Years ago, when the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation went into effect, teachers and administrators overreacted, so panicked by these new federal requirements that many states turned to shallow exams as a means of demonstrating student “progress.” This was tragic, for although many states had rich standards in place, they often chose assessments that valued lower-level thinking. And as we now know, instruction was not driven by what standards were adopted; instead, instruction was driven by shallow assessments.
Many negative consequences spawned from the NCLB era. Writing, for example, wasn’t even mentioned under NCLB guidelines, and, as a result, it got short shrift in many states when it came time to develop the new NCLB-aligned assessments (more on this in a moment). Because recreational reading was seen as “soft,” it got kicked to the curb. Because surface-level thinking was demanded, it became the norm. (The 2012 SAT reading scores, for example, were the lowest scores in four decades. The juniors and seniors who took that test were in kindergarten and in first grade when NCLB began, thus becoming the first group of students whose entire school experience was shaped by NCLB-driven instruction.) Because of their allegiance to these new tests, schools started churning out memorizers instead of thinkers. We produced fewer students who could write coherent extended pieces. More students left our schools hating to read. And teaching students how to think deeply—to analyze, to synthesize, to evaluate—became a much more arduous task.
Looking back at the NCLB movement, it is easy to see how the testing pressures led schools away from those practices proven to be in the best interest of developing literate, well-rounded students. Those pressures were real—often with teachers’ jobs on the line—and teaching to the test became the laser-like focus at many schools. I can remember conducting workshops for the various schools in my district where teachers spent hours discussing, breaking down, and prioritizing newly adopted state standards. We spent inordinate amounts of time sifting the new standards into categories: Which of these standards should be designated as “power standards”? Which of these standards were most likely to be tested? Which of these standards should receive less attention? We felt a need to prioritize the standards because we realized immediately that there were too many of them, that it was impossible to meaningfully teach all of them. (Marzano and Kendall [1998] studied the standards implemented in states across the country and came to the conclusion that we would have to change K–12 to K–22 to have enough time to properly teach the standards adopted by most states.) As teachers, we were panicked because we realized there was simply not enough time to do what we were being asked to do. Worse, we came to the realization that some of the most valued standards (e.g., the ability to write a multi-draft essay) were not going to be tested at all. Teachers were thus stuck in No Man’s Land: should we provide our students with the deep writing experiences we know they need, or should we gear our instruction toward raising test scores? With pressure from administrators and from the public, many teachers chose the latter approach.
Regardless of the instructional approaches taken, not having enough time to teach the standards that would be tested exacerbated the situation. To make sure students were ready for the tests in the spring, schools rushed to develop a series of benchmark exams. We began testing students to see if they were ready to take even more tests. School benchmarks. District benchmarks. State benchmarks. I remember joking that if my boss demanded just a couple more tests, I’d have the easiest (and most boring) job in the world—I could stop teaching altogether and simply be a test monitor. Kind of funny until you consider the teacher in Texas who told me that to meet her school district’s testing demands, she had to spend fifty-five days of her school year either directly testing her students or preparing her students for tests. Fifty-five days she was not teaching. Fifty-five days her students were not learning (that’s nearly one-third of a school year where her students are not receiving instruction). So at a time when teachers desperately needed extra time to teach the standards, time was taken away so students could have extra test prep time. The results, by now, are well known: reading instruction shifted to an over-emphasis on surface-level understanding. Writing instruction was radically reduced (and in some schools, all but eliminated). And in the middle of all this madness we lost sight of what was in the best interest of our students.
The Common Core State Standards (and other new standards movements like the Next Generation Science Standards) are now here and I am afraid it is starting to feel like déjà vu. We are consumed by talk of a new wave of onerous testing. We are concerned that top-down reform will not work. We find ourselves incredulous at talk of evaluating teachers through one-time test scores. We are offended that the teaching of kids from all kinds of backgrounds (who possess a vast array of ability levels) is characterized as a “Race to the Top.”
These concerns raise a new concern: that the issues swirling around the adoption of the newest set of standards, much like the issues generated by the NCLB era, have again diverted our focus from the best practices of literacy instruction. The pressures generated by NCLB, for example, clouded the judgment of many teachers and administrators, veering instruction away from best practices and leading to an over-emphasis on multiple-choice exam preparation. I am concerned that the pressures generated by the latest rounds of new standards and new testing are tempting teachers to abandon what they know is best for their children, sending both teachers and students down similar destructive instructional paths.
To avoid repeating some of the mistakes made during previous reform movements, and to ensure that quality instruction remains at the forefront of our classrooms, educators would be best served to keep three key lessons in mind:
Lesson 1: Avoid falling in love with these standards. They won’t be here forever.
Lesson 2: Recognize that the standards by themselves are necessary but insufficient.
Lesson 3: Remember that good teaching is not about “covering” a new list of standards; good teaching is grounded in practices proven to sharpen our students’ literacy skills.
Let’s take a brief look at each of these lessons.
In any era of new standards, we should remind ourselves that new sets of standards come and new sets of standards go. And though the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), for example, are in some ways a marked improvement from the standards of previous movements, the CCSS, too, have their share of shortcomings (more on this later). Before we myopically fixate on any set of new standards, teachers and administrators would be well served to remind themselves two things about the new standards: (1) teachers who religiously follow them are being asked to do things that are not in the best interest of our students, and (2) these new standards will one day be ushered out the door to make room for the next generation of “improved” standards. When first introduced, new standards come with a certain gravitas—a gravitas, however, that is unlikely to persist. One study, How Well Are American Students Learning? The 2012 Brown Center Report on American Education, notes that “standards with real consequences are most popular when they are first proposed. Their popularity steadily declines from there, reaching a nadir when tests are given and consequences kick in. Just as the glow of consensus surrounding NCLB faded after a few years, cracks are now appearing in the wall of support for the Common Core” (Loveless 2012, 14). These cracks are evident and widening: some outlier states—Wisconsin, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Indiana—have either opted out of the CCSS entirely, or are on the road to doing so. At least five other states have opted not to offer the online assessments designed to measure students’ progress in meeting the standards. As the Brown Center Report reminds us, a new and “better” approach is always around the next corner. To steal the words of Laertes in Hamlet, it might be helpful to see any set of new standards as “forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting” (Shakespeare 1997). What is now sexy to policy makers will not be sexy to policy makers in a few years. All standards movements come and go, and the standards currently in favor in your state will be no exception. Don’t fall in love with them, because one day they are going to leave you.
In California, where I have taught for twenty-nine years, students had to pass the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE) as a prerequisite for receiving a high school diploma. On the language arts section of the exam, students were asked to read a number of passages and to answer questions, and they were required to demonstrate writing proficiency by responding to an on-demand writing prompt. Every student in the state took the CAHSEE, so, in theory, you could compare the literacy level of a student in San Diego with the literacy level of a student in San Francisco. In theory.
But things begin to go sideways when one considers how the CAHSEE was scored. Because the powers that be were deeply concerned that too many students would fail if the bar for passing the exam was set too high, they set the language passing rate at a mere 60 percent (and even more ridiculously, the bar to pass the math section of the exam was set at 55 percent). And it got worse. Though the CAHSEE required students to produce an essay to demonstrate writing proficiency, the essays themselves were weighted lightly into the students’ final scores. In fact, because the essay section was factored so minimally, a student could actually score a zero on the written portion and still pass the exam. That’s right—a student could pass the CAHSEE without demonstrating the ability to write a single sentence. (When a state tells its teachers that writing is literally worth zero, is it any wonder teachers abandon writing and turn their classrooms into multiple-choice test-prep factories?) To the public, however, a reading of the published test scores looked like many of our students were exiting the system as proficient, but to those of us in the classroom, we knew that it was an illusion created by a simple lowering of the proficiency bar.
This manipulation to make more students appear proficient was not an issue limited to California. As the Brown Report notes, many “states have undermined their own credibility when it comes to measuring student learning. Accounts of dumbed-down and poorly-written state tests, manipulation of cut scores to artificially boost the number of students in higher performance levels, and assessments on which students can get fewer than 50% of items correct and yet score ‘proficient’ fuel the belief that states individually cannot be trusted to give the public an accurate estimate of how American education is doing” (Loveless 2012, 7). In many cases state test scores rose, and as a result many schools looked better on paper, yet if one were to take a closer look at national scores—scores that were not influenced by local manipulation of what defines proficiency—alarm bells went off. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, the 2012 reading SAT scores, for example—a national assessment—were the lowest in four decades. (I intentionally chose the 2012 scores because they measured the first set of students whose entire K–12 education was shaped by NCLB.) What I did not mention is that the 2013 scores remained equally as bad—test results that “put a punctuation mark on a gradual decline in the ability of college-bound teens to read passages and answer questions about sentence structure, vocabulary and meaning on the college entrance exam” (Layton and Brown 2012).
I understand and empathize with the philosophy of giving each state the right to develop its own standards and testing program—our country was indeed founded on the notion of states’ rights—but giving states this freedom has far too often led to shenanigans (artificially cut scores, ridiculously low passing rates) that undermine our students’ education. As the Brown Report notes, some states have proven that they cannot be trusted when it comes to determining student proficiency.
I also understand and empathize with the notion of adopting a national set of standards. (This should not be misunderstood as an endorsement of all the over-the-top testing that accompanies the new standards. More on that later.) Students who cannot write should never be deemed “proficient.” In addition, a student who is deemed “proficient” in Mississippi should be held to the same standard as a student who is deemed “proficient” in Massachusetts. Adopting a national set of standards is a necessary step toward ensuring that the notion of “proficient” means the same thing, regardless of where you teach. It is my hope that the adoption of national standards will help to eliminate the shameless manipulation of tests scores, thus enabling valid comparisons to be made.
Though adopting a national set of standards may help eliminate some of the problems that occur when states operate independently, let’s be really clear about two things: first, that even though the new standards are almost universally markedly better than the standards that drove previous eras of education, the new standards still do not always serve the best interest of our students. They are better, but imperfect. They contain blind spots and shortcomings. And second, let’s not forget that the adoption of any set of standards, no matter how strong they may be, does not ensure that teaching gets any better. The standards simply indicate what should be taught; they do not discuss how they should be taught. But, of course, as we know, how the standards are taught is the critical component to elevating our students’ literacy skills. As the Brown Report states, it might be best to consider the new standards “as aspirational, and like a strict diet or prudent plan to save money for the future, they represent good intentions that are not often realized—it is an intended curriculum, and the intent does not necessarily mean results” (Loveless 2012, 13). Later in this book I will examine how these new Common Core standards, despite being a step up from the standards used in the NCLB years, have continued in many cases, despite good intentions, to drive bad teaching.
When thinking about raising student achievement, a strong set of standards is a necessary starting point, but it’s just that—a starting point. When considering the possible impact new standards might have on student learning, the Brown Report analyzed states’ past experiences with adopting new, rigorous standards. The study asked a central question: Did the quality of state standards lead to greater student achievement? The answer, they found, was no. Simply creating and adopting new standards did not raise student performance. This does not bode well for the implementation of the CCSS, for as the study notes, “The empirical evidence suggests that the Common Core will have little effect on American students’ achievement. Despite all the money and effort devoted to developing the Common Core State Standards—not to mention the simmering controversy over their adoption in several states—the study foresees very little impact on student learning” (Loveless 2012, 12).
The Brown Report also examined another interesting question: Did raising the rigor (the cut points for determining proficiency) drive better student achievement? Once again, the answer was no. The study found that “states with weak content standards score about the same on NAEP as those with strong standards” (Loveless 2012, 12). (NAEP is a national assessment that has been in place since 1969 and is the main source of data for a report known as the “Nation’s Report Card.” NAEP is generally considered to be the gold standard of national assessments. For more on NAEP, go to http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard.)
So let’s review these two key findings by the Brown Center: Simply adopting new standards does not raise student achievement, and simply increasing the rigor by raising the “proficiency” bar does not work, either. Merely spelling out what students should be learning does not equal results. This is not to suggest, however, that the Common Core and other recently-adopted standards are worthless. On the contrary, I believe many of the new standards provide a target for good instruction. But I also believe, as I will discuss in subsequent chapters, that some of the new Common Core standards are misguided, thus leading to practices that are not in our students’ best interests. This is why hitching your wagon blindly to any standards movement is rarely a good idea.
There is a scene in the film Bowling for Columbine where Michael Moore (2002) approaches a Los Angeles police officer at the site of a petty crime and asks him if he has instead considered arresting anyone for the smog that is blanketing the city. The smog, he says, is sure to harm way more people than the minor crime currently being investigated. Moore’s question is a joke, but underlying the joke is a genuine concern: Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the trivial that we lose sight of the bigger picture; the minutia clouds what is most important.
I am often reminded of this scene from Bowling for Columbine when I conduct workshops for teachers on how to get reluctant students up and writing. In these workshops, I review the writing demands inherent in the Common Core standards, and I make the point that, generally, students are not getting enough writing practice in our schools. This declaration often makes teachers a bit uncomfortable, and during these workshops, I am invariably asked the same question: “How do you fit in all this writing around the new standards?”
This question is a red flag. The fact that I have been asked this question numerous times lends me to believe that teachers are again becoming so overly focused on the standards that they are losing sight of the bigger picture. The teaching of writing should never be seen as an activity to be “fit in” around the standards. Writing instruction should be a nonnegotiable, core value in any classroom, and teachers should not have to be concerned with fitting it in. The question “How do you fit in writing instruction around the new standards?” is the wrong question. The correct question should be, “How do you fit in all of the standards around your writing instruction?” Like the police officer who is chasing the petty crime instead of seeing the bigger picture, I am afraid that teachers are becoming so hung up on teaching every new standard that they are losing sight of the core literacy needs of our students. Teaching is not an exercise in checking items off a list of standards, and any teacher who cuts writing instruction short simply to ensure every standard is addressed is doing his or her students a terrible disservice. What does it matter if teachers sprint through all the standards if at the end of the year their students still cannot write well?
Enter a new wave of standards, an attempt to change what was done over the previous decade. The good news is that they have arrived. The bad news is that they have arrived. Let me explain, first by discussing the good news that comes with the latest wave of new standards.
Clearly, it’s time to try a different approach, and, though I have already acknowledged that simply handing teachers new standards will not drive meaningful change, I hold out hope that teaching to a set of new, deeper standards might be a necessary first step in reversing this “gradual decline” found in many of our students. What fuels this hope that the new standards might present an opportunity to strengthen instruction in our schools? Why might the new standards be a good thing? Two reasons.
Instruction in the NCLB era was driven by the flurry of testing that accompanied it, and, unfortunately, those tests put a premium on surface-level, multiple-choice thinking. As mentioned earlier, writing was often ignored completely, and as a result, writing was devalued in schools across the country. (I don’t think this observation that writing was devalued in schools across the country is hyperbole. It is based on countless conversations I have had with teachers throughout the United States.) We raised a generation of memorizers who have trouble thinking deeply and who can’t read and write well.
My hope that new standards will be a catalyst in driving more rigor into our classrooms reminds me of the time I found myself on a flight sitting next to the president of a large computer software company. At that time my oldest daughter had just graduated from UCLA and was looking for work in a very bad economy, so I asked the businessman sitting next to me what he looks for when he recruits new employees. He matter-of-factly told me that when hiring, his firm looks for the smartest people in the world, often searching for candidates from top American universities, from India, from China. The conversation continued as follows:
“How is your search for qualified applicants going?” I asked.
“Not so well,” he replied.
“Why is that?”
“It’s still easy to find smart people, but it is getting really hard to find smart people who can think.”
An interesting idea, isn’t it? That our schools are producing smart students who cannot think. At a time when literacy demands increased globally, the NCLB lowered the literacy bar. Teachers drilled their students with multiple choice test preparation materials. Instruction broadened and often stayed in the shallow end of the pool. Rigor was sacrificed, and schools became a lot more boring. One recent study, Do Schools Challenge Our Students? found that even students believe that school has become too easy:
You might think that the nation’s teenagers are drowning in schoolwork. Images of sullen students buried in textbooks often grace the covers of popular parenting magazines, while well-heeled suburban teenagers often complain they have to work the hours of a corporate lawyer in order to finish their school projects and homework assignments. But when we recently examined a federal survey of students in elementary and high schools around the country, we found the opposite: Many students are not being challenged in school.
Consider, for instance, that 37 percent of fourth-graders say that their math work is too easy. More than a third of high-school seniors report that they hardly ever write about what they read in class. In a competitive global economy where the mastery of science is increasingly crucial, 72 percent of eighth-grade science students say they aren’t being taught engineering and technology, according to our analysis of a federal database. (Boser and Rosenthal 2012, 1)
When students say that school is too easy, you know educational reform is headed in the wrong direction. My experience leads me to believe that the above study is half right: I have found that kids who are in the honors track are asked to work hard, but that the bar remains too low for the wide majority of students.
No one is accusing the latest set of standards of being too easy. On the contrary, when it comes to teaching reading and writing, the new standards raise the bar of what it means to be literate. These standards have reintroduced rigor, and that is good. No one rises to low expectations. As Smokey Daniels once said to me, “You can have rigor without the mortis.” I am hoping the new standards will help bring this rigor back into all classrooms, and in doing so, redefine what is meant when a student is defined as “literate.”
To prepare for the demands of the CCSS, participating states have aligned with assessments developed by either the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career (PARCC) or the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC). These new assessments require much more from students than the assessments that drove the NCLB era, and the pressure generated by these new tests presents an opportunity. For example, the new assessments require students across the curriculum to demonstrate their thinking via writing. This renewed emphasis on writing has already prompted teachers from all content areas at my school to come together to discuss ways writing can be infused into their curricula. Some of these teachers are known for not having their students write very much, but since the new assessments value writing, and since the feet of these teachers are being held to this new testing fire, they are beginning to explore ways to bring more writing into their classrooms. It is true that teachers like you or me do not need to have a test held over our heads to prompt more writing in our classes; if every test was taken away tomorrow, we would still have our students write daily. But, sadly, this is not the case with all teachers. There are a number of teachers out there who need the threat of published test scores to nudge them into bringing more writing into their classrooms. At my own school, I have seen evidence that the pressures of this new testing are beginning to drive more writing across the curriculum. The new standards demand writing; student writing is going to be scored; and the results will be published. New writing accountability is driving more writing across the curriculum, and this is a good thing.
So the good news is that the new standards raise the bar of what it means to be literate, and in doing so, often encourage richer and deeper instruction. But along with the new standards come some new concerns.
Though increased rigor may prove to be beneficial, the new standards raise questions about how they are sequenced. P. David Pearson, internationally-known reading researcher from the University of California at Berkeley, wonders how the sequence of skills from one grade level to the next in the Common Core standards was determined. How was it decided, for example, that a particular skill is introduced in the fourth grade instead of in the fifth grade? Who determined these sequencing of skills, and are they developmentally appropriate? “Are they researched-based?” Pearson wonders. “Do they come from tradition? From professional consensus? Best guesses?” Rather than accept this sequencing as gospel, Pearson suggests that “teachers in grade-alike bands get together and assess the logic and the practicality of the progressions that they see in the current standards” (Pearson 2014).
Shelley Harwayne, who in her forty years in education has been a codirector of the Teachers College Writing Project at Columbia University as well as a superintendent of District 2 in New York City, worries that the top-down approach favored by the Common Core of making students more college and career ready has negatively affected children in the early grades, particularly in kindergarten. Harwayne notes that we don’t really have kindergarten anymore, that what used to be first grade has become kindergarten, and what was once kindergarten—a time for socialization, a time for play, a time for developing wonder and creativity—has all but been eliminated. Harwayne also laments that not all five-year-olds are developmentally ready for the academic rigor of the kindergarten standards, and to force those standards on all five-year-olds is educational malpractice (2013). More on this concern can be found in Chapter 3.
With a new set of standards comes a new set of tests. One of the problems with NCLB was that it tested our students into oblivion, and many are concerned that the same thing will happen with the adoption of the CCSS (or with the standards adopted by the previously mentioned outlier states). Stephen Krashen, professor emeritus at the University of Southern California and internationally-recognized expert in second language acquisition, notes that “the common core is calling for more standardized testing than we have ever seen on this planet, far more than the already excessive amount required by No Child Left Behind. In addition to final tests, there will be interim tests given throughout the year and perhaps even pretests in the fall. Instead of only testing math and reading in grades 3 through 8 and once in high-school, the common core will test more subjects and more grades. I estimate at least a 20-fold increase in standardized testing. The common core will not help prepare students for anything except tests” (Krashen 2012).
Though I disagree with Krashen’s assessment that the latest standards will do nothing but prepare students for tests—as stated earlier, I believe, for example, the new standards will drive more writing into our schools—I do share his concern that our students will be massively over-tested. The standards themselves are not the issue here; the problem lies in how much instructional time will be diverted to make students “test ready” for the PARCC and SBAC assessments. Those of us who work with below-grade-level students know that every instructional day is crucial, and we also recognize that every day our students spend taking or preparing for a test is a lost instructional day. Worse, I am concerned that teachers’ overattention to the exams will once again drive them into an over-the-top test-prep mode, eliminating additional instructional days while increasing the danger of classrooms turning into worksheet factories.
But perhaps the biggest worry that emanates from the new round of tests comes from how the tests already appear to be shaping instruction in a way that is not in the best interest of our students. One example: the tests that assess the new CCSS value argumentative writing over narrative writing; therefore, teaching students how to craft a good story is being placed on the back burner (more on why this is a bad trend is found in Chapter 5). On the reading side, nonfiction is overvalued, and when the tests favor nonfiction, I am concerned that the curriculum and instruction will be tilted so that our students will be given less practice reading novels and poetry. The new Common Core reading and writing anchor standards may be better on paper, but the tests that states have adopted to accompany the new standards do not treat all the standards equally. Some standards are more valued than others. Take the skill of close reading, for example. Because close reading of short passages is valued by the tests, some teachers are overdoing having students analyze short passages. Conversely, the tests do not measure a student’s ability to hold his or her thinking across 300 pages, so less emphasis is placed on having students analyze longer works. In this case, the new tests are already driving instruction that is not in our students’ best interest. (The close reading example is just one example of how the new tests adversely affect instruction. There are other cases as well, as discussed in subsequent chapters in this book.) If teachers teach religiously to these exams, their students’ literacy development will be harmed. This is not hyperbolic, especially if you consider one recent study that looked at the effects of top-down federal education policies such as Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind. The study focused on the reform movement in Washington D.C., New York City, and Chicago. These districts were chosen “because all enjoyed the benefit of mayoral control, produce reliable district-level test score data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), and were led by vocal proponents who implemented versions of this reform agenda” (Weiss and Long 2013, 3). What is the big take-away from this study? That these reform movements “delivered few benefits and in some cases harmed the students they purported to help” (3). Specifically, the report found the following:
• Test scores increased less, and achievement gaps grew more, in “reform” cities than in other urban districts.
• Reported successes for targeted students evaporated upon closer inspection.
• Test-based accountability contributed to thinning the ranks of experienced teachers, but not necessarily bad teachers.
• School closures did not send students to better schools or save districts money.
• Charter schools further disrupted the districts while providing mixed benefits, particularly for the highest-needs students.
• Emphasis on widely touted market-reform [test-based teacher evaluation, increased school choice, and the closure of “underperforming” schools] drew attention and resources from initiatives with greater promise.
• The reform missed a critical factor driving the achievement gaps: the influence of poverty on academic performance.
• Real, sustained change requires strategies that are more realistic, patient, and multi-pronged. (3)
When it comes to enabling our students to deepen their literacy skills, there is little evidence that top-down federal education policies such as Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind work, so instead of dragging teachers down another new road that is likely to end in yet another dead end, this book suggests an alternate path: Let’s step away from the politics and madness that have accompanied yet another new educational movement. Let’s step away from the pendulum that has swung once again. Let’s step away from teaching to another series of tests that narrow our instruction. Instead, let’s direct our focus on what we know works when it comes to teaching students how to read, write, listen, and speak. Let’s focus on what is in the best interest of students.