DAVID COLEMAN SILVER FOOT MARCH 11

DAVID COLEMAN WAS BORN WITH A SILVER FOOT IN HIS MOUTH Patrick J. Finn David Coleman, the current president of the College Board and the force behind the Common Core State Standards, grew up in downtown Manhattan as the son of a psychiatrist and a college president. He attended Stuyvesant, a select New York City public high school where only three percent of students who apply are admitted. He earned a bachelors degree in philosophy at Yale, a bachelors in English literature at Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar) and a masters in ancient philosophy at Cambridge. In a 2013 address to an International Reading Association meeting, Coleman stated that he felt like a piata, he had been so battered in recent months by English language arts experts (that is teachers of reading of and teachers English language arts and their professional associations). He referred several times to the intemperate language he had used (the topic of Last week's Monday Morning Essay) that may have been the source of some of the tension. According to a March 2014, New York Times article this intemperate language, cemented his reputation among some as both insensitive and radical, the sort of self-righteous know-it-all who claimed to see something no one else did. The tension erupted when Coleman and Susan Pimental published a paper entitled Publishers Criteria for Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts and Literacy It is highly significant that this paper is directed to the publishing industry (Education/Corporation Complex), which I believe is the intended benefactor of this new set of standards with their attendant need for teaching materials, teacher in-service training, tests, test-preparation and tutoring. The authors claimed the paper was based on consultation with the literacy research community. When it drew an outcry from the literacy research community that was stunned by the authors ignorance of the research and informed practice English Language Arts Coleman and Pimental revised the paper claiming once again that it was based on consultation with the literacy research community. Are there two such communities with diametrically opposed views? Coleman, with his elite background, seems to be wholly obliviousness to who students in the vast majority of American schools are. He has disparaged pre-reading activities such as discussing vocabulary that students might find troubling in a text and discussing the historical or geographic knowledge that will enhance the readers understanding of the text. He claims activities like this rob the students of the pleasure and excitement of discovering information from reading the selection itself. In his defense, he read from a letter from a letter from Walter Kintsch stating that is hard to know how much background is needed, that its an individual thing, but it should not be over done. Well, none of us saw that coming. Critics have also accused Coleman of not understanding the concept of students motivation (or lack of motivation, much less student resistance), He insists that he does, and to prove it he describes a classroom activity for teaching the Gettysburg Address, a very short text where the word dedicate appears six times. He would have students discuss the differences in meaning, nuance, implication, and so on of dedicate each time it appears. He suggests that this kind of close reading of the document be addressed for the entirety of three successive class periods, and he says finally to his International Reading Association audience, We would all be very interested. Lucy Calkins, the founding director of the Reading and Writing Project at Columbia Universitys 1

Teachers College has commented dryly on this lesson saying she doesnt feel theres evidence that this method works. Lucy is too kind. I would suggest that David Coleman attend the St. Patricks Day Parade in NYC and observe the people marching with police, firefighters, the American Legion, and AFSCME or go into a Target in a city or first ring suburb. He will observe people who are employed, most of whom have a family income of over $50,000 per year, who have families and are law abidingwhat my mother would call the salt of the earth. Are they included in Colemans wethose who would all be interested in a protracted discussion of the meaning of a single word as it appears in The Gettysburg Address? Are their teen-aged children included? Coleman seems to have no understanding of the teachers job of motivating students to engage in language study in most of the classrooms in this country. Incidentally, would a discussion of where Gettysburg is and what was happening in the Civil War when that speech was delivered not have been time well spent before the students took up reading The Gettysburg Address? The New York Times article closes with Colemans belief that whats at stake is our nations ability to deliver opportunity for all, which, he claims is about the soul of the country. I would suggest, then, that we take the money and resources that are being expended on the Common Core State Standards (which are not new) and spend it on alleviating the scourge of poverty that accounts for the lions share of student failure.