The premise behind the Common Core State Standards is that all public school students will be college and career ready for the theoretical workforce of tomorrow. Even in Texas, which never adopted the Common Core, College and Career Readiness Standards (CCRS) drive public education today. Yet, what is called ‘college and career ready’ may not be preparing students at all because most US college freshman can only read at a seventh grade level.
Education expert Dr. Sandra Stotsky is the formidable figure on the front lines who is questioning what can be done to make sense of Common Core and all this college and career readiness.
She is best known for serving on the Common Core Validation Committee in 2009-10 and refusing to approve standards she called ‘inferior’, along with colleague James Milgram, Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University.
She is also Professor Emerita at the University of Arkansas and is credited with developing one of the country’s strongest sets of academic standards for K-12 students when she was Senior Associate Commissioner in the Massachusetts Department of Education (1999-2003). Stotsky was also responsible for revising or developing the licensure tests for prospective teachers.
She co-authored the 2008 Texas English Language Arts and Reading (ELA/R) standards, working with Susan Pimentel under a contract with StandardsWork, a company located in Washington, DC. Pimentel was later associated with Common Core.
One year ago, Stotsky told Breitbart News Sunday that from the get-go, the Common Core English Language Arts (ELA) was not a set of standards and that the mathematics standards left out the very standards necessary for preparing a kid for a STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, Math] career.
Breitbart Texas recently spoke with Stotsky, who said, “We are spending billions of dollars trying to send students to college and maintain them there when, on average, they read at about the grade 6 or 7 level, according to Renaissance Learning’s latest report on what American students in grades 9-12 read, whether assigned or chosen.”
She also pointed out that reading on a lower level of difficulty and complexity in high school is reflected in the lower reading level of books that colleges assign to incoming freshmen as summer reading.
Stotsky clarified, “The average reading level for five of the top seven books assigned as summer reading by 341 colleges using Renaissance Learning’s readability formula was rated 7.56.”
That means, a large number of college freshman are basically reading on a level of grade 7 at the sixth month mark.
Texas college and career ready public schools may or may not be reading on any higher level than their Common Core college and career ready counterparts.
For example, the Smithville Independent School District (ISD), assigned In the Country of Men to high school students. It was only on a reading level of 5.8 (grade 5, month 8).
While the book was challenged for its content, a few eyeballs should have been on the book’s low reading level.
In Fall 2014, Highland Park ISD in the Dallas area was the center of a brouhaha over its high school English class reading material.
The book level of one of the novels, The Art of Racing in the Rain, was 5.7. That means, grade 5, month 7. Another assigned book, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, received a readability score of 4.0 (grade 4) using Renaissance Learning’s formula.
This is not even close to what students read at the same grade levels years ago, such as the classic satire Vanity Fair.
Stotsky raised a significant point — many colleges are not demanding a college level reading experience for incoming freshmen. “Nor are they sending a signal to the nation’s high schools that high school level reading is needed for college readiness,” she said.
She added, “Indeed, they seem to be suggesting that a middle school level of reading is satisfactory, even though most college textbooks and adult literary works written before 1970 require mature reading skills.”
However, colleges can’t easily develop college level reading skills if most students admitted to a post-secondary institution in this country read even high school level textbooks with difficulty, she continued. “Strong growth in reading starts in elementary school. And it must include student willingness to read regularly in and outside school, a practice that hinges on kids getting hooked on books,” she wrote in a Pioneer Institute article.
“For almost 100 years, there have been many surveys in this country of what children prefer to read. Despite changes in immigration patterns, family literacy, and cultural influences, what boys and girls like to read has been relatively stable,” she told Breitbart Texas.
She added that boys prefer adventure stories, military exploits, sports heroes, and historical nonfiction; while girls prefer books about people’s relationships and animal stories. “As all teachers know, both love fantasy,” she said, citing the Harry Potter series as an example.
In 2006, the Texas Association of School Administrators (TASA) formed the Public Visioning Institute to meet 21st Century needs, claiming to foster creativity and innovation, a “thirst for learning” plus more meaningful assessments and accountability measures, according to their 2012 promotional video.
Today, TASA’s “high performance” consortium created through Senate Bill 1557 during the 82nd legislative session consists of 23 school districts. It was intended to act as a model where, former Coppell ISD Superintendent Jeff Turner touted, students would come to school engaged in the content and teachers would “become designer and facilitator of lessons.”
Their intention was to show that if they could “go in and create our own system and show they are performing at least as well, if not better than everyone else who in the system of test-test-test, then we can help the state understand that there is no need to test our kids every year in every subject,” according to Turner in the video.
However, Breitbart Texas reported on an increase of the public school campuses statewide that were identified as one of 1,199 failing or low performing schools because of poor test scores or unacceptable ratings on the 2014 Public Education Grant (PEG) list.
Twelve of TASA’s 23 high performance public school districts had campuses on that list.
Stotsky may have the solution that cuts across everyone’s college and career readiness standards.
She wrote, “We need to relabel them high school ready standards and give the so-called ‘college readiness’ tests based on them in grade 8, which is where they belong with respect to content and cut scores.”
Essentially, she said, the Common Core’s benchmarked testing was actually “a better indication of whether students can do authentic high school level work in grade 9 or 10 than of college level work.”
It is not just the ELA, either. Stotsky has been vocal that most of the nation’s high school graduates do not do much in mathematics beyond grade 8 compared with what students in high-achieving countries can do by the end of middle school.
In 2010, Stotsky co-authored The Emperor’s New Clothes — National Assessments Based on Weak “College and Career Readiness Standards with Ze’ev Wurman, former US Department of Education official under President George W. Bush.
They wrote, “There has been a striking lack of public discussion about the definition of college readiness (e.g., for what kind of college, for what majors, for what kind of credit-bearing freshman courses) and whether workplace readiness is similar to college-readiness (e.g., in what kind of workplaces, in the non-academic knowledge and skills needed).”
Makes one wonder what all this college and career ready education is for.
Today’s attention span is too short, in part because of technology, games, social media, etc. When I was twenty, friends and I went to see Tender Mercies. I can’t imagine any twenty year olds seeing a movie like that now. How can people who communicate in 140 character outbursts read an entire book? Hell, they don’t even spell out entire words like “because”.
A 7th grade education is more than enough to learn to say … “I WANT ….”
It would also be my evaluation that the rate of literacy in the US is not good, and dropping. I’m flabbergasted on a daily basis by posters on the internet in which the author cannot distinguish between:
their
there
and they’re
Or
to
too
and two
Or
your
You’re
and ure (joke ok?)
sight, site, through, thru – I don’t mind the expansion and willful opportunism of English, languages are in constant evolution as they must be. But much of the illiteracy I see is just plain ignorance and lack of training.
What the actual fuck are these kids doing in school in the 5th grade now? I know we were dissecting sentences into subject/verb agreement, adjectives, nouns, pronouns and making diagrams of how they all fit together. In the FIFTH GRADE.
Then we lived in Eastern Europe for years. Everybody had a book in hand and there must have been hundreds of daily newspapers. The rate of literacy was rated at around 98%.
We were in south America two years ago, I would judge the general rate of literacy we saw there might have been 50% to 60%. And the poverty was rampant.
There is no place left in this world where illiterate or functionally illiterate can survive in anything but lifelong abject poverty.
+There’s not even any fucking excuse for illiteracy. Anybody – man, woman, or child; black, white, green, or brown, can be taught to read and write.
No excuses. In the USA it cannot be described as anything less than a complete systemic failure.
Universities are money making machines. They need students in order to collect big bucks from student loans.They don’t give a shit if a student can read as long as he can sign the loan papers. It is all about the education establishment getting over on the public and using the force of government to secure their privileged position.
phonics works…the “whole word” method, as used in today’s “public (indoctrination) schools” is responsible for the decline in reading skills.
Phonics involves “breaking down” words into their elements….and it works…
The government doesn’t want people who can think independently. They might question the whole arrangement between the rulers and the ruled. Can’t have that!
No, the educational system is working as devised. Churn out millions of mouth-breathers, use the falling test scores as a justification for bigger budgets, and bribe politicians with union dues to keep the status quo in place.
Nothing changes until parents decide they no longer want their children indoctrinated at government day care prisons known as public schools. When the funding dries up, so does the bribing. That’s when legitimate change becomes possible.
I think I’m with Stanley. Teachers are pushed to keep passing students. Students are too addicted to their phones etc etc to even pay attention to whats going on.
One of my co-workers left because he was moving. I happen to have his phone number so I could use him as a job reference, and asked him if he was going to change his number once he hopped area codes…. His response was, “Hell no! I’ve had this number since I was 14!”
When I was 14, dad’s cell phone (and I think I was the only one in my class who had a parent with one at my school) was almost the size of a suitcase. It was 5w, not 5mw like many of today’s phones. Wrap your hand around it’s whip antenna, and you would feel the warmth. There’s a reason dad used an external antenna most of the time. Hell I was tearing apart and rebuilding computers by age 8. Today’s generation doesn’t even seem to care. The information is out there, its free. They just don’t want to take the time.
Heh, also reminds me the shift that the internet itself has gone thru. When I started on it in the early 90s, people referred to it as the, “information superhighway.” Back in those days, there were no ads. Now the internet is commerce central.
The problem is both cultural and educational. As Stanley mentioned, the age of technology has greatly diminished kids’ exposure to, or interest in, the written word. I now observe children who are allowed to play on a cell phone during church services, a practice so fundamentally stupid on several levels it makes me want to scream.
Another cultural issue is the high percentage of Hispanic immigrants in the schools. Those learning English cannot handle grade-level reading materials, of course, and it takes several years of immersion in a second language to master the vocabulary and grammatical structures. Even more important for reading comprehension is the background knowledge one brings to a text, so a language learner is further hindered by the lack of cultural familiarity. These kids bring test scores down, so panic ensues. I believe the dramatic dumbing down of middle school textbooks I have observed in California is related primarily to this situation.
Classroom practices have changed tremendously, and some of them are positive. However, I think the over-emphasis on group work has diluted kids’ opportunities to interact with text in a way that demands their own comprehension skills be exercised and improved. Teachers are now hounded to include lots of group “experiences.” Unless this experience is extremely well-planned and executed, it is ineffective, especially in matters of reading comprehension.
My grandson is in second grade in a CA district that has fully embraced Common Core. He attends an excellent public school with rigorous expectations and high test scores (would it surprise you to know it draws from a neighborhood of a prosperous professional class and serves a population that is about 60% Caucasian?). Common Core insists a second grader needs to know what inferencing involves, and be able to define it, which he can do quite proficiently. This is considered necessary to be a good
reader I suppose. No, it’s not! Literary analysis at this age kills the pleasure of reading a good yarn and surely interferes with the potential to get “hooked on books!” I want to scream some more. The main point of reading instruction at this age should be exposure to lots of wonderful tales in lots of different genres with lots of opportunities for listening to an adult reading aloud and even more time to read to oneself. Sadly, this approach seems to have been largely discarded in favor of getting together with a group, reading a story, performing some sort of analytical task, and producing a graphic organizer to reflect the group’s conclusions. It reminds me of why I retired from teaching.
One more thing I would like to share is from substitute teaching in high schools, the textbooks are definitely beyond the abilities of the students, at least in the district where I work, which is heavily Hispanic. They’re basically unusable for the average student, who is being urged, of course, to go to college so he or she “can get a good job.”
Wow Gayle, that was about the most expertly written post on the internet that I think that I have ever read. I also agree with just about everything you said. No, wait, I agree with everything you said.
Overthecliff nailed it. Higher Ed is just a con game using 18-year-olds (and their ignorant parents) to milk the Federal Credit Tit.
“Everyone should go to college.” WHY?! WHY? To get degrees in HOBBIES?
Who on earth is stupid enough to pay $100,000 or more to get a “degree” in photography, writing literature, black studies, women’s studies or a host of other “fields” having nothing to do with ANYTHING?
Parents pawn the family home to send their precious daughter to whore herself for 4 (5?) years or their son to discover the joys of binge drinking and waking up in a puddle of vomit.
People are clearly stupid.
Higher Ed, if it makes sense at all (it’s a Prussian import of dubious value) is for people with IQ’s above 110. That’s table stakes, enough to get in the game but not enough to insure success.
Only a small fraction of the population is this intelligent. The rest should not consider it. Sending those not intelligent enough to benefit from a college degree to a university is a complete waste of resources.
Want to study Romance Literature? Audit an online class or go to the library.
Ps: common core, like all top-down, centrally planned bureaucratic stupidity, just becomes another way to window-dress the folly of one size fits all education.
Smart parents always see to the education of their sons and daughters. Sending them “to school” (public, private or choice C) is but a small part of educating a child.
Stupid people farm out that job, smart people take a highly active role in it.
I taught my two boys to read starting at the age of 3 when they entered pre-school. I used “The Reading Lesson” (
This book uses phonics as the method to teach reading. I would do about 10 minutes each night to go through the book. I gave myself and my boys a year to get through the book. By the time they both started kindergarten they were both able to read Frog and Toad books. This was fun for me to teach them to read, it was inexpensive, and they are still ahead of their classmates when it comes to their reading level. My youngest, currently a second grader, is reading Calvin and Hobbes and the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. My oldest, currently a fourth grader, is reading Hunger Games, Eragon, and Eldest (all possibly containing too much violence/languauge, but I think he is mature enough).
Varnelius,
That is why we at TBP should clone Gayle, she is spot on, bright, and caring.
Some time in grade school one of my teachers introduced me to science fiction novels. He loaned me a few science fiction books and I was hooked. Some of what I read was written by Isaac Asimov who was considered a “Hard Science Fiction” writer, which means even though the story is fiction it is based on actual scientific principles.
I had never given it much thought before but I now realize that set me on a path toward a scientific based career. I found science classes fascinating and interesting and easy. So I guess my ending up with a career in engineering all began when that teacher handed me that first book.
When I was growing up we didn’t have a TV. And of course we didn’t have any of the technology that totally occupies kids today. I had plenty of time to read. Kids today have little or no time for reading; therefore that skill is not likely to be developed.
Gayle says: The main point of reading instruction at this age should be exposure to lots of wonderful tales in lots of different genres with lots of opportunities for listening to an adult reading aloud and even more time to read to oneself.
Older folks can recall a time when the milk was delivered door to door. Bread and ice cream vendors made their presence known. This was still a common practice in 1960’s Juarez. My uncles would send me with a silver peso coin to chase down the comics vendor. One sold Lagrimas y Risas romance comedies, another sold Memin Pinguin the adventures of a black kid and his barrio pals. There were Los Supermachos, Alma Grande, Chanoc, lots of cowboy comics, the adventures of Roldan the knight errant, the educational Vidas Ilustres, the weird Brujerias, the satirical Familia Burron, the magical Kaliman, the illustrated literature classics and the popular romances Yesenia and Geisha which were serialized stories.
At the end of the school year our teachers would let us bring comic books to read and exchange on the last two days of classes. I would read until I got a headache and could read no more. Mad Magazine was a favorite, Cracked a poor second, CARtoons was horrible. Marvel comics always topped two dimensional DC heroes because Marvel heroes had a human side. There was Jerry Lewis, the 3 Stooges and Peter Porker, Tom and Jerry, Donald Duck along with Uncle Scrooge was always more fun than Mickey. Richie Rich, Little Lotta, Little Lulu, HotStuff, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Archie, Gyro Gearloose, Betty and Veronica, along with the Sunday funnies, Tumbleweeds, Alley Oop, Snuffy Smith and Barney Google, Li’l Abner, and many others supplemented my Saturday morning cartoons diet.
In the old Project Bravo offices, I read Boys Life and Readers Digest. In the local Pharmacy I read paperbacks – Don’t Eat the Daisies, Monkeys Go Home..
I was surprised when I offered a funny short story to my co-worker to read, she said she didn’t like to read. Jerk.
Before I go, I’d like to say we had a pretty redheaded English teacher, she had a wonderful hourglass figure that we sophomore boys appreciated immensely, especially when she wore her black dress with flower print. she taught us vocabulary words and I recall she defined the word catty and gave us an example: “That dress looks so nice on you, I remember you wore it all last month”. Anyway, she was the only teacher I recall that would read aloud to us. She read a whole novel to us in the space of a month or two. She routinely posted the answers to her tests on the board but I refused to use that aid.
Varnelius and Welshman
Thanks for the accolades. Compared to most around here, I feel pretty lame most of the time. I am passionate about faith and education, however.
Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, has done extensive work digging up the ‘why has this happened?’. Her book is dry and extensive but worth the time if this subject is important to you. Also, free on the link below.
http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/
She also supports a blog that addresses present educational issues that may be of interest.
http://www.abcsofdumbdown.blogspot.com/
Timbo: reading what you had to say, wanted to mention something. Think I was a 4th grader when I read “The Day After.” I know its kinda cold war-ish, but it gave me a healthy fear of nuclear war. At my age, back in the day, we didn’t go thru the duck and cover bullshit like some others around here I bet did,… I don’t know, but it sounds like your 4th grader might be ready for that book. Fairly easy reading, yet heavy on family, and consequences.
(I’m pretty sure that was the name, i guess don’t quote me on that….)
“Those who do not read have no advantage over those who can not read.” – Mark Twain?
1. MOST high school students have NO business going to college. IQs below 100 most notably. College is a complete waste of time, money and effort for those “students.” Or at least it should/used to be. Shame that vocational training has become looked down on. Some people are best suited to non-book industries, this is NOT a condemnation of the people, it is, simply, truth. As gramps always said, “somebody has to dig the ditches and clean out the septic systems.”
2. Comparing our overall scores with other countries is futile. Do we really think that China is shoving kids with 70 IQs into Algebra and advanced trig? Common core has the schools teaching algebra to 9 year olds. MOST 9 year olds have NO business starting those complex subjects at all. And most will never have the need to learn it. Why can’t we accept and glorify the diversity of man? Nope, we spend trillions shoving square pegs into round holes. Genius that is.
3. As with most subjects, reading is made a chore that “must” be accomplished. NOBODY likes “chores” and I’ve always thought that was a big part of the reason the majority of us never open another book once school is done. Reading isn’t fun, it is a job.
4. Parenting has changed from raising children to be responsible, contributing, happy, adults, to “my stuff is better than yours, my kids too” and we wonder why there are so many idiots?
I was reading the bible to my mother at the age of 4. I vaguely remember the day that dad came home and mom told him I had read multiple verses to her. Dad didn’t believe it, pulled me onto his lap opened the papers to the comics and asked me to read to him.
There is one, and only one, reason why I started reading so young. My parents read to me constantly. Ok, two reasons, they also read constantly and that was the “norm” in our house.
One of the most common comments on my various homes over my life have been, “Wow, that’s a lot of books! Did you actually read them all?”
My son was reading before Kindergarten too, but not my daughter. I was really second guessing myself until the end of K when I received a notice from the health department that my daughter failed her eye exam. Turns out the poor kid had little closeup vision and next to none long distance. I didn’t know because she knew her letters and numbers before she was two. Little shit had managed to identify them correctly by their different blurs. I all of a sudden realized why she would say her head hurt when I would try to teach her to read, the eye strain actually did hurt.
She is now in fourth grade and reading at an advanced level, so advanced that her teacher requested we send in the books for her to read during daily reading time as the books in the classroom are too simple for her.
@Timbo, I read Gone With the Wind for the first time in third grade, I read Roots in the fourth. What rereading GWTW over the years has shown me is that the more adult/mature themes were glossed over/not understood when I was younger. Subsequent readings brought more of the story to me. My dad’s very best rule was that I would NEVER be censored from a book. Well, until I found the Rape of the A.P.E. when I was about 12. That one he took from me hid multiple times. I always found it. Lesson to be learned: don’t hide books from an avid reader that is responsible for babysitting your kids and cleaning your home, she’ll always find them.
College has become a joke that promotes the Status Quo while destroying a love for learning and churning out lots of debt with little common sense or actual skills.
If we truly wanted a nation of readers we would stop spending money on programs for kids and start spending money on promoting the act of parents reading to their kids. Parents that read produce children that read. Not the other way around.
Once again we put the cart in front of the horse and can’t figure out why it doesn’t work.
Really not surprising. For these educational “experts” they are hammers, so the world must be full of nails. The “experts” have no true understanding of what it is like for the majority of children that don’t find school/reading fun. They are smart, well-educated, and most likely, LOVED school because they were smart and school was a confirmation of that. To most like that they cannot conceive of the feelings of doubt and inadequacy that our schools produce in the non-brilliant. I have seen this time and again. Incredibly smart people that feel they are idiots and refuse to even try book-learning because they were told everyday they were too stupid to “get it.”
My nephew could tear a motor apart and rebuild it when he was 10. Nearly everytime I see him I overhear him telling himself he is stupid. I’ve tried to explain that just because he didn’t fit in the schooling hole that it makes him stupid. Brilliance comes in many forms, many of them have nothing to do with test scores and overly-complex curricula.
In the mid ’80s, I went to work for my fraternity headquarters. There were 4 other recent grads working with me. One day, one of the secretaries told me I was the best writer of them all–based primarily on proofreading the reports I had to write about the chapters I visited.
I was truly shocked. No way. That’s gonna be news to the professors who gave me “C”s in college or to the other professor who couldn’t believe I already fulfilled my college’s writing requirement and was taking his course to do it again (I interpreted his incredulity as a sign that I was really bad–which of course was why I taking doing a writing requirement class again–typically one of the toughest courses offered by the various departments).
I can only imagine how bad the other guys were–all of us graduated from well regarded schools, though mine was the only private one (and founded about 100 years earlier than their schools). And I had the lowest GPA (B-) of all 5 of those recent grads.