Saturday, September 22, 2012

Constructivizing the Common Core

I've long been skeptical about whether the Common Core Standards, however well intentioned, can spur positive education reform. As I argued earlier on the Core Knowledge blog, the vagueness of these standards leaves way too much room for interpretation:

An article in the latest Edweek on the common core English standards, for example, teems with Constructivist buzzwords: "inquiry;"  "habits of mind;'" "cross-disciplinary."  It also describes a hypothetical assignment, inspired by the core standards, that reeks of Constructivism's fuzzy open-endedness, "real life" relevance, personal connections, and interdisciplinary sprawl:
A look through the 66-page Common Core Standards for English, Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects shows a couple of occurrences of cross/inter-disciplinary, a couple of occurrences of "inquiry" (though not in a particularly Constructivist sense), and no occurences of "habits of mind." There's certainly plenty of room for a Constructivist interpretation of the core standards, but there's also room for much more.

In particular, there's apparently room for a rather bizarre conclusion about what sorts of texts to assign, at least according to the Edweek article:
"Rigor," apparently, is defined entirely by the Lexile rating system:
But Lexile is not designed to be the sole basis for determining rigor. Lexile ratings are based on just two factors: word frequency and sentence length. From Lexile's own website:
Who in their right mind would think that "The Catcher in the Rye" should be read by fourth graders--let alone "The Sun Also Rises" and other works by that author so well-known for his simple sentences and vocabulary?

Second, where does Edweek get the idea that all students should be assigned "on-grade-level texts"? This idea--in the same spirit as Constructivism's half-baked "differentiated instruction" paradigm--is nowhere in the common core document. Nor is it a good way to teach the many students who are reading substantially below grade level. (Their schools' insistence that all students be taught on-grade-level texts was one of the biggest complaints of my TFA students).

Interestingly, crude word counting along the lines of Lexile rating seems to be the basis for some of this Constructivist exegesis of the Common Core Standards. For example, librarian Paige Jaeger, who proposed the clothing label/UN ambassadors' project above as a rigorous, "inquiry-based" project, was inspired in part by having counted:
But true reading comprehension is much more than word counting, and before anyone can "analyze," "integrate," and "formulate," say, a document like the Common Core Standards, he or she must first be able to comprehend full sentences--however short, and however high the frequency of the words they contain. Given how deathly boring the Common Core Standards documents are, this is, however, a very tall order, and one that I myself have no intention of actually following.


Rivka said...



William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying: 5.4
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises: 4.4
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls: 5.8
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath: 4.9
John Steinbeck, East of Eden: 5.3
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon: 5.0


1crosbycat said...


Auntie Ann said...



>> The amount of passive voice the writers used ranged from 2.3% to 13.43%.

>> The number of characters per word ranged from 3.72 to 4.58.

>> The readability ranged from 72.34% to 91.84%, with an average of 83.1%.



lgm said...

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is no less gruesome than Agatha Christie. And the sex child was assigned to read this book in 8th grade (ages 12-14 here in NY)'s easy even at this age to realize that mom preferred to satisfy her sexual desires over raising her son....wonderful portrayal of women and great thinking points for a 12 year old, it is not.

lgm said...


It's anti-eltism. The thinking is that those of poor socioeconomic status were deliberately tracked in to below grade level reading groups and not allowed to progress. Therefore, these low groups are not allowed. Additionally, no child shall get ahead of any other on the public dime, certainly not by being offered an above grade level reading group, no matter what the child's instructional reading level is. In other words, if you want to teach your child to read before the school does, you need to get thy offspring to private school.

Anonymous said...

You're equating "interdisciplinary sprawl" with constructivism or other failed pedagogical strategies. I wonder how you came to that conclusion, since John Hattie meta-analysis from Visible Learning show an effect of d=.39 (a respectable effect)for "Integrated Curricula". Am I missing something?

Katharine Beals said...

"Am I missing something?"
I believe so. There's a big difference between the "integrated curricula programs" Hattie reports on (in which, say, math is integrated into science, or language arts is integrated into social studies) and the kind of sprawling interdisciplinary project I describe above, which starts with students inspecting label and ends with them "imagining themselves as ambassadors at the United Nations" and "figuring out what issues are most pressing for their country and how best to plead for funding."

Anonymous said...

Hmm, I think what you're really objecting to is not interdisciplinary teaching as such, but personal (i.e. "soft", "emotional") projects. How would you feel about UN budget projects that required only analysis of past UN budgets and an essay/research paper on analyzing trends in or reporting broad sociocultural initiatives ? That would be an integrated assignment of sorts, but lack the kind of personal response features you outlined above.

Katharine Beals said...

Anonymous, the projects you describe are indeed a lot less "soft and fuzzy" than the one cited in this post--and than the typical projects assigned in today's elementary and middle schools. Your hypotheticals have a lot more substance. However, for students to really benefit from such projects, they first need a lot of background knowledge. That background knowledge is best taught in a more systematic, direct way than project-based learning permits. That does not rule out teaching such background knowledge in an integrated way--e.g., integrating science (e.g., scientific discoveries and inventions) or language arts (e.g., essay writing) into, say, history instruction. Nor does it rule out assigning projects once that background knowledge is attained.