Invited Testimony for a Hearing on
House Bill #616 and Senate Bill #210:
Bills
to prohibit the State Board of Education from adopting and implementing Common
Core’s Standards and Tests
Sandra Stotsky
Professor Emerita of Education Reform
University of Arkansas
March 6 and 7, 2013
I thank State Representative Paul Curtman and
State Senator David Pearce for the opportunity to support bills prohibiting the State
Board of Education from adopting and implementing the standards for public
schools developed by the Common Core Standards Initiative—as part of a larger
effort to downsize government. I will explain why Common Core’s English language arts standards and
future tests are worse than those Missouri has used in recent years, why Common
Core’s ELA standards will lower student achievement and reduce the quality of
your teaching force, and why they cannot be changed unilaterally by Missouri no
matter what you are told.
My professional background: I was a senior associate commissioner in
the Massachusetts Department of Education from 1999-2003 and, among other
duties, was in charge of development or revision of the state's K-12 standards
in all major subjects, licensing regulations for teachers and administrators,
teacher licensure tests, and professional development criteria. I reviewed all
states' English language arts standards for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in
1997, 2000, and 2005. I co-authored Achieve, Inc.'s American Diploma Project
high school exit test standards for English in 2004. Finally, I served on
Common Core's Validation Committee from 2009-2010.
I will speak briefly to the following points.
1. That Common Core's English language arts
standards won’t lead to college readiness
2. That they lack a research base, international
benchmarking, and qualified authors
3. What leads to college readiness in the
secondary English class
4. That Missouri
cannot change one single word in Common Core’s standards
5. What Missouri can do to increase student learning
in all subjects
1. Common
Core's English language arts standards won’t lead to college readiness: Common Core’s “college readiness” standards for
ELA standards have many
flaws:
Common Core expects English teachers to spend over 50
percent of their reading instructional time on informational texts at every
grade level. It sets forth 10
reading standards for informational texts and 9 standards for literary texts at
every grade level, K-12. (An
informational text is a piece of writing written to convey information about
something, e.g., gravity, bicycles, nutrition.) There is no body of information that English
teachers have ever been responsible for teaching, unlike science teachers, for
example, who are charged with teaching information about science. In addition, English teachers are not trained
to give informational reading instruction—by college English departments or by
teacher preparation programs. They study
four major genres of literature—poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction—and are
trained to teach those genres.
Common Core reduces literary study—what English teachers are
trained to teach. Common Core does not specify the literary/historical knowledge students need
in its standards. It offers no specific
criteria for selecting literary or informational texts for study. It provides no
list of recommended authors, never mind works.
It requires no British literature aside from Shakespeare. It does not require study of the history of
the English language.
Common Core’s middle school
writing standards are an intellectual impossibility for average middle school
students.
Adults have a much better idea of what "claims," "relevant
evidence," and academic "arguments" are. But most children have
a limited understanding of these concepts, even if Common Core’s writing
standards were linked to appropriate reading standards and prose models. Nor
does the document clarify the difference between an academic argument
(explanatory writing) and persuasive writing, confusing teachers and students
alike.
Common Core’s college-readiness standards are chiefly
empty skills. Skills training (such as how to use Google or
a card catalogue or find a main idea) alone doesn’t prepare students for
college. High school students need to be taught how to read and understand the
content of complex literary texts in order to do “critical thinking.”
It is not surprising that
such deficient standards received a grade of B+ from the Fordham Institute and
that the Fordham Institute claims Common Core’s standards are superior to those
in most states. Fordham Institute received
at least $1,000,000 dollars from the Gates Foundation to promote Common Core’s
standards. The top officials at the Fordham Institute changed the evaluation
form (and grading scheme) it had used in earlier reviews of state ELA standards
in order to claim that Common Core’s ELA standards were better than those in
most states.
2. Common Core’s standards lack a
research base, international benchmarking, and credible authors: Common Core’s
Validation Committee, on which I served, was supposed to ensure that its
standards were internationally benchmarked and supported by a body of research
evidence. Even though several of us regularly asked for the names of the
countries the standards were supposedly benchmarked to, we didn’t get them. Nor did we get citations to the supposed body
of evidence supporting the idea that an increase in instruction in
informational reading in English or other classes will make students
college-ready.
We did not get evidence on
international benchmarking because Common Core is not about “rigor for all,”
despite all the parrot talk. In grades 6-12, it is about “rigor for none” or
educational rigor mortis. Its goal is not to increase all students’
achievement—the goal of the Bay
State student standards
and tests, and teacher standards and tests.
Common Core’s goal is to close the demographic gaps in student
achievement the easiest way that Gates and the USDE could figure out—which is
why Jason Zimba, the mathematics standards writer told the Massachusetts Board
of Elementary and Education at a public meeting in March 2010 that
college-readiness for Common Core means readiness for admission to a
non-selective community college. The aim
of its high school mathematics standards is not to strengthen the high school
curriculum and to prepare a regularly increasing number of students for college
freshman calculus courses.
Reading researchers have
acknowledged there is no research to support Common Core’s claim about the value of informational reading
instruction in the English or other classes. It is also the case that the
organizations that developed these standards (CCSSO and NGA) and that promoted
them (NASBE, PTA, Achieve, Inc.),
as well as recent reports on the “validity” of Common Core’s standards by one
scholar at the University of Oregon and another one at Michigan State
University, have all been funded by the Gates Foundation. None offers
evidence that Common Core’s standards meet current entrance requirements for
most colleges and universities in this country or elsewhere. Moreover, the Gates
Foundation chose the chief writers of Common Core’s standards in English
language arts and mathematics. Neither has ever taught in K-12.
3. What leads to college readiness in
secondary English classes? The study of complex literature in the English
class, not informational texts, leads to college readiness. Students have to be taught how to “read
between the lines.” Literary study was the focus of the Massachusetts 1997 and
2001 ELA standards, considered the “gold standard” among state ELA standards
long before Massachusetts students scored in first place in grades 4 and 8 in
reading on NAEP—and stayed there.
Moreover, from about 1900—the
beginning of uniform college entrance requirements via the college boards—until
the 1950s, a challenging, literature-heavy English curriculum was understood to
be precisely what pre-college students needed.
From the 1960s onward, the decline in readiness for college reading
(acknowledged in the Common Core document) reflected in large part an
increasingly incoherent, less challenging literature curriculum that was
propelled by the fragmentation of the year-long English course into semester
electives, the conversion of junior high schools into middle schools, and the
assignment of easier, shorter, and contemporary texts—often but not always in
the name of multiculturalism.
By reducing literary study, Common Core’s 50/50
mandate decreases students’ opportunity to develop the analytical thinking once
developed in just an elite group by the vocabulary, structure, style,
ambiguity, point of view, figurative language, and irony in classic literary
texts. It also reduces the quality of
those who become English teachers. Most
English teachers want to teach literature, a major reason they become English
teachers.
4. Why Missouri cannot change one single word in Common
Core’s standards: The
two organizations that developed Common Core’s standards have copyrighted their
documents. States that have adopted Common Core’s standards cannot change one
word of the standards in them, even if their teachers find the standards
confusing, placed at inappropriate levels, or poorly written. States can add up
to 15% of their own standards but must assess this 15% themselves. This 15% is above and beyond what is in the
Common Core standards.
5. Why Missouri’s
own ELA Standards didn’t increase student learning enough: The fact that the Bay State’s
standards seem to have been more effective than those in other states can be attributed
to the simultaneous changes in the academic requirements for teacher and
administrator training programs, licensure tests, and professional development.
High quality in a state’s standards is
not enough. Raising the academic bar for admission to an education school
and embedding the content of strong academic standards into its educator
preparation programs, licensure tests, and professional development will over
time lead to increases in achievement for all students in reading and
mathematics, as it did in Massachusetts.
Final Comment
Let me
repeat some basic points of fact first.
(1) Common Core’s standards are NOT internationally benchmarked and will
not make us competitive. No country has ever been mentioned as a benchmark. (2)
Common Core’s standards are NOT rigorous. The Gates Foundation wanted to
make a sale. Would any state have
adopted them if it wasn’t told they were rigorous? (3) There is NO research or research
evidence to support Common Core’s stress on “informational” reading instruction
in the English class or in any other high school subject. (4) Missouri does not need
Common Core to find out how Missouri
students compare with Idaho
students. It can use NAEP’s results to
find out.
All state
standards need to be reviewed and revised if needed at least every five to seven
years by identified Missouri
teachers and discipline-based experts in the arts and sciences, and
parents. In addition, all state assessments
should be reviewed by Missouri
teachers and discipline-based experts in the arts and sciences before the tests
are given. This can’t happen with Common
Core’s standards and assessments. Missouri has lost
control of the content of its children’s education under Common Core. Its main task is simply to pay for its costs.
The future costs for staying with Common Core will far outweigh the costs for leaving
while leaving is still possible.
