In article in the Hechinger Report shows how the Common Core State Standards are getting students to write about many different subjects.
In the early elementary school grades, … classmates at Belle Chasse Primary School in suburban New Orleans wrote almost entirely from personal experience: describing their ideal vacation, trying to convince readers that a longer school year would be a good (or bad) idea, penning a letter about their adventures during summer break.
That all changed this school year [with the Common Core].
As fourth graders, [students] more rarely write stories or essays based solely on their experience or imaginative musings anymore. Instead, it’s all about citing “textual evidence.”
The article claims that the Common Core has kids writing using “textual evidence.” This is not exactly accurate.
News flash: My fourth-grade teacher taught me to support arguments using textual evidence 40 years ago. Before the Common Core. Before the standards that came before the Common Core. Before even the standards of learning in English language arts that came before that.
I bring readers’ attention to the article not because the Common Core had any role in getting students to write using text-based evidence, but rather because I found some of the examples used in the article, by the wonderful teachers in a Louisiana elementary school, fascinating and helpful. I hope you’ll read about them and discover an idea or two that would work with your own students.
The article quotes Lucy Calkins, the founding director of the Teachers College Reading & Writing Project, who said the Common Core calls for an equal weight on narrative, opinion, and informational writing. “It’s been a huge wake-up call that writing is important,” she said, adding that in the past some schools failed to teach writing at all since it wasn’t prioritized under No Child Left Behind.
Aha!! Now the truth comes out! Writing was in our curricula since — forever — but the Common Core gave us a “wake-up call,” also known as a high-stakes test, that all of a sudden made writing important. Whew! I’m so glad we finally figured this out. All sarcasm aside, as important as writing has always been, it really wasn’t tested under the federal NCLB law.
Now, of course, with the Common Core, writing is going to be tested. And those standardized tests could bring about the death of the Common Core. It has been pointed out that the biggest reason “textual evidence” is required in the Common Core is that it makes writing test questions easier. The real value of literature is not so much in the words of the text itself but in the allusions and references in the text. Of course, that really can’t be tested, so the Common Core reverts to a strong reliance on texts, which we can easily put in front of students taking a high-stakes standardized test.
The high-stakes testing movement is a disaster, and it would be an even bigger disaster if we have to kill the Common Core in order to get rid of bad standardized tests. The standards in the Common Core need revision, and if they’re linked to specific test questions, the standards can’t be changed. That will be their demise.
That is, if we are to put the Common Core to good use, we must decouple the standards from the tests, so we can rearrange the Common Core into something that works for our students. If that is not possible, the national standards movement and the good fight fought by so many good people will be lost.
It’s the only way. If we can’t save it, the writing emphasis will wither away, at least on documents and records seen by bureaucrats in Washington. (I hope, beyond hope, that our nation’s fourth-grade teachers will still realize the value of writing, even if it’s not tested on a high-stakes standardized test.)