The Education Invasion. Joy Pullmann
proud.”
“How do we know he’s proud?”
“The book said that.”
“Let’s go to our book and highlight evidence that he’s proud: ‘He has an important job.’ What does he keep calling the bridge?”
Another child: “The Golden Gate Bridge.”
That isn’t what the teacher is looking for. “At the beginning, what does it say? ‘The impossible bridge.’ If it’s impossible and you do it, are you proud?” A few kids say, “No.” Mullen looks at them and says firmly, “Yes.”
Close-reading theory has told Mullen to stick to the text. Following that dictate costs her and the kids an opportunity to talk about the reasons for their “incorrect” answers, which would have made their discussion far more interesting and fruitful. Perhaps the teacher was just off her game, with fifteen grownups watching from the back of the room.
Mullen then tells the children to pair up and look for more evidence to help answer the challenge question. As they rearrange themselves, she sends about five who need extra attention off to a semicircle in the corner with the assistant (the object of envy among visiting teachers).
In another part of the school building in Bensenville, a pair of teachers are leading an eighth-grade class in close reading. For most of these students, English is a new language, so they are also using a picture book. Grandfather’s Journey, by Allen Say, tells the story of a Japanese man who emigrates to the United States but keeps traveling between the two countries, in each place longing for the other. The prose is simple and spare, with just one sentence per page, but the watercolor illustrations are exquisite. Grandfather’s Journey won the 1994 Caldecott Medal for American picture books, which emphasizes illustrations over language. Its publisher says the book is suitable for children ages four through eight, but Scholastic rates it at a third- through fifth-grade reading level.28
This classroom too has desks arranged in clusters of five. A bulletin board in the back displays “Grandfather’s Journey Vocabulary”: evoked, homesick, towering, exchange. In the front, a projector beams questions about the book onto a screen. After each question is a reference to a corresponding Common Core standard: “Why do you think grandfather surrounds himself with songbirds? RL.8.4.” (The code means Reading: Literature, Grade 8, standard 4.)29
The eighth graders are much quieter than the second graders. They keep their answers short and low. The two teachers — Nick Georgopoulos, a young man with tousled hair, and Argiro Vranas, a petite woman in tall heels — energetically work the room, circling the students, pointing to their open books, querying. As students sequentially answer the questions on the screen, the teachers say to the class: “Do you guys agree...? Write down your text evidence.” The teachers are clearly working hard, but it’s difficult to tell whether the students are. Maybe visitors make them bashful, too.
The twenty-four visiting teachers watch several different lessons of this kind, and then gather in the school’s music room, around seven folding tables topped with brightly colored plastic tablecloths and strewn with highlighters. The walls are covered in sound-absorbing pads and lined with a string of small American flags. The teachers who gave the model lessons, plus several of the district’s instruction and curriculum coaches, sit around the room in canvas director’s chairs. First, they answer questions.
An early one: “Where did you learn to do this?”
Caitlin Hare, a first-year Bensenville teacher with a kind, open face, takes that one on. “All through college we learned about Common Core, so I do feel comfortable with it,” she says. Her third- through fifth-grade class will finish out summer school with another five-day close reading of one main fiction book about the Oregon Trail, accompanied by a number of nonfiction “texts” such as travelers’ journal entries and historical accounts, to meet Common Core’s nonfiction requirements.
Leah Gauthier, the district’s instructional services director, then speaks up: “When we started, there was no textbook for Common Core. This did not happen overnight. We’ve taken baby steps the whole way.”
Those baby steps included ditching textbooks, except for continuing to use Everyday Math curriculum as Bensenville’s main resource for math. (Everyday Math is regularly pilloried as one of the “fuzzy math” textbook series.) A curriculum committee now pulls together all the materials each Bensenville grade uses, and integrates all the subjects. So an “English” class might use historical or science-based materials, and a science class might include math concepts.
“Because we jumped in, we’re not flailing now and can add more,” Gauthier says. “We were a textbook district, doing the same thing in every room on the same day. Now standards are ingredients.”
Argiro Vranas chimes in: “Before, I didn’t know how I could spend five days on one text. Now, this is how we do it in Bensenville.”
Common Core supporters insist that the program doesn’t restrict or control teachers. That claim conflicts with common sense and with what teachers hear in their districts. Quite plainly, Common Core is an instructional overhaul. It is intended to change what and how kids learn, which requires changing what and how teachers teach. There’s no reason to go through all this trouble if it doesn’t change much of anything. That’s why teachers have to get in line and implement the required “instructional shifts.”
In Bensenville’s Q&A, the visiting teachers sound much like the summer-school students: willing but unsure; struggling to grasp the new paradigm. “What is a good resource for informational text?” asks a gum-chewing teacher with flipped blond hair. “How do you have time for this?” wonders another, with a pale pink manicure.
A Bensenville principal says he did practice lessons in close reading in order to understand how to give teachers feedback, and the first one was like “one of the rings of hell. If I were evaluating my [own] lesson, there would have been some hard conversations afterward.”
After the Q&A, the conference participants dive into a practice set. The workshop facilitators hand everyone a one-page set of four excerpts from Bud, Not Buddy, a Newbery Award–winning book by Christopher Paul Curtis about a ten-year-old African American orphan boy who runs away from an unkind foster family during the Great Depression to search for his musician father. Scholastic rates it at a fifth-grade reading level.30
“We read full novels all the time,” Kay Dugan says. “That we don’t is a Common Core myth.”
The teachers review some specific Common Core requirements, including the instruction to “annotate along the way” as the students did in the model lesson, and then work in groups to develop their own “text-dependent questions” about the book. Finally, they share their results with everyone.
The teachers at one table have it down. One sample question they came up with: “When it says, ‘Jerry looked like he’d just found out they were going to dip him in a pot of boiling milk,’ what does that mean?”
Teachers at another table are still confused. They twirl their pens and talk to each other in fragmentary fashion. “I don’t get this,” says one, pursing her lipsticked mouth and leaning her head on her hand. “What kind of questions are we supposed to ask? ‘Where are Bud and Jerry going?’”
The idea, Gauthier explains, is to have children cite a source for their answers and steer them away from emotional responses, because their feelings are not the point of reading literature. After all, “You don’t have to read Jack and the Beanstalk to answer, ‘How would you feel if you were chased by a giant?’”
Is Close Reading Effective Teaching?
If one looks at supporting materials for Common Core, the time that Bensenville teachers spent instructing others in the close-reading method may seem warranted. An instructional guide from the PARCC testing organization, for example, says that close reading is “a key component of college and career readiness” and will be included in its exams.31 David Coleman, a main