The Education Invasion. Joy Pullmann
often mention teachers who are scared to object to the new curriculum and tests, but Russell had not heard any Warren teacher say that Common Core was less challenging than the old curriculum. As the state of Indiana considered reverting to its previous standards, his district’s biggest worry was that students would then perform poorly on the SAT and ACT college entrance exams, which had been changed to fit Common Core. “I don’t want kids to lose opportunities because of a political battle,” Russell said. An often overlooked part of the standards debate is that school leaders and teachers cannot choose which standards they will use, no matter how strongly they prefer a particular set.
While national reviewers such as those at the Fordham Institute have rated Indiana’s previous standards higher than Common Core — among the best in the nation, in fact20 — Russell thought the state tests had set expectations too low. Indiana’s tenth-grade English test measured an eighth-grade reading level, for example. As for complaints about diluted math instruction (remember the Furtado twins in Massachusetts?), he noted that Warren still offered advanced classes to students who wanted to go beyond the Algebra II that Common Core prescribes as a final math course, so they could enter college with calculus under their belts, ready for a science or math major.
As it turned out, Indiana largely retained Common Core with some minor changes, including a new name: Indiana Academic Standards.21 The Warren district has continued to use its Common Core materials and practices, referring to Indiana’s standards and Common Core as essentially a unit.22 Recall that the district was lucky enough to get extra funding from the nation’s taxpayers to support the revamping of its curriculum and the retraining of teachers — an advantage most districts cannot expect. So how have Warren students performed with their new and improved education?
Data on the Indiana state test results released in August 2014 showed that Warren was one of only two districts in Marion County (the state’s most populous county) to see a decline in passing rates over the previous year. It just barely beat out the state’s worst-performing district, Indianapolis Public Schools. The superintendent, Dena Cushenberry, blamed the Warren district’s comparatively poor performance in part on the burdens of meeting the requirements for curricular changes and other mandates that the U.S. Department of Education attached to the RTT grant.23 So much for that.
Hoping for the Best
In late June 2014, when teachers ought to be out sunning themselves, a trio of them perched on bright purple block chairs inside a Frank Lloyd Wright–looking new elementary school in Bensenville, a suburb of Chicago. They’re enjoying a snack break at a teacher training conference, and discussing whether they can emulate a model Common Core lesson they’ve just seen.
“Most of my kids are not on grade level,” says a youthful teacher in gray slacks, with black hair piled into a high bun. “Lots have no dads or moms, and are being raised by whoever. They’ve got their own problems.”
A teacher sitting across from her, in a purple boyfriend cardigan and jeans, notes that her school isn’t bright and airy like the one they’re sitting in: “It’s dark, and old. I think the kids pick up that feeling when they’re inside.” Teachers get two reams of paper per month for copies, she says with a sigh, so they buy more themselves. The other two teachers nod in empathy.
“I like how they told the kids first what they would learn, then they learned it” in the model lesson, says a wavy-haired blond teacher whose nametag reads “Angelique.”
“How did they get the kids to be so quiet?” the gray-slacked teacher wonders. Probably because the model classroom had two teachers for fifteen students, she guesses. She doesn’t have a teaching assistant or co-teacher, so “I got to keep my students from jumping out the window.” And besides, “some parents you can’t call [for help] because you know the kid is going to get a beating.”
Teachers and staff in Bensenville School District spent two months putting together a three-day conference for nearby school districts on how to teach Common Core. Illinois agreed in 2010 to replace its state curriculum mandates and tests with Common Core, but in the summer of 2014, Bensenville was still one of only a few Illinois school districts already all-in.
It certainly helped that Bensenville, a bitty district of only three schools next to O’Hare Airport, received federal money to support its Common Core implementation, like Warren in Indiana. Bensenville got $20,644 out of a $43 million Race to the Top grant to Illinois in 2011.24 In exchange for this RTT money, 35 of the 866 school districts in Illinois, including Bensenville, agreed to comply with new federal mandates in advance of the other districts. The money-getting policies included rating teachers at least partly on their students’ scores on standardized tests, increasing science and math initiatives, and reorienting instruction around Common Core — all Obama administration priorities. Bensenville also volunteered to run trial versions of Common Core’s federally funded national tests before all schools had to use them in place of their existing state tests in 2015. That gave them more time to align their teaching with the test format.
The $20,644 didn’t cover the cost of making all these changes, but Bensenville wanted to be one of Illinois’s few “reform exemplars,”25 willing to strike out into a thicket of education policies that the Obama administration planted. The RTT provision to use standardized test results as the main basis for rating teachers and schools was expected to change teacher training nationwide in line with the new curriculum and its associated tests, but that process was going slowly. Bensenville’s instructional leader, Kay Dugan, had just interviewed “a bright teacher candidate from a good school” and asked her what she knew about Common Core. The candidate replied, “I never heard of that.”
Dugan, a petite lady with bright gray eyes, also co-chaired Illinois’s Educator Leader Cadre,26 a group of teachers and administrators who led workshops on Common Core for PARCC, one of its national testing organizations. She spoke of “pushback” against Common Core from teachers and administrators in other school districts on the ground that it’s “too hard” for the students. That training conference with its model lessons in the summer of 2014 was designed to help other districts feel as confident in their new set of curricular clothes as Bensenville.
A Look at “Close Reading”
The Bensenville teachers leading the workshops are enthusiastic, if perhaps a bit nervous at having groups of outside teachers observe their summer-school lessons. The buzzword of the day is “close reading,” a technique of literary interpretation that was popular in universities some time ago and entered K–12 classrooms along with Common Core. Adapted for younger children, it seems to mean anchoring their observations about a text (the teachers never speak of a “book” or an “article,” but always of a “text”) in direct quotations from the material.
In her second-grade classroom, Kristi Mullen pivots from child to child, handing out highlighters. The tykes have just read Pop’s Bridge by Eve Bunting, a fiction picture book about two young San Franciscans whose fathers — one Asian and one Caucasian — are helping build the Golden Gate Bridge. Young Robert, the white boy, thinks his father has a more important bridge-building job than his friend Charlie’s dad, who is a painter. But one day the two boys see several workers die in a fall, and Robert realizes that constructing the bridge endangers all the workers equally. Scholastic, the book’s publisher, says the book is appropriate for readers in kindergarten through second grade.27 Summer-school students, of course, are behind their peers. That’s why they’re in summer school.
“I’m going to ask some text-dependent questions,” Mullen says to the children, emphasizing the last three words and flipping to a “warm-up” on a giant pad of paper stuck to an easel. It tells the children to underline, on copies of the book’s first few pages: “Who are the important characters in the story? Why are they important?” The children’s desks are arranged in three clusters of five, and Mullen walks among them repeating those two questions. “Charlie’s father is important because he builds the bridge,” one student offers. Mullen repeats the answer, then adds, “I like your text evidence.”
After a few minutes of this, there’s a “challenge question”: “What