The Education Invasion

When Arkansas signed on to the Common Core curriculum man- dates in 2010 — to be followed later by national tests to enforce them — Highfill joined the committee her school convened to decide how to put the mandates into place. Schools across the country created similar committees.

In the era of “education accountability,” curriculum mandates spell out the learning requirements that annual tests assess. The national Common Core tests measure only reading and math to fulfill the federal mandates, but Common Core actually asserts authority over the entire curriculum, since its English mandates also apply to “literacy in history/ social studies, science, and technical subjects. A series of grant competitions and executive rewrites of federal education law during the first year of the Obama presidency ensured that Common Core would determine far more than what teachers hand to children in the classroom. The administration required schools to use Common Core test results in evaluating, ranking, hiring, firing, and even redistributing teachers, and required states to use the results to judge and rank schools and even to take them over from local authorities.

Unlike most teachers, Highfill had paid attention to how Common Core became her boss. When she got a look at the mandates, she was dismayed at what they would do to the extraordinarily rich lessons she had been providing her students.

In language arts, Common Core explicitly requires schools to give “much greater attention to a specific category of informational text — literary nonfiction — than has been traditional.” A graph included in the standards document shows an increasing nonfiction intake through the school years: 50 percent in fourth grade, 55 percent in eighth grade, 70 percent in twelfth grade. This requirement alarmed Highfill, who had achieved great success with her students by feeding them a diet replete with poetry and short stories and classic novels.

“Where is the research that proves more nonfiction is better for students?” she asked. “What about inferencing skills that you only get with fiction and poetry? That was my whole issue: please, tell me where the research says this is better for kids.” Indeed, research indicates that students’ experience with high-quality fiction is a major predictor of their college success, while it finds nothing of the kind for nonfiction.