Content Knowledge and the Common Core

From the Marshall Memo #441

In this Education Gadfly article, Robert Pondiscio of the Core Knowledge Foundation says he understands why some teachers see the Common Core State Standards as “just one more damn thing imposed on them from on high, interposed between them and their students.” But Pondiscio believes these standards have the potential to be quite different. They explicitly encourage teachers to immerse their students in real content – “rich, deep, broad knowledge about the world in which they live… Common Core restores art, music, history, and literature to the curriculum.” 

Content never should have left the reading curriculum, he says: “Reading is domain specific. You already have to know at least a little bit about the subject – and sometimes a lot about the subject – to understand a text. The same thing is also true about creativity, critical thinking and problem solving. Indeed, nearly all of our most cherished and ambitious goals for schooling are knowledge-dependent… [The Common Core State Standards] rescue knowledge from those who would trivialize it, or who simply don’t understand its fundamental role in human cognition.” 

David Coleman, a principal author of the Common Core, agrees: “There is no such thing as doing the nuts and bolts of reading in kindergarten through fifth grade without coherently developing knowledge in science, and history, and the arts… It is the deep foundation in rich knowledge and vocabulary depth that allows you to access more complex text.” 

Our mistake in recent years, says Pondiscio, has been teaching reading as a set of generic, transferable strategies like main idea, author’s intent, and compare-and-contrast. Common Core will change that: “By asking teachers to focus their efforts on building knowledge coherently – and making it clear that doing so is fundamental to literacy – CCSS represent an essential breakthrough for reading comprehension and vocabulary growth,” he says. “CCSS invite elementary-school teachers to rethink the tedious regimen of content-free ‘mini-lessons’ and empty skills practice on whatever reading materials happen to be at hand.” 

Pondiscio tees off on another sacred cow in elementary reading lessons: focusing on an item in a text and asking students to produce “text-to-self” responses to literature (How do you feel about the character’s decision to hit her friend?). This approach, common in many state standards, strikes Pondiscio as condescending; it assumes, he says, “that children cannot be engaged or successful unless they are reflecting upon personal experiences nearly to the exclusion of other subjects.”

By contrast, the Common Core standards ask students to do close, evidence-based reading of fiction and non-fiction texts, pushing them to read with clarity, depth, and comprehension. “We’re no longer ignoring what we know about reading comprehension and language development,” he concludes. “And we’re making elementary-school teachers the most important people in America.” 

“Nobody Loves Standards (and That’s O.K.)” by Robert Pondiscio in The Education Gadfly, June 14, 2012 (Vol. 12, #23), http://bit.ly/Ml0Izn