This is a really fascinating moment in education, because 46 states and Washington, DC have adopted the Common Core standards. Right now, the Common Core standards are standards for reading in language arts, in both fiction and what the Common Core calls IT, informational texts, what we used to call nonfiction but basically it’s the same. Also in science and in math.
And the Common Core is not yet a standard for content. It’s not “you need to study Gettysburg as opposed to Vicksburg.” That’s not what it’s saying. It’s thinking, and the reason for the Common Core, why do we have the Common Core? The Common Core came about because under No Child Left Behind, every state had to show adequate yearly progress. And states, not being stupid, said “all right, we’ll set the bar at progress at that which we can make.”
So famously, a child graduating, doing really well as a 12th grader and graduating high school in Mississippi, was an 8th grader in Massachusetts. And this just made no sense. It made no sense for the colleges that these graduates went on to or for the workforce that they went on to. The other thing is, we came to realize that education, especially in reading, had focused very heavily, not only on fiction as fiction, which has much to offer, but also on personal response to fiction.
One of the most standard sets of essays children did from elementary school on were personal narratives. How do I feel about this text? What does this text, what emotions does it give in me? Do I identify with the character? And we come to realize that when those graduates enter college and the workforce, where they’re asked to assess material, not on what do I feel, but what does it say, they were unprepared. Because when they were dealing not with what do I feel, they were being handed textbooks which were telling them XYZ date, name, event, timeline, chronology.
So they could either regurgitate that set of settled information or give a personal response. They could not analyze the wealth of kinds of information that are coming at all of us all the time. So what the Common Core has developed is this idea of a spiraling approach, which means, this is what I love about it, when you have a preschool class that’s sitting there in a library and the library is reading them the story of the Three Little Pigs, as well as every other tool she’s always used to engaged the kids, she is also going to be asking them what do you think’s going to happen next to the house of straw, the house of wood?
She’s going to ask, okay, what’s your evidence? What in this story gives you evidence for thinking that’s going to happen? And then she also may say, well, who’s telling this story? Would the wolf tell the same story? What’s this same story from the wolf’s point of view? And fortunately, we now have picture books that tell the same story from the wolf’s point of view. Why does this matter is ‘cause as the spiral moves up, that same child will keep being asked, as he or she reads, why do you think that?