Education Week - January 30, 2013 - 15

EDUCATION WEEK

man’s poem “O Captain! My Captain!” in a unit about Abraham
Lincoln’s assassination, alongside Chasing Lincoln’s Killer, a
work of nonfiction by James L.
Swanson, and Assassin, a historical novel by Anna Myers.
“In the past, I would teach fiction and explore more narrative
writing, and leave it to the social
studies teachers to teach nonfiction, but doing both makes my instruction stronger,” said Ms. Powers. “It’s a stretch for me, but it’s
more beneficial for my students.”
When she and her fellow teachers first began reorganizing who
would teach which works of fiction
and nonfiction, “I did hear, ‘How
am I ever going to do this?’ from
colleagues,” Ms. Powers said. “But
once we put the units together, they
saw how it could work. It will just
take some time to own these new
units and make them compatible
with your teaching style.”

Accountablity Concerns
Some of what has stoked controversy about the standards’
emphasis on nonfiction is the
document’s Appendix B list of
“exemplar” texts.
High-school-level suggestions,
for instance, include FedViews,
the newsletter of the Federal
Reserve Bank of San Francisco;
and “Executive Order 13423:
Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management,” by the General Services Administration.
But common-core architects say
such titles are meant for classes
other than English, and seeing
them as texts that displace works
like The Catcher in the Rye takes
titles out of context and ignores
the messages of the standards
document as a whole.
In an essay published online
Dec. 11 in the Huffington Post,
Susan Pimentel and David Coleman, the lead authors of the ela
standards, lamented the “mistaken
belief” that more informational text
means that literature and fiction
“should take a back seat” in the
high school English/language arts
classroom.
They noted that Page 57 of the
standards lists text types that are
envisioned as being at the heart
of such classrooms, from novels
and one-act plays to lyrical poetry,
essays, opinion pieces, and biographies. They pointed out that Page
58 offers a selection of book titles,
including Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, that
makes high-quality fiction’s role in
the ela classroom “unambiguous.”
In an email to Education Week,
Ms. Pimentel said that teachers
and local administrators are the
ones who must decide how to share
responsibility for the increased emphasis on nonfiction. “If a lot of good,
close reading of high-quality, challenging texts is going on in science
and history classes,” she said, “then
English/language arts teachers need
to carry less of that responsibility.”
The common-core authors
“recommend that ela teachers
be part of the change,” she said,
but that is up to each school or
district to decide, and she noted
that the standards do call for Eng-

lish/language arts teachers to teach
some informational text.
Still, “we expect that in most ela
classrooms, literature is likely to account for the great majority of reading,” Ms. Pimentel said.
William Maniotis, an English teacher at Merrimack High
School in Merrimack, N.H., has
his doubts that it will work out
that way.
When he reads the common standards, he doesn’t conclude that he
must drop a lot fiction from his
classroom, he said, but upcoming
assessments for the common standards, due to roll out in 2014-15,
could exert a powerful influence
on that. It is English/language arts
teachers who will be held accountable for the results, which will drive
what happens in their classrooms
week to week, he said.
“When the new tests come out,
and the focus is more on nonfiction, and the test scores go down,
who are they going to look to to fix
that? The English teachers,” said
Mr. Maniotis, who has taught for
17 years.
“That’s the dilemma we face,” he
said. “Even though we use predominantly literature in our classrooms,
we are going to have to cope with
the nonfictional piece to an inordinate extent.”

Recovering the Prince
Getting the right fiction-nonfiction balance in the long term can
mean short-term sacrifices.
Jim Burke, who teaches English at Burlingame High School in
San Mateo, Calif., said he couldn’t
find room to teach “Hamlet” last
semester, as he was focusing intently on a nonfiction-heavy unit
aimed at the research and synthesis skills in the standards.
He thought his students benefited immensely from the unit,
writing challenging eight- to 10page papers that bolstered their
college preparedness, he said. And
he even managed to work in Hermann Hesse’s novel Siddhartha.
But still, it pained him that
Shakespeare’s classic went by the
wayside. Next year, he will know
better how to trim the unit so that
he can include “Hamlet,” he said.
“You have to be willing to accept a
certain amount of mess in this process of redevelopment, reimagining
the curriculum,” said Mr. Burke,
who also runs a popular online discussion forum for English teachers.
“A class is a working draft. You inevitably have some stuff on the floor.”
The spring semester, an inquiry
into the relationship of fear to
power, will include 1984 by George
Orwell, Julia Álvarez’s In the Time
of the Butterflies, and Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.”
Coverage of “deeper learning” that
will prepare students with the skills
and knowledge needed to succeed in a
rapidly changing world is supported
in part by a grant from the William
and Flora Hewlett Foundation,
at www.hewlett.org.
Scan this tag with your
smartphone for a link to
more information about the
nonfiction expectations of
the Common Core State Standards.
www.edweek.org/links

JANUARY 30, 2013

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Education Week - January 30, 2013

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