Education Week - November 14, 2012 - Special Report - S9

at each grade. Mr. Pearson said descriptors at transition grades, such as in upper elementary and middle school, may become the “Achilles heel of the standards.” “As you move through the grades, it changes in funny ways, and I don’t think the changes are based on any actual research, but on professional consensus,” Mr. Pearson said. “We may end up in the strange position of having a standard in 8th grade easier than one in 6th grade.” Mr. Shanahan agreed that “some of the targets are a little goofy,” noting, for example, that the common core requires children to compare two texts in kindergarten, but there is no specific evidence that this skill should develop in that grade versus, say, grades 1 or 2. On the other hand, Mr. Shanahan said, “I think what the learning progressions tell us is a 4th grade teacher can no longer be a 4th grade teacher, or even a grades 3-4-5 teacher. They need to be a teacher of literacy and understand the precedents and antecedents of what a student needs to know.”

state standards were developed, they basically became the curriculum,” said Ms. McLaughlin, who also chairs the reading department at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania. “If the states that adopted the common core say to their school districts, ‘This is the curriculum,’ and teachers feel they must teach to the test, the curriculum as it exists would not include the metacognitive strategies, the writing-process strategies... and that’s a problem.” Ms. Neuman, the former assistant education secretary, disagrees. “I like the idea of focusing

on outcomes,” she said. “Comprehension strategies and metacognitive techniques have often been talked about as repair strategies, but you have to actually know you are not reading well to use those. So it’s a little bit of a Catch-22 here. What this new approach is saying is focus on the text, because many remedial readers rely too much on their background knowledge and think they understand what they are reading when they actually do not.” The University of Michigan’s Ms. Duke echoed the researchers’ general concern that there has not

been enough study of what good comprehension looks like and how to teach it in new contexts required by the common core, such as Internet articles, data tables, and texts that also include graphics. “When a standard calls for us to get kids proficient at something we don’t yet know how to get students proficient at, we really have to scramble a little bit,” she said. “Hopefully, in a decade, we’ll have really nice research on effective ways to go about this.” Mr. Shanahan agreed. “I don’t know of any studies or lines of research that might make

us decide three or five years from now, let’s take out these items or put these in,” he said. “In many ways, the common core is silent on that. They’re taking it on trust that we’ll either know how to do it or we’ll figure it out, and, as a field, I’m not sure we do know how to do it.” n
Coverage of “deeper learning” that will prepare students with the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in a rapidly changing world is supported in part by a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, at www.hewlett.org.

Getting There From Here
Much of the criticism of the common core’s research base comes from what it leaves out rather than what it includes. In the years since the National Reading Panel, reading researchers have made significant advances in the development of strategies for reading and comprehension, as well as metacognitive factors that contribute to reading success, such as attention and motivation. In its preface, the literacy standards bluntly limit their scope to “required achievements”—the outcomes of reading, as opposed to strategies for comprehension. “The standards do not mandate such things as a particular writing process or the full range of metacognitive strategies that students may need to monitor and direct their thinking and learning,” the common core states. Rather, it says, teachers should use their professional judgment and experience to decide how to help students meet the standards. “It’s not because [the commoncore designers] rejected that research,” Mr. Shanahan said. “The notion was that you wanted to focus on outcomes, not the inputs. It might be helpful to teach a student whether he’s paying attention or not, and if not, to do something. The common core isn’t saying you shouldn’t do that kind of thing, but that’s not an outcome.” Maureen McLaughlin, the president-elect of the Newark, Del.-based International Reading Association, sees the lack of reading-strategy research in the curriculum as tantamount to having no research base where it counts most. “I see a gap between the standards and school curriculums, because typically when [previous]

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Education Week - November 14, 2012 - Special Report

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