Decoding Signals from David Coleman and Chester Finn, Directors of the Common Core Chorus (Opinion)
The Men Behind the Curtain
I’m still processing what I learned yesterday from EdWeek about the admission of a “stunning” missing piece from the “architects of the common core.” I apologize in advance for preaching to the choir. I’d love to hear your voices talking back.
The founding fathers of the Core Beliefs dictated goals for reading instruction in excruciating and sometimes incomprehensible and incoherent ways and prepared an external accountability loop to hold teachers responsible for student failures.
But they intentionally left blank all of the space taken up by curriculum and instruction and deliberately stayed silent. According to yesterday’s EdWeek piece—
“That means that even under the same state standards, district-level—and even classroom-level—decisions about materials and methods can lead to big variances in the quality of instruction that children receive.”
Wasn’t that the intention? Tell them their goals and turn them loose?
So how do we bring equity to materials and methods? This hole has been filling up with Core-aligned commercial materials for the past several years, driven by the marketplace, driven by public money.
In early reading instruction there is a problem. Commercial publishers have taken to treating all children as if they have dyslexia. If they don’t, they suffer the fate of Lucy Calkins.
Core thinking is prescriptive and professionally hegemonic. If materials and methods aren’t approved by SoR experts, things are unbalanced. Don’t get me wrong: Phonemic awareness, phonological recoding in short term verbal memory, slow digit naming speed, and all the rest are important. Dyslexia as a construct has some scientific reality.
But dyslexia is not an epidemic. Thinking that first-grade teachers must teach the same phonics that you would use with a dyslexic child to every child in class for 25 minutes per day is problematic.
Along with Core-aligned materials come teacher-proof plans and scripts (methods) to safeguard classrooms from the vagaries of suspect teacher thinking. Commercial publishers are ready to throw their voices like ventriloquists into the mouths of teachers. There’s plenty of stuff on the market.
This screenshot comes from an earlier post linked at the bottom of this post (NIDI = National Institute for Direct Instruction):
There is another option. The question becomes which option is a better societal investment:
“Teacher collaboration in professional learning communities (PLCs) is a promising form of professional development that improves the quality of education (Doğan and Adams 2018; Stoll 2015; Vescio et al. 2008)….Studies have found that PLCs can lead to changes in teachers’ perceptions, and evidence [shows] effects on teachers’ practices and students’ learning as a result of what is learned in PLCs (Lomos et al. 2011; Vescio et al. 2008).”1
Back in the day (early 1990s) when I was working in a district curriculum office as a literacy specialist, my boss asked me to visit a high school and see what I could find out about how teachers at the campus were implementing a scripted phonics intervention program for ninth graders (the exact same Core-aligned Reading Mastery materials from NIDI). I may have written about this in an earlier post.
I saw 👀 ninth-grade classrooms alive with vibrant Black male students whose knowing laughs revealed full comprehension of the absurdity of the scene, teachers’ reading from scripts, skillfully herding cats, entertaining the kids, students’ responding to rapid fire prompts with choruses of phonemes or similar acoustic utterances, teachers rewarding students with Dorito chips. Where were the White students? I‘ve not been able to erase these clips from memory. It was horrible on many levels.
A few years later, Chicago implemented its plan to “reconstitute” failing schools. District leadership identified such schools by standardized test scores, scores which have long served as a proxy for separation of schools serving poor and marginalized Black, Brown, and White learners from schools serving White learners from whoop-dee-doo communities.
Failing schools in Chicago were put on notice, the tough love approach: They had a year to bring up their test scores or they would be shut down and reopened with new leaders and teachers. Somehow, someone contacted me through UC Davis to work with teachers at a middle school as part of a district effort to “help.” My job was to bring up scores in reading.
For a year, every second Thursday I flew from Sacramento to Chicago, spent the entire day on Friday at the school, and took a red eye home again. Twice a month for eight months I “helped.”
David Perkins (1985) discussed a phenomenon called the fingertip effect in the context of information technology that applies. Administrators whose days are spent outside of classrooms sometimes assume that if they provide teachers a tool, teachers will use it. If they fail to produce, it becomes their fault.
Put the tool at their fingertips. You’ve done your part. Well, no, learning how to use the tool—that’s the pivot point. What do you do with it once you have it…
So the powers that be put me and others of my ilk at the fingertips of teachers across Chicago serving primarily Black students in failing schools with no understanding or agreements about how to use this frail human tool. Like a one man band, I was a one man stand in for a professional development network.
On my first visit I waited for a spell in the office to speak with the site administrator, who was dealing with a crisis—every other Friday there was always a crisis. When I saw her, I asked her what she wanted me to do. A Black woman with an obvious love for her students, she was juggling a million balls as the morning at school unfolded.
The school had organized what she called a “war room.” She suggested I go there and see how I might help. Afterwards, she thought I might wander around the school and introduce myself to the teachers. Things weren’t happening quite as I had expected. I think I had over prepared.
I asked about plans for me to do in-services, but she said there was no time. Teachers already were staying past contract time every third Friday. I asked her about the possibility of my working with teachers to do some demonstration lessons, and she thought that was a fine idea—if I could get any takers.
I headed out to the war room. Most of the teachers I passed were White. Every student I passed was Black, all of them wearing a uniform of blue jeans and solid color t-shirts. The building was made of cement bricks decades ago; the inside walls had never been painted. The floors were linoleum tile, gray, worn thin from decades of foot traffic, rarely intact squares.
I enjoyed the raucous laughter and the friendliness of the kids in the hallways, the music of school I’ve loved since childhood that devolved into silence in the classrooms.
There was a bustling and a hustling in the war room among the teachers assigned the task that seemed deadly serious. After a quick hello—they expected me—I was soon seated at a Scantron machine, feeding it bubble sheets for almost a hour. The whirring and clicking of the machines served as background music.
I learned that teachers administered retired bubble in tests every three weeks on Thursday and met together Friday after school to get the breaking news from the Scantron machines that would determine which standardized lesson plans they would have to repeat for the next three weeks. They were fighting for their jobs, and they had to raise their test scores by Spring. This was flat out direct teaching and reteaching to the test.
Over the months that year, a handful of teachers permitted me to teach and co-teach with them as I had been doing in my district. Sometimes I acted the part of a student, doing the exercises, raising my hand to participate, sometimes even answering a question from the teacher or asking one. The kids gradually accepted me in one particular classroom, and I made it a point to sit in. I learned a ton from them. I can’t say the teachers learned as much from me.
My heart broke in the classroom of a young male eighth grade English teacher. During my first visit, I noted that his students were organized into three groups, one small group of five females sitting in a circle close to his desk, one mixed group of twelve arranged haphazardly in the center, another smaller group at the back of the room near the windows. I asked him what principle of group organization he was using.
“The students near my desk, they want to learn. The students in the middle sometimes want to learn. The ones at the back, they don’t want to learn. They’re quieter if I leave them alone. They like to look out the window,” he said. “Some of them sitting in the middle sit near the windows some days.”
One Friday around lunch time I happened to walk by his classroom. The practice at the school was to line your kids up in quiet, straight lines for the journey to the cafeteria. The young English teacher had formed his line and was walking up and down, inspecting posture like a drill sergeant might do, when a short guy who sat near the windows spun around and slapped the teacher in the face. I understood why. The teacher’s glasses were broken.
There was a group reflex to stop the anger from becoming a melee, and within minutes the boy was in the principal’s office, the Chicago PD showed up, and I spent the rest of my day as a one man PLN cooling my heels in the office, being interviewed as a witness. The boy was expelled.
I have a heart breaking ending to this story as well, but I didn’t intend this to take up so much space. I will say I don’t know what happened to the boy, but life went on in the young teacher’s classroom. I’ll tell you about my last day at the school if you’re interested. Just let me know. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, people were crazy and times were strange.
I shudder to think of the results if the architects of the Common Core get into the business of writing materials with prescription methods and sanctified assessments for schools that have been underfunded and under resourced since the beginning of time.
No amount of instructional scripting and scientific scripture is going to erase this neglect. Under the Core regime, state education departments have adopted an explicit hands-off policy on methods, leaving instructional decisions to LEAs. I’ve looked at their websites. There is an arrogance and coldness in the language used about assessment that is disturbing.
State administrators rely on Smarter Balanced or PARCC to provide assessments used for external accountability. Unless teachers work in an LEA that functions as a professional learning community, teachers get little structured help thinking deeply about their pedagogy, doing their own teacher research.
This is a Wizard of Oz moment with Chester Finn and the David Coleman band behind the curtain. I wonder if they see it as an opportunity to dig in and close the system by advocating for mandated methods and materials?
The Science of Reading is big business in cahoots with Big Government homing in on the last leg of the stool: Materials and Methods. Two things I thought the Core got right were its benign neglect of teachers, freeing them to practice their profession, and its math standards (I’m no where near expert enough to speak on this second topic but teachers I respect say this).
We as reading educators deserve what is coming down the pike if we don’t raise our voices against this deprofessionalization of teaching by those misusing the narrow, ultimately counterproductive trademark SoR approach of usurpation of teachers’ minds and voices. Let’s start SoR 2.0 and locate it in dialogic knowledge building inside professional practice involving teachers and researchers in planful collaboration in every LEA.
Professional learning networks: From teacher learning to school improvement?
Rilana Prenger, Cindy L. Poortman, Adam Handelzalts
Journal of Educational Change (2021) 22:13–52
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-020-09383-2