Common Core and Text Simplicity

             I’ve been overtrained. This has resulted in bad decisions in the classroom.

             Some things I do as an English teacher are based on beliefs I’ve always had. I believe that intellectual conversation is genuinely energizing, and that the mind brightens as the distinct and minute shades of perception disclose themselves or resonate with sudden possibility. I believe that writing is more than a utilitarian skill one learns, but an act of meditation that likely alters one’s relationship with being-ness. I believe that the act—the physical act—of reading a book does a thing few other technologies or interactions do, which is disrupt the flow of our day, and meld our imaginations to our understandings—at the yielding and halting pace of thought. I believe that much of good writing can be taught, and that, just as the vivid and useful conjuring of a subject relies on specificity, so too does teaching writing rely on an instructor’s ability to describe and call forth the particulars of craft.

             Such beliefs, however, compete with professional training. There were two years when English department heads monthly skipped a day of teaching to go downtown and study newly minted national standards as we developed our own; then there were training days to which we returned as department leaders to unpack these standards once we, predictably, threw out our two years of work and formally adopted the Common Core; most recently, as one of the building’s “career ladder teachers,” I spent more time downtown where implications on our classrooms were weighed and spelled out.

             Yesterday was the day I realized I’d absorbed too much.

             In addition to the books we read as a class, our ninth graders choose and read a book independently; it’s an assignment that honors student interest and adjusts to individual levels, habits and experiences. But last year, as a result of meetings downtown, I added a requirement that insisted books be read at a student’s level, and that students engage active reading skills by annotating text or reflecting (not summarizing) along the way, and also that they gather and apply unfamiliar vocabulary. This year I further added themes for the more advanced readers: 19^th century lit, prize winning books, modern lit (1900-1950), book group best bets, and banned books.

             I do like the added themes because students spent years in readers-writers’ workshops, where they were able to choose almost every book they read, emerging from middle school with a customer’s-always-right aversion to any book not automatically appealing; this level of choice cuts the leg off a gorgeous things books do—bring kids to new worlds, bring empathy and humility to the soul. Anyway, the 19^th century isn’t as buttoned up as kids think. Novels were considered vulgar and escapest for years, and just like today, books were more often tales than literature, more development of plot than layered cake of meaning. So, boys afraid of leaving Percy Jackson could do worse than Ambrose Bierce, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, H.G. Wells, or Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan or Princess of Mars.

             Yesterday, I’d gathered a wonderful group of parents to come in on what amounts to every third Friday to provide book chats and tutoring to my ninth grade kids. This was our first event together. By the end I was personally exhausted, because my freshmen are habituated to class activities changing in 10 or 15 minute bursts, and on this day I’d asked them to stay quiet and read for most of the period; at the same time, noise was percolating all around the peripheries of the room where parents were holding book chats; furthermore, though we’d been to the library weeks before and I’d tasked kids repeatedly with starting their books, many were without or were just starting—only to discover they hated their books; and so I spent hour after hour tamping down unrest. This simmering energy wasn’t the problem, though. That’s just what happens with 14-15 year olds you tell to be quiet for an hour on a Friday. I’m just saying it was draining. I later fell asleep on a chair in my living room the way I always do on a Friday evening. No, what was different resulted from the brief conversation with four parents after the final bell rang after 6^th period.

             “Are you up for some feedback?” one parent said. As the four debriefed their experiences, Anne described advice she’d been giving kids who’d found nothing to like in their 19^th century literature. Break it up into chunks, she told them. Set small reading goals. Don’t bother with taking those notes until you’ve read at least 50, 60 or 70 pages. They need to get into it first, she was saying. They’re not familiar with the vocabulary or these places or times, and so I told them, she said, they should just wait with taking notes. Get a feel for the language and the story first. Anne strongly implied or outright declared that pairing annotation skills and independent reading of 19^th century literature is the wrong way to start the high school experience.

             And, of course, she is right. So next year, I’ll delay the independent reading of 19^th century books until later in the year.

             But she was right about a more important thing, a larger idea I needed to remember. Readers, and especially hesitant readers, should have the experience of being absorbed in a book; they need time to fall in and wonder, to feel; if required, they can stop and take a look around later, once they’re engaged.

             Didn’t I used to push for that? Don’t I want that now, as a teacher of reading? When did metacognitive reading strategies overtake the stirring of the imagination? What happened?

             I believe I was overtrained.

             Here’s some of what we’ve been learning from Common Core English Language Arts standards.

• The goal of school is to get kids college and career ready.
• School at the K-12 level has been way too easy.
• There is a sizable gap in text complexity between what students are expected to read and use in college and in high school. Students are overwhelmed in college as a result. K-12 must therefore level up their text complexity.
• Text complexity is associated with lexile scores, which is determined largely through vocabulary and sentence structure. Creative writing, poetry, narrative writing, short stories and novels do not have the text complexity that nonfiction has. In grades K-12, literature, narrative and creative writing has been overemphasized to students’ detriment in college and on the job.
• Readers need to be exposed to reading material that challenges their reading level. To grow as readers, they must read material at the high end of their lexile band or higher. This will also help them develop strategies for difficult reading.
• The most important teachable strategies for dealing with difficult material are close reading skills. Students need lots of work with close, active reading. This means lots of instruction and practice with annotation.
• There are Common Core discussion and speaking standards but these will not be tested, so we will never speak of them again.

             I don’t like a purpose of schooling more interested in employers’ needs and employees’ income hopes than in the health of body, mind, spirit and community. But I agree that students can and should develop skills for working with difficult texts; I agree that annotation is a skill that yields direct benefits. And so, as I said, I have adjusted the independent reading assignment accordingly. Now kids are stepping out of familiar genres and cultures, as I’ve asked them to, and if they’re not overwhelmed by the vocabulary and florid prose of 19^th century, they’re stunted by the annotation assignment, in which I’ve told them to avoid summarizing—the one note-taking act that helps track reading when confused. I’m doing nothing to help them enjoy their books; and in fact, students are in danger of slamming the door on an entire century of literature and more.

             And there’s the larger problem. While it has elements of inquiry and critical thinking, the Common Core is not interested in creativity, imagination, reflection, empathy, community, or civic engagement; yet it overwhelms the Language Arts classroom with its other needs. Literature and writing should be so much more.

             And in terms of text complexity, a piece so important that it bookends all the other standards because all the other standards rely on that text complexity, I’m starting to think it’s the most destructive standard of all.

             The reason I’ve asked more advanced readers to read from particular pools of books this year is because last year I discovered I couldn’t ask them to simply read “at their reading level.” According to the Measures of Academic Progress or MAP, and according to the way lexile scores work, many students are too advanced for novels. They need the challenge, apparently, of a book like Critique of Pure Reason instead. So, on the one hand, the idea that a 14 year old is too advanced for most novels is a hard thing for an English teacher to believe; on the other hand, it’s clear this is what the Common Core holds true—it’s the reason it wants this nation’s teachers to start de-emphasizing fiction.

             Here’s what this looks like. According to scores earned by my current ninth grade students during last year’s MAP, the average lexile score in one of my blocks is 1157—a number reached with 34% of the block officially designated as having special needs: registered English Language Learners, Special Education students, and kids on 504 plans. The 60 kids in my other block of ninth graders, meanwhile, average a 1327 lexile score. These scores suggest our students are right where kids should be, because, according to a Common Core appendix on text complexity, 9^th and 10^th graders should reach lexile scores of 1050-1335.

             If our kids are average or above average in their reading abilities, and if we are to honor the intent and requirement of the Common Core, what books are available to them?

             Here’s a sampling of books and their scores to help answer that question: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises has a lexile score of 610, and is, according to the premier lexile search site, appropriate for ages 3 and up. Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities reaches the heights of 790, too easy, apparently, for all but a few. The Heights that Emily Bronte Wuthers, meanwhile, is 880. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is 950. Pride and Prejudice is somewhere between 900 and 1100. Tolstoy’s War and Peace clocks in at 1240. How about some more recent classics? William Faulkner’s Sound and Fury and Toni Morrison’s Beloved are both scored 870. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is 950. Or, from The Guardian’s list of the 10 books people are most likely to lie about having read: George Orwell’s number isn’t 1984, but 1090.

             This means one of my blocks could read and benefit from War and Peace, but everything else would be too easy. And it means my other block is way too advanced for Tolstoy and the rest of it. Let’s hope they read their Woolf, Faulkner or Ellison when they were apparently ready for it—in 4^th and 5^th grade.

             There’s a fundamental problem with calibrating what we do to what a computer can measure, and what we do, meanwhile, is build assessments and national goals and teacher evaluations and whole cloth curriculum. This is what we are doing. The pressures applied to principals, teachers and students in “testable” subjects like my own are shaped to an embarrassing extent by the algorithms of what a computer or a table of calibrated human scorers can measure. Consider what the Advanced Placement craze has done to writing: essays on the test are written in 35 minutes and by necessity reward formulaic writing like three-pronged theses leading to five paragraph essays. Schools end up teaching a lot of terse, formulaic writing. Then, when students are unprepared for college writing, the national solution has been to turn ever more to the most rigorous courses available—those guided by the College Board in more Advanced Placement courses. It’s a sickness.

             Even if Common Core standards aren’t supposed to be about a test (and we were told this summer to take the one released writing and reading test that heralds the assessment every 11^th grader in the state will take next year and “backmap” it for its Common Core skills and then continue working backwards to create the scaffolded lessons leading up to it, until we have a coherent unit aligned to standards)—even if the Common Core standards aren’t supposed to be about a test or computers, I blame the index measured by computers for coming up with a narrow and destructive definition of text complexity, which, by numbers that measure diction and syntax but not irony or ambiguity, privileges nonfiction over fiction, by 70%—favoring a toilet installation manual with its unfamiliar vocabulary over Faulkner with its layers of race, class, accusation and forgiveness.

             I blame software and computer moguls who present themselves as philanthropists while we convert classrooms into labs in preparation for new computer adaptive testing; I blame our bean counting policy wonks for dictating what is important while we slide into ever more mechanistic relationships to each other and the world around us. And I blame myself for losing sight.

             I can teach the measurable skills and still make time for imagination, for inspiration, for creativity and conversation, but it’s also easy to lose sight, to get overtrained, to inadvertently push students into a lifelong antipathy towards an entire century of literature that absolutely dazzles when we make the time to ride it.

             Read Neil Gaiman's lecture on imagination for better thoughts on the subject.
             And Catholic scholars have written a stunning letter trying to keep Common Core standards out of Catholic schools with lines like this one: "Rather than explore the creativity of man, the great lessons of life, tragedy, love, good and evil, the rich textures of history that underlie great works of fiction, and the tales of self-sacrifice and mercy in the works of the great writers that have shaped our cultural literacy over the centuries, Common Core reduces reading to a servile activity." Amen.