The Education Invasion - Joy Pullmann

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he noted that it came from a textbook published before Common Core came out. Bad math instruction has been around forever. On the other hand, parents aren’t crazy to see a connection between bad math and Common Core, because “in school districts, and in schools, and in classrooms, people hear a certain message from Common Core. And one of the messages is: kids need to be doing this kind of ‘deeper learning, deeper thinking, higher-order thinking’ in mathematics. . . . It gives local educators license to adopt a lot of this garbage, this really bad curriculum. And they do it under the shield of the Common Core.” When teachers have no choice but to use Common Core, it’s harder to hold them accountable for bad instruction.

      Terms like “deeper learning” and “real-world problems” mean special things in the education world. Loveless calls this terminology “a dog whistle to a certain way of approaching mathematics that has never worked in the past.” It was tried nationally in the 1960s and again in the 1990s. “It failed both times. And we are seeing a resurrection of some of these bad materials and these bad practices again. And it’s partially the Common Core’s fault.”12

      Common Core English

      Not far from Liberty Elementary School, with the one-cubes and ten-sticks, Tessa Bohonos is giving an English lesson to her class of advanced freshmen at Warren Central High School. It’s the last lesson of the day, and the kids are quiet. That’s partly because they spend about half of the class time using their Chromebooks. Bohonos has just earned her master’s degree in education technology from Ball State University, and she’s eager to apply her new skills.

      Her long ponytail swings as she walks about the room. The desks are arranged traditionally, facing the front in rows. The walls are not aflutter with a kaleidoscope of color like the first-grade room. In the back, dramatic black and white posters of Greek gods from classical mythology brush the ceiling in a neat row, but otherwise the room is subdued and focused.

      The students hunch over their Chromebooks, squinting at the screens. They spend a few minutes entering new “academic vocabulary” into Google spreadsheets, then several minutes on a short lesson. Common Core says high schoolers should “use technology, including the Internet, to produce, publish, and update individual or shared writing products.”13

      Bohonos tells students to cluster around the whiteboard and write any story elements they can think of, because “I don’t like to spend time on things you already know. That’s boring.” They write words like conflict, protagonist, thesis in deliberately random, multicolored verbal fragments across the board. One young man writes sideways. Then Bohonos hands the students a page filled with vocabulary terms, many of which have just been written on the whiteboard. They run through the list together. Anything a student doesn’t know well, she says, should go into his academic vocabulary spreadsheet.

      “I’m not saying this will for sure happen,” she says, tilting her head and sounding secretive, “but these words just might show up on a future quiz.”

      Students spend the rest of class working on an essay due in four days, before they read To Kill a Mockingbird. Their “pre-reading” essay must be on one of three topics: race relations, banning books, or “the N-word in literature.”

      Bohonos reminds students to turn in a bibliography with their essay. She has put several articles related to each topic on an online pinboard for students to use as sources, including articles on the Scottsboro Boys and Plessy v. Ferguson. Bohonos tells me she’s adding historical documents to her instruction because of Common Core’s requirement that students read progressively more nonfiction. Warren’s RTT application says that eighth-grade teachers in the district will assign readings that are 45 percent “literacy” and 55 percent “informational” passages, as Common Core directs, with the ratio shifting to 30/70 by twelfth grade.14

      Common Core also mandates assigning books at the students’ grade level rather than their reading level, so now Bohonos’s nonadvanced students will read the actual book To Kill a Mockingbird instead of the simpler screenplay, as they did before. A Fordham Institute survey of 1,154 English teachers nationwide in October 2013 found that more than one-third of the high school teachers assigned To Kill a Mockingbird, the most commonly used book.15 While this book’s themes are appropriate for middle school or later, the reading level of the language is rated for elementary schoolers; one Common Core–approved scale says it’s a good fit for a midyear fifth grader.16 In other words, it’s thematically but not linguistically complex, although Common Core claims to emphasize the latter.

      Bohonos walks around, conferring with students individually as they write. Once the essay is finished, students must post it online and respond to at least three of their classmates’ essays “with at least 75 words in your response,” Bohonos says. There’s a hitch: the Chromebooks won’t allow cutting and pasting into the discussion board, so students have to upload their essays as attachments. But overall, Bohonos likes the online board: “It’s what college students are using,” she tells her students.

      Bohonos is excited about helping students practice “collaboration” and “twenty-first-century skills” with another assignment based on To Kill a Mockingbird: they will choose approximately two pages of “descriptive text” from the book and add images to create a short YouTube video. The Common Core standards ask high school kids to “make strategic use of digital media” and “integrate and evaluate information presented in diverse media and formats.” Since it’s a new lesson for Bohonos this year, she’ll try it out on the advanced students first, and then use their videos as examples in her other classes.

      “Authentic, Collaborative” Teaching

      Bohonos and Latdrik were among the teachers paid with RTT grant money to attend several Common Core seminars put on by the district in summer 2013. Teachers who participated in the Common Core planning committee, also compensated with grant funds, spent a week and a half thinking through the standards and writing them “in kid-friendly language,” Bohonos said.

      The standards document itself is heavy reading, laden with jargon. Here’s a general standard for language arts: “Acquire and use accurately a range of general academic and domain-specific words and phrases sufficient for reading, writing, speaking, and listening at the college and career readiness level; demonstrate independence in gathering vocabulary knowledge when encountering an unknown term important to comprehension or expression.”17 Translation: Learn a lot of words, and look up words you don’t know.

      “The Common Core can be vague if there isn’t an administrator saying ‘This is how we take this,’” Latdrik acknowledged. The Warren district was methodical in helping teachers apply the mandates in their classrooms. Teachers met regularly with a Common Core coach. Every Wednesday morning, they met in groups both within and across grade levels to discuss a specified topic, such as the collaborative aspects of Common Core, or workshop approaches to math and writing. Warren’s high school English teachers held a close-reading workshop for faculty in other departments; Bohonos worked with art teachers, explaining how close reading is “like analyzing art.”

      Latdrik said the first two years of Common Core were “rough,” but she came to like it. “Rather than me standing up and teaching [students] a skill, it’s me coordinating experiences where they can authentically engage in that on their own,” she explained. “I’ve never felt more like what I’m teaching them in kindergarten and first grade is truly important.”

      Warren’s professional development program highlights materials from self-described “constructivist” educators, who promote you’re-on-your-own techniques rather than traditional teaching styles based on giving explicit instruction and imparting knowledge. In one Teaching Channel video, for example, a middle school math teacher has his students find the formula for the surface area of a cylinder without assistance.18 The progressive educators who control teacher training tend to favor constructivist methods. Research has shown that this approach may be effective with well-off students, but is likely to be detrimental to poorer children whose families are less equipped to fill in the gaps left by self-led instruction.19

      Ryan

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