In Retrospect (So Far): Three Positives and Two Serious Flaws in the Common Core State Standards

I’m beginning to wonder if the Core standards are as good as it gets—for this era. As Janet would say, there is no reason to start from scratch even if it were possible. Schools have lasted because of the innovation and resourcefulness of educators over the long haul. They’re voluntary standards, not federal, a point that is becoming increasingly more salient. They are firmly planted in educational institutions. California could retreat from the minutiae and create something commensurate with the big Core picture, using much of the vision, restructuring the rest. Other states could join. Following the Academic Passport model of the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education (WICHE), constituent LEAs or Counties or States could nest more thoughtful professional development and assessment frameworks in an ongoing research and development process involving resourced personnel.

The idea for teacher development would be grounded in the professional prerogative of teachers to apply educational research according to their judgments rather than respond to external mandates or coercion (see David Pearson’s ltRRtl podcast on the Core). David spoke about three big picture elements in Core assumptions that are worthy and form the basis for picking up the pieces of old inventions and repurposing them, as Janet Hecsch would say.

First, the Core begins with the end in mind, with a vision of accomplishment at graduation, and then parses out levels of complexity starting in kindergarten. True, there are problems in the details; sometimes a goal for third grade is more complex than one for sixth grade, but as David points out, we just don’t have the research to map development at each grade level. Nonetheless, expecting our teachers to increase challenges as the years pass is not a bad idea.

Second, again following David, the Core embraces the idea that children can do much more complex thinking and learning than we’ve given them credit for in the past. Instead of devoting so many activities in the curriculum where learners are working at a comfortable level (in reading, knowing 98% of the words in a text), the Core expects children to learn to sit comfortably in complexity, to read difficult texts carefully and closely for nuances and subtleties, to scour the text within its four corners to get what the author’s words are saying.

Third, David and the validation committee especially valued the Core’s emphasis on literacy within the disciplines. For decades literacy educators have been calling for reading and writing across the curriculum, for directly teaching ways of using literacy within disciplinary epistemologies as tools for constructing knowledge. The Core instantiates this call in national, not federal, standards that almost every state has voluntarily adopted. I’m not up to speed on the influence of this Core idea on current versions of teacher preparation reading and writing methods courses, but if they haven’t been impacted, there is an open door.

The flaw which would require some rethinking is, however, fatal: The edict that readers make arguments in favor of an interpretation or understanding of a text using evidence within the four corners of the text. David is a great believer in close reading, in interrogating texts, in getting a clear view of all of the evidence the author has provided. But texts do not contain within themselves all of the information a reader needs to comprehend a text’s meaning. Texts are written and read in contexts which are not explicitly defined inside the texts. Readers bring prior knowledge and experience to texts, draw on that knowledge to make sense of a text’s words, and use what they know of the world to make their own assessment of a text’s meaning. Whose meaning is it? The Core has it wrong, at least according to the weight of seventy-five plus years of scientific study of comprehension.

The four corners problem shows up in Pauline Holmes’ ltRRtl podcasts focusing on writing instruction at the high school level. Pauline tells us that high schoolers are indeed learning to scour literary texts for evidence and accompanying analysis to support interpretive claims precisely as the Core demands. This activity does indeed demand sitting in complexity, but it also walls off the student’s cultural, historical, and personal identity. As a result, the experience of responding to literature in human terms gets distorted. Students view reading literature as an academic chore to be finished and filed away in an essay written according to a formula for no particular purpose other than a grade. That’s writing instruction, too.

Sneak preview: Karen Smith identifies for us a flaw in the Core perspective on writing related to the four corners problem. As a regular classroom teacher with rich and varied experience at a variety of k-12 levels, Karen also co-directed the Area 3 Writing Project from the early 2000s until 2021, an affiliate of the National Writing Project, and has a great deal of insight into professional development in k-12 writing instruction during the initial rollout of the Core and after problems in implementation arose. More on this second flaw soon in Karen’s upcoming podcast. Fortunately, this one is partly remedied without a substantive change in the Core’s vision. I’m also scheduling podcasts with incoming first year students at Sacramento State to see what they learned about writing in high school.