Recently, the Curriculum Insight Project was invited to testify before the DC Board of Education. The Board was concerned about the potential adoption of a middle school curriculum “that prioritizes shorter texts,” in the wake of parent outcry.
The panel’s title: “From Standards to Success: Evaluating ELA Curriculum in DC.”
Can you spot the dissonance?
Here’s what everyone knows but we sometimes forget: our ELA Standards aren’t prescriptive about the texts used in curriculum. The Common Core authors tried to signal that curriculum should be designed around grade level books, as I detailed for the DC Board, but the Standards don’t explicitly set expectations on the necessity of books in ELA. Sadly, the field isn’t good at reading between the lines.
Today, more than a decade into Common Core implementation, the majority of elementary schools are using curricula1 that lack books in “chapter book grades.”
Take Georgia, for example. Its Science of Reading reforms pushed Balanced Literacy curricula out of schools—but they pushed out books, too:
Nothing in the Standards was there to prevent this.
In fact, every single state with a state list endorses the use of book-free curricula today, via their state lists. As of this moment, at least one basal (Into Reading or Wonders) is on every state list, and usually multiple. Even in states with strong curriculum reform efforts, like Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Louisiana.
In light of these troubling developments, I was thrilled that the DC Board of Education was asking important questions about books in curriculum, and sharing their learnings.
Still, during the Q&A, I found myself blurting out something that felt like the real message of this moment: We’re in the Post-Standards Era. Everywhere you turn, the field is reckoning with the misunderstandings of the Standards Era, and the limits of the Standards.
Exhibit B was the testimony from Natalie Wexler, my fellow panelist in DC. Her statement revolved around the pervasive misperception that teachers are supposed to “teach to the standards,” which has led to weak instruction. Many educators have been sounding these notes2. This, too, is Post-Standards Reckoning.
The Standards for foundational skills were solid; Louisa Moats was the lead author of that portion of the Common Core, after all. But nothing in the Standard told teachers not to use cueing and running records. The Standards didn’t give a prescription for the most effective way to teach decoding skills, and today there’s a national discussion about the need to right-size phonics instruction.
The confusion about the nature of reading comprehension: one more example of Post-Standards Reckoning3.
And then of course there is EdReports, the philanthropically-funded effort to review curricula against the Standards, which didn’t even get that right4, and certainly didn’t evolve to aid the field with thorny Beyond-the-Standards questions.
Naming the Post-Standards Reckoning isn’t meant as a rejection of the Standards (not in ELA, anyway). They were better Standards than their predecessors. But the Standards had limitations: they articulated goalposts, but they didn’t articulate “what not to do” or “what to leave behind” for teachers. They weren’t prescriptive about the most effective teaching methods and content in curriculum5. They left important messages about the role of knowledge to “the Shifts,” and most of the field missed the memo.
Ultimately, we have learned a lot about the limitations of Standards, even good standards, to align the field around effective instruction.
And state leaders seem to be last to get the memo about these limitations and misunderstandings. So, we need to explain the problem in a way that state leaders can hear it.
In a few cases, we have seen states step up. Louisiana and Tennessee grasped the goals of the standards, and promoted use of knowledge-building curriculum, to fuel comprehension. Texas just mandated a book list, to force books back into ELA.
But I’m hoping we don’t “leave this one to the states,” and force every state to move these balls forward. This is the work of a new National Reading Panel, if you ask me6.
It’s also the work of the curriculum community, to articulate the Musts of a good curriculum—moving beyond the Standards (and also beyond the-Standards-plus-Science-of-Reading). Soon, we will release our first ELA curriculum guidance docs, to take our own crack at it.
Spoiler: “Your curriculum should incorporate whole books” is front and center.
In the meantime, here’s what I said in DC.
My testimony to the DC Board of Education
I’m pleased to be here to discuss best practices in English Language Arts curriculum selection.
I have only 5 minutes on this rich and important topic, so I have linked additional resources from my written testimony.
Understandably, your team is interested in selecting curriculum aligned to DC’s standards.
The standards were clear about the importance of texts. Each of the three Common Core “shifts” in ELA references texts, calling for students to “Practice regularly with complex text and its academic language” and to “Build knowledge through content-rich nonfiction.”
Lead author Sue Pimentel has called to place texts at the center of ELA instruction, and you will find liberal reference to “books” in Common Core guidance docs.
The Standards authors have also emphasized the research showing the importance of a large volume of reading to grow reading skills, largely by exposing students to broader vocabulary, and textual language.
However, the standards are not prescriptive about which texts students should read.
The standards give guidance for text complexity and the balance of fiction and nonfiction for each grade. But, in deference to local control norms, they left it to schools to choose the texts and topics of study.
We need to look at other evidence to consider the right balance of books versus passages in ELA.
This is an area of limited research, yet we do have studies making the case for whole books over passages.
Maryanne Wolf, the leading scholar on reading and the brain, has argued based on neuroscience research that the “deep reading” experience from books nurtures our capacity for sustained attention, and also for empathy and insight.
There are also studies in classroom settings.
In a British study of seventh grade students, teachers did a “fast reading” experiment, reading two challenging novels with students over 12 weeks.
With this fairly short intervention, researchers found that students gained 8.5 months of progress in reading comprehension, and weaker readers made 16 months worth of progress. Gains in student engagement were icing on the cake.
Researchers have also demonstrated that increasing sustained cognitive activity “markedly” increases cognitive endurance, a lesson we should apply to reading.
We can also look at field evidence.
Louisiana is a good state to reference for 8th grade reading. In an era of national decline, Louisiana’s eighth grade outcomes held up, with only a modest pandemic dip. Today, Louisiana has the second-best reading proficiency in the nation for economically disadvantaged eighth graders. And Louisiana’s signature reform was to bring curriculum designed around whole books into statewide use.
In England, which has been rising in the PISA rankings for 15 year olds, students in secondary grades consistently work around whole novels and plays, in alignment with national standards.
If we want students to build the reading stamina necessary for reading long works, it stands to reason that they should work with longer books in schools. Critically, there is no evidence that a diet of passages can develop students’ reading stamina as effectively as longer works.
Until we have research evidence proving the lack of harm from a diet of shorter texts, I would argue that the precautionary principle should apply in education, as it does in medicine: first, do no harm.
We would not tell runners to attempt to train for a marathon by doing only sprints, simply because “no research proves that it doesn’t work.” Similar common sense should prevail for longer-form reading.
Unfortunately, misunderstandings abound about the necessity of books in ELA curricula.
Some misinterpret the design of our assessments—both state assessments and popular progress-monitoring tools—to suggest that students grow their reading skills by practicing on short passages then answering comprehension questions. Yet there is no evidence for such a practice. In fact, as the Louisiana example demonstrates, state-scale gains are evident where schools consistently use book-rich materials.
Also, the major publishers in the US have normalized the use of passage-dominated programs, which are more profitable to develop and distribute than curricula with whole books.
But these programs, too, lack a research base, in spite of their popularity. They consistently expose students to less overall reading volume than book-rich programs—in conflict with the research showing that reading volume matters.
We need the body of evidence, not the quality of the marketing, to carry the day in our schools.
Many learning science experts have made the case for the value of books, not just passages, to improve reading skills and also fuel student engagement, cultural literacy, and discourse-rich classrooms. Doug Lemov, Natalie Wexler, and Carl Hendrick echo my points in their writing, and make valuable points of their own. I hope the DC Schools community will read the linked material.
Hear all prepared statements as well as the Q&A in this recording.
Hear From Team Books
As you hear at the close of my testimony, I’m not the only one making the case for whole books, thankfully.
Doug Lemov has done heroic work, from his column “Why Are Books Disappearing from English and Reading Classrooms?” to advocacy for the FASE reading approach, a popular practice for novel study.
He hosted an excellent podcast conversation with Dan Willingham and Stephen Sawchuck. Doug also joined Kyair Butts and Mike Austin for this AEI webinar.
Also, don’t miss:
Carl Hendrick: In Defence of the Whole: Why Students Should Read Books Not Just Extracts
Natalie Wexler: Beyond Excerpts: Teaching with Whole Books Boosts Comprehension and Engagement
Miah Daughtery: In Defense of the Humble Novel
Johanna Winant and Dan Sinykin, two college professors: The Case for Whole Books
I hope more people take up this cause.
Me, I’m becoming the meme:
The Last Word Goes to a Teacher
Closing with the words of a fourth grade teacher in Oregon:
I’ve been reading novels all year with my students, but it feels like a clandestine act of subterfuge. I’ve had to claw back minutes from a disjointed ELA curriculum that I’m supposed to be teaching with fidelity. But it’s worth it.
Your writing and others give me the inspiration, and evidence, to continue.
Today, my fourth grade class finished the complete novel “Out of My Mind” about a brilliant girl with cerebral palsy.
A boy, with emotion in his voice, reflected that he would, “Never look at someone with a disability in the same way ever again.” Others chimed in with similar sentiments. These reactions were only possible because we read the whole story.
In our basal, it was presented as an out of context excerpt.
When we finished Number the Stars, another young boy literally leapt out of his seat and loudly exclaimed, “That was the best book I’ve ever!”
Kids aren’t getting to experience full novels in school anymore and they’re HUNGRY for it.
It’s not just that disconnected ELA curriculum are ineffective, but they are robbing students of these experiences.
Amen.
My best estimate for the market share of the knowledge-building and book-rich curricula is 35-40% of the market. My best estimate for the Basals, all of which design instruction around passages, is 50-55%.
You’ll see this theme in Whitney Whealdon’s The Problem With Standards and Ben Zulauf’s critique of standards-based grading. Luke Morin notes an “obsession with ‘standards mastery’” that’s impeding good teaching.
Also arguably a critique of the National Reading Panel.
I’m republishing an important footnote from my piece on the flawed curriculum review landscape:
Some presume EdReports got its reviews against the Common Core Standards (CCSS) right, at least, and its issues lie elsewhere. This simply isn’t the case. And you don’t have to take it from me… the Standards authors haven’t hidden their differences with EdReports.
Since 2018, the Standards authors and architects have been publishing content to counter EdReports signals.
In 2018, Student Achievement Partners – an organization founded by the Standards authors – published “We’re Bullish on Bookworms” to show their support for Sharon Walpole’s program in the wake of its first (of two) flawed EdReports reviews.
In 2020, SAP published a widely-circulated report on Teachers College Reading Workshop Units of Study. EdReports had notoriously dragged its feet in reviewing TCRWP, and the SAP report seemed to push EdReports off the fence about Balanced Literacy curricula. The damning EdReports reviews of TCRWP and F&P soon followed.
In 2021, SAP published a report on issues with Wonders, after the McGraw-Hill program received a surprising all-green review. In subsequent webinars and articles, Sue Pimentel (lead author of the CCSS in ELA) and her fellow panelists made clear that the concerns were not unique to Wonders. They spoke of “basal bloat” to reflect the category-level nature of the issue.
In 2022, the Knowledge Matters Campaign published a list of curricula endorsed for their “knowledge-building” virtues. This list directly countered the EdReports assessments of the curriculum landscape. The Campaign is run by StandardsWork, an organization co-founded by Pimentel. The team behind the curriculum guidance included Pimentel, Meredith Liben, and David Liben—all authors or architects of the CCSS ELA and its related guidance documents.
Really, these EdReports issues have been hiding in plain sight for years, and the Standards authors led the field in signaling them… albeit subtly. If You Knew, You Knew.
To be fair, most Standards don’t do some of the things I am calling out as things the CCSS didn’t do. The point here isn’t CCSS ELA-shaming. It’s putting a fine point around the areas of confusion in the field, and pushing leaders/states/a new National Reading Panel to act on them.
No, I’m not calling for big, bold, new Standards. When you recognize the limitations of Standards-based reform, you look to other opportunities to advance the cause of better reading instruction.
That doesn’t mean states shouldn’t refine their standards. I’d love to see states bring whole book reading requirements into their Standards.
Still, the lesson of the Emily Hanford/Ed Tech era is that strong communications and well-marketed products moved the instructional needle in the last decade more than Standards. I’d say we should learn from that.
The standards adopted by my Mom’s Pennsylvania district in the 2000’s. Twenty-five books per year. I’m here for it!
Pushing education is an iterative process.
Clearly the standards should have been clearer about the need for and number of whole books needed. I imagine they just didn't consider anyone being stupid enough to to think that you didn't need lots of whole books. But here we are.
Now its clear the standards should be updated to make that recommendation explicit.
Fantastic. Love the analogy about sprinting and the critical note that students are *hungry* for this. A lot of students actually love learning when you give them meaningful materials and content.
When would you recommend including novels? Maybe one or two in second grade and build from there? Then of course I have the science perspective, lots (most) science text will remain as passages, but the MS Facebook science teachers groups have the occasional post about reading a novel/book (Hidden Figures is a popular one).
Lots of fiction will integrate easily with content but some worthy fictional books will not and that's okay too.