Puff Pieces and Common Core
4 min read
Over at the Huffington Post, Joy Resmovits has a softball piece up on David Coleman.
It's a good study in how to use the intangibles to sell your subject. In the second sentence, she introduces the idea that Coleman is about "ideas and inquiry" by stressing how that was inculcated in his childhood. In the third sentence, she juxtaposes Coleman next to the image of Martin Luther King, Jr. These rhetorical devices provide the frame for the rest of the piece. They aren't relevant to the story, but they are useful as a signifier of authorial intent.
Two commonly repeated inaccuracies in the piece deserve special notice.
Commonly Repeated Myth One: Objection To Common Core Is Limited To The Political Fringe
From the Resmovits piece:
As schools begin to implement the Core, far-right and far-left advocates are trying to roll it back.
There is considerable objection to the Common Core from people in the middle of the political spectrum. A recent PDK/Gallup poll (pdf download) found:
Among the third (of poll respondents) who had heard of the Common Core, only four of 10 said the standards can help make education in the United States more competitive globally; a majority said the standards will make the U.S. less competitive or have no effect.
The common lie told by proponents of Common Core - and parroted uncritically by some journalists - is that dissatisfaction with the Common Core is the domain of political fringe elements. The reality is many people haven't heard of the Common Core yet, but among those who have, many are unimpressed. By attemtping to relegate dissatisfaction with Common Core to the political fringe, it becomes both easy to dismiss and makes for more exciting news. The reality that there may be a dispassionate middle is nowhere near as exciting as rabid partisans.
The fringe objections to the core are akin to birther-style theories, and are equally cringeworthy. Please report or add to the list on twitter with the hashtag #corespiracy.
Commonly Repeated Myth Two: The Standards Will Help Kids Who Relocate
One of the selling points frequently used by proponents of the standards is that they will ensure that all students are learning the same things, regardless of their geographic location. Joy Resmovits puts it like this:
Because states write their own standards and exams, students who move across state lines might find themselves passing math in one state and failing in another. The governors sought to address this problem by creating common standards.
However, as proponents of the standards can't say enough, the standards are not a curriculum. And, more importantly, that is a completely accurate statement: standards aren't curriculum. Curriculum is the means - the lessons, the pacing, the activities - by which a set of standards can be achieved. Curriculum is what students do each day in the class.
Proponents of the standards are also very clear in stating that the Common Core State Standards DO NOT come with a standard curriculum, and that schools are free to choose whatever means they want to meet the requirements of the standards.
Getting back to the myth, a common curriculum would meet this need. A common standard won't.
While the line between standards and curriculum can get blurry, I would not expect a journalist writing about education to miss it, or to allow this to pass without some examination.
Missing entirely from the piece: any mention of David Coleman's assessment of why the English Language Arts standards will help prepare students for the "real" world: "people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think". This quotation comes from a presentation Coleman gave to the New York State Department of Education.
A detail like this would actually be relevant to the piece. It provides real background, in David Coleman's own words, about his perspective on what people need to know to succeed.
I am holding out hope that journalists writing about education will actually think critically about their subject, and ask obvious questions. Pieces like the Resmovits article - that read more like an advertisement for a specific perspective than actual reporting about a subject - do us all a disservice.
