Debating the Common-Core Nonfiction

Requirements
By Anthony Rebora on December 28, 2012 12:52 PM
An op-ed in the Los Angeles Times defendskinda, sortathe language in the Common Core
State Standards requiring teachers to assign more nonfiction texts. But it disputes the notion that
the nonfiction requirements can be handled across subject areas and thus not necessarily interfere
with the traditional emphasis on fiction in English classes:
Yet despite what the core curriculum's fans say, it's clear that fiction will take a significant hit.
The standards written for high school English coursesand not for science, history or math
include a set of 10 weighty skills that students must learn concerning nonfiction, as many as
there are for fiction. Students aren't going to learn those by adding a few essays or one good
biography to the academic year. A major portion of English classes will have to be devoted to
nonfictionat least a third, and perhaps as much as 40%. Some wonderful fiction is going to
have to come out of the school year.
Meanwhile, Diane Ravitch questions how and why the common standards writers even came up
with the specific percentages required for informational-text vs. literary reading:
Whose wisdom decided on 50-50 [for elementary and middle grades] and 70-30 [for high school]?
Who will police the classrooms? Where is the evidence that these ratios are better than some
other ratio or none at all?
Yet one of her readers, an English teacher and self-professed former common-standards skeptic,
defends the nonfiction requirements, saying they force teachers to re-engage with the curriculum
and challenge both their students and themselves:
While the ratios, as you pointed out, are hard to enforce, they play an important role in pushing
teachers out of the same old content. No one who has worked with the Core literacy standards
sees them as anti-intellectual. In fact, we see them as rigorous and designed to foster critical
thinking. What I have come to realize over the years is that I teach discreet genre-related skills
for poetry, drama, the novel and memoir. Why was I sending kids off to college and work
without teaching them how to engage in complex, informational and non-fiction text? Now I
have partners in that effort in other content classes down the hall. It makes sense.
Along somewhat similar lines, Core Knowledge's Robert Pondiscio says that, for the sake of
building student proficiency in vocabulary and comprehension, teachers should be worrying less
about possibly dropping a few short stories from English class and more about giving students
opportunities to read widely.
All I want for Christmas is for Common Core critics, rather that retailing scare stories that CCSS
will replace literature with readings of government reports on agriculture and insulation
regulations in English class, to temper their criticism even a little bit with an acknowledgement
that maybe a coherent, content-rich curriculum (which CCSS does not, cannot mandate but
strongly recommends) might not be the worst thing to happen to our schools.
Update, 2:30 p.m.: Catherine Gewertz, apparently on the same wavelength as us this afternoon,
has more on the context of the common-core nonfiction vs. literature debate.
Literature and Nonfiction: Common-Core
Advocates Strike Back
By Catherine Gewertz on December 28, 2012 1:07 PM
As we've told you, a particular slice of the common standards in English/language arts has
become pretty flammable lately: the rise of nonfiction reading. The standards' expectation that
students read more informational text has sparked fearsome would say misinterpretationthat
great works of literature will be displaced from classroom instruction.
Even though mainstream news media have by and large ignored the common standards, this
issue got enough traction to break through that quietude, garnering a Page One story in The
Washington Post, and even becoming the butt of jokes on National Public Radio's popular "Wait,
Wait, Don't Tell Me" show. And the literature-being-squeezed-out people have been just about
the only voices in the general-interest media on the issue. The Los Angeles Times ran an editorial
saying that regardless of the standards writers' intent to preserve a hefty place for literature, it is
sure to take a major hit under the common core.
With all this stuff flying around, education historian and blogger Diane Ravitch opined, it's going
to take something biga major speech, or a partial retraction of the standards, to make the issue
go away.
Until recently, the closest we'd come to a major speech on the nonfiction-versus-fiction question
was a piece in the Huffington Post by the English/language arts standards' co-authors, David
Coleman and Sue Pimentel, insisting that literature "is not being left by the wayside."
The message to rally the troops must have gone out, however. Because since the
Coleman/Pimentel piece appeared, the common core's defenders have stepped up to
counterbalance the literature-pushout crowd. The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation's Kathleen
Porter-Magee, for instance, posted a piece arguing that it's a misinterpretation of the standards to
say that teachers will have to teach less literature.
In a recent email blast, the Foundation for Excellence in Educationled by former Florida Gov.
Jeb Bush, one of the common core's biggest backersdeclaimed the "misinformation flying
around" about what will happen to literature under the common standards. "Contrary to reports,"
it said, "classic literature will not be lost with the implementation of the new standards." A
glance at the standards' own suggested text lists, it noted, "reveals that the common core
recognizes the importance of balancing great literature and historical nonfiction pieces."
The email directed readers to other recently written articles that "show how this latest attack on
common core doesn't withstand fact-checking," including Porter-Magee's piece, an op-ed in The
Boston Globe headlined "Required Reading, or Just Misread?,"and a piece by nationally
recognized literacy scholar Tim Shanahan titled, "Willful Ignorance and the Informational Text
Controversy."

Cultural-literacy guru E.D. Hirsch weighed in on the issue with an essay in The Wall Street
Journal. Cari Miller, a policy adviser for the Foundation for Excellence in Education, wrote a
post for the group's blog, Ed Fly, arguing that "Don Quixote and To Kill a Mockingbird aren't
going anywhere."
The email blast also included an article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel by former longtime
education reporter Alan J. Borsuk, an intriguing inclusion, since that story said that the
nonfiction expectations of the standards "almost certainly will mean fewer classics. ..." It also
explored, however, the ways that fiction and nonfiction study can weave together to bolster
students' engagement in reading, and their skill with it.
Whether this issue lives or diesand what form it takes if it surviveswill be very much worth
watching in the coming year.
Categories:
English/language arts ,
Standards
Tags:
common standards ,
literature ,
nonfiction