Laboring to Learn to Labor in High School

Since you asked for my opinion…

Writing teachers of the Core in U.S. public high schools are buckling their seatbelts as artificial turbulence continues to roil the friendly skies. Transmuting traditional academic writing achievement into gold stars of the five-paragraph or the rigidly rhetorical variety will be less straightforward. For example, once upon a time it was safe to assume that students would have to do some homework to produce an essay about a conclusion drawn from a short story with a claim, premises, and evidence. Claude 3 at $20 a month lets students upload a text and get an analysis instantly.

I uploaded a PDF with all of Emily Dickinson’s poetry just a few days ago and commanded Claude to codify nuances of Emily’s uses of the em dash. This assignment was bottled by the bot as trivia, very disappointing, I believe because you have to be human to touch or taste her work, with the cognitive equivalent of the fingers and the tongue. The obvious, feckless analysis offered proof that human tolerance for ambiguity and pleasure from absorption in language is beyond bot competence.

Despite the fact of Jeb Bush’s endorsement of the standards in a 2013 Times magazine article, heaping praise on the bipartisanship which ultimately scuttled the redesign of the NAEP Reading Comprehension test in 2021, I’ve tried desperately to embrace the positives of the Common Core State Standards. Because of the algorithms in the CORE, AI has made this embrace much softer.

Thinking about the CCSSs enervates an uneasy tension in my neurons: Most of us want public school to triumph in varying degrees for many reasons following this latest inflammation of the Neanderthal gene in the body politic. We have a candidate for President actively trying to dismantle the legal system itself. Public school in a democracy is not a given—ask W.E.B. Du Bois or Horace Mann. It is literally in a post-COVID post-truth AI crisis and could fold in Red states.

Two conceptual problems in the Core could be overcome with strong writing instruction. Once amended, teachers would find AI more potentially useful. First, the default inheritance of the term “genre” means the writing curriculum has no vertical nor horizontal shape at all. Talking genre means talking narrative or informational with argumentative tossed in as an aperitif. Envisioning learning to write as composing narratives, expositions, and arguments distorts the network of genres in which writing is done…rambling now…

…a business letter, a resume, a scientific report based on observation, a policy brief based on a current issue, an assembly manual, a personal journal in response to a unit on the Civil War, a memoir, a poem in free verse, a literature review, a position paper for a debate, a contract for a grade, a survey instrument for classroom research, an abstract or executive summary, an annotated bibliography, a legal document for a classroom mock trial, an editorial, an obituary, a feature article, a piece of literary criticism, an apology, a prayer, an autobiographical incident, a biography…

Second, the default inheritance for reading is “close.” Reading fiction for logical evidence to support a claim, while practice in making and breaking arguments ought to take place daily, is sort of bizarre because it teaches no one how to read and respond personally to literature, which (the Science of Reading notwithstanding) can be taught. It diminishes lifewide and lifelong learning when literature serves reason rather than imagination.

AI could write hundreds of essays grounded in Emily’s PDF. Note that AI cannot respond to Emily, but it can beat a dead horse with analysis, it can swat the fly buzzing as death approached. The Core does not expect learners to learn how to envision and imagine literary worlds, the human side of aesthetic response.

The Core expects students to toil tediously over incidentally literary textual terrain for evidence of a claim which a bot can analyze faster than a speeding bullet. The Core assigns students the very same tasks the bot can do much more quickly. Yet the Core ignores instruction in aesthetic reading, the humanizing aspect, the very thing AI cannot and will never be able to do.

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I sometimes wonder about the visual acuity of the Core drafters: As the framers looked into the future, they saw with their right eye the bright lights of “college,” but with their left eye, they saw a house of mirrors called “career.” Career becomes the dumping ground for the unwashed, the unfinished, the curricular sleepwalkers. A King of Royal euphemisms, “career” holds those students not destined for college accountable for their decisions in a way those headed for the university are not. University bound students see counselors. This dichotomy represents a societal capitulation: Even prison can be a career, and the guy did it to himself.

Adolescents know the word college in some sense, but where I come from nobody wants to be charged with book learning. When I graduated from high school, graduates from poor families either disappeared somewhere, enlisted, got drafted, or enrolled in junior college as I did. But career? A young adult who believes college is real because their parents have degrees doesn’t talk about a careers. They talk about college essays and majors.

What might have been the fallout if, instead of “college and career ready,” the framers used something more straightforward like, oh, “college and labor ready”? How about “college and job ready”? Within a career, there are often different levels of skill and expertise that define a vertical hierarchy. Entry-level positions require less experience and specialized knowledge. As well, level of autonomy and decision-making power are reduced along with compensation received. Is the implication that a diploma means entry-level at a factory, the service industry, a sanitation company, the military?

Vertical hierarchies in a career involve relationships between managers and subordinates, those with authority and those without. Managers have more power over labor processes, assigning tasks, setting expectations, and evaluating performance, shaping the nature of the work experience and the degree of control individuals have over their own labor. What are the implications when the word “teacher” can be substituted for “manager” in the previous sentence?

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Mississippi recently developed an e-portfolio system delivered to high school students in a year-long course wherein learners upload artifacts to publicly display their college and career readiness. Implemented in 2022 across the state as a graduation requirement, according to online documents, the e-portfolio requires each student to prepare an ISP, an Individual Success Plan, and to complete the course to accomplish the following purpose:

“The following unit provides guidance for the development of a student portfolio. This portfolio enables students to demonstrate the culmination of their proficiency in academics, 21st century skills (i.e., critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication), and citizenship. Reflecting on who they are, the portfolio allows students to communicate and demonstrate 21st century skills and knowledge of postsecondary and career interests. The final portfolio exhibit should affirm students’ abilities to think critically and creatively, to solve practical problems, to make reasoned and ethical decisions, and to communicate effectively.”

Another document available on the Mississippi State Department website offers an alternative course to accommodate students engaged in “work-based learning.” The WBL alternative to the Core e-portfolio was developed to respond to the needs of Mississippi’s economic sector:

“One of the biggest challenges for many Mississippi business leaders is the shortage of a trained, reliable, and consistent workforce. Work-based learning (WBL) addresses this challenge by giving students opportunities to connect what they learn in the classroom with authentic work experiences. Furthermore, WBL experiences provide training grounds for students to practice and improve nontechnical skills, including dependability and working with others.

The MDE’s Office of CTE and Workforce Development determined that the current WBL credit-bearing course, Career Pathway Experience, should be revised to increase the number of students who have access to credit-bearing WBL experiences without compromising the quality of these experiences.”

The portfolio course implicates Human Resources at each school in more local activity than the work-based learning alternative. In the course document schools are put on notice: “This portfolio will require cooperation and collaboration among faculty members to ensure students have the resources needed to complete the project (i.e., administrators, academic teachers, counselors, and/or media specialists).”

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Labor is a heavy word. Hard labor is physically demanding work involving manual tasks like mining, loading trucks, transporting toxic waste. Union labor may involve hard labor, but its essence refers not to physical activity, but to economic agreements between laborers and employers for better wages, benefits, and working conditions. Skilled labor requires specialized apprenticeships, training, knowledge, or expertise—electricians, plumbers, machinists, programmers—and command higher wages. Professional labor confers an explicitly ethical and legal framework for certification.

High schools are in some ways the step-child of American public schools. Even in the Deep South before the Civil War there were makeshift, guerilla grade schools for black children and poor white children, though laws were against schooling for slaves. By the turn of the century something like 10% of the age cohort ready for high school actually attended (Collins, 1972). During the Industrial period demand for more highly educated workers was very soft and often handled by apprenticeship.

The 20th century was well on its way before the country took notice and decided high school was worth studying. In April, 1930, a wide ranging group of teachers, parents, researchers, and related philanthropists met to discuss how to go about what became known as the “Eight Year Study” led by Ralph Tyler. Thirty high schools were eventually selected to design and experiment with a progressive curriculum, and the students who graduated and went to college were tracked. In the report published in 1942 by Wilfred M. Aikins, this first brainstorming session in 1930 bubbled over with great ideas, but each great idea eventually ran into a brick wall:

“In the course of the two-day discussion many proposals for improvement of the work of our secondary schools were made and generally approved. But almost every suggestion was met with the statement, ‘Yes,~ that should be done in our high schools, but it can't be done without risking students* chances of being admitted to college. If the student doesn't follow the pattern of subjects and units prescribed by the colleges, he probably will not be accepted.’ Under these conditions not many schools were willing to depart far from the conventional high school curriculum. They could not take chances on having their candidates rejected by the colleges” (Aiken, 1942, p.1).

The study aimed to determine if high schools could effectively prepare students for college by using progressive education methods, rather than the traditional college-preparatory curriculum. Progressive education was a distinct, fresh concept grounded in John Dewey, learner-centered, responsive, flexible teaching. According to Aiken, by 1930, 70% of high school age individuals were in school and getting a rigid, one-size-fits-all curriculum. Billions of dollars had been invested by states, cities, towns, counties, and townships in buildings and equipment. Communities saw value and were taxing themselves to pay the salaries of nearly 300,000 teachers.

But something was wrong. The curriculum had gradually expanded from basic college disciplines to include social studies, home economics, music, and a range of various offerings. The educators gathered together knew that of six who enter the high school only three would graduate; of the three who graduated, only one would go on to college. For five out of six, high school would be the end of formal schooling (p.3).

Among the many grievances aired that day about high schools, one that resonates today was the failure of the high school to teach students how to live as a meaningful participant in community life. This concern linked to an anti-democratic authoritarian disposition shaping the teacher-student relationship. If you’d like to read more about the concerns, the study, and the recommendations, Aiken’s book is available online at the url above. I’ll leave you to ponder one more concern raised one day in April in 1930:

“In spite of greater understanding of the ways in which human beings learn, teachers persisted in the discredited practice of assigning tasks meaningless to most pupils and of listening to re-citations. The work was all laid out to be done. The teacher's job was to see that the pupil learned what he was supposed to learn.”