None of this happened.
Gates, ever the monopolist, wanted a single national bullet list to which to key
a) an Orwellian database of assessment results and other evaluations and
b) [de]personalized education software that could be “sold at scale.”
Lord Coleman the Sellf-Inflated presented himself as ready to do the job—an act of astonishing hubris, given that he had almost no relevant expertise himself. Then, instead of consulting people who did knew something about each of the subdomains of ELA and thinking through, anew, what standards in ELA should look like, he and Susan Pimentel simply reviewed the lowest-common-denominator groupthink of existing state ELA standards and created a new list based on those and on their own quaint prejudices. The old state standards were almost completely content free, and so is the CC$$ bullet list. It’s an almost content-free, vague, abstract, backward list of overly broadly drawn SKILLS. The doleful consequences for our nation are clear: a dramatic devolution of ELA curricula and pedagogy resulting from taking the Gates/Coleman bullet list as the de facto curriculum.
When I first reviewed these “standards,” it looked to me as though a group of small-town business people–the tailor and the owner of the MiniMart–had hacked them together based on their vague, inaccurate, wildly gap-filled memories of what was taught in their English classes back in the day. One would have gotten similar results if Gates had hired David Coleman to write new “standards” in medicine and had sent him to a cabin in Vermont with a copy of Galen and the 1859 edition of Gray’s Anatomy to base the new standards on. In domain after domain, these “standards” are breathtakingly backward and full of holes and fail to outline coherent, systematic development of bodies of knowledge in the student over time. If you look at the language “standards,” for example, you will find that they reflect PRESCIENTIFIC, folk theories of how vocabulary and grammar are acquired and aren’t informed by the vast amount of learning that linguists have done about these subjects over the past 60 years. It’s as though we had new “standards” for the Navy that warned about sailing of the edge of the Earth. It’s as though we had new “standards” for Physics instruction that tell us to teach that objects naturally seek their place, that light travels through the luminiferous ether, and that fire results from the release of phlogiston from combustible bodies.
Accomplishment in English (and in any other language) results from two distinct modes for gaining knowledge and ability. One is unconscious ACQUISITION. The other is conscious LEARNING. This is a fundamental and hugely important distinction in the contemporary cognitive science of language learning, but these “standards” aren’t informed by such understanding. They treat apples as though they were carburetors. And what should students gain from their English classes? Well, they should acquire and learn a) automatic, unconscious acquired and applied understanding of the syntax, morphology, semantics, and a lot of the vocabulary of the language and b) DESCRIPTIVE KNOWLEDGE of the areas that English covers (examples of descriptive knowledge: what a couplet is, who invented the detective story [Poe], what the Puritans and Transcendentalists believed and how these beliefs affect the history of ideas in the United States, who Mary Shelley was and what she wrote and why it was important, what a pastoral poem is and what conventions it relies on, the elements of the hero’s journey, how a sonnet is structured, and so on)]. And they should also acquire and learn c) PROCEDURAL KNOWLEDGE in a great many areas (examples of procedural knowledge: how to plan a fable [short, animal characters behaving like humans, a conflict, a moral], techniques for achieving sentence variety, how to put together a Works Cited page, how to speak melodically, how to format a play or a film script, and so on). And, of course, learning in the various domains would be scaffolded over the course of the 13-year period of instruction.
But choose ANY domain of ELA and ANY subdomain (e.g., literature: prosody, genre, literary archetypes and motifs, conventional symbolism, styles and movements, major authors, critical approaches, narrative structures, etc.; writing: sentence structures, ways to connect ideas; rhetorical techniques; figures of speech; planning pieces of various types, structural formulae for writing of various types, etc.) and you will look in vain in these “standards” for systematic development of students’ knowledge and abilities of these over time. The “standards” are a randomized mess and leave out most of the important stuff–descriptive content and procedural knowledge.
Let me give one example. Let’s consider ways of approaching or making sense of literary works. Collectively, those are known as critical approaches or critical lenses. There are many ways in and out of literary works, and the CC$$ in ELA treats NONE OF THEM coherently and systematically across the grade levels, though it makes lip service to ONE of about twenty-five major approaches (what I call CC$$ New Criticism Lite). What is the value of learning a variety of ways of making sense of a story or poem or play or film? Well, among its many functions, learning procedures for doing various types literary criticism gives people toolkits for making accessible, in interesting ways, works that otherwise wouldn’t be.
So, one approach to criticism involves consideration of the intellectual biography of the author—Biographical Criticism (What experiences did he or she have? What ideas was he or she interested in?) For example, you will be able to read William Butler Yeats’s poems “Leda and the Swan,” “The Magi,” and “The Second Coming” with greater understanding if you know that Yeats was a mystic and believed that at various times in history, the spirit world intersected this world and disrupted everything, creating a new age. Zeus got with Leda, who gave birth to Helen of Troy, which led to the Trojan War and the Heroic Age. God became man, in the form of Christ, initiating a struggle between paganism and Christianity resulting in the Christian era. Something new and very destructive and disruptive is about to be born in our time, and we don’t know what it is yet. Yes, Yeats actually believed in these fables. And he couldn’t spell worth a darn, either. Nonetheless, he was a truly superb poet.
Another approach to criticism looks at how literary works are informed by ideas, politics, social life, and so on at the time of their composition—Historical Criticism. So, what are we to make of Plato’s weird little Allegory of the Cave from the Republic? Well, it can only make sense if you have some background in ideas current in Plato’s time. Plato was impressed by Greek mathematics. He thought that one could conceive of/think about perfect forms like a perfect point or triangle that could not be found in the world. In Greek, there was one word, psyche, for both “mind” and “soul.” So, Plato decided that you couldn’t find perfection, of mathematical forms, of truth, of beauty, of virtue, or of anything else, by looking at the world but that you could discover these simply by thinking carefully—by using your mind/soul and making repeated, recursive, critiqued stabs at the problem (the famous Socratic Method). Without this background, Plato’s little parable will be completely opaque because some of its underlying ideas are foreign to our time, which points to a second function of criticism: it extends our range of understanding beyond our own conventional understandings derived from our current milieu.
Another approach involves learning about genres and their characteristics—Genre Criticism. When we know the type of thing a work is and the characteristics of that type of thing, we can see what we couldn’t before. So, from ancient times, there was fantasy literature and mythology involving nonordinary things—banshees and fairies, strange monsters, gods and demigods, weird places, etc. But in 1817, an 18-year-old girl (!) named Mary Shelley created a new kind of story involving extremely weird, nonordinary things. She borrowed an old fantasy/folklore motif—the creation of simulacrum of a person, like the European Gollum or like the Tripod helpers created by Hephaestus and described in the Iliad—but she added a twist: she made the story SCIENTIFICALLY PLAUSIBLE, based on the science of her day, by creating a mechanism borrowed from what were for her contemporary scientific studies. The mechanism was animal electricity, or galvanism. In so doing, she created a new genre of literature (at 18!!!!), the science fiction story. Fantasy and myth, on the one hand, and science fiction, on the other, all deal with weird, strange occurrences. But the latter genre differs from the others in two respects—it must be scientifically plausible, and it must present a warning about the possible negative consequences of scientific/technological hubris. Once a student knows this about sci fi, he or she will read or watch works in this genre with renewed understanding, and he or she will be more likely as an adult to follow Robert’s Rule:
For more on sci fi and plausibility, go here: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2020/01/20/why-science-fiction-is-impossible-a-science-fiction-writers-confession/
Now, all of this might sound complicated and irrelevant to teaching K-12 graders–kids. But it’s not. Most of the major approaches to criticism can be practiced at very, very simple levels. (Genre criticism, grade 2: Parables are very short stories with a moral and human characters; Fables are very short stories with a moral and animal characters.) The great literary scholar Paul H. Fry, in his magisterial Theory of Literature, illustrates this by presenting very, very simple explanations of a picture book story, Tony the Tow Truck, using a wide variety of critical approaches. Or, have a look at Frederick Crews’s delightful books on criticism, The Pooh Perplex and Postmodern Pooh, in which he satirically applies various critical approaches to Winnie the Pooh stories.
One could imagine a set of standards that was actually informed by expertise. Such a set of standards for ELA might contain a thread to develop students’ procedural knowledge of ways to make sense of literary works—a literary criticism thread. A subdomain. And that thread would start very simply and then build, systematically, over 13 years, knowledge of and ability to use the major approaches to literature. One of the fundamental distinctions (and divides!) in literary criticism is between interpretation as recovering the author’s intention versus interpretation as thinking about the significance of the experience of the work to the reader. This is the difference between “What do you mean?” and “What does this mean to me?” That’s a distinction that can be PRACTICED very, very early on—by very little kids.
If Lord Coleman and Lady Pimentel, appointed by Gates the deciders for the rest of us, had bothered to consult literary scholars, they might have learned some of this. They might have learned that EVERY SUBDOMAIN in ELA consists of a body of acquired or learned, unconscious (e.g., you use the rules for ordering of adjectives without knowing what you know of them) or conscious (sci-fi stories differ from fantasy because they must be scientifically plausible), descriptive or procedural knowledge, and they might have set about producing a scaffolded, spiraled, systematic outline for teaching that knowledge over time. For example, the “standards” contain a speaking and listening strand/domain. So, what are the elements of speaking? Well, these include pitch and intonation, stress, length, rhythm, pace, volume, timbre, articulation, enunciation, diction, respiration, facial expression, eye contact, gesture, stance, posture, proximity, register, silence and pauses, movement, dialect, paralinguistic vocalization, body language, and resonance, to name a few. Trained speakers, such as actors, have command of all of these. They know that they can make their voices more melodic, and more pleasant to listen to, by lowering their average pitch and then varying their pitch around that center, slightly heightening the normal variations in pitch that are used in everyday speech. They know that they can use variation in pitch and rhythm to avoid sounding monotone. They know that they can make their speech more engaging by making strategic use of gesture and body language and eye contact and body language. They know that they can create surprise and interest by strategic use of pauses or unusual timbre or register or pitch. They know that they can control timbre in various ways so that they don’t sound shrill or nasal or otherwise awful. And all these things can be simply taught and practiced. One could imagine a speaking and listening strand that actually did that (and much else) over time and so produced adults who were good at public speaking and performance. But as with other domains and subdomains in ELA, look for these in the almost content-free CC$$ in ELA, and they are not there.
Going up the Coleman stair,
I met some knowledge that wasn’t there.
It wasn’t there again today.
No one, of course, can learn this way.
But doing what I have suggested here would have required the deciders for the rest of us to have consulted experts who actually knew something about the various domains and subdomains that the “standards” purportedly “cover.” It would have required a lot less of Gates- and Coleman-level hubris. And it would have required rethinking what “standards” in ELA might look like and mean. No, the list cannot simply be of some random, vaguely articulated “skills,” for look closely at a skill, and it consists of consciousy learned or unconsciously acquired descriptive and procedural knowledge. It must specify content. Instead, the makers of the CC$$ relied on their own received, hackneyed, backward, uninformed notions and on the execrable existing state standards and produced an almost completely content free list of vague, abstract skills that has led to a dramatic devolution of ELA curricula and pedagogy because of the high stakes attached to tests on them.
My advice to teachers struggling underneath the CC$$ Occupation, for that’s what it is: give lip service about it to administrators as you have to; then close your classroom door, ignore the puerile Gates/Coleman “standards,” and teach English.
For a brief outline of types of criticism (think: ways to approach a poem, story, play, film, etc.), go here: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/03/24/approaches-to-literary-criticism/
Copyright 2020. Robert D. Shepherd. All rights reserved. This post may be freely shared as long as it is unchanged and this copyright notice is retained.
For more of my writing about Education “Reform,” go here: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/category/ed-reform/
I’ve written a lot about Ed Reform over the years, and especially about its effects on U.S. pedagogy and curricula. If you don’t want to wade through all that, good places to start are here:
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2020/01/06/stopping-by-school-on-a-disruptive-afternoon/
and here:
and here:
and here:
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/03/15/what-happens-when-amateurs-write-standards/
and here:
Bob Shepherd | Praxis 