As noted in The New York Times:

McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken

Sponsored research to find answers

To these Questions:

*Are cows ever happy?

*Do pigs feel pain?

*What do chickens really want? (see “Animals Seeking Happiness,” June 29, 2003)

Question:

Where is the New York Times report on sponsored research to answer these questions:

*What causes kindergartners to feel pain?

*What do 3rd graders really want?

*Are 7th graders ever happy?

Quick Summary: In 1983, the editor of Classroom Computer Learning asked me to review reading software. The mailed me a huge box of offal, and Beware the Rosy View! is the result. I had been a middle- and high-school reading teacher for more than a decade but I was teaching third grade when I dug deeply into computer-based instruction had to offer.

Some months later, that same editor asked me to take a look at an IBM-sponsored project that required a hefty amount of advanced technological hardware to teach students to read and write. At the time, 15,000 kindergartners and first graders in 220 schools in 13 states were participating in the program. I studied all the materials and spent a couple of days in one classroom. I think my observations then still inform the technological elements currently marketed as game changers. With the IBM program, although some computer work was involved, the kids used Selectric typewriters for their writing.

Beware the Rosy View! Classroom Computer Learning October 1983

Educational camp followers–publishing gurus, methods entrepreneurs, education professors and curriculum coordinators–are always on the lookout for the package or product or system or technique that can bypass the vagaries of individual teacher-and-student interaction and thus ensure universal quality education. In my 18 years as a teacher, I have witnessed at least a half dozen such programs presented in my district as the way (at long last) to end forever the need for remediation. One time the administrators were so confident of their product that they abolished all remedial teaching positions at the same time that they handed out the new manuals. Long before the manuals were dog-eared, the remedial teachers were back.

Messiah or Monster?

But now the deus ex machina truly is with us, greeted with loud hosannas and only a niggling bit of doubt. In our time of peril, with no solution to the literacy crisis in sight, a mechanical miracle is offered up to sweep aside low reading scores with a flutter of the video display screen. This time the product is so wondrous that few people are asking whether it’s messiah or monster. The administrators in my district, however, are a bit more cautious. Instead of abolishing the remedial positions immediately, they are installing the computers in all the remedial labs.

“Microcomputer-managed information,” “Total microcomputer instructional management,” “Total skills program,” “Enrichment,” “Remediation.” The microcomputer can do it all. We hear of schools where the SATs went up by 30 points after the introduction of computers, districts where math skills increased 1 1/2 grades in three months. Time magazine tells us there is a “new breed of whiz kids” out there, a generation that is “propelling traditional education down promising avenues.” We hear that two-year-olds are programming after just an hour’s exposure and wonder what’s wrong with our own humdrum lives. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education (September 22, 1982), Paul Connolly of Yeshiva University remarked that “parents who cannot compete with their children in video games marvel at the brave new world they do not understand and join the chorus that warns that those who do not rejoice in the new technology may be buried by it.”

The computer chorus line is seductive, but teachers must not be diverted from looking at the questions raised by the use of computers in schools, the same old questions that have always plagued the serious educator: who’s in charge, what kinds of decisions are they making, and how do they treat kids? In 1832, Emerson wrote in his journal, “Everything is a monster till we know what it is for.” What is so monstrous about computers is that in the hands of the bureaucrats, the pencil pushers, and the greedy, they make wrong-headed notions of pedagogy easier to implement. There is evidence abounding that computers can be used as tools for exploration, discovery and invention. But this electronic capability is irrelevant in schools purchasing packets of computer-aided instruction to push the same old skill drill, materials that insist knowledge is learned in itsy-bitsy pieces of hierarchical process, methods that insist you gotta learn the easy stuff before you can look at the hard stuff.

How can we greet software with anything but contempt when it’s marketed with the huckster’s spiel that it proves teachers with “all they need to know” for curriculum planning, that the computer will “monitor and manage student progress,” “prescribe assignments,” and make students “progress more rapidly”?

As might be expected, some folks in the reading skill business have been quick to jump at the possibility of another profitable Band-Aid approach to reading instruction: I recently visited a classroom where a reading management system is being installed. The publisher of this system has provided the teacher with a list of all the workbook activities necessary for the “mastery” of a host of objectives. Here I found our old friends: beginning blends, ending blends, vowel diphthongs, syllabification, finding main ideas, and so on. Coincidentally, all these workbook exercises happen to be published by the company selling the management system. Some of them were copyrighted in 1927.

As happens so often in education, teachers with 20 years’ experience were not consulted; in essence, they were each handed $2,000 worth of workbooks. The idea is that the student plows through all the workbook pages listed by the publisher for a certain skill. When he’s finished, he punches his A), B), C), or D) answers to a test into the computer. The computer then generates reports of his performance for the teacher, the parents, the district evaluator, the board of education.

Judging from the number of kids per machine, each kid will have about three minutes a week to punch in his answers. (Good thing the tests are short.) In reality, then, the computer in this management system is being used only to correct tests and reckon students’ grades. It can compile individual, class and districtwide scores, and I sincerely hope school board members will rest eassier knowing that reading scores are figured to the third–or thirty-third–decimal place.

McDonald’s Rules for Quality Control For the price of those workbooks, the teacher could have gotten Logo, Bank Street Writer, Gertrude’s Puzzle, Rocky’s Boots, and a host of other software to introduce her class to the wonders of computers. Seymour Papert, one of the creators of the Logo computer language, says if children are allowed to mess around with computers they will become apprentice epistemologists; they will think about thinking, learn about learning. But educational bureaucrats don’t understand this notion. Letting kids fool around with the turtle or the mouse or the word processor requires a tremendous amount of faith. You don’t get a post-test with Rocky’s Boots, so you can’t prove to the administration that a kid messing around in his own mind is learning anything. Our education managers get nervous at the idea of a kid being in charge. They want the machine to program the child–not the other way around. This attitude isn’t new. H. L. Mencken recognized empty technique when he encountered it in 1918.

The aim seems to be to reduce the whole teaching process to a sort of automatic reaction, to discover some master formula that will not only take the place of competence and resourcefulness in the teacher but will also create an artifiical receptivity in the child.

I am told that the virtue of such a computer-managed reading system is that if Johnny moves from School A to School B within the city, the educational leaders feel confident that his educational process won’t be disrupted because everybody’s teaching the same skills, using the same workbooks, getting the same computer printouts. This, of course, presume that when you know what page Johnny is on, you know something about Johnny as a learner. It is the McDonald’s Rule for Quality Control in Education. Teachers are provided with the franchized forumula and are expected just to serve it up “as is.” The learning comes pre-packaged, pre-sequenced, pre-ordained as useful. Plug the kid in to his electronic fast fix and the management system will do the rest. Nowhere is the phrase “garbage in, garbage out” more applicable. [emphasis added]

An interesting sidelight is that some administrators are wondering how they will evaluate teachers under this new system. “After all, you won’t be teaching,” they say. I suspect administrators will have their hands full checking that the franchized formulas are being adhered to; meanwhile, teachers and kids will soon be looking for ways to subvert the master plan, to introduce individuality, personality, common sense. They will have to do that to stay alive.

People who sell these computerized skill programs like to emphasize that they are a “back-to-basics, No-frills” approach to learning. But if you buy into this mind set, then everything that isn’t a measurable skill becomes a frill. You end up with a new Gresham’s law: The curriculum that is quantitatively measurable will drive out the curriculum that is qualitatively justifiable. It would be naive not to admit the appeal this idea has for many people. Marie Winn points out in Children Without Childhood (Grune, 1970) that our children live in the Age of Preparation. Fostering early skill acquisition has become a much greater priority than encouraging fantasy, imagination, creativity. She quotes a teacher: “Kids in our kindergarten can’t sit around playing with blocks anymore. We’ve just managed to squeeze in one hour of free play a week, on Fridays.”

To dwell on computer-assisted reading instruction programs is not to suggest that the other stuff is any better. One could be as critical–or more so–of math-skills programs. According to the Wall Street Journal, when 300 teachers evaluated a batch of mathematics software, only 25 percent of it earned a score of 60 percent or better. Traditional publishers are spewing forth what they know best–only now their workbooks light up and sing. Nontraditional companies have jumped into the marketplace, but they, too, are using the workbook rather than the kid as a model.

And science is no better. Recently I was intrigued by a disk that purported to teach youngsters something about the human body. I should have been warned by the subtitle, “Step-by-step instruction.” The program does nothing mroe than offer cryptic, dictionary-style definitions of various body systems and functions–just one damned definition after another. “Animation” consists of words occasionally bouncing around the screen for no apparent reason. The lessons are tripe that no reasonably healthy student would sit still for. Following the so-called instruction is a test of 67 questions, a test of the worst kind: choose A), B), C), D) or true/false regurgitation of definitions. There is no invitation to explore, elaborate on or integrate information. I had thought that the program, at the very least, would show some dynamics of the body processes: the blood circulating, the food digesting. I was wrong. Programmers of such material operate under the phenomenological principle that it’s enough to light up, wiggle, and bleep.

All these junky materials are marketed both as skill developers and as tools that bring “computer literacy” to the schools. This, of course, is just the newest educational buzzword, one employed to intimidate teachers, impress taxpayers, and enrich publishing conglomerates. In the name of computer literacy, children are learning a few purely mechanical skills; where to insert the disk, and which buttons to push. As implemented in most schools today, computer literacy is a fraud that has nothing to do with the significance computers can play in people’s lives.

For Whom the Bleep Tolls

Teachers always need to become knowledgeable about educational theory and apparatus, but it is very likely that most of us do not ourselves need to become truly computer literate. Paul Connolly gives us hope when he questions the notion that data processing is at the core of every enlightened being. It is refreshing to hear, amidst the apocalyptic blather about the uninitiated being left crippled and helpless in the wake of the technological revolution, that maybe there are some worthwhile people in this profession for whom the computer’s bleep does not toll.

It is tempting, however, for someone like me, a third grade teacher who knows firsthand of the physical difficulties eight-year-olds have in getting words on paper, to embrace the word processor as the heaven-sent answer to my woes. Sure, the novelty of the keyboard will appeal to the kids. The erasing capabilities along make it seem worth the price.

Contrary to the claims of certain proponents, however, the blank screen is not really “friendlier than a blank sheet of paper.” Once the child has tired of typing his name, the names of all his friends and relatives, the alphabet, all the jokes he knows, the time will come when he is supposed to produce words of his own: he will need something to say. Actually, most young children, if properly encouraged, have a lot to say. The problem is that once it is said they seldom see any need to change it. Donald Graves, author of Teacher and Children at Work (Heinemann, 1983), although cautiously optimistic about the possibilities word processing offers young children, warns that seeing their words neatly printed might make children even less anxous to revise. Words typed are already more final and official than words hand written.

More important, says Graves, is the fact that a word processor won’t make a good writing teacher out of a bad writing teacher. Graves is one of those educators who speak to the fact that the child needs time to explore, to discover, to create. This time cannot be pre-programmed: there are no shortcuts. The good teacher knows that and gives the child room.

Bertram Bruce, co-director of the Massachusetts-based Quill, a set of microcomputer-based writing activities for children in grades three to six, notes that sometimes the students with the best teachers don’t use the computer writing program as much as expected because there are “so many interesting competing activities in their classroom.” This point cannot be overstated. When a teacher decides to use the computer, she has to make time for it. She has to decide not to do something else. When a teacher introduces a computer program, she and the children have a right to demand that it be better than the alternatives.

Bruce proudly notes that the computer-writing activities are so powerful that some children come in before and after school to work on them. I believe that and am happy kids are being encouraged to write. We don’t need a computer, however, to get the kids back into the building. They will come for optical illusions, bones, the solar system. I’ve had kids show up to practice borrowing in subtraction. Kids will even come to write stories with pencil and paper. If a good teacher offers to stay after school, she will always find plenty of company.

Another Shot of Novelty

Recently I attended a reading conference where a teacher-presenter said she liked working with computers because they made her feel important. “Reading teachers are so ordinary,” she said. “This makes me special.” At first her naivete made me sad, but the more I thought about it, the angrier I became. This is a parody of the professional, someone who needs a triannual shot of novelty to keep her going. The true professional needs stamina for the long haul; she needs to be able to face the fact that things are probably going to be more the same tomorrow than they are today.

In The Micro Millennium (Viking, 1980), Christopher Evans predicts that teachers will be replaced as “exclusive repositories and disseminators of specialist knowledge.” While acknowledging the failure of the old-style teaching machines and programmed learning, Evans asserts that the teaching computers will be genuinely “smart”; they will “adjust their responses. . . to meet the needs of the moment,” giving the impression that they are “interested” in teaching. A person who is capable of believing such hogwash has no notion of what goes on in a real classroom.

It is likely that I make myself an endangered species by admitting this, but I don’t leave my classroom at the end of the day proud that I have 3–or 13–skills. When I recall my crystal moments in teaching, I’m not thinking of the day 96.4 percent of the class scored 98.672 percent on a long-division quiz. I am likely to be thinking of something that had nothing to do with the cr blend, the eights times table, or any of the other minutiae of the ostensible curriculum. I am probably recalling something serendipitous, something unforeseen that happened only once and will never happen again–like the day my deaf student learned a “knock knock” joke.

I don’t offer my students a glut of information; instead of factoids, I present an attitude and approach to learning. I like to think that children with me for ten months develop some self-reliance, a love for the sound of our language, at least a beginning awareness that they can experience joy in words, both in their own words and the words of others. I also throw in a bit about the power of numbers and the wonders of messing around in science. I try to help children get a feeling of the “connectedness” of things. I believe that for this job I am uniquely qualified. On my good days I have faith in my own judgment, sensitivity, and skill. Even on my bad days I know that I will get another chance. To do my job as I have defined it, I am in charge. I yield to no higher authority. None.

That doesn’t mean I don’t look for help. I make sure I am knowledgeable about as many theories and as much material as possibly, even the tiddly-pom that lights up and whistles Dixie. I need the experts to help me separate the pap from the prophecy, but I don’t need them to make me feel special. For that, the kids are enough.

Postscript: The deaf child referred to in this article found me on Facebook 30 years later–to tell me what Amelia Bedelia and knock-knock jokes meant to her. This is the real meaning of teacher wait time.

IBM’s “Writing to Read” Program: Hot New Item or Same Old Stew? Classroom Computer Learning March 1984

What good luck! There are electric typewriters in the classroom. What bad luck! The kids have to listen to a computer voice output sound out the word bed for 12 minutes, type letters onto the computer keyboard, and then fill in multitudinous workbook pages before they can to near the typewriters. John Henry Martin, a retired educator, has created “Writing To Read,” a program packaged and sponsored by IBM, a relative newcomer to the educational marketplace. Billed as “interactive learning,” the program uses Personal Computers and a host of other technological gadgetry to teach kindergartners and first graders to read. Martin insists that children’s own writing is at the heart of this program, but the most visible part is drill and practice.

On the day I visited the classroom, the computer was drilling a youngster on the word chair. The voice output repeated: “This is a chair. Say chair. Say ch. Type ch. Say air. Type air. Say chair. Type chair.” As the phoneme was pronounced, the appropriate letters made their way from the border of the screen to the center. The child was instructed to say the word, then say each phoneme sound, and then say the whole word again. And then the child was to type the word.

I watched a first grader waiting for his chance to type bed. He had three fingers poised on the appropriate keys. Those fingers were the only things about him that were still. While he waited for his chance to “interact” with the computer, he looked over his shoulder to see what the teacher was doing, kicked his partner, twisted in his chair one way and then another. Occasionally he glanced at the screen. It was all quite normal first grade behavior, especially in the face of interminable repetition. Finally the voice output prompted him to type the word. He never even looked at the screen to check his answer. The boy knew he had typed the word correctly because bed appeared on the screen. If it hadn’t, he would have been looped back for more repetition–not alternative work, just more of the same.

Computer buffs will tell us that during this process the computer provided something called immediate feedback, letting the child know whether he was right or wrong. But I’ve yet to be convinced of the importance of immediate feedback on the /ch/ blend.

Does such division of learning into itsy-bitsy pieces divorced from content really give the child a sense of the purpose of reading? I think not. Children don’t need this style of constant reinforcement if language is meaningful. If their language environment is rich and whole, children are reinforced intrinsically and continuously. The context provides natural clues that help the learner to discover what the language is about and how it works, and also whether he is right or wrong.

After completing the computer lesson, the child listens to a tape that instructs him to write letters, phonemes and words in his work journal. Later he practices the same letter sounds without the cassette instructions. There are ten cycles in the computer program and ten corresponding work journals. “Journal” is a misnomer, with its connotation of personal writing. The highly structured work journal activities are indistinguishable from those in conventional basal workbooks.

For the listening/reading station, Martin selected 18 children’s books, such favorites as The Snowy Day, Make Way for Ducklings, The Little Red Hen and Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The child plugs into a tape that reads the book at a very slow pace so he can follow along word-for-word in a copy of the book. Martin might well be reminded of reading theorist Frank Smith’s observation that “a parent does not read to her child to teach her to read. They are sharing a pleasurable experience.”

Martin recommends that the fourth station, the independent writing station where the child writes with the typewriter, be placed in the center of the room, denoting its importance to his system. Certainly, this station is an oasis of hope in a very controlled world. But how well the child learns to make use of the station depends on the individual teacher; little help is provided by the program. The teacher’s manual does suggest that teachers encourage independent writing by providing “activities that stimulate play with words.” But the activities listed are a potpourri of story starters, artificial topics and devices inappropriate both to the age of the children involved and to the writing process as it is described by such writing experts as Donald Graves and Lucy Calkins. One example should suffice: The guide recocmmends that after reading the Just So Stories (one of my favorite for older children), the teacher should invite the children to write a story about how a zebra got its stripes. Kindergartners and first graders! The teacher who follows Martin’s advice and invites 26 children to write “If I could hope like a grasshopper, I would. . . ” should be aware that she will have to read the results. There is a reason that Calkins recommends encouraging young children to stick to personal narrative.

Children like to write, and the children in the IBM are no exception. I watched them finish up the workbook pages and move to the writing screen with relief and joy. Three weeks into the “Writing To Read” program a first grader used the skill he had acquired and wrote, “My pig is a funne pig B kuz he splashz in the mud.” (The influence of Martin’s “key” vocabulary is clear in this child’s story.) We can surely share the child’s joy in writing this, but he didn’t need computer lessons and workbook drills to succeed. Donald Graves has demonstrated that a child needs only five or six sound-symbol relationships (usually consonants) to be able to write. Moreover, in her book Teacher, Sylvia Ashton-Warner showed us years ago the vitality of “giving” children powerful words, words with emotional content. Martin’s list seem to have been chosen not because of a possible impact on the child but because he wants to introduce a certain sequence of phonemes.

Don Holdaway, noted New Zealand educator and author of The Foundations of Literacy, says that the sequential blending of sounds is probably one of the least useful strategies in learning to read. Holdaway describes a holistic approach using oversized books combined with the talent, intuition and experience of the teacher, and the curiosity, perception and enthusiasm of the children. Holdaway apologizes for the expense of such big books and tells the teacher how she could make her own. I look at the three or four computers, the numerous Selectric typewriters, the mounds of work journals in the “Writing To Read” program and thought of all the big books and trade books a school could buy, all the children’s own books they could publish, all the poets and joke book writers they could invite to visit.

Apparently, children who complete the “Writing To Read” program do well on standardized tests, but it’s important to remember that such tests have limited and often trivial objectives. What we need to ask is not children’s percentile ranking at the end of first grade but how many books they have read in sixth grade, how many stories they have written and shared with their fellow students. How many hours a week do these students spend independently with books?

In fairness to Martin and the IBM crew, I must acknowledge that I find most reading programs wanting. I like to see children in control, and program makers seem intent on getting them in step. Borrowing from Emerson, I want fire, “a little less mutton and a little more genius.”

How Today’s Software Can Zap Kids’ Desire to Read Classroom Computer Learning November/December 1984

Most reading software is foolish and impudent, an odious endeavor. And the mistake is right up front–in the endeavor itself, not in the execution. I like clever graphics as well as the next person, and today’s software certainly drills with pizzazz. But what I find foolish is the basic premise–that reading can be achieved by drilling students on discrete skills.

Plenty of folks are fond of consonant blends and their assorted kin. A skill is comfortable. It is easy to spot; it can be measured, charted, graphed, put in a data bank, brought out on parent conference night. Certainly these skills are nothing new and I do not blame the computer parvenus for their existence. But neither do I thank them for making things easy for the educational bookies who insist we can know a kid by the numbers in his folder.

Folks who play the educational numbers game never ask what a collection of 1,392 of these skills is good for, what the kid should do with them. Acquisition is the only goal. Computers, which allow isolated skills to multiply faster than the biblical tribes, merely encourage the foul bureaucratic impulse for collection, storage, and retrieval. I can only express my gratitude that, when I taught reading in New York from 1060 through 1983, I was unaware that the New York State Education Department had 1,800-plus reading objectives stored in its computer bank.

Consonant Blends that Dance a Jig

People ask me what I have against the consonant blend and other wonders of phonics. Absolutely nothing. I show my students that these devices are helpful–but only to help them read books, not to fill out skill sheets. In my years as a reading teacher, I watched any number of fancy skill-drill programs pass through the coordinator’s office. But those who offer only a choice of how skills are to be presented–filmstripped, tape-recorded, televised or computerized–offer no choice at all.

Bureaucrats seem ever able to find thousands of dollars for up-to-date ways of delivering the same old skills at the very time they cite budget deficits as the reason for laying off librarians. A computerized skills checklist may be convenient for justifying one’s application for federal monies (to purchase more electronic checklists), but we must demand more of our reading paraphernalia. We must insist that it be good for kids. We teachers must not relinquish our savvy about kids and how they learn to read.

Disk-drive partisans justify their use of computers by bragging about the bonanza of “immediate feedback.” If one can’t think of anything else to say about a program, there is always “speedy correction.” And yet thoughtful scholars such as Frank Smith caution us against being too quick to offer feedback. If a child is to become a reader he must be willing to take risks. Do we want to be too quick to label such risks as error? I, for one, am not grateful to the guys who bring me the nasty combination of silly questions and speedy corrections. I find no charm in immediate numerical gratification.

And then there is “impersonal feedback.” Now there’s a notion to make a granite wall weep. I want my students to become personally involved with books–to puzzle over them, laugh over them, and, when necessary, to get angry with them. For this to happen, I need to be passionately involved. I need to offer myself–my intuitions, experience, knowledge, and, yes, also my pleasure, my ire. Better I should wrongly holler at a kid than abrogate my teaching role in the name of impersonal feedback. I did not become a teacher in order to replace enthusiasm with anomie.

But then, I don’t see reading as a steady progression along carefully sequenced rungs of skill development. Reading has always seemed a more pesky enterprise to me. We must recognize that the hucksters of skills systems have a disarmingly optimistic view of skills but are propelled by a dismal view of children. Reading cannot be handed out like scratch-and-sniff stickers. The skill-and-drill fix is about as helpful to children’s intellectual development as sucking on jujubes.

Skill-Drill Thrills.. . . and Chills

So how do we keep our feet firmly on the rock of pedagogical principle when faced with so many reading programs on disk? How do we find the few that are worthwhile? We can’t rely on software review. They seldom measure the electronic hugger-mugger against, say Charlotte’s Web or King Arthur or Never Cry Wolf. Instead, reviewers say, “This is better than a workbook.” Paltry praise indeed. The students shouldn’t be wasting time with a workbook either.

No, we have to look at the stuff ourselves. I recently did that and I doubt that anyone could possibly believe what I saw. You had to be there. The dim-wittedness offered up by much current software in the name of reading comprehension and thinking skills is quite amazing. Let is suffice to say that there exists a junk category of software totally fascinating in its foulness. I spent hours punching in wrong answers just to revel in the stupidity of the “explanations, (except that I often erred in my anticipation of errors and got answers right that I intended to miss. (That meant starting the program all over, since I was determined to see every one of the wacky explanations.)

Anyone who is in aw of the technological breakthroughs in education should work through the 815,000 ugly little sentences generated by one program–a program that purports to teach the 38 rules for capitalization. This software operates on the principle that if the kid doesn’t get it the first time, then make him try the same thing 814,999 more times. Or consider Vocabulary Development, Phonics in Context, Spelling Mastery, Choosing Titles, Prefix Tutor. The titles alone tell us we don’t need this nonsense. There’s no wit here. No whimsy. Just whistling in the pedagogical dark.

I am stunned by the wrongness. These products are billed as research based and dazzlingly up-to-date, but they give me a prickly feeling of deja voodoo, proving over and over that anything that can be put in a dime-store workbook can also go on a floppy disk. I recall Dorothy Parker’s advice about a book she was reviewing: “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” Likewise, I recommend rubbing these skill disks with a nice big magnet.

Or how about the program that asks students to reconstruct on a blank screen a passage from Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann? If that task seems rather strenuous, the student can choose instead to supply every other letter or all the vowels. I’ll admit there is an interesting principle at work here, one involving “structural clues,” but I cannot fathom the choice of literary selections. Nor can I believe that a student, assuming she does re-create the passage, would ever be inspired to read the real thing.(But I confess to never having finished Magic Mountain even when all the letters were there from the start. When I see such an excerpt in a program purportedly designed for students age nine and up, I wonder who is kidding whom.

Tremendous effort seems to have gone into producing software that spews out readability formulas for any literary passage you care to input. In my survey, I discovered programs based on most of the major word- and syllable-counting schemes, including Flesch, Lore and Fry, Dale-Chall, the Navy, General Motors, Bell Laboratories, the Department of Defense. But such software only encourages teachers to dump the delicate art of guiding students to books best able to capture their interests and imaginations in favor of academic numerology. And I say to hell with it.

I also uncovered numerous computer versions of word scramble, hangman, Go Fish, and Old Maid. Certainly kids like such stuff, but I can’t see that the computer enhances these old chestnuts. I’d rather see a child playing Go Fish with a friend than a machine. I’m not even convinced that kids would choose to play hangman on the computer rather than on the chalkboard–not without some moments of deliberation. (Kids love the word-processing capabilities of chalk and eraser.) But if a teacher is determined to find some use for the electronic beastie in her reading classroom, better she let the kid play hangman than insist he search-and-destroy all the blends he spots or shoot down vocabulary words. And for teachers who laboriously construct crossword puzzles and word searches, the good news is that programs exist to simplify their lives.

A Glimmer of Hope And All the Bright Lights

If we do not set our expectations too high, then there are some software programs that can be useful in the classroom, programs worthy of some celebration. I’ve looked at various programs traveling under the name of poetry that are fun and even intriguing the first few times one plugs in words. But I hope that teachers will help children to see that poetry is the careful, meaningful choice of words, that writers work hard at their craft, that even though plugging in words at random can be fun, it isn’t poetry. A program such as Suspect Sentences (Ginn), in which a student tries to hide an original sentence in a literary passage so that his peers can’t find it, seems to have more potential than most language arts programs. To play this game successfully, students must read critically and then model their own writing after an author’s style. They certainly won’t come away thinking that any old word will do.

The Sentence Maker portion of Word Worx (Reston) encourages children to use their understanding of grammatical structure to create sentences. The computer presents five letters, and players try to make sentences using those letters. Once a word is used, the computer will not allow it to be used again. Kids keep making sentences until they run out of ideas–or guess the computer’s sentence (an adage or famous quote). Although critics might point out that such an exercise addresses only surface and not deep grammar, it is nonetheless one of the better programs available, and teachers need not feel apologetic for allowing it into a classroom.

Never Forget the Pageantry of Peas

When all is said and done, the computer is not going to stimulate much reading. Reading a screen filled with type is neither amusing nor inspiring. It is actually painful, and people who are forced to do it should receive adequate monetary compensation. Certainly it is not something we should inflict on children we are trying to encourage as readers.

Long ago, E. B. White commented on the great technological breakthrough that promised to revamp the kitchen so that we could push a button and peas would appear on a paper plate. White pointed out that the technocrats had misunderstood the “pageantry of peas.” Similarly, though I am bombarded by an electronic hailstorm, I’m not willing to let the skills people get away with obscuring the pageantry of reading with their flood of state-of-the-art sound-and-light shows. I don’t care if the kids down the hall stay a skill lesson or two (or even 56) ahead forever.

No. Instead, I hope to nurture my students in an environment that convinces them they might want to read a book someday. I see too many proficient decoders, kids who perform extremely well on standardized tests but never willingly pick up a book. They have mastered an incomplete system, one they find lacking in marvel or mystery. As Mark Twain reminds us, the man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.

So I say to those fellows with their whistling curriculum: I am wary of mistaking convenience for progress. The worth of a machine depends upon the use to which it is put. Marching children through reading systems in the name of efficient record keeping has the pedagogical justification of a No-Pest Strip. One good book is worth 1,000 floppy disks. Or more. I’d trade my WordStar disk for almost any one of E. B. White’s sentences. Or Gore Vidal’s. Or Calvin Trillin’s. Or Max Apple’s. My list is wonderfully long. And I would not trade my memory of Jessica’s face when she first read Amelia Bedelia for a whole skills-management system.

Once I turned in the article, the editor was bombarded by complaints from the advertising crew, so someone provided a lengthy introduction, ending with the statement that this is one educator’s view.

Showing his grit and stamina, the editor gave me a box of software devoted to teaching reading, and How Today’s Software Can Zap Kids’ Desire to Read was the result in late 1984. And the editors introduced it with this brief warning: Beware when you’re choosing reading software!It’s all too easy to become beguiled by the razzmatazz and forget to take a hard look at the pedagogical underpinnings.

I present all three articles here. It is striking how these pieces, written 30 years ago, speak directly to our current crisis. Please don’t interpret this statement as being a reiteration of the pendulum theory. The pedagogical issues are similar but now, faced with the iron-fisted US Department of Education control of federal dollars, the crisis is much worse. And the metaphor is an anchor for deep-sixing teachers and public education itself, not a pendulum providing temporary disruption.

This article appeared in English Journal, November 2013.

by Susan Ohanian

I still cannot take my measure without a classroom of children to give me clues. . . .
Where Reeny goes we shall follow.
–Vivian Gussin Paley, The Girl with the Brown Crayon: How Children Use Stories to Shape Their Lives

When you grow up in this world you realize people don’t give a shit about what you feel or
what you think.
–David Coleman, leading author and architect of the Common Core State [sic] Standards

While studying for a master’s degree in English literature, I dated a physics major, and the first present I ever gave him was Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. I’d loved that book so much after reading it–unsupervised–as a first-year college student that I tried to avoid any class where it might be taught, for fear my joy might be parsed right out of it. A. A. Milne described this passion: “One does not argue about The Wind in the Willows. The young man gives it to the girl with whom he is in love, and if she does not like it, asks her to return his letters. The older man tries it on his nephew, and alters his will accordingly. The book is a test of character” (qtd. in Moore 45). I don’t know that I deliberately set out to test that physics student, but how could I keep company with someone who didn’t take inordinate pleasure in Tom Jones? And, dear reader, I married him.

Ann Tyler captures the mindset I was trying to avoid: “Rose had a kitchen that was so completely alphabetized, you’d find the allspice next to the ant poison” (12). Tom Jones was just too important to me to submit to alphabetizing. I feel the same way about teaching: I’m not an alphabetizing kind of teacher. Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out that “we boil at different degrees” (55). We should celebrate differences–those of teachers as well as those of students. I just bought a T-shirt from a kindergarten teacher who responded to Common Core imperatives: “They’re going to have to pry the crayons out of my cold, dead hands.” This T-shirt, available in many colors, announces Occupy Kindergarten (Schwengel). Every AP English teacher should buy one, because we all must care about the survival of blocks and finger paints in kindergarten. High school teachers reap what kindergarten teachers sow.

Talk to seventh-and eighth-grade teachers who embrace what they do, and they’ll tell you they relish the great exaggerations these students provide. When I read standards-based reading lists that seem sent in from some other planet, I wonder if they’re referring to the seventh-grade Sherri who is obsessed with makeup and fashion magazines. Or the Sherri who sucks her thumb and wants to listen to a tape of Rumpelstiltskin. The Sherri I know can’t be pinned down to read the same book from one day to the next, never mind the same book as all her classmates. As Stephen D. Krashen observes, “Home run book experiences vary widely among children” (8). Speaking from long experience, I figure a teacher has to be a bit off-center herself to linger with seventh and eighth graders. Off-center–but not loony enough to think she can standardize these kids, or would ever want to.

Frank Smith warned us decades ago that “The journey to learning cannot be planned in advance and controlled like a journey to the moon” (66). To suggest otherwise is an insult to intelligence. For more information on the self-destructiveness of the hustling, techno-driven way of life, read Thoreau, read Moby-Dick, read Morris Berman’s Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline. Read anything by Matt Taibbi or Chris Hedges. I mention these writers because you can’t consider seventh graders without considering the world they live in. You’d have to be insane to hold these truths to be self-evident–that all children are created equal, that they should all be subjected to the same complex text at the same time. Insane.

My plan here was to make the defense of fiction that NCTE ignores. I collected many volumes–from The Girl with the Brown Crayon: How Children Use Stories to Shape Their Lives (Paley) to Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dogged the FBI, and Transformed Children’s Literature (Nel); Gates of Excellence: On Reading and Writing Books for Children(Paterson); How Fiction Works (Wood); Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction (Reynolds); Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction (Oatley); Should We Burn Babar?: Essays on Children’s Literature and the Power of Stories (Kohl) Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature (Mickenberg and Nel); Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio Narratology (Frank); Free Voluntary Reading (Krashen). All these and more. They are worth reading. And reading again.

I call on Norman Mailer for my favorite insight of this moment: “Good and great literature is most effective at changing your life when you are young” (qtd. in Shwartz 159). Ignoring this truth is the tragedy of our time: we are robbing children of the literary heritage that matters for a lifetime. A child only gets to be 5 or 8 or 13 once. And when you deprive him of his literary right to find the book that will knock his socks off, that chance is gone–forever. I told Pete, the second most obnoxious kid I ever encountered (Ohanian, “To Pete”), that Katherine Paterson, whose Great Gilly Hopkins I’d read aloud to the class, believed every teacher should read Ramona the Brave. Since Pete could not read, I taped the book for him, with the instruction, “Tell me why Katherine Paterson wants every teacher to read about this first grader.” I’m not sharing Pete’s on-target answer because every teacher should read the book.

It is offensive to imagine that fiction–from The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin to Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH to The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian–needs a defense. Making a defense is exactly what the Standardistos want us to do: spin our wheels and tear up our souls on a detour. The issue is not how to parse out fiction and nonfiction. The issue in a democracy is Who decides? Who decides what children need to learn? Who decides what teachers need to teach? Who? Our silence as a profession has ceded victory to the power brokers, and the only thing left is to wonder: Which technology will come first–driverless cars or teacherless classrooms? As I write this, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has funded inBloom, Inc. to fully sequence learning ad ensure a technology takeover of the classroom. Here’s Bill Gates, whose education policy “moves in apparent lockstep” with that of Education Secretary Duncan (Golden): “The standards will tell the teachers what their students are supposed to learn, and the data will tell them whether they’re learning it (Gates).” Matt Taibbi’s description of Occupy Wall Street perfectly fits the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation/US Department of Education enterprises: “Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It’s about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become.” Occupy kindergarten! Occupy the schools (Ohanian, “Whoo-Hoo!”). The resistance to Common Core State [sic] Standards is about something much bigger than testing companies and publishers and what grade gets tested on Macbeth. I use [sic] when the word State occurs as part of the Common Core nomenclature because the standards were paid for by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the US Department of Education coerced state consent with threats and money. I find it unsettling that an organization that went so far out on a limb about grammar reform in 1940 has descended into such a degree of passivity about the Common Core and the national tests driving that core (Skinner 179-87). I’ve written about how NCTE censored me on the Connected Community (Ohanian, “My Censorship”), informing me that “All defamatory, abusive, profane, threatening, offensive, or illegal materials are strictly prohibited.” As if I’d done anything of the kind. I asked for information on just which one of those outrages I was being accused of. I’m still waiting for an answer.

NCTE has broken my heart by promoting Gleichschaltung over the professional values we hold dear. I choose not to dwell on professional chicanery and heartbreak because two students from my distant past have reached out, reminding me of Mary Oliver’s words:

Always there is something worth saying about glory, about gratitude.

Glory

In his introduction to The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs, Malcolm Gladwell writes, “Dogs are not about something else. Dogs are about dogs” (xv). Bingo. We must accord kids the same dignity: Kids are about kids. Kids are not about anything else, not about the nation’s gross national product, not about future workers in the global economy. Kids are about kids. Today. Here and now. Leslie, a deaf child in public school for the first time in my first-year-as-a-third grade-teacher classroom, found me on Facebook. She said she searched because she wanted to thank me for introducing her to Amelia Bedelia, which she now reads with her own children. For Leslie, the homonyms were complex text. Once she caught on to the play on light bulbs and flower bulbs, she was able to “get” the knock-knock riddles that had eluded and frustrated her all year. The day she yelled, “I get it! I get it! Let me read it out loud!” the class cheered. Then she yelled, “Let me read another one!” Classroom glory. Not in the lesson plan. [Despite the glory of reuniting with Leslie, I couldn’t stick with Facebook.]

Two weeks before this article was due, Emily got in touch. Emily was in my combined seventh/eighth-grade language arts class decades ago, the class where I started exchanging daily notes with kids. Looking for writing that involved them, that helped them find their voices, I drew on my experience with a daily note exchange my father had initiated, an exchange we kept up for more than 30 years. Our notes were basic: Dad told me the height of his sunflowers; I complained about shoveling the driveway. But the impact was profound–for both of us. And so I handed every student a 3 x 5 notebook, announcing that there was a note inside from me, and I wanted an answer. The small notebook size was deliberate. I didn’t want kids to be intimidated by a huge 8 1/2 x 11 blank sheet of paper. Michael spoke for most of his classmates when he complained, “Why would we write to you when you’re right here?” But I stood firm, and he was soon hooked. As spring approached, I told students that for me the first signs of spring were the asparagus ads in the newspaper. Kids thought this was a hoot, such a teacher thing to get excited about asparagus. But they watched the paper and left ads on my desk, competing for who could find the best bargain. Michael won.

Dear Ms. O,
As you no I want to Boston firday. It was a lot fo fun. When I first got to Boston we drov aron looking for a parking plas. We fon one and then we got out of the car. We walk to a fance market and had a bite to aet. Than we went to the aquarium and that was eciting There was a shoe with dolphins and seals. Wan we got out we want by a fruit markt. I thogt of you and chekt the pric of asprgus. It is $1.00 a lb in Boston and 3 heds of letis for $1.00. Boston is a long way to go for asprgus tho.
Your frend,
Michael

Michael told me his family thought he was nuts when he said he had an urgent need to go int a vegetable market for his teacher.

Michael and I shared daily notes for two years, and the week before his graduation from eighth grade his mother sent me a letter. “I was going to phone you, but Michael told me to write a letter. He said when you care about someone and you have something important to tell them, you write it in a letter. He learned that from you. He learned a lot, and we are grateful forever.”

In the end, we can only teach who we are, and because Michael’s letter is a testament to who I am as a teacher, I often read it when I give talks. Teachers always look beyond the spelling, noting voice, structure, knowledge of audience, humor, and so on. And I add a PS: I found out that Michael became a big-time chef in a tony restaurant. I claim partial credit. After all, I introduced him to an interest in asparagus.

This is a simple exchange: no kits, no processes, no rubrics, no graphic organizers, no snazzy peer editing techniques–no hoopla at all. Just a teacher writing notes and her students writing back.

I’ve written about Emily’s notes (Ohanian, Caught 74-78). She never missed a day, frustrating me because she never progressed beyond dutiful, short, dull responses to my questions. Then one day my question was, “What is your favorite flower?” Emily replied, “Red rose, yellow rose, blue rose, and pink rose or zinnia.”

Delighted to have struck a chord, I answered,

Dear Emily,

Here’s a poem for you by a woman named Elizabeth Coatsworth. I like it a lot and hope you do, too.

Violets, daffodils
Roses and thorn. . .
Your friend,
Ms. O

From that point on, Emily’s notes to me consisted of lists of flowers. One day her note was:

Carnations, sweet William, baby’s breath.
Emily

That’s it: the whole note. The next day it was

Daisies and marigolds.
Emily

I wrote questions about some of the flowers in her lists, but she didn’t answer. She just kept writing those lists:

Bloodroot, pansy, tansy, tulip, dandelion, milkweed,
iris, baptisa.
Emily

Dogtooth violet, lady’s slipper, jack-in-
the-pulpit
Emily

Wild rose, gold rose, honeysuckle, cactus, black-eyed Susan, sweet pea, four-o’clock, Queen Anne’s lace, butterfly bush, morning glory, lily of the valley, harebell, thistle, bardock.
Emily

Sometimes her lists were short; sometimes they were long. No matter what I said in my note, Emily just kept giving me more flower names. Emily lived with her grandparents and worked in their nursery, so her lists were knowledge-based as well as sourced from the big, fat Encyclopedia of Gardening she lugged to school every day in her book bag. Every day I wrote Emily funny stories about my cats, complaints about shoveling snow, what I cooked for dinner, what I did over the weekend. Every day she gave me lists of flowers. Then one day when I wrote about how much I was looking forward to spring, Emily surprised me.

It is supposed to get to 65° today.
Your friend, Emily

The “Your friend, Emily” was in tiny letters almost too small to decipher. I wanted to whoop with joy. I wrote her a spring poem in reply and asked her a question. “If you had a choice of any place in the world, Emily, where would you like to visit?” Over the months, I had asked Emily 50 or more questions, all of which she calmly ignored. But here came another answer.

Dear Ms. O,
Portland, Oregon.
Brown and furry caterpillar in a hurry,
Take your walk to this shady leaf or stalk. . . .
Christina Georgina Rossetti and Emily

What a gift. I wrote back, telling Emily of my delight. I included a short poem about butterflies in my note and asked Emily another question: “What do you like about butterflies?”

Dear Ms. O,
They look pretty and all the different butterflies
and special colors and it would be nice to fly.
In spring the chirping frogs
Sing like birds . . . in summer
They bark like old dogs.
Onitsura and Emily

That was the last question Emily answered for another two months. Every day her note consisted of a poem, and I gave her one back in mine. Plus I always asked her a question. One day Emily read my note and complained, “You just took my poem. I was going to give that one to you today.” We agreed that it’s lovely when two people want to share the same poem.

When Emily was a senior in high school she brought me a poinsettia at Christmas. “I hope you still like flowers,” she smiled. Then she asked the question that every former student always asked: “Do you still write those letters to kids?” My answer continued to be yes.

After Emily graduated from high school, she started sending me a card at Christmas and a Happy Spring card in April. Emily’s cards followed me through four address changes. For a few years she included a short note. Then there were cards but no note. Just her name in tiny, tiny letters. One year there was a card with a poem by Christina Georgina Rossetti. No name. Twice a year I send her a card, always telling her something about what I’m doing, offering news about my cats, and always asking her a question.

Christmas 2010, 2011, and 2012, no card from Emily, but I kept writing. Then in late February 2013, a manila envelope arrived. In it was a Christmas card in its envelope–misaddressed and returned to her–plus a Valentine’s card. And a letter! In it, she turned the tables, asking me lots of questions about the weather and the cats. She asked me if I’m still writing books. “It must be a lot of books by now.” She signed off in big letters: “love always, your friend, Emily.” That 2013 letter is why Im writing this article for the glory of it . . . and the gratitude.

While in high school, Michael of asparagus fame dropped by to tell me he made his whole family watch The Acorn People on television, noting that the book we read in class was better. “I bet you never thought you’d hear me say that about a book,” he grinned. “Books always win,” I replied. The Common Core State [sic] Standards can decree impossible levels of complex text for all, and the national testers can offer tests on Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Ohanian, “PARCC”) and NCTE can keep its silence about how this one-size-fits-all approach denies many students access to a literacy that can enrich and empower them. But as Castle Freeman Jr. cautions, “The Norton Anthology of English Literature is seventeen hundred pages long. It’s a fat and heavy book. It will stop a bullet, but it won’t cover your nakedness” (32).

I call on my teacher colleagues to heed Mary Oliver’s advice: “Refuse all cooperation with the heart’s death” (Swan 53).

Works Cited
Berman, Morris. Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline. Hoboken: Wiley, 2012. Print.
Cleary, Beverly. Ramona the Brave. New York: Morrow, 1975. Print.
Coleman, David. “Bringing the Common Core to Life,”Albany: New York State Education Building. 28 Apr. 2011. Web. 11 Aug. 2013.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Society and Solitude. Boston: Houghton, 1870. Print.
Frank, Arthur W. Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012. Print.
Freeman, Castle, Jr. My Life and Adventures: A Novel. New York: St. Martin’s, 2002. Print.
Gates, Bill. Prepared Remarks. National Conference of State Legislatures. 21 July 2009. Web. 16 Aug.
2013
Gladwell, Malcolm. The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs. New York: Random, 2012. Print.
Golden, Daniel. “Bill Gates’ School Crusade.” Bloomberg Businessweek 15 July 2010. Web. 15 Aug. 2013.
Jones, Ron. The Acorn People. New York: Dell, 1976. Print.
Kohl, Herbert R. Should We Burn Babar?: Essays on Children’s Literature and the Power of Stories. New York: New Press, 1995. Print.
Krashen, Stephen D. Free Voluntary Reading. Santa Barbara: Libraries Unlimited, 2011. Print.
Mickenberg Julia L., and Philip Nel, et al. Tales for Little Rebels:A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature. New York: New York UP, 2008. Print.
Moore, John David. Pottering about the Garden: Kenneth Grahame’s Version of Pastoral in The Wind in the Willows.Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 23.1 (1990): 45-60. Print.
Nel, Philip. Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dogged the FBI, and Transformed Children’s Literature. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2012. Print.
Oatley, Keith. Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction. Malden: Wiley, 2011. Print.
Ohanian, Susan. Caught in the Middle: Nonstandard Kids and a Killing Curriculum. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2001. Print.
_____”Literature Has No Uses.” Vitals Signs 1: Bringing Together Reading and Writing. Ed. J. L. Collins. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 1990. Print.
_____”My Censorship Problem with NCTE.” Daily Censored. 11 Nov. 2011. Web. 17 Aug. 2013.
_____”PARCC Claims to Measure Skills Needed for Life Beyond High School.'” 6 Mar. 2013. Web. 17
Aug. 2013.
_____”To ‘Pete,’ Who’s Lost in the Mainstream.” Education Week. 3 Apr. 1985. Print.
_____”Whoo-Hoo! Occupy the Schools.” Daily Censored.19 Feb. 2013. Web. 17 Aug. 2013.
Oliver, Mary. What Do We Know: Poems and Prose Poems. Cambridge: Da Capo, 2002. Print.
_____Swan: Poems and Prose Poems. Boston: Beacon, 2010.Print.
Paley, Vivian Gussin. The Girl with the Brown Crayon: How Children Use Stories to Shape Their Lives. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. Print.
Paterson, Katherine. Gates of Excellence: On Reading and Writing Books for Children. New York: Elsevier, 1981. Print.
Reynolds, Kimberley. Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction.New York: Palgrave, 2007. Print.
Schwengel, Kurt. Rock and Roll Kindergarten. Web. 5 May 2013. 17 Aug. 2013.
Shwartz, Ronald B. For the Love of Books: 115 Celebrated Writers on the Books They Love Most. New York: Grossett,1999. Print.
Skinner, David. The Story of Ain’t: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published. New York: Harper, 2012. Print.
Smith, Frank. Insult to Intelligence: The Bureaucratic Invasion of Our Classroom. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1988.Print.
Taibbi, Matt. “How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests.” Rolling Stone 24 Nov. 2011. Print.
Tyler, Anne. The Accidental Tourist. New York: Random, 1985. Print.
Wood, James. How Fiction Works. New York: Farrar, 2008. Print.

With apologies to Christopher Marlowe.

Come read with me and be my Drone
And we will make reading skills our own.
Let corporate precepts rule our field,
And all the stubborn students yield.

There will we stand with methods right
And Global Economy skills ignite,
Forsake shallow rivers, at whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

Now will I give thee Lyon-Moats rubrics
And a thousand checkmarks therapeutic.
Warnings of “Needs Improvement”
Squash well any union movement.

A plan must follow the Bill Gates dollar
Which you”ll wear as pretty dog collar.
Forswear student self-selected reading
And follow the rules of Coleman inbreeding.

A plan to follow every day
In the Ed Industrial squeeze play
And for these plans to make your own,
Come read with me and be my Drone.

These silver fixes for thy meat
As precious as the gods do eat,
Shall on an ivory table be
Prepared each day for thee and me.

The corporate swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each school morning:
If these delights in thy mind have shone,
Then read with me and be my Clone.

Some years back, a comment on Twitter about Flat Stanley provoked me to locate this article, published in The Atlantic September 1987. I received some 150 letters from people who had read the article–not from teachers but from ordinary people who cared about literature. One man jumped off the train in Denver to mail a letter to me. Flat Stanley author Jeff Brown wrote, saying he had received lots of mail about my article. He also said he had no idea about what had been done to Stanley. I sent him an offensive basal.

“CHILDREN LIKE A fine word occasionally,” Beatrix Potter once told her publisher, when he complained about the use of the word soporific in her book The Tale of Flopsy Bunnies. I taught elementary-school students for the better part of two decades, and I count myself firmly in Ms. Potter’s camp. It follows, of course, that I can muster little enthusiasm for basal readers, those homogenized and bowdlerized grade-school texts, edited according to elaborate readability formulas and syllable schemes, that constitute the bulk of the average child’s officially sanctioned reading material in American schools. Basal readers can be criticized on a lot of grounds. Their worst fault, I think, is that for no good reason they squeeze the juice out of some very fine tales. Here is a passage from the Paul Leyssac translation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes’:

“Magnificent!’ “Excellent!’ “Prodigious!’went from mouth to mouth, and everyone was exceedingly pleased.

Here is the same passage as rendered in a modern reader:

“How marvelous,’ they echoed the emperor. “How beautiful!’

Sure, prodigious is a tough word, but it’s a word that young readers would be pleased, perhaps exceedingly pleased, to try out, to repeat, to save.

Admittedly, the publishers of basal readers encounter prodigious difficulties in the preparation of their texts. They are under acute and conflicting pressures from educators, from parents, and from organized interest groups of every kind. Too, the sensibility of many old stories may often be at odds with the tenor of our times. In many instances, however, the sense behind the censorship seems impossible to fathom. The difference between many familiar children’s stories in their original form and the way they appear in basal readers is, indeed, so striking and the changes, it seems to me, so unnecessary that several years ago I began comparing old and new versions line by line.

A good many of the editorial changes are of a kind that one would never write an angry letter about but that nevertheless give one pause. I have in mind changes like the following:

This sort of thing does not, I suppose, amount to extreme literary deprivation, but the average classic children’s tale–a work by, say, Andersen, Kipling, or Pearl Buck–in basal form contains hundreds of such alterations. Taken together they suggest a preternatural disposition to tinker, which in turn perhaps reinforces a parallel disposition to cut and trim and simplify, to tame and domesticate what is powerful, florid, and wild in the way that good writers use our language.

The latter disposition is pronounced. Consider how, in Kipling’s “How the Camel Got His Hump,’ “sticks and thorns and tamarisks and milkweed and prickles’ becomes, in basal form, “sticks and shurbs’; or how a “great big lolloping humph’ turns into a “great big humph.’ You lose a great big lolloping lot when you lose the humph’s gerundive. Consider how, in Walter Blair’s “Pecos Bill,’ “giving a coyote yell of a size to make any state that was less tough than Oklahoma split right down the middle’ becomes, in basal versions, “howling like a coyote.’ One of the stories my students have most enjoyed over the years is Flat Stanley, by Jeff Brown. As the title implies, Stanley has gotten himself flattened, and the story goes on to describe the very special things that a flat boy can do, including travel across the country by mail. Here is a passage from Brown:

The envelope fit Stanley very well. There was even room left over, Mrs. Lambchop discovered, for an egg-salad sandwich made with thin bread, and a flat cigarette case filled with milk.

They had to put a great many stamps on the envelope to pay for both airmail and insurance, but it was still much less expensive than a train or airplane ticket to California would have been.

Here is how the passage appears in a basal reader:

The envelope fit Stanley very well.
There was even room left over for a sandwich.

My students always loved the author’s mention of thin bread–they knew he was being very deliberate in his choice of words, and they appreciated his nod to their intelligence, his acknowledgment that they would know he was sustaining a joke. They appreciated, too, the humor of egg salad–a much yuckier substance than, for instance, bologna, and one with which you would certainly not choose to be sealed in an envelope. I appreciate the taboo governing allusions to cigarettes, and yet what my students tended to note is not the reference to tobacco but rather Mrs. Lambchop’s ingenuity in finding a way to make sure that her son, while in the mail, is able to drink his milk. Eventually, Stanley’s friends mail him back from California in

a beautiful white envelope they handmade themselves. It had red-and-blue markings to show that it was airmail, and Thomas Jeffrey had lettered it “Valuable’ and “Fragile’ and “This End Up’ on both sides.

Basal readers simply stuff the kid in “a beautiful, large white envelope,’ and get on with the story.

I have compiled notebook after notebook of alterations of just this kind, which probably makes me some kind of a nut. I find it hard to believe, though, that the unscrupulous editing of basal readers doesn’t matter. Like Bartleby the Serivener, modern reading textbooks are “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn.” There is room in our children’s literature for silliness, for unpleasantness, and for difficult words that children do not know. Above all, there is a place for detail and nuance and subtlety, which children perhaps admire more than adults do. Young readers are not like the Emperor of Austria, who told Mozart that his music was great but complained that there were too many notes. Perhaps a few of them could be cut?

Mozart was lucky. He succeeded in silencing his critic with the question, “Which few did you have in mind?’ The editors of modern basal readers, unfortunately, would have had a reply. There is a book kids love called Nate the Great, by Marjorie Weinman Sharmat, and here is a passage that does not appear in any of the basal versions:

“Fang has sharp teeth and I, Nate the Great, say that we should keep anybody happy with sharp teeth. Very happy.’

I never used the basal texts, and so my students could sigh and grin over that phrase “Very happy.’ They copied the device, as they did other devices, in their own writing.Children notice and savor the ruffles and flourishes in special writing. It is these, in the end, that keep us reading books.

If I were in charge of the world

I’d cancel facilitators,

Friday spellings,

Pizza bribes, and also

Questions at the end of the story.

If I were in charge of the world

You could read Charlotte’s Web and Flat Stanley

In any grade you wanted.

You could even read them twice.

If I were in charge of the world

There’s be a million million

Pages of delight,

Instead of thirty-two novels

Somebody else chose.

If I were in charge of the world

Nobody under age 40 would be badgered to read Moby Dick.

No books would come by decree,

And a person who said knock-knock riddle books with pop-up pages are a quintessential part of a reading program

Would still be allowed to be

In charge of the world.

Here is the mission of the U. S. Department of Education (from their website):

Our mission is to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.

How many teachers go into the classroom each day with the goal of getting their students ready to be global competitive?

Instant Aptitude Test

Take this quick quiz to find out if you are prepared to work in a classroom, in the office of the U. S. Secretary of Education, or at the Business Roundtable in cooperation with the Aspen Institute.

1. Lesson plans

a) are subject to instant change.

b) are a necessary guide to global competitiveness.

c) are a necessary guide to global competitiveness.

2. A parking place

a) should be ensured by contract, grievance procedures, and arbitration.

b) cannot be assigned without first completing a critical impact study of the neighborhood, its constituents, and its corporate overlay.

c) is evidence of federal overfunding of schools. Let them walk.

3. Phones

a) are necessary to contact parents and the American Civil Liberties Union.

b) are necessary for sending status memos to the media.

b. are necessary to contact Dial-a-Joke, Dial-a-Prayer, Off-track Betting

4. Pencils

a) are an endangered species.

b) must be ordered every April.

c) must not be purchased with federal funds, it being the provenance and privilege of every parent to exercise his/her/their inalienable privilege to provide her/his/their children with the writing implement of her/his/their choice.

5. Hallways

a) are where kids figure out how important things work.

b) are dens of iniquity that could be tamed if teachers would exercise their professional duty and patrol them.

c) should be returned to the hallowed state in which our forefathers founded them.

6. Sex Education

a) means explaining to an 8-year-old how people get sexually transmitted diseases.

b) means confiscating condoms.

c) is the provenance of parents and religious leaders.

7. Students opportunities to grow up to be good citizens are enhanced by

a) owning and enjoying books along with adequate housing and parents earning living wages.

b) scoring above the national norm on standardized achievement tests.

c) teachers who do their jobs.

8. Chastity, Cincinnatus, Clemens are an example of

a) alphabetical order.

b) things that provoke ulcers.

c) choice, content, and character education to build productive citizens.

9. The three basic components of education are

a) the kids, the teacher, and the books.

b) district goals, curriculum objectives for each grade, and evaluation procedures.

c) content, character, and competitiveness.

10. Things that must be taught:

a) reading and math

b) a nationally agreed-upon scope and sequence of necessary skills.

c) a direct line to character and competiveness.

Note: This article was published by Counterpunch, Nov. 3, 2015, but it remains distressingly current.

Go To Counterpunch for direct link to the articles. Big NYT logos and photos were getting inserted when I put links here.

It’s definitely time for an update on this.

On Sept. 6, 1871, The New York Times published Karl Marx’s obituary,[1] even though Marx was very much alive at that time–and didn’t die for another eleven years. Whether it was obstinacy or wishful thinking, the Times never ran a correction on this item. In more recent times, educators who wondered if they’d live long enough to see a correction on Times fly-by-night education reform claims found small hope in this New York Times official Correction, March 2, 2013:

An article on Friday about New York City’s estimate that it will cost about $56 million to buy new textbooks and other materials to help city public school students meet rigorous Common Core academic standards misidentified the classes in New York State that will take standardized tests in April based on the new standards. It is third through eighth graders, not kindergartners through eighth grade.[2]

Certainly, this glitch doesn’t compare with other Times bloopers that have made it to the Corrections page:

* Walter Cronkite did not storm the D-Day beaches but covered the landing from a warplane

* Congressional candidate Alexander Sacks said “Communist fronts,” not “Communist faggots”

* In “Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard” a spy from an atheist organization fell into a vat of broth, not a monkey or Sampath in the form of a guava.

* An article about drilling for oil off the coast of Angola erroneously reported a story about cows falling from planes, as an example of risks in any engineering endeavor. No cows, smuggled or otherwise, ever fell from a plane into a Japanese fishing rig.

Other corrections have involved misidentifying someone’s My Little Pony character, clarifying just when Gore Vidal had sex with his longtime live-in companion, situating Bermuda in the Caribbean, mistaking longitude for latitude, putting the picture of the wrong catcher in Yogi Berra’s obituary, offering illumination on whether Ahmed Abu Khattala drank a strawberry frappe or mango juice at a luxury hotel, correcting the age of Melania Krauss [Trump] when she posed for a picture in Talk magazine: “She was 29, not 26, making her almost a quarter-century younger than her future husband, not more than a quarter-century younger.”

And so on.

Considering all the Times’ misstatements on Common Core since the June 3, 2010 announcement of the release of the standards, the glitch about K-3 is indeed very small potatoes. But correction of small detail is a critical Times strategy, such repairs serving as opportunistic sly boots, offering reassurance to readers that the paper is meticulous about facts. Get the small trappings right and then maybe nobody will notice the deliberate, obfuscating curtains of distortion and duplicity shrouding what matters. As Renata Adler points out, [3] “the policy of Corrections is a form simultaneously of consolidation of power and of hiding. . . . It is a form of Fundamentalism, it protects the ideology.” With New York Times Common Core coverage, that travels as News is corporate Verdict.

The fact that in Times education coverage, public relations crackerjacks are much more likely to be quoted than pedagogy experts sits in sharp contrast to news presented by the science staff when writing about medical research. Health and science writer (and part of a 2015 Pulitzer Prize team) Pam Belluck explains:[4]

Once we decide it’s worth doing a story, there are several next steps. Besides doing a detailed reading of the study, examining related cancer research and interviewing the researchers and unconnected experts, I’m always interested in talking with real people with relevant experiences.

That last sentence cuts to the core of the problem with the Times coverage of education in general and the Common Core in particular:

* Interviewing researchers

* Interviewing unconnected experts

* Talking with real people with relevant experiences

This has not happened in Common Core coverage.

Let’s start with the June 2010 article announcing release of the Common Core.[5] Longtime reporter and two-time Pulitzer Prize (for writing on Iran-Contra and drug trafficking in Mexico) reporter Sam Dillon declared that “The new standards were written by English and math experts convened last year by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers.” In the ensuing five years, Times staffers repeat this claim again and again, though no experts are named, other than Sue Pimentel. Dillon gives no clarification here. In actuality, Pimentel trained as a lawyer but is a Standardisto’s standardisto. She got her big start in Standards setting with a 1993 grant in from the Walton Family Foundation and was a co-founder of Standards Work. Her close connection with Achieve put her in prime position to write the Common Core standards in language arts.

This piece introducing the Common Core to America does not mention that the Common Core existed because of a hundred million or so from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Instead, for his opening description of the Common Core, Dillon called on the perennial Times favorite education go-to mouthpiece, Chester E. Finn Jr., here identified as “a former assistant secretary of education who has long called for national standards.”

In some 60+ education articles that Dillon wrote for the Times in 2010, he quoted 14 different university professors, 12 individual school superintendents, and a school bus driver—one time each. No repeats. That same year Dillon quoted Finn seven times. Finn was on the Times speed dial long before Dillon used him. Since the early 1980ies, whether the subject has been bilingual education, school governance in Chicago, Maxine Greene’s pedagogy, same-sex education, gifted education, special education, or merit pay for teachers, the New York Times calls, and Chester E. Finn, Jr. delivers. In 1991, Finn himself was profiled in an article[6] with this headline: “Washington at Work; Education Pundit Heard As Voice of Revolution,” In November 1997, in an article on the teaching of mathematics,[7] Finn’s remarks were bannered on the front page as Quotation of the Day.

The New York Times calls and Finn delivers. He’s smart, and he’s colorful. The fact that many respected educators think he’s wrong is irrelevant to the Times. The paper’s approach was made very apparent in 1999 with the release of a Harvard Graduate School of Education Civil Rights Project study, “Resegregation in American Schools.”[8] The Times quoted three sentences from the civil rights study. The only person in the country asked to react was Chester E. Finn, Jr., who was also given three sentences, including this one: “’Gary Orfield must be the only American who still thinks that integration for its own sake is an important societal goal.” No one was quoted supporting the report. Then, one month later, the Times carried news[9] about the release of another report–one from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation advocating scrapping most teacher-hiring regulations tied to schools of education. The Times identified Chester E. Finn, Jr. as Fordham president and a principal editor of the report as well as an Assistant Secretary of Education in the Reagan Administration.The Times gave 1 ½ time more ink to the Fordham report than to the Harvard Civil Rights Project report.

Up Close and Disturbing: The New York Times Looks at Common Core

When I read an article about China in the Times, I know that one correspondent, has a Ph.D. in Chinese studies and has lived in China for 15 years; another received Polk and Asia Society awards for China coverage; another took a sabbatical to improve his Mandarin. And so on. Think of what education reporters bring to their beat: they went to school. When coverage of the Common Core began to rev up in 2013, here’s who covered it:

*22 news items by staff reporters whose beat was at least temporarily education. One had been covering the metropolitan policing, another global terrorism. For another, a temporary stop at education came before assignment to the China beat.

*12 news items by reporters on other beats, including the science of climate change, New York regional news, book review, data analysis, economics, Congress, scientific miscellany, technology, wedding announcements

* 9 opinion pieces by Times Editorial Board plus 2 signed pieces by Brent Staples who writes the unsigned Editorials on education

* 5 opinion pieces by staff op ed writers

* 3 op eds by someone not employed by the Times, including a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, an emeritus professor of political science at Queens College, a middle school English teacher

The Times Editorial Board, like the legendary Boston Brahmin Cabots, who spoke only to God, finds no need to communicate with education practitioners or researchers to reinforce their claim that the Common Core is necessary for the economic well-being of the country. The board is joined by staff op ed writers in insisting that the Common Core is heavily researched and jam-packed with critical thinking and problem-solving skills that workers need to keep the nation competitive in the Global Economy. Like people waiting for Senator McCarthy to open his briefcase at the House UnAmerican Activities Committee meetings, Times readers wait for even a snippet of a study by one education researcher providing evidence for all this phantasm.

It just isn’t there.

The New York Times education coverage has become quasi-governmental, promoting the corporate push for standardization of public schools. Not only are readers not informed that the Common Core was developed and heavily promoted with hundreds of millions from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the oft-repeated selling point that these “standards that have been adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia” fails to acknowledge that the states did it for the money, accepting the Common Core for the Race to the Top financial bribe handed out by the US Department of Education, most definitely not for the pedagogy. Savvy readers keep a count of how often the Times intones unproven key phrases right out of the press releases from Common Core headquarters: “the Common Core sets a national benchmark for what students should should learn”[10]; “a focus on critical thinking and primary investigation”[11]; “set more rigorous classroom goals for American students, with a focus on critical thinking skills, abstract reasoning in math and reading comprehension”[12]; “emphasize critical thinking”[13]; “emphasis on free-form thinking”[14]; “emphasize deep analysis and creative problem-solving”[15]; “written by a panel of experts … focus on critical thinking and analysis”[16]; “modeled on the teaching strategies of countries, especially in Asia, that perform better on international comparisons”[17] ; “a more rigorous set of standards”[18]; “heightened expectation of student progress. . . ideal of a rigorous national standard”[19]; “tougher learning standards taking root across the country”[20]; a set of rigorous academic standards”[21]; “the new, more rigorous academic standards”[22]; “a set of rigorous reading and math standards”[23]; “a tougher set of standards”[24]; “the standards were written by a panel of experts convened by a bipartisan group of governors and superintendents to emphasize critical thinking over memorization, to better prepare students for college and jobs”[25]; “new benchmarks for what students need to know and be able to do”[26]; “new and more rigorous set of academic standards”[27]; “more rigorous academic standards.”[28]

As we read this over-the-top legerdemain about the Common Core—verified by absolutely no evidence from research or classroom practice—we have to wonder about the absence of those reportorial strategies so clearly outlined by the Pulitzer science reporter:

* Interviewing researchers

* Interviewing unconnected experts

* Talking with real people and relevant experiences

Where’s the Left?

In an August 16, 2013 piece on the Common Core,[29] Motoko Rich mentioned “growing opposition from both the right and the left before it has been properly introduced into classrooms.” Let’s think a moment about just whom the Times is talking about here. “The Right” is clearly marked as Tea Party zealots. “The Left?” Anybody’s guess. The only Common Core opponents Rich mentioned are “a group of parents and teachers” who argue that the tests aligned with the standards are too difficult, but she quotes Kati Haycock of Education Trust worrying about the “terrifying prospect” if “a bit of anti-test rebellion coming from the left” joined up with the Tea Partiers.

Sam Dillon covered[30] a paper published by the ostensibly liberal Albert Shanker Institute advocating common curriculum, but the Times igored the manifesto signed by a group Education Week described[31] as “more than 100 leaders in education, business, and politics, most of them conservatives.” Likewise, the Cato Institute opposition to the Common Core goes unmentioned. Instead, the New York Times chooses to give ink to the bizarre. We get eight-year Times executive editor Bill Keller announcing[32] that Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin and their cohorts are trying to kill the Common Core, “arguably the most serious educational reform of our lifetime.” Common Core: most serious education reform of our lifetime, and to attack it, declares Keller, is to be stupid. Keller identifies conservatives who support the Common Core, as “scholars”: Katherine Porter-Magee of Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Partnership for Inner-City Education and Sol Stern, senior fellow at Manhattan Institute. Neither Keller nor any of his Op Ed cohorts seem to be able to find any scholars on the Left. Or even in the middle.

Instead, we get Op Ed windbag David Brooks,[33] who offers a flip dismissal of both the right and the left in the “boredom” known as Common Core:

We are pretty familiar with this story. A perfectly sensible if slightly boring idea is walking down the street. Suddenly the ideological circus descends, burying the sensible idea in hysterical claims and fevered accusations. The idea’s political backers beat a craven retreat. The idea dies.

This is what seems to be happening to the Common Core education standards, which are being attacked on the right because they are common and on the left because they are core.

Of course it’s a given that opinion columnists get to say anything they damn well please, but does anybody think David Brooks has ever talked with a Leftist education researcher?

In a 2014 piece headlined “Common Core Curriculum Now Has Critics on the Left,” Art Baker, claimed[34] that Common Core, “applauded by education leaders,” previously had no resistance from liberals. But now, an “acclaimed high school principal on Long Island,” called the Common Core a “disaster.” He offered no hint of how he came to know this principal’s political philosophy and offered no statements from any avowed Leftist scholars. Instead he quickly moved on to the Times’ tried and true source on the Right:

Common Core advocates like Michael J. Petrilli, executive vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy group, have been taken aback.

Twenty-three paragraphs later, Baker closed with a statement from Chester E. Finn, Jr., identifying him as “a former assistant education secretary and now senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.” Baker fails to acknowledge that Finn was also president of the Fordham group for which Petrilli was vice-president, thus avoiding the admission that he was using two soundbites from Fordham in one article.

On his Taking Note blog, Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal zeroed in[35] on one Florida politico to nail home the proposition that Common Core opponents are out to lunch: “Florida State Representative Charlves Van Zant, a Republican, said the new educational standards were a ploy to make schoolchildren gay.”

In 2015, an Ivy-League-educated freelance ed writer trained as a lawyer told Times readers that poor kids in particular need something like Common Core because “they’re the least likely to acquire the kind of knowledge they need at home.” [36] The Times failed to inform its readers that this contributing writer serves on the board of the Writing Revolution, where Common Core architect David Coleman is an advisor. This outfit promises to deliver the exact skills students “need to meet the demanding new standards of the Common Core.”

New York Times education coverage seems particularly egregious when one looks at other reporting. Take knee replacement, for example. Articles acknowledge the procedure as contentious and a variety of people with diverse expertise and experience are cited: surgeons, physical therapists, researchers—and patients. Similarly, with a disputed topic like geo-engineering, both advocates and opponents with scientific expertise are given quite a bit of ink. But a topic like Common Core, which exposes every schoolchild in the country to radical disruption, is presented as necessary and beneficial, with dissenting expertise notably absent.

As Eugene Debs noted in 1920, [37] “The working class can expect nothing from the press of the capitalist class but misrepresentation and injustice in the struggle for its rights.” News folk at the New York Times seem determined to trumpet the miracle flimflam Bill Gates paid for while at the same time beating up on teachers for not being smart enough to do the job corporate America wants done. The public remains in the dark about the fact that once Gates got that Standardize Test bee in his bonnet he shelled out money to organizations ranging from the PTA to the Council for a Strong America to the American Enterprise Institute to the US Chamber of Commerce to the Thomas B. Fordham Institute to New Venture Fund to Success Academy —and nearly 200 more—18 pages of recipients—to bring the notion home. This money went not for researching the need for and benefit from national standards and testing, but to promote and/or develop supportive materials and implementation plans for a done deal called the Common Core. Readers can ask when the New York Times will cover the origins and promotion of the Common Core in muckraking detail, but it’s difficult to see that anyone on staff might be listening.

In Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the selling of the Iraq War, Michael Isikoff and David Corn reported[38] that for a year the Times had been under pressure from readers and press critics demanding the paper explain its reporting on Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Then-executive editor Bill Keller wrote this admission regarding the paper’s Iraq coverage:

[W]e have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged—or failed to emerge.[39]

Make no mistake: With regard to the survival of public education, the weapons of mass destruction are real, and the New York Times offers a cover-up that parallels the one Keller admitted to. Schoolchildren, their teachers, and anyone who recognizes the importance of public education in a democracy deserve an aggressive reexamination of the unsupportable spin on the Common Core published and applauded in this newspaper of record.

Notes.

[1] Karl Marx obituary, New York Times, Sept. 6, 1871

http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1871/09/06/78772976.html?zoom=15&pageNumber=4

[2] Baker, Al, New State Academic Standards Are Said to Require $56 Million Outlay for City’s Schools,” Correction,New York Times, March 1, 2013

[3] Adler, Renata, Canaries in the Mineshaft, St Martin’s Press, 2001. 30-31

[4] Belluck, Pam, “End-Stage Chemotherapy: Reporter’s Notebook,” Insider, New York Times, July 28, 2015

[5] Dillon, Sam, “States Receive a Reading List: New Standards for Education,” New York Times, June 3, 2010

[6] De Witt, Karen,“Washington at Work: Education Pundit Heard as Voice of Revolution,” New York Times, Aug. 2, 199

[7] Steinberg, Jacques, “California Goes to War Over Math Instruction,” New York Times, Nov. 27, 1997

[8]Bronner, Ethan, “After 34 Years, Resegregation Emerges in Schools, Study Finds,” New York Times, June 13, 1999.

[9] Pollak, Michael, “Faulting Plans to Raise Bar on Teachers,” New York Times, July 21, 1999.

[10] Baker, Al, “New York Schools Detail Cost of Meeting New Standards,” New York Times, March

[11] Gillis, Justin, “Science Panel Calls for Broad Changes in Science Education,” New York Times, April 10,2013

[12] Kyle Spencer, “Students Face Tougher Tests That Outpace Lesson Plans,” New York Times, April 15, 2013

[13] Hernandez, Javier, C., “Union Chief Recommends Delay in Use of Test Scores,” New York Times, May 1, 2013

[14] Hernandez, Javier, C., Results of New Testing Standard Could Complicate Bloomberg’s Final Months,” New York Times, Aug. 5, 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/05/nyregion/results-of-new-testing-standard-could-complicate-bloombergs-final-months.html

[15] Herenandez, Javier C. and Robert Gebeloff, “Test Scores Sink as New York Adopts Tougher Benchmarks, New York Times, Aug. 8, 2013 

[16] Rich, Motoko, “Education Overhaul Faces a Tough Case of Partisanship,” New York Times, July 24, 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/24/us/politics/education-overhaul-faces-a-test-of-partisanship.html

[17] Chang, Kenneth, “With Common Core, Fewer Topics But Covered More Rigorously, New York Times, Sept. 3,

[18] Baker, Al, “For Bloomberg, a Day to Celebrate Successful Schools,” New York Times, Sept. 17, 2013

[19] Baker, Al, “Culture Warrior Gaining Ground,” New York Times, Sept. 28, 2013

[20] Baker, Al, “Tardy Deliveries Keep New Books Out of Teachers’ Hands,” New York Times, Oct. 5, 2013

[21] Rich, Motoko, “Raising the G.E.D. Bar Stirs Concern for Students,” Oct. 12, 2013

[22] Baker, Al, “Obama, at Brooklyn School, Pushes Education Agenda,” New York Times, Oct. 25, 2013

[23] Rich, Motoko,“Language Gap Study Bolsters a Push for Pre-K,” New York Times, Oct. 22, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/us/language-gap-study-bolsters-a-push-for-pre-k.html

[24] Hernandez, Javier C., “New York State Seeks to Scale Back Student Testing,” New York Times, Oct. 26, 2013

[25] Pérez-Peña, Richard, “A Plea for Catholic Schools to Ignore Guidelines,” New York Times, Nov. 5, 2013

[26] Hernandez, Javier C., “Educational Publisher’s Charity, Accused of Seeking Profits, Will Pay Millions,”    Pérez-Peña, Richard, “A Plea for Catholic Schools to Ignore Guidelines,” New York Times, Nov. 5, 2013, Dec. 13, 2013 

[27] Hernandez, Javier C., “Educational Publisher’s Charity, Accused of Seeking Profits, Will Pay Millions,” New York Times, Dec. 13, 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/nyregion/educational-publishers-charity-accused-of-seeking-profits-will-pay-millions.html

[28] Baker, Al, “Bumpy Start for Teacher Evaluation Program in New York,” New York Times, Dec. 23, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/nyregion/bumpy-start-for-teacher-evaluation-program-in-new-york-schools.html

[29] Rich, Motoko, “School Standards’ Debut Is Rocky, and Critics Pounce,” New York Times, Aug.

[30] Dillon, Sam, “Bipartisan Group Backs Common School Curriculum,” New York Times, March 7, 2011

[31] Gewertz, Catherine, “Critics Post ‘Manifesto’ Opposing Shared Curriculum,” Education Week, May 18, 2011

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/05/09/31curriculum.h30.html

[32] Keller, Bill, “War on the Core,” New York Times, Aug. 19, 2013.

[33] Brooks, David, “When the Circus Descends,” New York Times, April 18, 2014.

[34] Baker, Al, “Common Core Curriculum Now Has Critics on the Left,” New York Times, Feb. 17, 2014 

[35] Rosenthal, Andrew, “No Comment Necessary: The Common Core and Gay Conversion,” New York Times Taking Note blog, May 20, 2014

[36] Wexler, Natalie, “How Common Core Can Help In the Battle of Skills vs Knowledge, New York Times, Aug. 28, 2015

[37] Debs, Euene V., “The Power of the Press,” The Toiler [Cleveland], whole no. 107, Feb. 20, 1920)

[38] Isikoff, Michael and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War. Crown 2006, 360

[39] from the editors, “The Times and Iraq,” New York Times, May 5, 2006 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/international/middleeast/26FTE_NOTE.html

NRT adjutant General Back from Kindergarten War Zone. Set for appearance on Fox News.

Congresses Passes Bill Sylvan Airport Passsenger Phonemic Awareness Test not mandetory. Ultra-Business travelers lobby for hardship exclusion.

Classroom Bomb Threat a Hoax Toledo, OH. Police blew up brown paper bag containing bologna, not embedded modifiers. Agents from Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Umlauts secured the site.

Cruise/Cruz sign up for Spielberg premier phonics ballet: Differential Cryptoanalysis of the CR Blend set for release in the Fall.

Bickering Stalls Schwa Stimulus Package Attorney General warns partisanship swirling around the President’s plan threatens national security.

Calls for National Guard Lesson-Monitoring represents locals keeping their neighborhood safeSpecial Report NRT Special Counsel warns blends resistance cells proliferating

Hispanic Sentence-Diagrammer-of-Year Award

RESEARCH MATTERS The Effects of Phonemic Instruction on PreSchoolers Who Own Turtles: A Model-Based Metanalysis Special Report from the US Dept of Agriculture funded by the Gates Foundation

RESEARCH MATTERS The Effects of Computer-Mediated Phonics on the Acne Severity of Middle-School Readers Special Report from US Deprtment of Energy

RESEARCH MATTERS The Effects of Phonemic Intervention with At-Risk Youth Allergic to Eggplant Special Report from Arne Duncan, Emerson Collective

Attack on Phonics! Are Your Children Victims? Learn about Keeping your loved ones safe. Tonight at 6.

Speak up! Should anyone receive a high school diploma without first demonstrating homograph proficiency? Meet this Fortune 500 star who says NO! Live at 7

UP CLOSE and PERSONAL Chicago family without access to 16 rules for syllabification hit hard. Hear their painful story. Live at 8

Phonemic Awareness Neighborhood Watch Taking on Terror. Only YOU can keep our communities safe. Live at 9

Shakespeare’s Schwas Thomas B. Fordham Institute Special Report. Live at 10

IN THE POPULAR PRESS

STOP Rationalizing Evil! Why I Believe in Dipthongs, Bill Gates, New York Times Op-Ed

Professorial Terrorism: Stifling Vowel Digraphs on Campus, New York Times front page

The Phonics Crisis: Why Poor Children Fall Behind, New York Times front page

The Case for Phonics Vouchers, New York Times Business Section

How a Phonics Advocate Spends Her Sundays, New York Times weekend special

While busy studying for law degrees at Harvard, this couple found time for romance at a phonics picnic, New York Times, Vows

The Phonics Disaster: What Lazy, Ignorant, Abusive Teachers Don’t Want You To Know about Lack of Phonics in Their Classrooms, New York Post front page

The Phonics Disaster: What Lazy, Ignorant, Abusive Teachers Don’t Want You To Know About Lack of Phonics in Their Classrooms, Fox News at 6

What Makes an Economy Grow? PHONICS Business Roundtable warns that 93.863% of Americans live inphonics poverty, subsisting on fewer than five short vowels a day. Tune in for Phonics Good News Marathon!

Take This Test and Shove It

Should a Miami Teenager Have to Deconstruct a Poetic Account of Tracking Moose in Alaska to Get a High School Diploma? n

 Parents of kids facing tests that determine a child’s ability to received a high school diploma should take a close look at the questions being asked–and then ask a few questions of their own. Don’t miss the author’s reaction to what Florida Standardisto hasd done with his work. See below.

Reading test – grade 10 This story [sic] is a sample Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test reading exam for the 10th grade. After reading the story [sic], answer the six questions that follow.

Snow
By John Haines

To one who lives in the snow and watches it day by day, it is a book to be read. The pages turn as the wind blows; the characters shift and the images formed by their combinations change in meaning, but the language remains the same. It is a shadow language, spoken by things that have gone by and will come again. The same text has been written there for thousands of years, though I was not here, and will not be here in winters to come, to read it. These seemingly random ways, these paths, these beds, these footprints, these hard, round pellets in the snow: they all have meaning. Dark things may be written there, news of other lives, their sorties and excursions, their terrors and deaths.

I was walking home from Redmond Creek one morning late in January. On a divide between two watersheds, I came upon the scene of a battle between a moose and three wolves. The story was written plainly in the snow at my feet. The wolves had come in from the west, following an old trail from the Salcha River, and had found the moose feeding in an open stretch of the overgrown road I was walking.

The sign was fresh, it must have happened the night before.

The snow was torn up, with chunks of frozen moss and broken sticks scattered about; here and there, swatches of moose hair. A confusion of tracks in the trampled snow — the splayed, stabbing feet of the moose, the big, furred pads and spread toenails of the wolves.

I walked on, watching the snow. The moose was large and alone, almost certainly a bull. In one place he backed himself into a low, brush-hung bank to protect his rear. The wolves moved away from him — those moose feet are dangerous. The moose turned, ran on for fifty yards, and the fight began again. It became a running, broken flight that went on for nearly half a mile in the changing, rutted terrain, the red morning light coming across the hills from the sun low in the south. A pattern shifting and uncertain; the wolves relenting, running out into the brush in a wide circle, and closing again: another patch of moose hair in the trodden snow.

I felt that I knew those wolves. I had seen their tracks several times before during that winter, and once they had taken a marten from one of my traps.

I believed them to be a female and two nearly grown pups. If I was right, she may have been teaching them how to hunt, and all that turmoil in the snow may have been the serious play of things that must kill to live. But I saw no blood sign that morning, and the moose seemed to have gotten the better of the fight.

At the end of it he plunged away into thick alder brush. I saw his tracks, moving more slowly now, as he climbed through a low saddle, going north in the shallow, unbroken snow. The three wolves trotted east toward Banner Creek.

What might have been silence, an unwritten page, an absence, spoke to me as clearly as if I had been there to see it. I have imagined a man who might live as the coldest scholar on earth, who followed each clue in the snow, writing a book as he went. It would be the history of snow, the book of winter. A thousand-year text to be read by a people hunting these hills in a distant time. Who was here, and who has gone? What were their names? What did they kill and eat? Whom did they leave behind?

Adaption of “Snow” is from The Stars, The Snow, The Fire: Twenty-Five Years in the Alaska Wilderness by John Haines.

Questions. Base your answers on “Snow.”

1. What does the author mean by this sentence from the essay?

These seemingly random ways, these paths, these beds, these footprints, these hard, round pellets in the snow: they all have meaning.

a) Signs in the snow lead to different interpretations of the truth

b) Signs in the snow lead to different directions in the wilderness

c) Patterns in the snow can be connected to form a story of nature

d) Patterns in the snow can be connected to lead the observer to safety

Objective: Student selects and uses strategies to understand words and text, and to make and confirm inferences from what is read.

2. According to the author, which word best describes the story of snow?

a) Frightening
b) Random
c) Timeless
d) Violent

Student determines the main idea and identifies relevant details, methods of development, and their effectiveness in a variety of types of written material.

3. Which writing strategy does the author employ to express his views about snow?

a) Use of complex plot
b) Use of descriptive language
c) Development of varied structure
d) Development of believable characters

Objective:Student determines the main idea and identifies relevant details, method of development, and their effectiveness in a variety of types of written material.

4. After examining the moose’s tracks, the author concluded that the moose was

a) Cold
b) Confused
c) Large
d) Weak

Objective: Student recognizes cause-and-effect relationships in literary texts.

5. How does the author create suspense in relating the story about the animals in the snow?

a) By holding back information
b) By constantly updating the plot
c) Through detailed description
d) Through frequent use of adjectives

Objective: Student analyzes the effectiveness of complex elements of plot, such as setting, major events, problems, conflicts, and resolutions.

Ohanian Comment: Pardon me, but does the Florida State Department of Education really decree that essays have “plots,” which include such “complex elements” as “setting, major events, problems, conflicts, and resolutions?” Is E. B. White rolling over in his grave?

6. What is the mood of the opening and closing paragraphs?

a) Chaotic
b) Curious
c) Forlorn
d) Thoughtful

Objective: Student analyzes the effectiveness of complex elements of plot, such as setting, major events, problems, conflicts, and resolutions.

Note: This is what is known as a ‘sample’ item; it does not mean that the actual item has ever been used on a test. It does mean that this is the type of loony item found on Florida tests. Florida test writers turn a respectable piece of prose into something bizarre. For starters, they can’t decide whether it’s a story or an essay, and things go downhill from there. This type of questioning goes against everything we know about why people read or what they hope to get out of what they read.

I sent the questions to the author of the passage (who was a professor at the University of Alaska as well as Alaska’s poet laureate). Here is his response:

Dear Susan,

Thank you for the very weird pages from Florida education. I could hardly believe what I read, and then simply laughed. I gave copies to my students, and they laughed too! What is going on here? Education? I don’t think so.

My regards,

John Haines     

First Graders, Unite!

When Hollywood makes a movie, functionaries watch out for the well-being of animals. Compared to kindergartners, apes live a life of luxury. According to the rules, if an ape works for than three days in a row, then a play area must be provided for the ape’s relaxation. As our leaders scream about “skills for the global economy,” they talk a lot more about the necessity of  standardized testing in the midst of a Pandemic rather than need for play areas.

Maybe the schoolchildren of America should unioninize: First graders, unite! You have nothing to lose but your worksheets and homework.