A piece I've written over at The New Republic is getting lots of attention, so I thought I'd just expand on a few things here. I think the ambitions behind the Common Core are good ones, but I agree with Dianne Ravitch and co. that the whole thing was rushed and probably needed more input from those on the ground. Most troubling, I think, is the general tendency in education "reform" right now to reduce everything to some quantifiable metric, including literary complexity. It is a frightening assumption, in so much of our society right now, that if an experience can't be reduced to data it really isn't worthwhile. When we bring this assumption to bear on books or art it compromises the "human" experience at the center of the humanities. In short: it makes our teachers, and our children, less human.
Yes, I understand that some of the metrics used to measure reading complexity are primarily intended to improve comprehension -- and I agree this is a worthy goal for at least one part of our literacy education. I also understand that the standards carefully explain that students should also learn more nuanced reading skills. But the emphasis and the energy behind the Common Core points more in the direction of "comprehension" and quantifiable data than it does in the direction more broadly defined "reading." The CCSSO documentation repeatedly makes it clear that the final goal is better algorithms and metrics, better testing regimes, more failproof systems.
We must recognize that such systems, in both their conceptualization and implementation, often disempower and devalue teachers. The best teaching systems in the world -- like Finland's -- treat teachers as experts in their field and demand their expertise. They then trust teachers to match reading materials to children in a holistic fashion. This is the way it used to be, in some places, in America too. At least that was my lucky experience, growing up in a small, rural school, in a poor community in far western Oklahoma. I was a loudmouth, smartass kid, who was always in trouble for disrupting class. In my 7th grade year, I literally spent every day of the first month in after school detention. But in my 8th-grade year, I got lucky. That's when my English teacher took me aside and said: "you know what, you seem to get this literature we're reading pretty well. Why don't you go over to my bookshelf -- the one over there behind my desk -- and find something else you might like?" She particularly suggested I might want to take a look at The Catcher in the Rye, or maybe Clockwork Orange.
Clockwork Orange? What Jr. High kid today gets to read that book in school? But that teacher let me read all the naughty books -- the books that I, at least, felt like were just a little bit forbidden -- and I loved it. That semester I not only read Clockwork Orange and Catcher in the Rye, but also most of Steinbeck, On the Road, and everything I could find by Kurt Vonnegut. These books gave voice to some of the social discontent I'd begun to feel but never been able to articulate. They resonated with me, and in some very real sense they saved me, or at least saved my teachers from some of my disrupted disaffection.
I never stopped reading, although I did eventually get into Shakespeare and Milton too. I became an English professor so I could teach them all the time. And I hope that some of my students become teachers in a system where they're treated like professionals who can figure out what students would like to read -- what they need to read -- without using some stupid algorithm.
