Getting Complicated With Texts: Understanding the New ELA Standards

The GE Foundation’s recent Developing Futures in Education conference had no shortage of smart overviews and revealing PowerPoints to inspire and inform the business leaders and educators in attendance. But for this layperson, it was a hands-on workshop on ELA standards that provided the true  “Aha!” moments  about the Common Core State Standards—vivid illustrations of how radically reading and writing instruction is going to change.

In the session, targeted at high school English teachers, we got some excellent instruction ourselves: We dove deeply into a topic, wrestled with real examples, and participated in shared activities. Our leaders, from Student Achievement Partners, were David Liben, a delightful former high school teacher, and Jennifer Dean, an expert in ELA assessment who impressed upon us just how much time, care and judgment goes into writing a single test item.

The new standards, adopted by almost all the states, call for students to read a great deal more content-rich non-fiction—in high school, more Walden than Jane Eyre. They put a high premium on students writing to sources, using evidence from text to present analyses and defend claims. And they focus far more than has previously been the case on academic vocabulary—words that appear across the curriculum. The ELA experts chanted these shifts like mantras: Complex text! Evidence-based questions! Text worth reading and questions worth answering!

The idea behind the shifts is to prepare students for what they will confront in real life—business plans, legal briefs, newspapers, instruction manuals and other “informational” texts that will drive their decisions. Studies have shown that facility with complex texts is the key to achieving the college-ready benchmark on the ACT reading test, a standard that substantially correlates with long-term academic success. Yet, apparently, we haven’t been doing a great job of giving students that facility.  Studies show up to four years’ difference  between what students are reading at the end of 12th grade and what they are expected to be able to read in college or on the job.

Quality will now trump quantity. Now, educators  are under pressure to teach so much material that students are as likely to read a series of short excerpts as they are to read a whole article or book. Teachers ask cookie-cutter questions like “What’s the main idea? Or seek opinions with questions like “What’s your favorite animal and why?” The problem with questions based on experience is that they exclude students who haven’t had those experiences. “Text,” said Liben, “is the great equalizer.” Further, these “text-to-self” questions don’t prove that students actually understood what they were reading. They’re easy. They’re also time-suckers: “The more time you spend outside the text,” Libens  observed, “the less time you spend inside the text.”

So what is a “complex” text anyway? How do teachers select such texts? And how do the people who write the tests determine how best to assess students’ ability to understand them? We got some sharp insights into these essential questions by doing a close reading of three texts that filled the bill: a speech by Susan B. Anthony, a passage of dialogue about child labor, and a speech by Eleanor Roosevelt.  All were being considered for use in the new assessments aligned to the standards.

As we did our reading, we kept the hallmarks  of complexity in mind. On the high end of the scale, they include:  structure that is unconventional rather than expected, ideas that are implicit rather than explicit, and language that is figurative rather than literal, archaic rather than contemporary, and vague rather than clear. Sentences in very complex texts tend to be complicated rather than straightforward, and vocabulary is academic rather than plain.  Informational text that is defined as complex might require specialized knowledge, have multiple meanings, and an obscure purpose.  Complex literary texts tend to include references to other texts, demand cultural knowledge, and carry sophisticated, multiple perspectives. (More than one participant noted that such texts might well meet the standard of complexity, but that they might also fit the definition of bad writing.)

The group engaged in a lively discussion about how much context a teacher should supply with a reading selection. “Are you helping [students] understand the more background you give him?” Liben asked. Yes, he said. “But are you making them better readers?” No.  “If you call attention to the ‘hard parts’ are you helping them comprehend?” Yes, he said. “But you are depriving them of the opportunity to find key turning points on their own.”  In short, he asked his audience, “Do you measure success by how much you smooth the road for your teachers, or by how bumpy the road is?” The Common Core clearly leans toward the bumps.

Bumps certainly marked a speech by Anthony that was intended for readers at the 10th grade level. An excerpt offered without context, it was characterized by archaic language and syntax such as the following: “We assert the province of government to be to secure the people in the enjoyment of their inalienable right.” The session leaders admitted that the passage leaned toward the high end of the complexity scale, that it carried some “shock value.” But that is partly the point. As Liben told the group, the ability to understand syntax, the ability to translate or paraphrase complicated sentences, is one of the strongest predictors of reading fluency.

Another passage, some dialogue about child labor from a book called “Counting on Grace,” was designated for sixth graders. We were asked to put ourselves in the position of item-writers and decide which sample questions were worth asking and which should be scrapped. The criteria were simple enough: Does the question require close reading of the text? Does it have value ? (i.e., is it worthy of student attention?) And does it align with the standards?

Here is a question the group tossed out: “In this excerpt, Arthur feels strongly that the use of child labor is wrong. Think about an issue that you have strong feelings about. Compose an argument that you could use to convince someone to feel the same.” While the question was deemed worthy enough of student opinion, it is not text-dependent and does not align to the CCSS standards, which call for students to make arguments based on evidence in text. Two thumbs down.

It was interesting to see how much discussion it was possible to have over just one item. Even the choice of texts prompted controversy. Was the passage from an Eleanor Roosevelt speech too union-friendly? One teacher said it would have been flagged on his state assessments as too biased. Another teacher said that the topic of child labor would have been considered taboo on some current standardized tests. Dean acknowledged that test-writers have to be mindful that certain subjects, like death, divorce, or violence, could be troubling to some students, thus distracting enough to impair performance. But a surfeit of sensitivity can overly limit choice. “We get to the point where have pablum,” Dean said.

Dean and Libens also made it clear that literacy is not the exclusive purview of the English teacher. It is the responsibility of teachers in all content areas, and, yes, that includes math. It also includes teaching vocabulary. Now, teachers of subjects other than ELA often ignore commonly used academic words, taking time to define only those terms unique to their discipline. Under the Common Core, all teachers become vocabulary teachers.

The group was left with the overarching message that mastering text complexity is the secret to reading success. One speaker after the next stressed that we haven’t assigned students nearly enough of this kind of writing. And when we do, we give students so much support  that they hardly have to work to understand them. “We have been meeting students where they are,” Liben said, “instead of where they need to be.”

If the Common Core standards are implemented faithfully, that is clearly going to change.