(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.

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.