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.

Downed tree on the way to New Canaan Library, CT.

The day after Hurricane Sandy, my wife and I walked around our town. We’d been fortunate. Even though a fallen tree blocked our street, with every sort of power line beneath it, we had power and water and even TV and Internet. Our house was filled with neighbors charging their cell phones and craving hot coffee.

As we picked our way past trees and police tape and fallen wires, we saw home after home darkened, trees upended across yards, porches, and roofs. We finally reached my 92-year-old mother, who was trapped in her cold, powerless home, and my mother-in-law, who was even more imprisoned in an apartment with neither power nor running water. I’m sure you’ve all had similar experiences or have seen images such as these, and far worse.

The storm brought change. We all also saw President Obama and New Jersey Governor Christie work together—an image of what our nation could be and should be. And that brings me to the main point of this column. I believe that students in every school in America should address the following question: Are human actions changing our climate? And if they are, how? What can we do about it?

We’re living amidst wild nature. Is that due to climate change? What could be a more perfect Common Core question? What could be more central to our lives, and our students’ futures? To address these questions, kids need to use science, history, economics, ecology, biology, math, and social action—they can read dystopian novels such as Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker (Little, Brown, 2010) or M. T. Anderson’s Feed (Candlewick, 2002). These are questions on which experts disagree. That’s perfect. We’re not preaching to our students, we are engaging them in answering a question that’s as central to their generation as civil rights was to mine. Why should schools focus on anything else? Students will learn every required skill, but not as textbook abstractions, rather as the central issues facing us, all of us, right now and in the future.

I urge you, readers, make the case to your school. Or, if the teachers and administration are too pressed by tests to add a new unit, start a display in your library: Is human-induced climate change leading to catastrophic weather? Include books, print-outs from websites and magazines, and ads. (The New York Times has a fine set of learning resources about Sandy.) Then invite kids to add their notes, comments, and questions. Build it and they will come—and you’ll be the agent asking the key questions that must be asked… and answered.

There was a clear pattern to the week: the crowds increased each day—and by Thursday, there was a waiting list for people who wanted to get into our packed sessions. (We’re scheduling a new event for them.) As the crowds grew larger, the attendees’ backgrounds got more diverse. When Sue and I began offering these workshops in August, almost all of the people who came were school librarians, and that held true earlier in the week. But by Thursday, more than half of the guests were public librarians, teachers, supervisors, and administrators. Geography played some part in this: the more rural the area, the smaller the crowd and the higher percentage of school librarians; as we moved into larger cities, more people attended and they worked in a wider variety of jobs. Yet, even if location was one reason for the change in attendance, there was a clear theme in the questions, discussions, and overall mood that matters to all of us: CC is no longer coming someday, it’s here.

As each day went by, the discussions became ever more practical and pragmatic. People were no longer questioning whether CC was a good idea or what it is or where to find basic information about it. Instead, they were talking about implementation: What can I do to make sure that Common Core is part of my next lesson or unit? It was this real-world practicality that made the event seem worthwhile to teachers and administrators. Perhaps the single most exciting aspect of the week was seeing these school teams arrive together and work together—the idea that Common Core will only succeed when everyone in the building works together (and the local public library is an informed, integrated, resource) was no longer an aspiration, it was an unfolding reality.

Of course, with the practical comes frustration. Here are some of the kinds of questions we heard:

“How can I do all of the wonderful work on evidence, argument, point of view, and juxtaposed sources that CC wants, when my shelves are filled with books that all use the same layout and same huge color images, and say little about their sources?” Our answer is to use multimodal resources—another CC mandate—juxtapose an article from a magazine or database with a book on your shelves. Look carefully with your students, are the books really identical? Do they all have page numbers, tables of contents, and references to experts that were consulted? Do the experts or the institutions they work at have websites where you can get new information? Do their sites recommend a book on the same subject written for older readers to compare and contrast?

Another important question we heard was, “How can I use longer nonfiction books by excellent authors in my class when the books are only in hardcover and cost too much?” One strategy to meet this challenge is to divide up your class into “literature circles” in which students thoughtfully discuss a work. Twenty-five kids can be divided into five groups of five: one might use that costly hardcover, which the library may have or be able to get through interlibrary loan; another group can use a paperback; a third can use an ebook that’s available to multiple users; a fourth can work from a magazine and a related database; and a fifth group might even find a relevant graphic novel. With this approach, the cost problem has been transformed into a differentiated learning opportunity. Of course, this means the teacher has to work closely with her librarian to select resources that fit together.

And then there was this dilemma: “Having a display on ghosts, are they real?, would be great, but I have too many parents in my community who would protest. I pick my battles and that is one I don’t want.” That isn’t a Common Core question—it’s an issue for how you run your library. But it’s true that in opening the door to evidence, argument, and point of view, Common Core will bring more controversial questions out in the open. The issue is no longer about giving one novel to one child, it’s about showing students the many ways in which library resources look at issues, including everything from global warming and fracking to animal testing and using instant replay at Major League Baseball games. Some parents are likely to object when they see a view they dislike on display. Where, I would respond, do you want your children to see these debates, on the Internet or in an environment where adults help them recognize different points of view and evaluate their arguments?

And finally, here’s another question that many in our audience grapple with: “I’m a public librarian and teachers come here, hand me a list of books that they say is Common Core–approved, and are mad when I can’t find them. Indeed, many are out of print.” That list is the infamous Appendix B to the Common Core English language Arts Standards. As the list clearly states, these books are exemplars, not selections (for more on this topic, see “The Problem with Common Core’s ‘Appendix B,’”). Push back by pointing out that nonfiction, in all areas, can’t be frozen in 2009. Instead, check out recent selections by the National Council for Teachers of English’s Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children, the National Council for the Social Studies and the Children’s Book Council Carter G. Woodson Book Awards, the National Science Teachers Association and the Children’s Book Council’s Outstanding Science Trade Books for Students K–12, the Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal, the Association for Library Service to Children’s Notable Children’s Books, and the Young Adult Library Services Association’s Award for Nonfiction for Young Adults. See if any of their award-winning books can meet the same needs.

Each of the above questions reflects real problems that aren’t easy to solve. But that’s what is so wonderful about them: they arise because Common Core is real, it’s here, it’s happening, and we’re learning, together, how to make it work.

Buffalo is a city whose school system faces real challenges, including a high school graduation rate that it says hovers around 50 percent—a figure some see as artificially inflated, since the city has several nationally-ranked public high schools where everyone graduates and goes on to a good college. Remove those schools and the citywide graduation rate would dip closer to 20 percent. In that environment, exacerbated by tight budgets and the Damoclean sword of ever-evolving high-stakes assessments of educators, school librarians face some daunting challenges. And yet, it was right there, while speaking with some of the liveliest, most engaged and creative librarians I’ve ever met, that I learned a value lesson about the CC and school librarians that speaks to everyone in this profession.

Michael Cambria, the supervisor of libraries and director of the Buffalo School Library System, was in the room as Sue and I kept going over what the CC’s ELA standards ask of students, and thus of teachers and librarians: developing skills in critical reading, reading as an active process of questioning evidence, looking for sources, comparing and contrasting texts, and identifying and juxtaposing points of view. Mike essentially said, Look, teachers are under their own guns to cover content. Even though the CC standards emphasize depth over breadth and close reading over broad coverage, the reality for many teachers now is still dealing with enough content that may be on end-of-the-year exams to help their students jump through those hoops. That means it’s the librarian, and indeed only the librarian, who can teach students about the process that Dr. Carol Kulthau and my colleagues at the Rutgers Center for International Scholarship in School Libraries calls “guided inquiry.”

The library must become the place where students encounter, experience, and try out all of those critical reading skills that CC requires. For example, when a teacher is doing a unit on the rainforest, the old model was for the helpful librarian to clean out her Dewey 570 shelves, put the books on a cart, and wait for students to grab copies to write their reports. Nice, helpful, fine. But an aide could just have easily done that, and there’s an administrator somewhere who’s eager to arrive at precisely the same conclusion.

Instead, let’s say the librarian had made a display that showed how various books treat the rainforest differently, how one title uses this sort of argument and another that, how this book cites sources and that one doesn’t, how this recent article gives a logger’s take on the rainforest and that one presents a native person’s (or an ecology activist’s), then the librarian is suddenly invaluable and irreplaceable. She’s opened students’ eyes by using the materials she has on her shelves, in her databases, and at her downloading fingertips. The teacher may need students to answer, identify, and define questions; but the librarian models precisely the inquiry skills that CC emphasizes. And now the librarian can make the perfect case to make to her administrator: I’m doing what CC demands; I’m doing what most teachers aren’t able to do.

Sue adds this, from her insider’s perspective: “Another issue faced in Buffalo and many school libraries around the country is the fact that you are asked to cover more than one library every week. You only get to see these kids once every six days or twice a month in many cases. So what do you do? You do the same thing we just talked about, but on a much smaller scale. And you repeat it for a longer period of time. Running from one library to the other and you get there five minutes before the class arrives. Grab four books about any animal, say, penguins or whales. Present the four books to the group: flip through and show them the index, the table of contents, the glossary, the dedication, the source notes, the bibliography, the timeline, and so on. Talk to your students; ask them which book they liked best (every child sees things differently and has an opinion) and have them share their insights. Then, turn the kids loose in the library on a treasure hunt to find a book or books to take out and explore with those textual elements in mind. As you check out each child’s book in the hurried last 10 minutes of class—quickly as they line up to go—ask each child to share with their neighbor what they found in their book. It’ll reinforce your lesson as the children take ownership of their books and the experience will help build their critical reading skills. Remember, continue to repeat and repeat this lesson. Even if you are limited to short visits, you can be a powerful actor teaching and reinforcing critical reading skills.”

School librarians, your skills and knowledge of books and readers, make you the priestesses of process, the oracles of creative reading, the apostles of inquiry. Embrace that role and advertise it to your school community. This is the door that CC has opened for you.

Replica of first transistor invented in Bell Labs in 1947.

By a lucky coincidence, I happen to be reading a set of books that looks at the same moment in history from three different angles. Taken together, the three titles offer a more comprehensive picture of a time of invention and discovery than we’d typically get from an individual book: one title focuses on a remarkable genius; another on a breakthrough invention; and the third title, which explores a transforming theory, is really best seen as a moment in which circumstance, individuals, and technology converge to make change possible. The genius, the invention, and the theory are no less crucial, no less thrilling, but seen in three-dimensions as part of a moment in time, they give us a broader sense of why they came along when they did—which also can help us to understand the here and now.

This particular column, then, offers both a bit of history and hopeful speculation about the present. The history? My men’s nonfiction reading group is tackling Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (Penguin, 2012), an engaging and clear history of the Bell Labs. On my own, I’ve been working my way through George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (Pantheon, 2012), a fascinating though rather overwritten history of Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study. The two titles overlap in tracing the key developments of the theory, inventions, and designs that created computers and ultimately led to the digital revolution—the entire tweeting, networked, world that we currently live in.

Marching in the two books through the 1940s—a decade that saw advances in radar, cryptography, and on calculating the impacts of the A and then H bombs; the invention of the transistor, which would replace vacuum tubes in computers; and the insights of Bell Lab’s Claude Shannon, who, seemingly out of nowhere, mapped out information theory and thus the entire concept of bits flowing through channels (bits that could be text, sound, image, or you aunt Matilda’s famous apple pie recipe)—for the first time, I understood how today’s digital world came about. Indeed, Bill Gates has said that if he could travel back in time, the first place he’d visit would be the Bell Labs in 1947—in the midst of this moment when ideas that were purely theoretical in the ’30s became the machines, the first real computers, of the late ’40s. The two books beautifully capture how, through applied science, the most advanced and abstract ideas eventually became the physical tools we all use.

Sitting atop the Gertner and Dyson books on my pile is Mark Peterson’s Galileo’s Muse: Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts (Harvard University Press, 2011), an intellectually stimulating though certainly academic book that argues that in Europe between the time of the Greeks and the 16th century, math, and in particular, geometry, had become an abstraction, a part of theology (think of the world of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” [Knopf] trilogy). Peterson demonstrates that through poetry (Dante’s vision of heaven); music (polyphony); art (perspective); science (astronomy); and architecture (I haven’t read that part yet), geometry once again became a tool for measuring and understanding the physical world. Just as in the 1940s, technology, funding, need, and brilliance converged to create the digital world, in the 1500s and 1600s, art and science merged through math to fundamentally shift how people in the West created, built, invented, and, indeed, thought.

What’s possible today? What does the overlap of our needs and resources give us the chance to accomplish that was obscure, or even invisible, just a decade ago? The grand turning of the academic wheel toward nonfiction, evidence, and argument, which is central to our nation’s new Common Core standards, is, at its best, like the applied science of the 1940s and the practical geometry of the Renaissance. It’s not that we turn K–12 education into vocational training, nor do we neglect ideas, psychology, philosophy, or literary subtly. But we bring into schools the creative friction with the demands of society, which has proven so fruitful in the past. You might say we’re creating applied education—so that we can answer that frustrated student who asks, “Why do I need to know this?” Indeed, we are building an elaborate educational structure to respond to precisely that question. And there’s more.

As I wrote in my last column, our shift to the Common Core is being matched by related shifts in other countries (such as Barcelona), where the focus is less on national history and experience and more on global connections and innovation. I ask all of you, why do fourth graders study their state’s history? How is that in any way meaningful? Nowadays, parents work anywhere and everywhere, so there’s a good chance those fourth graders will move on themselves. Why do we repeat American history, and treat that history as if it was about events within our borders, and not one that always involved people, ideas, and events throughout the globe? (I can’t wait to read Professor P. J. Marshall’s new book, Remaking the British Atlantic, The United States and the British Empire After American Independence [Oxford University Press, 2012], which claims we get U.S. history wrong by not recognizing how entangled in the world of British empire, stretching as far as India, we remained long after the Revolution). Why do we look at websites to learn about cities and sites overseas, instead of asking students there to exchange photo and video essays with our kids?

Our moment of convergence may be that as we reexamine how we teach, as we build common goals across states so that we can share best practices, as we connect the tasks in our classrooms with students’ future needs, as global connections become expected, not unusual, we create linked educational experiences for young people everywhere. Who knows what geniuses, inventions, and ideas might arise from that?

Las Ramblas in Barcelona, Spain. Photo by Oh-Barcelona.com

I’m writing this piece from Barcelona, an ocean away from American public education and our Common Core (CC) standards. And yet all around me, I see connections rather than differences.

Barcelona was built as a Roman walled city, and added more walls down through much of the 1800s. Throughout those 1,800 years, walls defined and protected the city. But in the late-19th century, the walls were torn down and a new city began to spring up—a city where the fortunes that were made in the textile mills sponsored artists such as Antoni Gaudi, whose buildings are a marvel to this very day. And now Barcelona is almost too open to the world: it’s become the fourth most-visited city in Europe, trailing only London, Rome, and Paris. Being here in August, when many locals leave on vacation, exaggerates the presence of tourists, but walking down Las Ramblas—the vast, outdoor pedestrian mall—you’re mobbed by everyone from everywhere—and that’s only part of the internationalization that’s happened.

What was it—40 years ago?—when the formerly Italian, Greek, and Jewish fruit stands and delis in New York City were all run by Koreans? Then 20 years ago, the Koreans began to hire Mexicans, and now some Indians have joined them. Here in Barcelona, these businesses are run by South Asians—New York is the world and the world is New York. Opening out to the world has lead Barcelona in two opposite and familiar directions. Those who could join the global bandwagon did very well for a while, less so now that Spain is struggling economically, but they’re still doing OK. Those who were less fortunate were left behind and they’ve become poorer and poorer. The city veers between being open-minded on the one hand, and inward-turning and Catalan nationalist on the other.

Thinking of how to prepare for the future, the city has decided to focus K–12 education on training and inspiring students to become innovators, creating with an eye on the whole world. In other words, Barcelona faces the same challenges and offers the same types of solutions we do. We, too, are wide open to the world, with a gap between those for whom this is an opportunity and those for whom it is a growing threat. We, too, see both intermarriage and narrow nationalism growing.

We, too, are trying to prepare our young people to become problem solvers—that’s the essence of CC. My vision is that our students should be working digitally with their peers here in Spain—and also with those in Amsterdam, Paris, London, Delhi, Tel Aviv, and beyond. If we face the same international moment, let’s meet it as an international educational opportunity. Breaking down the walls of our schools may bring us our own new global Gaudi.

Photo by Jupiterimages

We always warn kids not to “pile on”—adding an extra shove when another kid is already down. But in this case, I have to add my voice to Melissa Jacobs-Israel’s. Melissa has expressed her frustration with the Common Core’s infamous Appendix B: Text Exemplars and Performance Tasks, and I couldn’t agree more.Sadly, Appendix B isn’t down.

In fact, a big problem is that it’s standing all too tall. I’ve just heard that Massachusetts—the state that perennially leads the education pack—has endorsed it. As my wife recently pointed out to me, though, I’m a fixer: if something is wrong, I always assume there’s a way to correct it. So this column is neither a complaint nor a “me too,” but a proposed solution.

First the problem: friends—and that includes librarians, teachers, administrators, and publishers—telling schools to use Appendix B as a buying guide makes no sense. Student Achievement Partners, a New York–based nonprofit group, first promulgated the Common Core (CC) State Standards in 2010. Of necessity, the books the CC development team evaluated were from 2009 or (much) earlier. The CC team knew that, which explains why Appendix B offers not “must-have” lists but “exemplars.” These are the kinds of books the CC team of teachers and librarians found useful for supporting CC goals. They’re listed for your reference as examples.

Like many, I was surprised by the list: not merely the dated books for grades K–6, but the almost total absence of titles written for middle school and high school readers. As I said, I’m a fixer. So I found out who was responsible for crafting the list—Steve DelVecchio a bright former school librarian who now teaches in the library school at the University of Washington. Steve explained that a team of teachers tried out books in their classrooms (though they couldn’t get all of the titles they wanted) and then reported back on those that they found worked well to support the CC.

That’s fine as a process, but not as a guide: we have no access to what the teachers said, why they favored one book over another, which books they wanted and couldn’t get publishers to give them, or how they used them. So Appendix B is precisely the opposite of what it claims to be—the books (plus, 6 to 12 primary documents) are not “exemplars” because we have absolutely no way to know what they “exemplify.” Even an editor-friend-of-mine who was pleased to see books she had worked on appear on the list was totally baffled. Why those particular books by a certain author, when there are 20 others by the same writer in the same format that are not on the list? If the list stated what was valuable in that author and that format, libraries would know to select which of the 20 suited them, rather than dutifully purchasing the two that happened to be on the list. We can all say it in chorus, “That makes no sense.”

Enough. Let’s move on to solutions. One of the great values of CC is that librarians and teachers in 46 states will face similar challenges and can share their solutions. Sue Bartle, the school library system director for New York’s Erie 2-Chautauqua-Cattaraugus BOCES, has started a new list of CC-enhancing exemplars, which better reflect what’s available in our library collections. These suggestions include annotations and information on why they are considered exemplars. It’s an open list, and everyone is welcome to add his or her suggestions and comments to it. Let’s build this list together, discuss it together, and craft it together to serve all of us as we implement the CC. Sue and I will have more to say about it in a feature we’re writing for SLJ.

Common Core tasks us to teach “critical reading” to young people, so that they are always questioning where information comes from and why the author reached his or her conclusions. We should be the same in our professional reading. Don’t accept a list because it exists: ask why, and then offer your own best insights. Help us build a “Better B” through our shared experience and intelligence, with all of our evaluation cards on the table. Appendix B will have served its purpose if it prompts us to be engaged readers sharing information we gather and stand by on our own. That’s the kind of example we need to set.

That sounds nice, but fairly innocuous. It’s what we tell our students to do with research assignments—build on what you know, and when you’re uncertain, look for more evidence while acknowledging your sources and the limits of your knowledge. But in this case, the author is talking about the venerable Bede, a monk and historian who lived in the seventh and eighth centuries. And, as the essay goes on to say, “he is sure about the all-embracing character of the biblical story and about living in the last days of the world.” For Bede, the bible is unquestionably true—it’s a factual account of historical actions by people he needs to track down. Now consider us and our students: What are the unquestioned truths of their lives, which they begin with, before they start their research?

See the problem? In teaching students how to be historians, we need to train them to question their own assumptions as well as the topics they’re investigating. Yes, like Bede, they need to look for evidence in areas they are unsure of. But unlike Bede, they also need to question what they have not previously questioned: the assumptions behind what they are “sure” is true.

For example, is it really true that a young person who’s the same age and gender but lives in another time and place is “just like me”? Is it true that a slave holder who claims to be fighting for democracy is a hypocrite? Is it true that their idea of “normal” is normative throughout this country, throughout the world? The challenge of being a historian is that you have to keep examining yourself as well as your evidence—where are you biased, where do you jump to conclusions, where do you believe ideas because they match your preconceptions, where does “rooting” for someone you like or a cause you support cause you to blur, ignore, or dismiss counterevidence?

Science uses the principle of the repeatable experiment as one test. If I claim doing X under Y conditions will bring Z result, you can test that by following the same steps and comparing the answers. By changing variables and observing outcomes we narrow the possible causes. But with history, that’s harder to do. The events are in the past, so we can’t perform tests on them. But we can do something similar by being fair and open. So long as the next guy can see exactly how I arrived at a particular judgment, he can check my sources. OK, that’s fine for sources, but what about assumptions? What makes me believe someone a thousand years ago would “obviously” have thought this, felt that, or been ready to fight for something else?

Rowan Williams’s essay on Bede explores how the monk poured the details he had gathered about British history into the biblical narrative he was certain was true. And that meant he told a story of a chosen people living out the example of the Jews, only this time it was the Christians on their island in the far north who carried that sacred mission, against their enemies—the parallel to the Philistines who opposed the biblical Jews. Of course, it’s exactly that narrative that the Puritans brought with them to North America, and has remained part of our own national mythology—sometimes in explicitly Christian terms, sometimes in a more generalized image of the United States as the leader of the Free World, the standard-bearer of Democracy bringing the benefits of freedom to the entire planet.

The United States did bring a new form of democracy to the world; we have indeed fought wars against dictators and tyrants. But does that make us exceptional? Different? Are we sure of that? Are we as sure of our truths as Bede was of his biblical truth? This is how history can help us—by holding up an unsparing mirror. What others didn’t see in themselves, we have the chance to observe in ourselves—that’s their gift to us. But we have to remember to teach our students to look at themselves as they look back on former times—that’s the true glory of history.

Photo by arbyreed

What binds us together as a nation? What do we hold in common? What are the invisible linkages of law, custom, trust—the “single garment of destiny,” as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., called it— which we weave with the intertwining threads of our lives?

I am prompted to think and write about this because of the shootings in Colorado and the inevitable swirl of Op-Ed and discussions about guns. I applaud Mayor Bloomberg for making gun laws an issue, but I suggest we here turn our attention from the political fray of specific legislation to a central question about citizenship. One of the key goals of K-12 education is to prepare future citizens. As a society, we have attenuated our sense of what it means to be bonded with other citizens, and the clashes over gun laws illustrate that. Every person who demands his or her gun for protection (hunting is a different matter) is saying that safety comes from what he or she does as an individual, not from the laws and customs of our shared society.

Social Studies is that strand in our schools that is supposed to teach young people about citizenship. What happened to Social Studies? In the dark days of NCLB, testing came to rule: literacy, math—these could be tested, and thus “annual yearly progress” assessed. The Social Studies community was so divided it could not establish standards to test. Thus, there were fewer and fewer Social Studies assessments. Thus the subjects meant less and less to how schools, and administrators and teachers, were evaluated. The decline reached its nadir a couple of years ago when the state of Nevada stopped training Social Studies teachers in its state colleges, since there was so little demand for them. The experts could not agree on which history and what values to teach, so there were no tests, so the schools ignored the subject—cutting it down, in some cases, to one hour a week in elementary school.

That is the story of one discipline and perhaps of interest mainly to those of us who value it. But now let us examine it within the national narrative: increasingly we focus on what we each individually can get. Self-reliance is as American as apple pie. There is nothing new in the idea that I want to make as much money, save as much in taxes, give my children as many advantages as I can. But that race to “get my pile” is always in some conflict with my role as a citizen. In school we try to equip students to do as well as they can in the world. We are also socializing them to become citizens—not just in the minimal sense of their obligations, but in the broader sense of being mutual members engaged in a common project, a common effort, to build a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

Media and money make government feel as far off as, well, Reality TV. Most young people think, correctly, that only really rich or famous people get on TV, or can run for office. Ours is a nation so big that governing feels very removed for most adults, and even more so for young people. But democracy is not just about elections and laws—it is about civic duty, it is about the society the people build and maintain together; about relying on one another. The fact that we could edge Social Studies further, and further, and further out of our schools shows what we value: pumping up each individual student for his or her race to somewhere. What will protect those monads, those units of individualism, on their life journeys?

Every man his own castle, every woman standing her ground, every American armed and dangerous. That is what we build when we forget that being part of a society is not just living by a set of rules that we grudgingly obey, but instead what Dr. King called the “inescapable network of mutuality.” Which “network” do we focus on in our schools—the digital land of clicks and downloads, or the human one of shared responsibility?

Susan Campbell Bartoletti at ALA Annual 2012

One of the presentations that I had a chance to participate in at the American Library Association’s annual conference, in Anaheim, in June, featured some unexpected drama. On Sunday afternoon, Dr. Joe Sutcliff Sanders, Nina Lindsey, Jonathan Hunt, and authors Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Marina Budhos, and I were considering whether there’s a “new nonfiction,” if that even matters, and what kinds of nonfiction best serve today’s young readers.

Just as Jonathan (whom many know from SLJ‘s “Heavy Medal” blog that he and Nina write, or from his Horn Book reviews) was swinging into his opening talk, a fire alarm sounded. We were told that this was indeed a real emergency—not a test, not a drill—and we needed to evacuate the building immediately. Thousands of librarians and other attendees filed out of the conference center and onto the plaza, which was soon abuzz with all sorts of rumors: a popcorn machine had gone awry, sending up smoke and flames, or a small earthquake had rumbled through nearby L.A. and set off the alarm. I never did find out the real story, but we soon got the all-clear signal—and when we had settled back into our seats, Jonathan offered an observation that all of us need to think about.

Although what he pointed out should be obvious to every grown-up who spends time with kids in libraries, I’d never heard it expressed so well: there are certain kinds of nonfiction that are very popular with young readers, said Jonathan, everything from books of records with weird and wacky facts to titles about the dead, the fierce, and the gross. And those of us who pay attention to starred book reviews and literary awards also know that we adults often praise nonfiction that fosters inquiry, critical thinking, and intellectual discovery. But, Jonathan asked, how do we bring young readers from stage one NF (records and such) to stage three (inquiry and critical thinking).

The solution: we need a nonfiction book that’s a “gateway drug” for kids-one that sets the nonfiction addiction in motion, that inspires the student who knew he loved books of records to take one more step into narrative nonfiction, so that by, say, late middle school or early high school, he’s seeking out more challenging texts.

Casting about for some examples of that, Jonathan praised last year’s big nonfiction book, Steve Sheinkin’s The Notorious Benedict Arnold (Flash Point, 2010). In his biography, Sheinkin tells a gripping story, reminiscent of the Landmark biographies that I loved reading as a child. He’s not questioning history or sources or conflicting interpretations-instead, Sheinkin just wants you to get caught up in Arnold’s dramatic life and keep turning those pages. (As one audience member pointed out, young readers who liked “biggest, highest, furthest” last year may well find heart-stopping true-life action a natural next step with Jennifer Armstrong’s Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World [Crown, 1998].) And yet, I think there’s a bigger issue lurking in the dilemma that Jonathan so perceptively brought to our attention.

Jonathan was talking about the “pull” of nonfiction books-which title, which kind of narrative, will pull readers in, will get them demanding one more book and signing up for holds on it. In another astute observation, Jonathan said that the popularity of nonfiction suffers because it doesn’t tend to be part of a series, like “Harry Potter” or another popular fantasy series that kids are crazy about. The lack of nonfiction series also limits the canvas for nonfiction authors. We have the odd case where fantasy writers—from J. R. R. Tolkien to Susan Cooper to Suzanne Collins—take real conflicts (such as World War II and Iraq) and “translate” them into novels that are hundreds of pages long and feature richly imagined worlds replete with their own languages and maps.

On the other hand, nonfiction writers, who are describing events that took place in the real world, are limited to a 64- to 96-page color-illustrated war book filled with sidebars. The very details of armament, strategy, and combat, which the record-book-obsessed reader might crave as his next step “up” into tackling longer nonfiction, just doesn’t fit into the formats available to today’s nonfiction writers. Although, if we’re really honest, this isn’t just a matter of format-East Coast trade book houses aren’t eager to give armament, strategy, and combat in the real world the kind of attention that many youngster’s crave—which is why many of the books on those topics come from a cluster of series publishers in Minnesota.

Yes, we need nonfiction series and page-turning action. But I think “pull” is only part of the problem. There’s a larger issue here. While many publishers ask authors whether a potential book fits the curriculum or pay for guides and other materials to interest teachers in using their nonfiction, this actually makes no sense. Since most nonfiction is only published in hardcover, teachers simply can’t afford to use it. And that gets to my concern: “push.” Teachers have always read entire novels with their classes, and in that way, they’ve taught students how to find out and appreciate more about the book’s characters, settings, plots, points of view, use of language, etc. While some kids may resent having fiction “picked apart,” I suspect that this process also shows them what a novel can do-what treasures it holds. The older nonfiction that encourages critical thinking is precisely the kind of book that teachers can share with their classes-opening students’ eyes to what nonfiction can do.

Indeed, professors Myra Zarnowski and Susan Turkel have shown how inspiring it is for fifth graders to discover this “literature of inquiry” when every student has a book and their teacher leads them through it (Journal of Children’s Literature 36 (1) pp 56-64; JCL 38 (1) pp. 28-34). If more teachers created this “push” into nonfiction, I suspect it would create a bridge-just as a page-turning nonfiction series would create more of a demand. The meeting place of push and pull is the gateway that Jonathan saw flickering in the distance.

In the late ’60s, Bob Dylan wrote a song called “I Pity the Poor Immigrant,” which channeled our nation’s dreams and images. And indeed, if you do some free associating with the word “immigrant,” you might conjure up some black-and-white images of “huddled masses” in steerage on the way to Ellis Island, or “coffin ships” creaking slowly across the Atlantic from famine-ravaged Ireland, or even African captives forced to endure the deadly Middle Passage. Or you might think of labor leader Cesar Chavez and the travails of migrant Mexicans workers in the late-20th century, or more recently, of the spate of laws and heated rhetoric that have been directed at undocumented Hispanic immigrants.

Whether you’re looking at the past or present, you’re probably picturing an immigrant as a person on the margin, in danger, in need of sympathy. Yet, as a new Pew Research Center study, “The Rise of Asian Americans,” points out, that image of an immigrant couldn’t be further from the truth—and thus, from the young people we meet in today’s libraries and schools. In fact, based on the latest research, you might say that Asian immigrant families should pity us poor Americans.

The survey begins this way: “Asian Americans are the highest-income, best-educated, and fastest-growing racial group in the United States.” In terms of status and accomplishment, it’s the Asians who are leading the way. And, as you get deeper into the report, you’ll notice that strong, often intergenerational, Asian American families have reason to pity, or at least question, their often isolated American peers who aren’t as close to their families. Do Asian American families ever have squabbles and fights? Of course. Are there non-Asian families that are tightly knit? Certainly. Are there future generations of Asians who’ll value individualism more than family bonds? Perhaps.

But think of how much of children’s and teen literature assumes that kids’ worlds are separate from their family’s—or that adolescents need to break free of their adult-run families to develop their own individual personalities. What if those stories no longer match the experience of the largest and fastest-growing segment of new Americans? Maybe we need a literature of “aunties”—those women who are close enough to be busybody relatives, but perhaps aren’t related at all, which is so characteristic of many South Asian families.

The other day we saw an Indian wedding party at a nearby park, and my Indian-looking older son—in scruffy clothes, dressed for a day of biking—caught sight of a stretch limo bringing the bride. An auntie noticed him out of the corner of her eye and sternly criticized not merely my son, but his parents. “Who dressed you?” she demanded. What terrible parent or sister would let a boy appear in rags at a wedding? Of course, it was her place to monitor a boy she’d never seen before—that’s just what aunties do.

It’s no surprise that the path to success for many Asian Americans is through education-and some young immigrants even arrive here with educational advantages: speaking English and with parents with advanced degrees. What does school mean to them and their families? What support are they likely to receive at home? How does the tone of a class and a school change as their parents’ expectations of the school rise?

The recent Pew report is a rich and subtle study that recognizes the obvious: there are many distinct Asian countries and cultures and, thus, many different Asian American experiences. For example, the median family income of Americans of Korean and Vietnamese descent is nearly $40,000 a year lower than that of Indian Americans. But there are trends that run through many Asian American communities, including a focus on education and family, and a general sense that America offers them a high degree of political freedom-there’s an optimism about their prospects and this nation. While the expanding Asian American population is more Christian than any other faith, issues such as same-sex marriage or abortion don’t typically spark controversy. And while this varies by country of origin, many Asian Americans are “marrying out”-adding to the intermarried and interracial character of our nation’s 21st-century population.

Caution: this picture of our largest immigrant sector varies from the last largest group, Hispanics, and very likely will differ from whoever comes next. The subtext of this story is that in this economic downturn, a variety of forces have worked against Hispanics (such as some now feel less inclined to come the U.S., and some of our citizens are increasingly resistant to having Hispanics here). Who knows what the next turn of the wheel of global economics and politics will bring to our shores?

Still, in order to provide today’s children and teens with the right materials, we need to have a clear picture of who they’re likely to be. And for now, that face is increasingly Asian.

What can you expect to find here? I’ll be addressing some of the same subjects I blogged about: Common Core (CC); nonfiction in general; schools; timely topics and how they relate to how we write, edit, and judge books for K-12 students; and, of course, the digital world. What’s the difference? A column gives me time to do some more cooking, and space to say more.

Let’s start with a book recommendation: everyone who’s grappling with the Common Core should grab a copy of John Kendall’s short and admirably clear Understanding Common Core State Standards. It’s published by ASCD, the curriculum development association, so it’s not the kind of Common Core ABCs you’ll find elsewhere. Instead, Kendall gives us the underlying logic behind the CC—why we need it, how it’s different from previous standards—based education guidelines, what it aims to do, and how. The book is like a blueprint showing a house’s architectural structure. (You can turn elsewhere for the appliances, furniture, and decorations. We’re in the midst of remodeling our kitchen, so these images come quickly to mind.)

Kendall points out that the Ohio Department of Education is developing a “hybrid CTE” (career and technical education) plan in which CC standards are woven in with what used to be called vocational education. As a father who recently watched his 11-year-old son build a bookshelf—and thus apply fractions, ratios, and measurements for the first time in the physical world—the idea of weaving together math, nonfiction, research, and physical work to produce a concrete result strikes me as brilliant.

I’ll give you the scoop on other noteworthy CC resources here as I come across them.

I’m also going to use this space to try something new. As an author, I’ve long been frustrated that nonfiction books for young readers receive scant notice, rather than more substantial reviews and essays. Like all books for young readers, the initial reviews in publications such as SLJ are constrained by word count and space, and so they’re essentially buying guides. And although critics and reviewers may occasionally write extended thoughts on picture books or novels, nonfiction almost never gets that kind of deep consideration. So I’m going to do that here for some classic texts, important books, and new ones. My essays and reflections won’t be buying guides—their purpose isn’t to grant or withhold a star. Rather, I want to think about what the author/illustrator/designer of a nonfiction book has attempted to do, and look at how they did it. That means that I may juxtapose two treatments of the same subject from different eras.

My goal is to explore and examine, not to provide you with another collection-development tool. I hope this deeper consideration—and your comments, disagreements, agreements, and the debates that are bound to follow—will be useful in thinking about nonfiction in general. To kick off that strand of this column, I’ll soon be writing an essay on Hendrik Van Loon’s 1921 The Story of Mankind, the first book to win the Newbery.

So friends, expect to see me here at least a couple of times a month, and remember, always “consider the source.”