical meaning. This alienation of meaning opens the whole undertaking to a deadly tedium. Sequestered from historical meaning, what is there to remember from such a lesson? As Chaffee concluded, the Gettysburg lesson “was intellectually limiting, shallow in scope, and uninteresting.”

Situating the Gettysburg Address lesson in a U.S. history class and employing the tools of the historian would offer students a far better opportunity to grasp the significance of the speech and make their own meaning out of it. History relies on chronology, which is essential for understanding causation. By the time of a Gettysburg Address lesson, students would already be familiar with the causes and outbreak of the Civil War, and banishing this context would be absurd. A close reading of the speech could proceed with reference to this context, as well as other skills of historical cognition like sourcing and corroboration. The Address offers dramatic evidence of how the war’s aims had shifted from the limited objective of preservation of the Union to the revolutionary objective of preservation through emancipation. EngageNY’s approach obstructs such an understanding.

Why do the CCSS assign history texts to ELA teachers? Chaffee, the English teacher who criticized the Gettysburg Address lesson, did not pose this question, but many English and history teachers have. Apparently, once texts are redefined as informational, they can be severed from their disciplinary moorings and moved around the curriculum like interchangeable parts. According to the CCSS, ELA teachers enjoy a “unique, time-honored place ... in developing students’ literacy skills,” (4) so the Standards simply assign them texts recognized as important by other disciplines. As part of ELA’s new responsibilities for historical documents (for grade 11 only), the Standards mention The Federalist Papers, presidential addresses, Supreme Court opinions and dissents, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century “foundational documents” including the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address -- all delegated to English teachers. (40) Only James Madison’s “Federalist Number 10” is mentioned on the History/Social Studies page. For grades 9-11, Appendix B adds fifteen US history documents to the ELA list and three for History/Social Studies. (Appendix B, 10-13)

This disproportionate delegation of responsibility endangers both disciplines. For history teachers, it means that English teachers who are untrained in the study of history will assume significantly greater responsibility for crucial historical texts. Because they need not concern themselves with teaching vast expanses of history, ELA teachers can devote more time to these documents than most history teachers can afford, and their lack of training in history combined with the Standards’ emphasis on ahistorical reading comprehension risks confusion and diminishes learning.

English teachers should be disturbed, too. Most of them study and teach ELA out of a love of literature and the arts, but they will search the common core in vain for guidelines on symbolism, imagery, or metaphors. Students will be expected to read widely in literature, but in the new world of the Common Core Standards, the dazzling turns and leaps of the human imagination are subordinated to the barren extraction of information. English teachers cannot find the prospect attractive.

The CCSS appear to be unstoppable, so how might teachers who object to them proceed? First, discontent with the Standards has apparently been strong enough to cause three states (Minnesota, Massachusetts, and South Carolina) to consider withdrawing from them, and pressure is mounting [Peter Wood, "The Core Between the States" in "The Chronicle of Higher Education," May 23, 2011] in three others to withdraw. Political options may remain viable. Exemplar lessons like New York’s may be improved. As noted, history teachers can interpret the Standards to advance the aims of history thinking. But the Standards appear to leave little freedom to venture from their fundamental approach. Under the heading “What Is Not Covered by the Standards,” the authors assure teachers that they do not specify how to teach, that content is still open, the suggested texts are incomplete, and so on. Still, any improvisations must be “consistent with the expectations laid out in this document.” (6) Testing will soon strengthen those expectations. Teachers are capable of creative recalcitrance, however, especially when asked to inflict bad pedagogy on their students. History and ELA teachers may find themselves agreeing with Jeremiah Chaffee and his colleagues at the end of their training in New York’s common core exemplars: “[W]hen it came time to create our own lessons around the exemplar, three colleagues and I found ourselves using techniques that we know have worked to engage students -- not what the exemplar puts forth.” Do rejections like these mean the common core has flunked history? A failing grade seems too harsh; after all, the Standards do ask students to read closely and think hard. A C+ more accurately measures the room for improvement.

Endnotes

1: See the discussions in Gordon Wood, The Creation of The American Republic, 1776-1787 (New York: Norton, 1969), 58-60, 402-403, 503-505, and Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 8-9, 10, 172.

2: I am ignoring standard 10, a generic reading comprehension skill.

3: There's a video [the aforementioned PBS video] of common core author David Coleman similarly banishing context from a lesson on Martin Luther King’s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."

Related Links

Alan Singer [historian and Professor of Secondary Education, Hofstra University]: "Gilder Lehrman's Flawed History of Emancipation" [History News Network, April 8, 2013. In the article Singer emphasizes that "Common Core has students doing careful reading of primary source documents without providing them with an adequate background or with alternative viewpoints that would support real analysis."]

Singer makes another important critique last November in The Huffington Post, "A Serious Flaw in Common Core."
The strict focus on the text directly corresponds with the literalist thinking of strict constructionists' reading of the Constitution. The latter group, as does Coleman, insist on reading texts for their words alone, and refuse to consider the period in which texts were written.

Note how the language of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia echoes the relationship between reader and literature that David Coleman insists upon:

"I am first of all a textualist . . . If you are a textualist, you don't care about the intent, and I don't care if the framers of the Constitution had some secret meaning in mind when they adopted its words. I take the words as they were promulgated to the people of the United States, and what is the fairly understood meaning of those words."

Singer aptly concludes his essay:

In the end, despite claims by advocates for Common Core, there is no universal timeless interpretation of a text. Meaning then and now is something that we debate, not uncover, while supporting our views with evidence from both the text and from the world. We can only interpret a text as 21st century human beings. Given our different experiences and social positions we may likely arrive at different answers about its deeper meaning.

See also Singer's "Reading Without Understanding -- Common Core Versus Abraham Lincoln" in the Huffington Post.

Aside from the conservative implications, is it not very contestable as to whether we must engage in a narrow reading of documents? We are being forced to adhere to the Common Core, under threat of getting bad ratings from supervisors. But is not all of the compulsion to conform very disturbing as to the idea of free thought, individual will and democracy? Is this not a moment in which we allowing ourselves to get bullied into groupthink in an effort to be professionally compliant with state directives?