Your students may choose to volunteer for military service; they will certainly become voters and taxpayers. As educators, it is essential that we teach them how to become informed citizens–to examine evidence and argument related to the issues that shape political opinion and decisions.

Missiles launched at Syria are likely to provoke a response that spills over into a future conflict. However, if Assad’s government is not forced to face the consequences of banned weapon use–assuming that it has indeed used them–we are deciding that the immoral and impermissible is acceptable. In the 1930s, in both Spain and Czechoslovakia, we saw that not standing up to dictators only encouraged them and lead to larger, more horrific, conflicts.

To attack Syria is to increase the chance that the rebels–many of whom are the sworn enemies of the United States– will win, or carve out a toxic territory of their own, a haven for global jihadists. This is what the Russians claim. Assad is secular leader, while the forces fighting against him include extreme Islamic militants. Yet to allow this president to murder with impunity is to continue the bloody family business; his infamous father slaughtered tens of thousands of his Muslim Brotherhood opponents.

Which is the world we want to live in?  One in which Syria is a failed state, where Al Qaeda cells flourish close to Israel and Turkey, or a world in which we accept the deaths of tens and even hundreds of thousands of civilians?

It seems to me that this is the topic and debate that our students should be reading about, learning about, and having right now. Evaluating evidence, point of view, and argument is as Common Core as it gets. As global citizens, our students must be able to get beyond headlines, read a variety of complex texts, and form opinions based on evidence. What should the role of the school librarian be in sharing information about current issues? Librarians can lead students to articles from international papers such as The New York Times; news sources such as Al Jazeera that present insights and perspectives that aren’t often visible in American coverage; and the websites of groups that are on the ground, for example, Doctors Without Borders.

How can we tell if chemical weapons were used? A perfect science assignment. Why would Assad use poison gas when he was winning the war and United Nations’ inspectors were about to arrive? A great question for social studies classes. Could the rebels have staged an attack on themselves in order to get international powers to attack Assad? Every child who has an older sibling understands that strategy: provoking the bigger kid to lash out so that s/he will take the blame.

Syria is not so far away–what we decide to do there will directly affect every student in your school. Right in front of our eyes events that may well have decade-shaping consequences are playing out. Librarians can provide the resources that allow students to parse the arguments and find their way to reasoned answers. We cannot stumble into war blindly, nor can we ignore the need for strong responses. We must take the sober, adult, responsibility of making hard choices. By providing students with evidence, librarians can help them to become the responsible citizens our nation requires.

But what I noticed right off—and surely struck many of you—is that we need to stop talking about the Common Core State Standards in the singular. There is a whole set of distinct Common Core challenges, and we need to be clear sighted about what they are, and the tools needed to address them.

I realized some time ago that there was more than one kind of Common Core experience. For young children, in preschool or elementary, Common Core is and will be their school experience. Year after year they will be exposed to content-rich nonfiction and increasingly complex texts and vocabulary, and they will gain skills in close reading and mining textual evidence. But for the students already in middle, and especially, high school, the Common Core Standards present another challenge. The schooling they received and learned to negotiate does not match the assessments that require them to demonstrate the above-mentioned skills. We need to define the needs of students who are in free fall as well as those who are rising through the new system. That is step one. Step two is more difficult.

The New York State results put me in mind of a suggestion a principal made to me earlier this summer: we must disaggregate scores to determine which cohort is experiencing the sharpest decline. This principal, accustomed to the daily triage of deciding where to best use limited resources, recognized that the lowest scores are not seen evenly throughout our schools. The steepest drops in scores seem to be in the most challenged schools. This may seem self-evident, but it is not. The needs of students— and communities—vary. What are the needs of a school where many families have deep pockets and available resources versus the demands of a school where almost all of the support and instruction takes place within the school building? And the issue is not just the burdens the students face, but school policies. In my experience, struggling schools too often turn to programs—teaching scripts, mandated curricula, and (very) limited and structured reading requirements. The cure makes the ailment worse.

Here’s a project for those reading this column: Can we compare the Common Core outcomes of schools with parallel demographics, a first set with accredited full-time school librarians against another that uses aides and volunteers, or in which the librarian essentially checks out books? Does a librarian make a difference in outcomes? How? We all need to know that—but we won’t find out until we look past the headlines and into the numbers.

What’s to be done? In one sense, I think the New York results are encouraging. The Common Core standards were initiated because high school graduates were not prepared for the next stage in their lives. The recent assessments have allowed us to examine those gaps while the students are still in our buildings. We have time to help these students. But what resources must we adopt to do so? How can the deep thinking and engaged reading required by the Common Core standards be effectively taught in the schools where there the pass rate was between 0 to 5 percent? Can we develop Common Core assessments that address vocational needs? I can’t be the first person to ask these questions. I’m eager to learn what kinds of programs and interventions you have seen that are effective, ineffective, or produce middling results. Surely there are innovators and researchers who are blazing trails, testing ideas, and pointing the way for the rest of us.

From any conventional point of view, these are the centuries you can skip on the way to the Crusades, the High Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. But this new scholarship points to an era of lively intellectual exchange. Indeed, from my research on Sugar Changed the World (Clarion, 2010), it’s clear that Hindus, as well as the last of Athenian scholars (whose intellectual lineage leads back to Plato and Aristotle), were also part of this world.

I realize, of course, that however fascinating the recovery the academic reviewer calls “submerged worlds” may be to scholars and interested adults, this period will never make its way into K-12 curricula. Or could it? Just yesterday I read Jonathan Israel’s review of Anthony Pagden’s new book, The Enlightenment: And Why it Still Matters titled “How the Light Came In” (June 21 2013, Times Literary Supplement), which outlines a very different age of intellectual ferment, the Enlightenment. The reviewer is deeply versed in that era and in his essay he lists writers across Europe and North America and two centuries, who, in various camps, were part of that period. Then I came across a third review—that of Sarah Churchwell’s Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of ‘The Great Gatsby.”  Now Gatsby is a novel high school students do read, and Churchwell’s book seems to capture the wide intellectual world that fed F. Scott Fitzgerald as he wrote it—especially the work of the modernist writers T.S. Eliot and James Joyce.

The themes of these essays and the books they examine—ancient theological debate, centuries of humanist and Enlightenment ferment, and the cluster of early 20th-century experimental artists—are that the individuals, inventors, and ideas we offer to students as a sequence of greatest hits were really the expression of much larger moments of upheaval and exchange. What if we shifted our educational focus from “Key People and 5 Things You Need to Know” to an exploration of how such a hub of exchange forms, flourishes, and fades away? What if we said it doesn’t matter if you are teaching about the invention of bronze, the Renaissance, the birth of atomic and quantum theory, or digital innovation today, we want your students to examine and understand how a group of thinkers and creators comes together, argues, debates, steals, shares, competes, builds, and yields exponential leaps in thinking, creativity, and invention?

If growth was our theme, we could get past the  “Plato to NATO” goal of passing on names and dates and explore patterns of innovation. We might end a unit of study by asking students to look around and discover where nodes of creativity are taking shape today. How might they best train to be part of those lively places and spaces? Would that not be a useful approach to education? I’d love to think about how to make this kind of curriculum real.

Yesterday, my-about-to-be 13-year-old and I visited the Great Books Summer Program at its Amherst, MA, location. It made sense to bring Sasha because he was just back from three weeks at the John Hopkins Center for Talented Youth (CTY). I wanted his take on how the two programs were similar and different, and what I might tell you about them. I’ll get to that, but first here is the news as it relates directly to school librarians reading this column: these programs, and doubtless similar others that focus on music (Read*Teach*Play at the Ravinia Festival, DARTS at Tanglewood), and the other arts and sciences are exactly what middle and high school students need. They offer what schools straining under reduced budgets and months of test prep simply cannot provide. And they are not just for wealthy families, tiger parents, and super-motivated kids. Not at all.

Every high school has a college guidance counselor. But the school library should be the Summer Mind Camp clearing center—where brochures are gathered and websites curated, and from where, via an email blast, parents read about these opportunities. Every school library has a summer program to keep kids reading, which is great. But these camps do so much more—and every child deserves to hear about them, and see if there is one that is a fit for them.

At CTY, Sasha took a class that focused on great Supreme Court cases, starting coincidentally, the very same week that the Court handed down its key rulings on the Voting Rights Act and same-sex marriage. He loved the moot courts and debates. For the first time in his life he was, as he desperately texted me one morning, “surrounded by Republicans.” It was a great experience. But as much as he was stimulated by the classes and the discussions, he grew because the other students hailed from all over the United States, and indeed, the globe. Sasha met, and got to know, the world of people and ideas he will grow into.

CTY offers many courses, including some focused on math and computing, and perhaps, as a result, drew a real mix of boys and girls. Great Books focuses on literature: the plays, poems, essays, and novels that its designers consider, in the Mathew Arnold sense, “the best that has been thought and said.”  It appeared to me that there were more girls at Great Books, but the population was equally international. A boy who had arrived from China showed Sasha around, led him to the basketball courts during a break, and became an instant pal.

One key difference between the camps was that CTY— a very large, long-established program across many campuses—often uses middle and high school teachers as its instructors. This means that the best of them are quite skilled at stimulating discussion and directing campers to come up with their own answers, even if they are not necessarily experts. Great Books, by contrast, hires college professors and its three campuses—Amherst, MA, Stanford, CA, and, just recently, Oxford, England—provide students with an opportunity to meet, to interact with, and to learn from leaders in their fields. These are not full-on college lectures—there is give and take. But to my eyes, the liveliest conversations occurred when the campers broke into smaller groups and processed what they had heard and read that day.

Both programs understand kids—these are not cram courses. They build days around an interplay of art, sports, social time, and learning. And what each supplies—in its own way, by its own rules—is a humanistic education, that exposure to deep thought, rich literature, and probing minds, which we all too often see squeezed out of our K-12 schools. These camps give young people an intense exposure to everything the Common Core tries to achieve—with their international peers.

The programs are not an extra for the few. They are necessary mind medicine, soul fodder, for our kids. And school librarians can, should, and must be the ones to let students know that these opportunities exist. CTY does require certain test scores. Great Books needs only a recommendation from a qualified adult (such as a librarian or teacher). Both programs are expensive (not including travel), but both also have well-established financial aid and scholarship systems in place. When you think of the young people in your school, start by asking who would really benefit from attending this kind of mind camp—this amusement park of ideas and creativity and global connections. Make sure he or she, and his or her parents, know they exist. Don’t begin with the question of who can afford the experience.

The real question is: who can afford not to have this opportunity?*

*(We came upon Center For Talented Youth on our own; the Great Books program invited me to visit and paid for our overnight stay. I do not believe my views in this article were slanted by their blandishments, but in fairness you all should know that I was their guest.)

Anyone who has attended one of my talks or workshops has probably heard me rail against state history assignments. I have never understood why they exist in the curricula of all 50 states, at a moment where fresh minds could be ablaze with so many more rewarding subjects. But this summer my 8-year-old, who will be in fourth grade this fall, and I took a little tour: we went to baseball games in Washington, DC; Baltimore, MD; Pittsburgh, and then Allentown, PA, where we caught the IronPigs. That tour helped me to understand this country in a way I never had before.

I’ve lived all my life in New York City and I now live just outside it. I grew up playing pick-up ball in Central Park—no little league for me and my friends. We went to games and watched them on TV, but not one parent, relative, or family friend ever donned school colors and rooted for a high school or college team. For us, the tide of seasons was the flow of New York teams, and our eyes were always on championships–—they were what mattered. We were interested in success, not in the upward movement of local talent from high school, to college, to pro. Our eyes in sports, just as our eyes in politics, history, and culture, were looking to the world; which was, in a way, our localism. Paris mattered, Peoria didn’t.

In each stadium on this trip, I saw kids, couples, families, and grandparents decked out in team colors. I felt intense local pride in each stadium, the sense that the team was their team, a reflection of their hometown. Of course, this was most evident in the minor league park. For the first time I perceived what announcers talk about when they pan the audience at a college games and mention the “Cameron Crazies,” or some similar nickname. I saw how, for a whole slice of this country, sports is about the local—the neighborhood kid who does well in a school game and gets his or her picture in the paper, later plays in a high school tournament, and then is recruited for State U. The local still has a meaning and importance that it never had for me

And yet. As we walked into the IronPigs stadium (Coca-Cola Park, as it happens), the ticket taker pointed to the person who came in just ahead of us: a tall, thin, young man bedecked with film equipment. “He’s a scout from the Japanese league,” she explained. Indeed, one of the best players on the IronPigs, Josh Fields, had just been playing in Japan.

And there is another “and yet:” on our way from Pittsburgh to the Lehigh Valley we took a detour to visit Fallingwater, the breathtaking home built by Frank Lloyd Wright. In his way Wright was also intensely focused on the local—using stone quarried nearby, building into the cliff, and incorporating the waterfall into the house itself. Every aspect of the building emerges as a kind of plant from the soil on which it stands. And it is so purely abstract that on walking into it my then-cranky son exclaimed, “It is so modern.” And so it is—local as essence, essence as local: the meeting place of drilling down and wide-angle lens to vast, international horizons. Like Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Famila in Barcelona, Spain, it is architecture as epic, as symphonic, as profound and deep as dreams.

The local abides—that was the lesson to me from this road trip. But the international is there—woven into the fabric of even these most hometown of events. That is what we need to do to make state history matter. How it is, was, and always will be been linked to the history of the nation and the world. We need to probe for essences as Wright did—finding pure truths in local stone.

The American Library Association (ALA) annual conference is upon us, and I’m vexed with both Association for Library Services to Children (ALSC) and Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA). As I tool around the country helping folks engage with nonfiction and the Common Core, I keep seeing evidence of deeply-seated and unexamined prejudice against nonfiction in those two divisions.

I followed with real interest the discussion of the Caldecott Award at 75 on the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) listserv. The first posts were about identity: the overwhelming number of winners that were both male and Caucasian. I asked about nonfiction in terms of genre and format. How many nonfiction winners have there been? And, how frequently has photography (often used in nonfiction books) been honored?

Though there were moving and passionate posts about Tanya Hoban and Nic Bishop, (I’d add Susan Kuklin and Charles Smith, to begin), no committee has seen fit to honor them. Indeed the only exceptions I’ve heard mentioned emphasize my point: Jacqueline Briggs Martin’s medal winner Snowflake Bently (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), illustrated by  Mary Azarian, is about a photographer, without his photographs, while Patrick McDonnell’s honor book Me…Jane (Little, Brown, 2011) has, drumroll, a single photo. Why, one might ask.

The answer rests in a rule that gets to the heart of the issue I am raising: Caldecott criteria require original artwork that has not been previously published. That means that a picture book that incorporates archival photography or images from a research institute can’t win. At a stroke, the medal eliminates from consideration any book that uses, say, NASA images. The award can go to a deceased artist, but I was told by an expert that the medal was initially designed to support living artists, thus the focus on new work.

The problem is that Caldecott criteria state that the award is presented in honor of “the most distinguished American picture book for children,” and defines distinguished as: “Marked by eminence and distinction; noted for significant achievement. Marked by excellence in quality. Marked by conspicuous excellence or eminence. Individually distinct.”

If the Caldecott is an award to encourage living artists, then (contra what I argued in The Horn Book years ago) we should have awards designed to encourage every brand of living artist. Affirmative action is affirmative action–let’s identify deserving sets of artists and make sure they get their due. But, if the Caldecott honors the most distinguished picture book, it cannot exclude a title that requires the primary use of archival images. When I read through the list of medalists, I see marvelous books and a line-up of wonderful artists deserving of their honors. But the members of that all-star team, no matter how luminary, are solely masters of ink and brush, paint, and pixel.

The Caldecott does not honor the most distinguished picture book; it honors the most distinguished rendered picture book. That is a crucial distinction because it signifies that great artistry can’t be found in the selection, layout, design, and display of images that have survived from the past. Indeed, one person who posted on the CCBC listserv intimated that she, and she assumed most others, believe photography is not an art form in the same manner as drawing, painting, or collage.

Another person pointed to the Robert F. Sibert medal as meeting the need for a nonfiction award. But that is not fair given that the Caldecott criteria state that the award selects and honors distinction. The Caldecott is the ne plus ultra, the cynosure, of awards–it cannot both assert its primacy, and–implicitly–disqualify whole categories of books. Moreover, Caldecott is an ALSC award–a division that stretches up to 8th grade, as once again the award rules stress. Surely those older readers of picture books–and we all know they are legion–often prefer photographs over drawings they see as childish. And yet this ALSC award inherently excludes those older books from consideration.

That brings me to YALSA. I’ve been furious ever since that ALA division decided to remove nonfiction from its Best Books for Young Adults (BBYA) list. BBYA is now best fiction. While YALSA has made efforts to improve its nonfiction prize, it has never recognized a key flaw in its plan: the BBYA meetings were a public forum where future librarians, authors, and editors, and could listen and learn, and its nomination list was often used by teens as a reading/discussion list. There is no longer an up-to-date list of young adult nonfiction titles for reading groups to consider, or a public venue where stakeholders can discuss teen nonfiction. It’s ironic that this has happened just when librarians, authors, and editors are asking for guidance in how to select and craft quality nonfiction.

So there we have it. Sure, individual books are honored, as Steve Sheinkin’s Bomb (Macmillan, 2012) was this year. But nonfiction remains marginal–so marginal that neither ALSC nor YALSA seems to notice their abiding bias. The question is, why?

Photographers Gerda Taro and Robert Capa

It’s been my experience that when the tests are over and the school year is winding down, librarians want a nonfiction author to charge up the students, and a Common Core speaker to share insights with the staff. So, all through May and June, my calendar is full.

Very often, the day includes a lunch session with a small group of students, that has an opportunity to gab with me over sandwiches. During one such get-together, a brave 8th grader asked, “Why should we care about history, anyway? It’s over.” She was straight talking, direct, and I thought she probably spoke for many of the others present. I gave her the answer I give myself: she and her peers live in the eternal now—perhaps teenagers always have—but popular culture, the media, social networking, and an array of electronic devices make it easy to be inside whatever is trending at the moment. I’ve learned that Internet trends follow the same spike-and-crash arc, and that many of today’s teenagers live within that 24-to-48 hour-blast-and-demise of rumor, hit, meme, song, and video. Surely that must-know imperative has always been with us—whether the information was whispered among friends, shared along on a village path, or written in a letter. Now, however, there appears to be no push back from our surrounding culture, no sense that the immediate world, however compelling, is of less weight than centuries of accumulated knowledge, art, culture, or history. So what could I say to that teen?

I took a plate and held it horizontally: “This,” I said, “is your world. You live in the eternal now.” Then I took a second plate, and placed it vertically, beneath the first: “This is what you stand on.” History is that column, that pillar, on which the present rests. As we investigate the past, as we ask new questions, as we line up cause and effect in new ways, our present changes. Indeed, as we begin to see how easily events could have been different or altered, we begin to see that we can influence the present and craft a new future.

We study history not out of reverence for the past, but to give us the tools to make a better future. Living in the eternal now, how will we ever know if we are just refashioning old mistakes? (I ran across exactly this idea in the work of William Crary Brownell, Edith Wharton’s first book editor, and the subject of my doctoral dissertation.)

All of this, however, is background to another recent experience I had in a school. I decided to make a PowerPoint presentation on the book my wife, Marina Budhos, and I are writing: The Eyes of the World: How Three Friends (Two Lovers), and a Camera Tried to Fight Fascism (Holt, 2014) The book is about Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and David Seymour (Chim) during the period of the Spanish Civil War.

There are many hooks for readers in this story, and one huge problem: few, if any, teenagers know or care about the Spanish Civil War. So what could I do to engage the students I was visiting? I decided to draw a parallel between nations’ choices about getting involved in the conflict in Spain in 1936 and our choices now about Syria. The parallels are striking: two clear sides, one we support and one we oppose, and a situation in which there are so many crosscurrents and dangers, few want to get involved. I crafted my PowerPoint and the kids responded positively. And then I read an article by Harvey Morris on The New York Times website, in which many scholars were drawing precisely the same parallel.

Why read history? Because we face terrible choices today, and we have the past to study—not as a lessons about right and wrong, but as a mirror that allows us to examine our actions and ourselves more closely. History matters because it is us—deepened, scrutinized, enriched in contemplation. It provides us with an opportunity to pause, weigh, consider, and reflect before we act. That is what I had to offer the questioning teen. I suspect she left with an inkling that I just might be right.

Most recently, I have been in New Jersey, where the Common Core assessments will arrive next spring. That state is just entering the territory New York has traveled—and I am sure that when I visit Kansas, Tennessee, and Nebraska later this year I will see some mixture of New York’s advance scouting and New Jersey’s sense that the game is now afoot.

So what lessons are to be learned from the states that have been through a full year of Common Core training, testing, and evaluating? My first suggestion is that if you are in a state new, or relatively new, to the Common Core, hunt around on the Internet. Go to EngageNY, or the Kansas State Department of Education site. There is everything to be gained from people who have already ventured down the Common Core road. Think about how to apply what they have learned, and experienced, to your state, district, and school.

The short form of what I have seen is this: the Common Core brings significant change to a school building. School librarians have the tools and position to be key players in this change—they understand inquiry and are eager to help students engage in research that goes beyond fact-finding missions. But to be essential participants in the Common Core initiative, librarians must know their nonfiction as well as their fiction. Nonfiction does not just mean subject areas, it requires that stakeholders become familiar with the different styles and approaches of a variety of authors.

Our past understanding of the phrase, “good for reports,” is meaningless. Under the Common Core, a report will not be three or five key facts, it will be facts plus sources that yield more than one point of view, or a comparison of approaches, or what one source presents against another. “Good for reports” is now understood to mean “good for thinking, questioning, and examining.”  In addition, under the Common Core librarians must become even more assertive. Teachers and administrators must see the librarian as an agent active in meeting the standards, not a passive assistant to another’s plans.

I urge those of you who have been through a year or more of training and testing to share your experiences. What worked? What didn’t? What was difficult? What was satisfying? What did you learn? What would you do differently next time?

One of the wonderful things about the Common Core initiative is that we are in it together. We can and should model for our students our willingness to share, to learn from others, and to teach from experience. We face this challenge as a nation, not alone. One of the key experiences of the consciousness raising of the late 1960s was understanding that many of the problems we faced were systemic, not personal. Common Core offers us a national exercise in mutual education. I hope to hear your insights.

As anyone who has followed our work in School Library Journal knows, Sue and I are advocates of clustering books (“Wondering How to Put Common Core into Practice? It’s Easier than you Think.” SLJ, Nov, 2012). But the focus on rereading short passages suggested a new idea: constellations. A constellation is a linked set of brief passages that librarians can select and offer to teachers as a course pack, or to students as an example of what close reading can yield.

It is one thing to juxtapose related materials such as books, databases, websites, and YouTube videos (as suggested in the above article), but quite another to choose and present excerpts, passages, and chapters that both link together and serve to support the kind of close reading and rereading that Common Core demands. While an experienced—or highly motivated—teacher can pull together such resources, clearly this sort of mining is within a librarian’s expertise. And it is this type of work that will become ever more important in the school environment as more print materials are available in e-formats. So, from a pure show-your-value-to-teachers-and-admins point-of-view, constellations are worth your time. Their real reason for being, though, is students.

Here are some examples of constellations:
For teachers: access a print of Dorothea Lange’s black-and-white photo “Migrant Mother (available free of copyright from the Library of Congress). Find a passage about the image from a series title about the Great Depression; juxtapose that text with the appropriate pages from Martin W. Sandler’s account of the photo in The Dust Bowl Through the Lens (Walker, 2009), Elizabeth Partridge’s Restless Spirit (Viking, 1998), Don Nardo’s Migrant Mother (Compass Point, 2011), and Albert Marrin’s Years of Dust (Dutton, 2009). These resources will provide at significantly different descriptions of how and where Lange took the photo and of the people portrayed in the photo, as well as distinct accounts of how (or whether) the image was retouched, cropped, and framed. This one constellation offers lessons in visual literacy, history, and historiography, and an opportunity for a close reading of texts and an image.

For students and teachers: Write down the first five words of the Gettysburg Address: “Fourscore and seven years ago.” Consider what those words mean, and why Abraham Lincoln chose them. Teachers can reference Gary Wills on YouTube discussing his Lincoln at Gettysburg (S & S, 1992), in which he masterfully analyzes that speech. For Lincoln’s listeners who knew their Bible, the word “fourscore” recalled Psalm 90:10: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” (King James Version)

Digging deeper, what does “fourscore” mean? Check your Oxford English Dictionary and you’ll discover that “score” as a 20-year period comes from the same root as to “shear” as a sheep, and to “mark or notch.” At one time, when counting his sheep, herders would score, or notch, a stick after the 20th creature passed by. “Fourscore and seven years ago,” closely read (and reread), offers links to the deep resonances of a famous phrase, a modern interpretation, and a trip into etymology.

To prompt thinking: Try this: open up Jim Murphy’s The Real Benedict Arnold (Clarion, 2007) and Steve Sheinkin’s The Notorious Benedict Arnold (Roaring Brook, 2010) and select passages where the authors each explain bad Ben’s motivations. Or, open up a random book on your shelves—I grabbed Russell Freedman’s Kids at Work (Clarion, 1994) and found this: “Boys began working as doffers when they were seven or younger. It was their job to remove the whirling bobbins when they were filled with thread and replace them with empty ones.” Link to definitions of “doffers,” “whirling,” and “bobbins, as well as books on Iqbal Masih,  or M.T. Anderson’s recent Op-Ed in the The New York Times on the Bangladesh clothing factory fire.

Get the idea? Find a passage or passages, a phrase or an image, and then search for related links that can be excerpted and/or highlighted. As you do so, you’re training young people to discover more in the starting place (thus close reading and rereading) and to follow what can be a endless—and exciting—trail of curiosity and inquiry. Let me know how it goes.

“In the Common Core era, we have all begun to adhere to a shift toward close and careful reading of complex texts. We expect students to think more deeply about the texts they are reading, from the “zoomed out” ideas of overall structure, organization, and theme to the very “zoomed in” details such as the effect a particular word choice has on tone and meaning in a sentence. We are teaching student [sic] that a lot can be gained by lingering over a particular text, or section of a text, and rereading sections that are confusing or they believe to be important.” The key word in the last sentence: rereading.

Anyone who follows this column knows libraries well. So I ask, can you point to a nonfiction passage that you have praised because it rewards rereading? So often when we promote a nonfiction title we stress that it goes down easy. We commend it because it’s browsable, meaning that it’s not necessary to read it through. Perhaps we applaud its fun facts—or because it’s a page-turner, or because it reads like a novel, or we couldn’t put it down. Indeed if a nonfiction title has unfamiliar terminology we extol its glossary and definitions, and we criticize it if we fear it will be too challenging for its intended audience.

Notice what we are actually saying: that nonfiction text should be quick and easy; it should not demand that readers slow down and return to it in order to winkle out its deeper meanings. To use outdated terminology, it’s good for reports when students can snap up the information at a glance, and it’s a pleasure read when they can zoom through it.

And yet the Common Core informs us—in the standards, and now, clearly, in the assessments—that students, from the third grade on up, need to dig in, to read purposefully, to read closely, and often, to reread nonfiction passages. We have long practiced this approach with fiction–it takes no effort to find the works of William Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson or commentaries on or critiques of them. Newer  versions or graphic interpretations of classic fiction titles are often available to help students comprehend these works. What we need to ask ourselves is, what tools do we have as educators to help students and colleagues prepare for the careful reading of nonfiction?

But, back to my question–can you point to a single book, a paragraph, or a chapter in a nonfiction book that you can highlight as rewarding rereading? And don’t point to primary sources–sure, those are great, but teachers don’t need help finding Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” They need to find passages that complement a study of that brilliant essay, passages that are worthy of reexamination. To help our students and colleagues, we must begin by examining our own reading, we must consider our knowledge of the books on our shelves and in our ebook collections, and the resources in the databases we access.

The comments on the first round of New York State ELA Common Core testing suggests that the tests themselves must be improved. That gives us time to sharpen our ability to prepare students and teachers to meet the Common Core standards—starting with the challenge of nonfiction rereading.

Cannadine’s thoughtful essay outlines some of the debates in the United Kingdom. He is one of the authors of a survey of history education in his country and this careful study has distinct echoes here. The authors map the many wars that have been waged over whether history education has leaned too left or too right, too rigid or too progressive. (For a hint of the U. K. debates, as seen through a U. S. lens, follow this thread on the Core Knowledge website. Cannadine, however, is not focused on that debate.

“The Future of History” argues that there hasn’t been a great decline from a prior golden age of history education and that different local conditions have influenced how well or how poorly history has been taught. Cannadine generally favors a national history curriculum, but thinks the current debates miss the key point; the problem is not whether more or less time is spent on topic A or person B, but rather that too little time is spent on history. In the United Kingdom, it is not a required subject after the age of 14. In the United States we have the opposite situation. Social studies and science share limited time slots in elementary classrooms and students arrive at middle school having learned and relearned the same small bits of U. S. history, with barely any awareness of a wider world.

Our Common Core emphasis on evidence, argument, and point-of-view will be helpful in remedying the gaps in our students’ knowledge since these are key skills for investigating history. And the increased use of nonfiction may well mean more compelling history books in ELA classes. Indeed, it seems that the Common Core encourages teachers, librarians, and schools to recognize that content matters—that educators need greater depth of knowledge in subjects to match and guide students as their nonfiction reading blossoms. But Cannadine’s essay also suggests a need for educators to expand their horizons beyond local challenges and opportunities.

Why are so many nations considering a national curricula? Because they can, and because they must. They can because our ability to gather and track data is expanding exponentially, which influences everything in our lives—from health-care records to the number-crunching analyses of politics and sports that Nate Silver’s 538 columns in the New York Times have made so popular.

Education is a series of benchmarks on the way to graduation. Those benchmarks are already data points under analysis. We can gather and analyze national educational data, and we will. We must. Because the final impetus for national standards comes from those who receive our students after they graduate—the trades, the military, and the institutions of higher education. This is true from state-to-state and nation-to-nation. Let’s study this global moment—to compare how nations struggle with and implement curricula to prepare their students for global challenges.

In effect NHD has turned history into a science fair. That is, instead of marching through whatever subjects are mandated by the local curriculum and dutifully matched to an approved textbook, students can decide which area of history they’d like to explore. There are some limits: every year NHD selects a theme, so kids who take part in the regional, state, or national competitions are given a general framework, but they still have a lot of latitude. For example, this year’s theme: “turning points in history,” can be examined from a U.S. or global perspective, or in terms of its impact on technology or law, singular events or lengthy campaigns, matters of high morality or pop culture, etc. Whether students choose to work on their own or in groups, they’re required to use both primary and secondary sources and to document their research. They can choose to write a paper, create a display, build a website, or perform on stage.

All of the above may be done well or poorly—so simply having a contest doesn’t, in itself, enhance Common Core thinking. But what I saw shows that there’s a very nice connection between the two. I viewed displays that ranged from civil rights and labor strikes to video games. In every case it was clear that the process of creating the presentation was the reward—students were doing real history, real research. They were investigating, gathering evidence, comparing interpretations, and arriving at conclusions. Every one of them was surprised by how much they learned in the process. Sure, that’s a handy phrase to tell a judge, but the animation with which they presented their projects, and the examples they gave could not be faked. These were young people of every age and background, some immigrants struggling to speak English, some accomplished presenters speaking rehearsed lines, who had discovered what history offers: the pleasures of researching, thinking, learning, and arriving at your own conclusions that you craft for an audience.

Congratulations, NHD! You’re helping the Common Core without ever stepping into a classroom. If any of you readers work in a school that doesn’t compete in NHD, I encourage you to read up on it and to share the information with your students and fellow teachers. You’ll be doing them a big favor.

(Nina Simone, “Children Go Where I Send Thee,” from the 1962 album Nina Simone Live at the Village Gate)

I’ve just returned from two days in Rochester, NY, where Sue Bartle and I ran some Common Core (CC) workshops, and our lively exchanges with teachers, librarians, and administrators reminded me of Nina’s words. We were there to talk about Common Core in the final run-up to New York’s first assessments, but this wasn’t a lecture. In fact, it quickly turned into a group therapy-cum-revival-testimonial session. Everyone had stories to share. We were hearing, straight from the trenches, about the Common Core crosswinds.

The first day drew people from wealthier suburban districts that have invested heavily in guided reading and in Lucy Calkins’s Reading and Writing Project workshops. The second day—a beautiful warm Saturday, no less—attracted a full house of people who work in inner-city schools where administrators seek to tightly script teaching and learning—often in ways that make Common Core’s emphasis on “depth over breadth” impossible to achieve. I’m using this column to sort out my thinking—and to invite all of you to share your own CC crosswinds—because one of the best things to come out of the day was the cross-school collaborations and exchanges of ideas.

I wrote about the problems that guided reading can pose for Common Core in a previous column—see “(Mis)Guided Reading”—and Mary Ann Cappiello, an assistant professor of language & literacy at Lesley University, sent me word of a recent article by the creators of guided reading, Irene C. Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, in which they discuss the difference between their actual system and how it’s all too often applied (“Guided Reading: The Romance and the Reality,” The Reading Teacher December 2012 V. 66 #4, pages 268-346, which unfortunately isn’t available for free online). I encourage any of you whose students are trapped by the guided reading’s carefully calibrated reading levels and not encouraged to follow their own interests to bring this article to the attention of teachers and administrators. Rigid, misunderstood, and misapplied, guided reading is directly at odds with Common Core.

I’d planned to write about the problems with Lucy Calkins’s approach, but New York City beat me to it. Dr. Calkins is a fixture at Columbia University’s Teachers College and, quite naturally, her ideas and the students she has trained have had a strong influence on the New York City school system. But in March, New York announced that after carefully weighing a number of curricular approaches, it was selecting two: Core Knowledge and ReadyGen. The city’s announcement didn’t mention Calkins, but the shift in focus was clear, and it’s easy to see why. Calkins has been the guru of the writing process, especially text-to-self connections. This was a welcome relief in the heyday of No Child Left Behind and encouraged a culture of writing and revision in many schools. But the CC English language arts standards expressly de-emphasize that area of subjective response and instead, focus on evidence that’s found in the text: “What does it say?’ over “how do I feel about that?” Schools and districts that have invested in teaching students how to write about “small moments” and have discouraged writing assignments linked to curricular subjects are at cross purposes with CC—in the same way as those that are turning guided reading into alphabet prisons.

Friends, as the New York City’s experience proves, just because your school or district has made a recent, expensive, investment in a system doesn’t mean you need to keep using it. Common Core drives the assessments—and your administrators need to know if you and your students are being hampered, rather than helped, by the tools that you are using. And that brings me to administrative rigidity. On that balmy Saturday, I kept hearing about scripting: a dual-language school that has had a decade of success with its existing program of alternating full days of English with Spanish, has now been ordered to use an English-only “module” in the middle of every day; a Montessori school, built around the multi-age classroom, has now been told that all of its students in each grade must follow a different curriculum; a middle school ELA teacher who has creatively matched fiction and nonfiction (as CC requires) for years is now mandated to use a curriculum that leaves him no choice in materials; reading teachers who teach students how to locate and analyze evidence in a text (which, as I just mentioned, is the heart of the CC) by making marginal notes and comments is concerned that on the CC assessments students will now be forbidden to use the very skills and methods they’ve been taught.

Just at the moment when Common Core is meant to encourage deep learning and thinking, and constant questioning, we see anxious administrators mandating scripts, uniformity, and blind obedience. This is simply wrong. What can we do? The first thing is to speak up; others are facing the same challenges that you’re facing, and we can exchange ideas. We always end our Common Core sessions with a workshop in which teams of teachers and librarians work together on a project. Right there in the room, you see a culture of collaboration taking shape—ideas from one classroom that fit a library across the city. The great thing about Common Core is that it is really “common”: everyone in 46 states is tackling this challenge.

Speak up: about what is working, what is not, and where the crosswinds blow. As you can see, I’m listening—and I want everyone to know.

Clearly, if we’re reconsidering how to teach both science and math, it makes sense that the resulting standards should be interconnected. Perhaps they’re not as interwoven as they should be. But as you’ll see if you spend time on Stanford’s Graduate School of Education’s website, “Understanding Language,” the links among the standards are much more interesting than simply making sure that science and math are aligned. There’s a Venn diagram that shows that English language arts (ELA) standards are an equal partner in the educational triumvirate: the sweet spot where all three disciplines meet is “building a strong base of knowledge through content rich texts; reading writing and speaking grounded in evidence” (ELA standards); “construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others” (math); and “engaging in argument from evidence” (science).

There you have it, the heart of the Common Core: an approach so clear, solid, and significant that it’s as true for English as math, as crucial in science as in the other two areas. We haven’t yet received the Social Studies standards, though New York State has created modified Common Core social studies frameworks for kids in K–8 and in grades 9–12 that give us a good sense of what’s coming. (For a preview, see “Draft NYS Common Core 9–12 Social Studies Framework Is Now Posted.”)

The same focus on evidence, argument, point of view that was the beating heart of Common Core’s math, science, and English language arts is evident here. I can’t tell those of you who are reading this whether your state will adopt all four standards. And as I wrote in my last essay, even those states that have agreed to adopt the English language arts standards are all over the map in their actual implementation. Another essay on the Thomas B. Fordham site called, “Moving Forward: A National Perspective on States’ Progress in Common Core Implementation Planning,” offers a recent survey of how prepared each state is, along with a healthy dose of skepticism. But the good news is that as each standard is released, we are turned back to the essence of this entire grand attempt to improve education: to help students to read, question, examine evidence, think, and debate—whether they’re adding a column of numbers, peering through a microscope, comparing two biographies, or closely examining a primary source. And that’s wonderful news.

Photo by Smithsonian Institution

I’m just back from FETC—the Florida Educational Technology conference. I was there at the behest of Scholastic to talk about Common Core (CC). (I don’t work for or publish with Scholastic, so I wasn’t there to sell their books. They wheeled me in as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about Common Core.) The week before, I’d been in Alabama meeting with high school teachers and seeing where they are in the great leap forward. I’m writing to give you a report from the CC front.

When it comes to putting the new education guidelines into action, there’s one word for where we’re at as a nation: patchwork. The variance among states is astonishing: Kentucky has already had its first CC assessments, and New York is moving full-speed ahead, training teachers, librarians, and administrators for its CC assessments in May. For those educators in Alabama, this is all a very distant star. But when I say patchwork, the state level is only the beginning: district-to-district, school-to-school, even classroom-to-classroom, there’s been a huge range of responses to CC.

Having just attended FETC, let’s begin with tech readiness. As most of you surely know, it’s mandated that the CC assessments be given digitally. One Florida school has 10 computer labs with 30 desktops whistling clean and ready for use—so 300 students can take the tests simultaneously. A visiting librarian from Atlanta nearly fell over backwards when he heard that—the best he can hope for is one lab per school. There is some wiggle room on when a school or district or state must be ready to deliver digital tests, but there’s absolutely no shared timeline or standard.

Digital brings up the next splintering: in Florida, it’s mandated that 50 percent of school materials must be digital by 2015 and digital tutorials must be available for students. On the convention floor, I saw vendor after vendor with materials to fill that digital space: from math apps to flight simulators that teach physics to global connections that link classrooms to fully online learning programs. But who can afford them? In one Florida district, 100 percent of its students receive free or reduced lunches. Yes, the district qualifies for Title I funding, but its kids are likely to be living with grandparents or even great grandparents, with no digital access at home—while another Florida district is encouraging fifth graders to BYOD, because every kid has so many digital devices.

Technology is just the beginning of the beginning. What I’m seeing in schools is a kind of simmering civil war. On the one hand, teachers who have long believed that “once I close the door, it’s my classroom and I do it the way I know best” are often skeptical about CC, especially since it comes with questionable, but high-stakes, teacher evaluations. And on the other hand, there are teachers who are eager to try new teaching methods and tools. So the patchwork response to CC extends literally from classroom to classroom.

One reason for this piebald landscape is that many districts have invested in expensive programs that, frankly, are directly at odds with CC. (For more on that, see my column “(Mis)Guided Reading”. As a school librarian, what can you do? First, be of good courage: the high-pressure but equally highly mixed response to CC you are doubtlessly experiencing is going on everywhere—we’re all facing this moment of flux. Secondly, use this opportunity to seize the leadership reins. Everyone in your building needs your knowledge of good nonfiction and technology and your ability to scour the Net for best CC practices that other schools have developed. One wonderful Florida district made a careful analysis of which digital device best supports learning. What grabbed the top spot? The humble PC, because of its keyboard. And yet, I heard tell of a teacher in an all-iPad school who midway through the semester reported that she had a big problem: she couldn’t figure out how to turn the device on!

Right now, CC adoption is a crazy quilt. Make sure you’re right in the thick of it, pitching in to sew those pieces into a useful pattern.

Photo by Hemera

Being out in the field, talking to teachers and librarians about the Common Core (CC), I’ve learned as much as I’ve taught. My world is often centered in my study (where I research and write), or in the graduate classes that I teach, or in the K–12 classrooms that I visit. In those spaces, I’ve learned, secondhand, about students being told they can only read an “L” or an “R” book—and how parents have demanded that libraries rearrange their collections from A to Z, according to carefully determined reading levels, so their kids can read totally non-frustrating texts. But it took being at a workshop out on Long Island, NY, for me to really understand the fundamental clash between guided reading and Common Core—something that many of you doubtless experience daily.

At the workshop, librarians spoke of their schools being, in effect, taken over by guided reading crews with their alphabet soup of labels and rigid instructions. That type of approach made absolutely no sense to me, so I did my homework. I learned that guided reading began as a good idea: breaking classrooms into groups by reading levels didn’t work since poor readers didn’t improve when they were clumped together, so teachers needed a new way to match individual readers, reading levels, and texts. So far, so good. Indeed, as one reading expert told me, providing a space, say 20 to 30 minutes daily, where, as part of the reading diet, a learner experiences clear sailing seems at worst harmless and at best a step toward success.

But this relatively benign approach has turned into an expensive program complete with minatory reading coaches who run around mandating to librarians what kids should be allowed to read. The second problem is that the steroidal guided reading monster is directly at odds with the Common Core.

As literacy expert Timothy Shanahan pointed out in “The Common Core Ate My Baby and Other Urban Legends,” a recent article in Educational Leadership, limiting students to below-frustration texts doesn’t necessarily help them (see, especially, “Legend 4: Teachers Must Teach Students at Frustration Levels”) nor does CC require all kids to tackle weighty tomes far beyond their previous reading ranges. In the early grades, where students are working to become fluent readers, CC doesn’t demand that they read more complex texts. And it’s precisely in that preK-to-2 band that learners may need some reading time where they don’t have to struggle. And that brings us to content.

The key clash between guided reading and CC is that those A-to-Z labels have nothing to do with content—they are about the ease of decoding. Starting in earnest in second grade, CC stresses that knowledge is a key part of literacy. This cuts two ways. Every elementary school librarian knows that a student who’s passionate about a subject isn’t daunted by the text’s difficulty—the multi-syllabic names of dinosaurs being a prime example. Curiosity drives readers on from one record, one wacky fact, one sports stat, one set of rules on how to care for pets, to another—and the text’s length or structure isn’t a formidable barrier. In turn, the Common Core standards emphasize that in order to read a student must identify details that add up to evidence and tap into modes of thinking that add up to argument and point of view. You can’t build those muscles without what librarians used to call “stretch,” or challenging, books.

Whether young people are on a sports team or practice an instrument, whether they play Minecraft or chess, they realize that to be good at something you have to work at it; you have to test your limits. Reading works the same way: you build muscles through confronting and overcoming a challenge, and you’re drawn to that challenge because you have a specific goal. We in library land know of many reading goals that appeal to students—books they want to tackle because they find them engaging, interesting, and exciting. Common Core adds the goal of preparing students for a successful life after school. That is the sort of guided reading that makes sense to me.

CC-licensed image by Flickr user schoeband

My 12-year-old son has spent this week getting ready for midterms. He’s working hard even though he knows, far better than I do, exactly what their weighted contributions to his final grades will be. He can name the percentage allotted to every single quiz, test, assignment, and extra-credit opportunity in all of his classes. And he claims that all he cares about is doing well enough to make the honor roll—no more, no less.

My eight-year-old, though, is taking piano lessons, and his teacher gave him the simple theme from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to practice, which gave me a reason to sit, transfixed, in front of an iPod and listen to the entire score. What I heard gave me the one good answer I can offer my sons for why grades really are not the point of education.

Give yourself a treat; go listen to the Ninth. You can’t help hearing how Beethoven plays with you—the music driving ahead with a martial air, you can almost sense the fife and drum of the people marching; now expectant as dusk; now soaring, reaching to and beyond the breaking point up toward sky, toward transcendence, toward Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” sung in the final movement:

Can you sense the Creator, world?
Seek him above the starry canopy.
Above the stars He must dwell.

Be embraced, Millions!
This kiss for all the world!
Brothers!, above the starry canopy
A loving father must dwell.

Can you sense the Creator, world?
Seek him above the starry canopy.
Above the stars He must dwell.

Joy, daughter of Elysium
Thy magic reunites those
Whom stern custom has parted;
All men will become brothers
Under thy gentle wing.

You usually hear the chorus sung in German, but I have recording of just the chorus in which Paul Robeson sings in English (slightly shifted to the political left, so it’s not about a Creator but rather the people united, “All for one and one for all”). When the chorus swells, it’s Robeson’s earth-rattling voice that I hear in my mind.

Beethoven masterfully braids together themes and melodies, so that you’re taken on an ever-winding journey upward. Robeson’s voice tells me the same story: everything is about creation. We put our children through their paces in school not so that they will learn something, or master something, or meet any standards. No. We give them tools so that they can experience the joy, the passion, of creating. All we are doing is saying, “Here, if you know this, there is more you can make; there is another path you can map; there is another song you can compose.” School—from pre-K to postdoc programs—exists so that we can all build more from within ourselves and with our colleagues.

Young people need training, so that they can become builders. In my Beethoven-induced reverie, I was thrilled to see this headline in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune: “Walnut High students build worlds in new academic program”. The article is about a school in California where 75 tenth graders have volunteered to work with three teachers, three periods each morning, to create a society from the ground up. As social studies teacher Justin Panlilio told a Tribune reporter, “Right now, the students are designing a world we call Atlantis. They have to build the government, cultural and economic structures that bind a society together.” Creation—that’s where school leads, not rote and grade percentiles.

My 12-year-old doesn’t have the patience to sit through an entire symphony. The soundtrack of his life is more immediate. But even as he put down one set of study guides and picked up another, he saw me beaming as I listened to the music. Perhaps there was a halftone of pity in his expression: poor old dad just didn’t understand what school life is really like. But I also caught a second of wonder. “Maybe, yes, maybe,” his eyes seemed to say, “there is a wild ocean ahead for me, not just these endless streams to cross.”

Photo: Stockbyte

Fans of baseball, football, and basketball, you all have something in common: it’s easy for you to tell what team is on the field, which one is off of it, and when players are changing their roles from offense to defense. In baseball, of course, three outs and the team at-bat retreats into the dugout, picks up its mitts, and trots back onto the field. In football, there are many variations and tricks of the trade. For example, a “hurry-up” offense is designed to move so quickly that the defense doesn’t have time to substitute fresh players onto the field. But in general, the exchange of players in our nation’s major sports is a slow and stately process that’s based on principles that kids learn when they first begin playing a particular game. There’s one sport, though, that’s totally different from the others—and I suspect it has a lesson to teach those of us in library land.

Unlike other sports, in hockey, players “change on the fly.” That is, a coach signals a group of players to jump onto the ice even as the others are whizzing off—the exchange happens in the middle of a play, as the puck is speeding down the ice. Hockey is such an exhausting sport that players only last a few minutes playing at full tilt, so a coach is constantly deliberating over whom to put in while trying to outguess the other coach’s moves. It’s a speeded-up, live chess match on ice.

I’m put in mind of hockey because of some recent developments in digital publishing. We’ve long known that Overdrive offers libraries subscriptions, rather than full ownership of books. Now Amazon has gotten into the act, offering its Prime members (who pay an annual fee) an ebook subscription. It strikes me that collection development is similar to the easy ebb and flow of offense and defense that I first described. A librarian knows her collection, sees where she needs to add titles, and from time to time, weeds those titles that have outlived their usefulness. But subscriptions are more like hockey.

In the digital subscription world, a librarian isn’t expecting her collection to remain the same for any length of time. She subscribes according to her current needs, knowing that the materials she has made available to today’s patrons may significantly change in the near future. For instance, she wants the latest and greatest of, say, news and financial databases. But in a subscription model, the constant churning and turnover isn’t just a matter of adhering to the latest dateline. A librarian may gain, or lose, an entire chunk of her collection as her subscription funding comes and goes, or as publishers’ digital policies change, or as patrons’ favorite digital devices shift.

What if we embrace a library model that’s part baseball and part hockey? What would such an arrangement look like? Print books, and some databases, would move in and out of the library at a leisurely pace, similar to ballplayers taking and leaving the field between innings. But digital subscriptions would constantly change on the fly: with new materials in, the old out, and the librarian playing the role of a highly tactical hockey coach, constantly matching ever-changing needs to ever-evolving resources. If that’s the case, the question isn’t “What do you own?” it’s “What do you need this very second?”

I can imagine a two-sport library, but there’s one caution. As you hockey fans well know, there’s one thing that can stop the rapid change of lines: when the game itself stops. The NHL and its players spent much of 2012 embroiled in a battle over money, and as a result, the players lost more than half of the current season. The one real danger in a subscription model is that it could break down totally and publishers could turn to some completely different plan. Well, if that happens, then librarian-coaches will just have to change partners and dance—on the fly.

First, a tangent: anyone who has spent time grappling with the Common Core (CC) English Language Arts standards knows that they have significantly raised the stakes on text complexity. Books that, say, we once thought were a challenging choice for fifth graders are now considered appropriate for fourth graders.

Why has the bar been raised, even though, just a few years ago, No Child Left Behind focused on kids who read below the old, less demanding, grade-level standards?

A key reason is that the metrics for upper YA titles—the types of books that teens have been assigned as the ultimate high school challenge—are 200 Lexile points below what high school seniors will be facing the following year in college. If K–12 education is a fire truck ladder, then we’ve built it too short to reach the escape window. In order to make sure that students are prepared for college, we needed to add more rungs to the ladder.

CC increases the text complexity so much that by kids’ final year in high school there are, as far as I know, no YA nonfiction books that meet the new education guidelines. To remedy that situation, students must necessarily read adult books, primary sources, or academic books. Fine. So if that’s where we’re leading students, how do we get them there?

An adult history book assumes that the reader already knows—or can know, or should know—something about the topic. If, for instance, a writer talks about the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts in a biography of John Adams, he assumes that the reader has studied them in school or can quickly Google them. The author’s job is to give an engaging take on what the passage of those bills tell us about Adams, and how this fresh perspective helps us see Adam’s time, and perhaps our own, in a new light. Since the reader knows the basic information, the originality is in the author’s thinking and presentation, and a source note may simply list where he got the primary source.

YA and academic books, though, have different goals. Books for young readers don’t presume our audience already knows the story. Indeed, even as we’re presenting what we hope is an enticing view of either an unfamiliar event (such as the race to make the first atom bomb or the outbreak of an 18th-century Yellow Fever epidemic in Philadelphia), or a familiar one (like the Great Depression or the 1963 March on Washington), we need to make sure that our readers understand both the basics and our new take. We have to treat the information itself as potentially new to them. This puts those of us who write for young adults in the same place as an academic historian, since he or she is presenting original research that’s aimed at shifting how we view the past.

Thus we, like the academic historian, need to let our readers into the process: Where does our information come from? Are there other perspectives? Are our sources reliable? We can’t presume that our readers have the necessary background, so we need to provide them with it; that’s why our citations need to be annotated. We need to show kids how our claims, our knowledge, are cooked.

Authors who merely cite sources without discussing them are seeing YA history as using a story to pass along settled information. This is appealing to fiction fans, who enjoy the narrative flow of a nonfiction book (and are thrilled that it doesn’t resemble a textbook), but for whom the information is the medicine which the spoonful of narrative sugar makes palatable. Not being familiar with either the content or the way that historians construct knowledge, they don’t miss what they don’t know. Those who question, discuss, and compare their sources see YA history as using a story to acquaint readers with the process of how knowledge is created. This is at the heart of historical writing, but may be totally unfamiliar to fiction readers, who often enjoy speculating about character and motivation in novels, but may have never learned that the same kind of thinking must be applied to our understanding of the real world.

I think annotated citations are great even for kids in the youngest grades, because we want them to be pestering us, demanding that we explain “How do you know that?” But by the upper-middle grades and certainly by high school this is no longer a choice. Our books are always as much about the construction of knowledge as about the information itself. To put it a different way, our highest goal isn’t merely that history should read like a novel, but that it should be as much of a puzzle as a math problem and as open to interpretation as a poem.

“Well-written” in nonfiction necessarily means “well-considered.” History is, ultimately, an invitation to the reader to participate in the process of thinking about, and thus re-imagining, who we are and how we got that way. That is what college offers. We can only make the link by sharing our process of discovery with our younger readers.

Coda: Right now, a related debate is going on among prominent historians and history educators. Stanford’s Sam Wineburg recently wrote a marvelous critique of Howard Zinn’s work—featuring his poor use of sources, which was then criticized by NYU’s Robert Cohen. For my take on the debate, with links to the Wineburg essay, see http://nonfictionandthecommoncore.blogspot.com/2013_01_01_archive.html; and for Cohen’s critique, visit http://hnn.us/articles/when-assessing-zinn-listen-voices-teachers-and-students.

Here’s what Sarah had to say about page four of my book: “There are two paragraphs here, which begin with the sentence, ‘There are two ways to tell the story of America.’ Again I was pulled to an abrupt halt. Really? (I thought) There are two ways to tell the story of America? Two? Not three or six or twenty.’”

Obviously, I don’t agree, and I look forward to a lively discussion with the Flowers team at some future gathering. But I’m restating my point here not to wrangle over my book’s language, but rather to reflect on the recent presidential election and some of the post-election analysis and complaints.

As the New York Times reported, some Republican voters in, for example, Wyoming are discouraged by the election’s outcome. Those businesspeople see what they term “dependency” on the government as “unsustainable” and directly counter to what they’re certain is our nation’s can-do, self-reliant, and individualist core. Of course, it was precisely this split between the 47 percent of takers and, implicitly, the 53 percent of doers that Governor Romney spoke of in that captured video—a split echoed by Bill O’Reilly and many others after the election.

From the Colonial days, when Pennsylvania’s rich lands were called the “best poor-man’s country,” through Emerson’s canonical essay on self-reliance, through the generations of graduation speakers who have used his words as their guide and inspiration, America has stood as a land where an individual has a chance to make good. Our emphasis on the individual as an individual was in stark contrast to the rest of the world, where a nation or empire generally embraced an established religion. In those societies, one was defined as belonging to the prevailing faith or viewed as an outsider. There was also a set class system in which your expectations were defined by your birth—and a strong sense of national heritage in which to be English, or Chinese, or Zulu was defined by not being something else. Of course, this made it difficult to figure out what rights to grant minorities, such as Jews, Quakers, Uighurs (Muslim Chinese), Koreans in Japan, etc.

No wonder the Wyoming voters are angry and feel as if the America they know, love, and believe in is slipping away and joining the muck of the world that their ancestors left behind. But there’s one key flaw in that narrative of American history. When Congress first set rules for how an immigrant could be become a naturalized citizen, it faced a major dilemma. Should just anyone be allowed to come here and join the American experiment, including Jews who could not vote or hold office in England and Catholics who might be beholden to the Pope? In 1790, Congress decided that religion would not be a barrier. Indeed, any free white person was eligible for citizenship. (The rule was amended to include Africans after the Civil War—and thus specifically excluded Asians and later Hispanics; the law was not fully replaced until 1952.)

For some Americans, being an individual has always been trumped by being part of a group: African Americans, Native Americans, LGBT Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, Jewish, Catholic, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist Americans, and even female Americans have always been aware of their group identity—once considered a demerit, now often a source of pride. Here’s the second narrative of American history: no matter who you were as an individual, the shadow of your group defined how others perceived you, and it greatly influenced your prospects. If you identify with any of these groups, American history has only fractionally been a story of individual effort. Rather, it has always been a matter of collective profile.

In the recent election, members of precisely these same groups tended to side with President Obama, and all of the post-election demographic analysis has been about their rising power. One narrative of America’s history that emphasizes collective experience is edging past another that emphasizes that individuals are free to seek their own destinies. But there are, as I said at the beginning, two narratives of our past. Both are, in their own way, true. Indeed, it’s the weave, the intersection, of belief in the individual and the assumption that that individual is white and male, that’s our national story. Both of these stories, taken together, subvert and enhance one another and make up the real pageant of our past.

What a perfect Common Core topic: present your students with a cluster of resources, some that focus on America as the land of the individual and others that focus on our nation as the land of group prejudice and collective experience. Soon, I hope, your libraries will be alive with sound of the resulting questions, comments, and debates. I can hardly wait.