The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (20 page)

The Common Core was formulated by a nonprofit organization called Student Achievement Partners, headed by Dr. David Coleman, now president of the College Board. Its most significant supporter was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has spent around $200 million to help develop and promote the Common Core. Many people have complained that the new standards were developed with the active participation of the testing-and-textbook industry and little input from actual teachers, but the problem is not so much one of corporate influence as of a creeping Babbitt-like mentality, which has no time for imaginative knowledge in its eagerness to create an efficient and productive “standardized man.” Coleman has worked at McKinsey and started several companies involved in educational policy, and he is by all accounts intelligent, affable and well-intentioned. But he has never stood in front of a classroom and does not seem to be much interested in what most good teachers hope to achieve: to kindle curiosity, passion, a desire to learn and know and live a full and meaningful life. Students are more than future employees.

The most controversial aspect of the Common Core is its mandatory division of reading into nonfiction (redefined as “informational text”) and fiction. For high schools, the required ratio was set at 70/30 in favor of informational texts, which range from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to Ronald Reagan’s 1988 speech at Moscow State University to material from the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank. Now, don’t get me wrong: I would have welcomed a more interdisciplinary approach, one in which Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” might be taught alongside James Baldwin’s
Go Tell It on the Mountain
and poems by Langston Hughes, but this was not the intention. The goal was not so much to illuminate the intersection between history and fiction or to demonstrate the rhetorical underpinnings and literary influences of historical speeches and documents as to replace anything that might invite subjective interpretation—the realm of imaginative knowledge—with tangible facts. Yet imaginative knowledge is one of the most potent ways of understanding and communicating with the world. This is something that was powerfully understood by those who wrote two of these informational texts: the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address.

There is something distasteful about the current fashionable buzzwords in educational circles. The goal is to promote “higher-order thinking skills.” Students are “workers in the global economy” and need to be “career- and college-ready.” In our tech-friendly times, we are told that students must be fed “data-driven instruction,” and they need to be “evidence-based learners” familiar with “key academic concepts.” While they do need to think clearly—which may be what is meant by “evidence-based critical thinking”—even more than that, they need their teachers, as one university professor so eloquently put it, to “mess them up,” by which she meant that students should be made to feel uncomfortable. They should be given a desire to think and to know, and asked to articulate their own questions rather than simply scratch a pencil across a page and regurgitate the “right” answers.

When I recently stumbled upon a piece by Coleen Bondy, an English teacher who participated in a training session for the implementation of the Common Core—an “exemplar for instruction,” to use the McKinsey-inflected terminology—I began to understand more clearly why fiction had been marginalized and found wanting: it is too subjective and insufficiently “evidence-based.” The “exemplar” for teaching the Gettysburg Address to ninth and tenth graders comes with a number of “text-dependent questions.” Teachers are forbidden from telling students about the context of its delivery; a trainer told Bondy that it was better “to give a cold, hard, assessment” of the text, saying, “we need to ‘remove the scaffolding sometime.’” Teachers are instructed to refrain from asking students whether they have ever been to a funeral, despite the fact that this was, of course, the occasion for the Gettysburg Address. Such questions, touching on “individual experience and opinion,” should not be asked. After a series of steps in which the students, to quote David Coleman, are made to “stay within the four corners of the text,” they will then be asked to write an essay about the “structure” of the address. This same dry methodology is to be applied to all “informational” texts; the suggestion is that the “facts” they contain will speak for themselves if teachers are sufficiently rigorous in their demands for their extraction and students sufficiently diligent in their efforts to retrieve and collect them. This “cold reading” as one high school teacher, Jeremiah Chaffee, writes, “mimics the conditions of a standardized test on which students are asked to read material they have never seen and answer multiple choice questions about the passage.” He adds that such “pedagogy makes school wildly boring. Students are not asked to connect what they read yesterday to what they are reading today, or what they read in English to what they read in science.” As one critic complained, this is “New Criticism on steroids.”

There is to be no interaction between the reader and the text, or the text and its context; students are simply asked to glean objective “evidence,” and all subjective interpretations are frowned upon. Is it any wonder that fiction—rife with exactly the kind of unanswerable questions that face us in life—is the unloved stepchild? Let us consider the teaching methods recommended in this “exemplar.” In an ideal classroom, would all students come to the same conclusion after reading the Gettysburg Address? Would the “evidence” point them all in the same direction?

We are not, as some critics have suggested, dealing with a conspiracy involving policy makers, billionaires and the chamber of commerce, but something far more insidious and difficult to tackle: what we have is the product of a dangerous mind-set, an attitude that in all honesty wants to do good, as we all do.

Is it a coincidence that the new standards look like a concoction of Mr. George F. Babbitt and his practical-minded Good Fellows when our policy makers are so antipathetic to education? The Republican party in particular, bent as it is on obstructing the Obama administration’s efforts to provide funding for the education of minorities and the poor, with its demands of steep cuts to the education budget and the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Arts, are too outrageous to deserve an argument. The recent budget proposed by Paul Ryan for the 2015 fiscal year, according to
Higher Ed,
“proposes steep cuts to many domestic social programs, including reductions to Pell Grants, student loans and research funding.”

The Republican senator from Alabama, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, sent a letter to then-acting chairman of the NEH, Carol Watson, asking why she was spending money on worthless projects, which he enumerated as follows:

“What is the meaning of life?” ($24,953)

“Why are we interested in the past?” ($24,803)

“What is the good life and how do I live it?” ($25,000)

“Why are bad people bad?” ($23,390)

“What is belief?” ($24,562)

“What is a monster?” ($24,999)

“Why do humans write?” ($24,774)

Meanwhile, the Republican governor of Florida, Rick Scott, informed his constituents that instead of wasting money on the liberal arts, “I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, math degrees . . . so when they get out of school, they can get a job.” How could this also become the mantra of the Obama administration, which rarely condescends to mention its own liberal arts formation? How did such a utilitarian attitude come to replace the creative American pragmatism embodied by the educational philosophy of John Dewey? Our public schools, especially in poverty-ridden neighborhoods, have been under pressure to give up music, arts, literature and all the subjects related to the humanities. But the administration’s admirable goal has been to raise the standards in these schools and provide equal opportunities for all. How can this goal be realized if these subjects are not taught alongside science and mathematics? I begrudgingly took note that the humanities were pointedly absent from the president’s last State of the Union speech, while mathematics, science and engineering at least got an honorable mention.

Then we have Bill Gates, the philanthropist whose money has been one of the biggest factors reshaping the educational system. In a speech to the National Governors Association emphasizing the importance of using data-based metrics to increase educational standards and bring down the costs in K-12 education, Gates noted: “The amount of subsidization is not that well correlated to the areas that actually create jobs in the state—that create income for the state. . . . Now, in the past it felt fine to just say, Okay, we’re overall going to be generous with this sector,” but now, he said, we should ask, “What are the categories that help fill jobs and drive that state’s economy in the future?” His response to this rhetorical question was perhaps self-evident, but should we really be surprised to hear this soul-crushing evaluation from a man who has argued that donating money to a new museum wing, rather than spending it on preventing an illness such as blindness, is morally equivalent to saying, “We’re going to take 1 percent of the people who visit this [museum] and blind them”?

Of course, not all of our tech entrepreneurs think like Bill Gates. This, for me, was one of the consoling aspects of delving into the controversy surrounding the Common Core: discovering how many tech people disagree with this view and see the liberal arts as central both to who they are and to their working lives. “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough,” said Steve Jobs. “It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing, and nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices.” In a famous, much-circulated graduation speech to the Stanford graduating class in 2005, Jobs urged students to follow their passion. He told them how he had dropped out of the expensive college he was enrolled in because his parents couldn’t afford it anymore. From then on, he followed his “curiosity and intuition,” despite the fact that he was very poor, sleeping on the floor in his friends’ rooms, walking seven miles across town every Sunday night to get “one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.” None of the things he did was in conscious pursuit of money or success. He was not preparing himself to be “college- and career-ready.” Instead, after dropping out, he attended seemingly useless classes that interested him, like calligraphy, on the side. He found it fascinating—“beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture.” Later, this interest resurfaced when he was designing the Mac, the first computer with a range of elegant fonts. He told Stanford students, “You’ve got to find what you love,” and ended his speech with a quote from the final issue of the
Whole Earth Catalog:
“Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

Bill Gates took a risk, and so did Steve Jobs. Neither one of them could ever have imagined that he would make so much money and have so much influence, but the lesson one should take from this is not simply “Drop out of college” or “Take a few more computer science classes,” but to be innovative, follow your passions—“Think different,” as Apple would have it. That spirit is sorely absent from the Common Core.

“Do people know the two most popular forms of writing in the American high school today?” a group of educators was asked rhetorically in a question-and-answer session shortly after the release of the Common Core. “It is either the exposition of a personal opinion or the presentation of a personal matter. The only problem—forgive me for saying this so bluntly—the only problem with these two forms of writing is as you grow up in this world you realize people don’t really give a shit about what you feel or what you think. What they instead care about is can you make an argument with evidence? Is there something verifiable behind what you’re saying or what you think or feel that you can demonstrate to me?”

This statement comes to us courtesy of David Coleman, the main engineer of the Common Core. With the arrogance that comes partly from self-importance, Coleman—who boasts of a Rhodes Scholarship and degrees from Yale, Oxford and Cambridge in philosophy and English literature, proving perhaps that there is some flaw in the teaching of those subjects—has determined that literature is insufficiently useful to the formation of future wage earners, which is perhaps one reason why, instead of reading a whole play by Shakespeare, students will now be limited to one or two speeches, making them the envy of Ted Babbitt.

The absurdity (because this goes beyond irony) of the Common Core is that its main architects were not teachers and educators. In introducing David Coleman in 2011 at the Institute for Learning, Lauren Resnick said, “Okay, so this is the kind of person we are going to be privileged to hear tonight. He has been involved in virtually every step of setting the national standards, and he doesn’t have a single credential for it. He’s never taught in an elementary school—I think. You know, I actually don’t know. He’s never edited a scholarly journal, but I think he has written scholarly papers.”

Really? You must be kidding! But then, as he took the stage, Coleman merrily concurred that he and other lead composers of our nation’s new scholastic guidelines are

unqualified people who were involved in developing the common standards. And our only qualification was our attention to and command of the evidence behind them. That is, it was our insistence in the standards process that it was not enough to say you wanted to or thought that kids should know these things, that you had to have evidence to support it, frankly because it was our conviction that the only way to get an eraser into the standards writing room was with evidence behind it, ’cause otherwise the way standards are written you get all the adults into the room about what kids should know, and the only way to end the meeting is to include everything. That’s how we’ve gotten to the typical state standards we have today.

In his speeches, Mr. Coleman uses the word “evidence” a great deal, reminding me of the way in which the magnificent Gradgrind, the headmaster of an experimental school in Dickens’s
Hard Times,
uses the word “facts.” Gradgrind wants his children and students to learn only facts—mathematics and physical science. “Wondering” and “fancy” are forbidden in his school. “Now, what I want is, Facts,” he announces. “Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.”