DCPS goes whole hog to implement the Common Core

An in-depth series in Education Week highlights one DCPS school’s struggle to implement the new Common Core State Standards. While it’s clear everyone is trying hard, the report raises some troubling questions.

The four-part examination, reflecting months of reporting, provides a fascinating look at the challenges of implementing the rigorous instructional standards that 45 states and DC are in the process of adopting. Although the series, three parts of which have appeared so far, looks at DCPS’s overall approach to implementing the Common Core, much of the story centers on one 8th grade classroom at Stuart-Hobson Middle School on Capitol Hill.

Reporter Catherine Gewertz, in an online chat with readers, explained that she chose to focus on DC partly “because it shows what a district might do if it takes a super-assertive, comprehensive, whole-hog approach to implementation.”

As Gewertz details, DCPS has been working feverishly since 2010, shortly after the standards came out, to revamp its curriculum to align with the Common Core. The district has deployed instructional coaches and held professional development sessions to bring teachers up to speed on a method of teaching that is very different from what most have been used to.

While the Common Core standards cover both math and English language arts, the series homes in on the latter. In that area the new approach requires “close reading” of texts, asking students both to draw conclusions about readings and cite specific evidence to back them up.

The Stuart-Hobson teacher whose classroom is profiled, Dowan McNair-Lee, struggles to get her students to engage in that process and to grasp concepts such as metaphor and simile. While she experiences some successes, the overall impression is that her 8th-graders have a long way to go.

DCPS is certainly to be commended for participating in such a candid examination of its internal workings, and it’s clear from the series that many teachers and administrators are, like McNair-Lee, doing their absolute best to make the Common Core work.

But at the same time, the articles raise some questions. For example, why is DCPS introducing Common Core-aligned tests at all grade levels at one fell swoop instead of introducing them gradually, starting with the youngest students? According to Gewertz, while some states are adopting DC’s “whole-hog” approach, most are introducing the tests in “chunks,” starting with the lower grades.

High school students who have had only a couple of years exposure to the Common Core are unlikely to do well on tests that assume students have been steeped in the approach since kindergarten. As one high school teacher complains in the online Education Week chat, “All of my kids who are currently reading on grade level will now be considered below grade level.”

And while some of the lessons McNair-Lee endeavors to drum into her students make sense, others seem off-base. In one lesson she introduces them to the idea of connotation versus denotation, leading them through the differences in meaning among the words “home,” “house,” “residence,” and “dwelling.” So far, so good.

But then she asks her students to apply the same concept to the word “chicken” when used in two different book titles: The Best of Chicken Cookbook and Are You Chicken? She’s surprised when all she gets are blank looks. But the “chicken” example is fundamentally different from the “home” one. The various words for “home” all describe the same thing with different nuances, whereas in the “chicken” example the word is being used in a literal sense in one instance and a figurative sense in the other. No wonder the kids were confused.

On another day, one of McNair-Lee’s students, a boy named Mikel, struggles to decide how to categorize the kind of allusion made by a cartoon referencing the children’s story The Little Engine That Could. (It shows “a sad little train engine begging for change near a sign that says, ‘I Thought I Could, I Thought I Could.’”) McNair-Lee is looking for the word “literary,” but Mikel ventures that it’s a “pop culture” allusion. McNair-Lee wonders if anyone read Mikel the story when he was a child, but I found myself wondering why the allusion couldn’t also be placed in the “pop culture” category. (We’re not talking, after all, about Faulkner or Fitzgerald here.) Not to mention that I wondered whether this was really a distinction that was worth teaching.

There’s much to admire about what the Common Core is attempting, but the devil, as always, is in the details. And the standards are going to be hard enough for kids to master without also asking them to compare apples to oranges, or to make distinctions that aren’t clear or particularly important. We need to make sure that administrators and teachers themselves understand what the Common Core standards mean before they try to teach them.

The fourth and final part of the Education Week series, which will look at year-end test results and their impact, will appear in August.