Focus

Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning

Mike Schmoker

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781416626374
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this 2nd edition of Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning, Mike Schmoker extends and updates the case that our schools could be on the cusp of swift, unparalleled improvements. But we are stymied by a systemwide failure to simplify and prioritize; we have yet to focus our limited time and energy on the most essential, widely acknowledged, evidence-based practices that could have more impact than all other initiatives combined. They are: simple, coherent curricula; straightforward, traditional literacy practices; and lessons built around just a few hugely effective elements of good teaching. As Schmoker demonstrates, the case for these practices—and the need for them—has grown prodigiously.

In every chapter, you'll find late-breaking discoveries and practical advice on how to simplify the implementation of new state standards in the subject areas; on the hidden pitfalls of our most popular, but unproven instructional fads and programs; and on simple, versatile strategies for building curriculum, planning lessons, and integrating literacy into every discipline. All of these strategies and findings are supported with exciting new evidence from actual schools. Their success confirms, as Michael Fullan writes, that a focus on the best "high-leverage practices" won't only improve student performance; they will produce "stunningly powerful consequences" in our schools.

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Section II

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Curriculum, Instruction, and Literacy in the Content Areas

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Chapter 4

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English Language Arts Made Simple

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Adolescents entering the adult world of the 21st century will read and write more than at any other time in human history. They will need advanced levels of literacy to perform their jobs, run their households, act as citizens, and conduct their personal lives.

—Richard Vacca

Literature makes significant life possible. [We] construct ourselves from novels, poems, and plays as well as from works of history and philosophy.

—Mark Edmundson

Literacy skills, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, are foundational to an education. That makes it doubly unfortunate that English language arts (ELA), more than any discipline, has lost its way. Despite the primary place it holds in the transmission of literacy skills, it is in desperate need of clarity. We need to simplify and reconceive ELA, ELA standards, and ELA assessments.

There is a ripe opportunity for improvement here—larger than when the first edition of this book was published.

As discussed previously, state standards and assessments have had a uniquely corrosive effect on language arts. As currently conceived, they have corrupted language education and its essential mission: to ensure that students can read, write, and speak effectively. To restore sanity to literacy instruction, we should begin by honoring its first principle: that every year, every student needs to spend hundreds of hours actually reading, writing, and speaking for intellectual purposes.

In this chapter, I advocate for a simpler model for how we teach English, starting in the primary grades. It will build on Chapters 2 and 3 and make frequent references to the literacy template described in the latter. We'll revisit some of the schools already discussed and examine some additional ones—all of which have achieved exceptional success by ensuring that students engage in abundant amounts of reading, writing, and speaking every year.

There's no denying that each of the disciplines connects and contributes to success in other disciplines. But this may be especially true of ELA. As McConachie and colleagues (2006) aver, students "develop deep conceptual knowledge in a discipline only by using the habits of reading, writing, talking and thinking, which that discipline values and uses" (pp. 8–14); or as Timothy Shanahan avers, "English teachers take responsibility for general literacy and language skills … that can be applied across all disciplines" (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2017, p. 20).

ELA contributes mightily to career success and advancement. As we saw in Chapter 2, literacy is "the most important single goal of schooling"—a reliable indicator of general competence and life chances (Hirsch, 2010, p. 1). This is borne out by recent reports on the importance of literacy in the workplace. Corporate recruiters in every field now name the abilities to write, speak, and listen as the most sought-after skill set. The average employer ranked communication skills twice as high as managerial skills (Hurley, 2015). Literacy has a decisive effect on corporate earnings and workplace advancement: companies such as Cisco Systems have found that no set of skills would do more to enhance their profits than oral and written communication skills (Wagner, 2008). Or as Robert Pondiscio (2014b) tells us, precise, skillful communication skills constitute the "language of upward mobility in America." These skills allow their users to "nimbly navigate the world of organizations, institutions and opportunities." In all its aspects, literacy has immense civic, academic, personal, and professional benefits. And like it or not, literacy depends very much on what we provide in our reading/ELA courses.

In light of such evidence, how effectively are we currently imparting literacy and communication skills to our students?

Literacy Education: How Are We Doing?

Consider the situation at the National Center on Education and the Economy. Candidates for a position were recently interviewed at the Washington, D.C., headquarters. In the interviews, the hiring team was dumbfounded to discover that only 1 of 500 applicants could write an effective summary of a report. This was a key element of their interview process (they hired that person; Tucker, 2017).

Similarly, recruiters at Cisco lament that "the biggest skill that people are missing is the ability to communicate: both written and oral presentations" (Wagner, 2008; emphasis added). This is not an uncommon perception in business and industry. Education writer Caroline Bermudez (2016) has described, in distressing detail, the mangled language of typical business letters and emails—all written by employees with college and advanced degrees.

How can this be? And more to the point: do these issues stem from deficiencies in K–12 schooling?

Consider the fairly recent performance in language arts in the best-performing state, Massachusetts. By 3rd grade, and despite their number one academic ranking among states, about half of Massachusetts students cannot read at grade level (Wu, 2010). The architects of the ELA Common Core tell us that only about a third of our 8th graders are on track to be ready for the literacy demands of college (Coleman et al., 2012). That's about the same as the percentage of high school graduates who are academically prepared for college—which, in turn, corresponds to the proportion who graduate from college (Petrilli, 2016).

Such findings help explain the recent complaints of elite colleges with the highest admission standards: the faculty can't understand why students with excellent high school grade-point averages (GPAs) arrive unable to write, and who write less effectively now than ever (Bartlett, 2003). As ASCD's Laura Varlas (2016) reports, our high school graduates "hit an academic wall during their first year of college" in the areas of both reading and writing—the primary province of ELA (p. 1).

Is it churlish to dwell on these deficits, to point them out to hard-working educators? It would be—if these were the result of forces beyond our control. But they aren't. These shortcomings can be traced to eminently correctable institutional tendencies that prevent school personnel from implementing practices that would transform our ability to teach students to be literate and articulate by high school graduation. The question might be "How much juice is left in the lemon in English language arts instruction?" A lot, it turns out. There's a tremendous opportunity for improvement here.

"Juice in the Lemon": The Current State of Reading and Writing Instruction

I once heard a renowned corporate head remark that in most enterprises, there is often "far more juice left in the lemon"—more room for improvement—than we perceive. This is certainly the case with ELA instruction. Again, I'm reminded of Dick Fosbury's discovery that any high-jumper could achieve unprecedented heights—almost immediately—if they were willing to adopt a different practice (the "Fosbury flop," in which the jumper leaps backwards over the high bar). High jumping records were shattered when this technique became widely used (Burnton, 2012).

What could K–12 educators do—that they're not now doing—to equip record proportions of students for the literacy demands of college, careers, and responsible citizenship? We get an inkling from Stanford's Linda Darling-Hammond, who cites a revealing passage in Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities. A parent called the high school principal to ask why his son does so little writing in school. In responding, the principal "let out a whoop" and then said,

Written work? There hasn't been any written work at Rupert High for fifteen years! Maybe twenty! They take multiple choice tests. Reading comprehension, that's the big thing. That's all the Board of Education cares about. (Darling-Hammond, 2010, p. 228)

Anyone who visits classrooms or monitors their children's schoolwork already knows this. Very few of my daughter's teachers had them write anything of substance, anything that prepared them for college. Even fewer provided actual instruction in writing. I know this from having been a middle school, high school, and college English teacher. For decades, we have known that students rarely read or write and even more rarely receive writing instruction in their English classes (see Hofstadter, Goodlad, Sizer, Jones, Cavanaugh, Olson, and multiple colleagues in Schmoker, 2006, pp. 92–96; Darling-Hammond, 2010).

And what of reading, with its reciprocal connection to writing? In the reform era, the amount, quality, and complexity of texts that students read have plummeted. On average, assigned readings are several levels below what they were even 20 years ago (English Language Arts Standards/Common Core State Standards, 2017, Appendix A; Stotsky, 1999). The average student in the 12th grade now reads books written at just above the 5th grade level (Paulson, 2014).

Students read less now than ever: Mark Bauerlein (2009) found that fewer than half of American high school students read or studied for more than an hour a week (p. 5). The New York Times writer Thomas Friedman (Friedman & Mandelbaum, 2011) cites findings that students don't spend much time reading, but they do spend about 7½ hours per day with "entertainment media."

If students aren't reading or writing in language arts, what are they doing? We get a glimpse of this from a young woman from Finland, who spent a year in the United States as an exchange student. Upon returning to her home country, she had to repeat the entire grade. Why? Because in the United States, instead of reading and writing (a mainstay of Finnish schooling) she and her fellow Americans spent their time preparing for multiple-choice tests or working on "projects" in which students were instructed to do things like "glue this to this poster for an hour." Students don't do such things in Finland (Gamerman, 2008, p. 2).

Are things really this bad even now—years into our multibillion dollar investment in various consortia and training around the Common Core (and similarly revised state ELA standards)?

The English Language Arts Common Core—How Much Effect?

As discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, the ELA Common Core is beset with problems—which even its architects acknowledge (Coleman et al., 2012). Its best aspects are found in its introductory and ancillary materials. But the Common Core's prominent, grade-by-grade standards are still a problem—one to which we'll return shortly. What has been the net effect of this high-profile innovation? After years of intensive investment, has it led to substantial improvements in student literacy?

English teacher and author Kelly Gallagher (2017) has been asking his audiences about their students’ current writing abilities in the Common Core era. The overwhelming majority confirm what he himself perceives: that student writing abilities are "in decline." E. D. Hirsch's (2016) recent research findings appear to confirm this: that our high school seniors’ "verbal abilities are worse than they were before the new reforms were instituted" (2016, p. 16).

When I visit ELA classrooms around the country, I only rarely find students actually reading, discussing, or writing about literature or nonfiction. I often ask my audiences what two things one is least apt to catch students doing if you pop in on an English class. After a pregnant pause, the response is always the same: reading and writing. I have quite recently visited classrooms in multiple school districts in which central office leaders spent years in Common Core consortia, attended multiple Common Core conferences, and provided professional development around the new standards. But when I visit their English classrooms, there is little or no evidence of change—skills-based worksheets and group work still predominate, sometimes with a Common Core veneer.

If such data seem too subjective, consider the findings of a report conducted after years of implementation and training in the new standards. The researchers were looking—explicitly—for classroom evidence of the "three shifts" of the Common Core (which were described in Chapter 2):

• Building knowledge through content-rich nonfiction
• Reading and writing grounded in evidence from text, both literary and informational
• Regular practice with complex text and its academic vocabulary

The rude findings: teachers themselves report that skills instruction—not the content of texts—continues to dominate. When students do read, they are provided with texts well below their grade level—instead of being helped to engage with more challenging texts (Shanahan & Duffet, 2013). In his visits to classrooms since the Common Core was introduced, Stanford's Sam Wineburg (2016) still sees instruction focused primarily on skills-based standards such as "assonance and alliteration." Old ways die hard.

And how much effect has the Common Core had on writing? According to Tanya Baker, of the National Writing Project, not much: "Kids are writing single paragraphs. It's so far from what we want for young people to be college or career ready" (Will, 2016). In the same article, we find that only 16 percent of assignments "required students to cite evidence from the text to support their thoughts and arguments"—thus 84 percent violate the essence of the Common Core. Joan Dabrowski (Will, 2016), the lead literacy adviser for the Education Trust, reports that writing in the Common Core era "rarely entails the kind of multi-paragraph, evidence-based writing that is promoted in college- and career-ready standards" (p. 6).

Kelly Gallagher (2017) cites a study by the Education Trust that demonstrated that even now, in the Common Core era, only 1 percent of assignments required extended thought (p. 25) and only 9 percent of middle school assignments were longer than a single paragraph (p. 26). Lee and Wu (2017) found that state assessments are undoubtedly more rigorous. But this has yet to have any significant positive effect on either classroom practices or performance outcomes (p. 1).

None of this should surprise us in light of what we saw in Chapter 3: that the Common Core is fundamentally at odds with itself, promoting authentic literacy in its introduction and appendixes and then—conversely—urging teachers to build discrete, skills-based lessons that are the primary impediment to authentic reading and writing. We can't seem to get past what David Pearson and Elfrieda Hiebert (2010) bemoaned upon reading the new standards: "elementitis," the tendency to reduce ELA instruction to "‘pieces’ of language" by which "skills are broken into elements and taught discretely" (p. 292).

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Endorsements for Focus, 2nd Edition
• Dedication
• Foreword to the 2nd Edition: The Importance of Evidence
• Introduction
• Section I. First Things First: What We Teach, How We Teach—and Literacy
• Section II. Curriculum, Instruction, and Literacy in the Content Areas
• Conclusion: Why Wait?
• Bibliography
• Study Guide
• Related ASCD Resources
• About the Author
• Copyright