Coordinating PARCC Frameworks and Common Core Standards

Teacher question:

I, and many of my fellow high school English educators, need some (more) clarification on the 70/30 split. Our state has adopted the PARCC model and our district is implementing the model for the English classes. Under the section "Extended Texts" on the model it reads as follows:

11th

A - Literature

B - US foundational text (Is this a full-length book taught in the English class?  If 'yes' please specify an example.  If no, please indicated what course/subject would teach this text.)

C - American Literature

D - Informational (Is this a full-length book taught in the English class?  If 'yes' please specify an example.  If no, please indicated what course/subject would teach this text.)10th

10th

A - Literature

B - Informational (Is this a full-length book taught in the English class?  If 'yes' please specify an example.  If no, please indicated what course/subject would teach this text.)

C - World Literature

D - Informational (Is this a full-length book taught in the English class?  If 'yes' please specify an example.  If no, please indicated what course/subject would teach this text.)

9th

A - Literature

B - US foundational text (Is this a full-length book taught in the English class?  If 'yes' please specify an example.  If no, please indicated what course/subject would teach this text.)

C - World Literature

D - Informational (Is this a full-length book taught in the English class?  If 'yes' please specify an example.  If no, please indicated what course/subject would teach this text.)

Shanahan Response:

There are a couple of things going on here. One is the advice given in the Common Core State Standards documents and the other is the advice given by PARCC. CCSS emphasizes the proportions of academic reading time to devote to the reading of informational text and literary text and PARCC's framework emphasizes how many texts per quarter should be read in school. In both cases, the information is only advisory. They are simply trying to be helpful in both cases, but their specificity and somewhat contradictory advice, is definitely confusing to teachers (who frankly need to take a breath and recognize this stuff as advisory rather than prescriptive).

Common Core Advice 

For high school, CCSS recommends that students read informational texts about 70% of the time, and literary texts about 30% of the time. The calculations on this are fuzzy… it is not entirely clear (or agreed upon) what counts as informational text or even what counts as reading for these purposes. If students have read a short story for homework and the following day they are to discuss it in teams or write a thematic essay about it, does that count as "reading" time since it was devoted to the study of a particular text or does it not count as reading time since most or all of the actual "reading" was carried on outside of class. Can't really tell with common core, so you have to guess a bit at this. (If you remember, in the past, I've indicated that I didn't love those proportions except in that they express the need to devote lots of time to both literary and informational texts across the whole school day/year.)

  My assumption is that if it is not poetry or a narrative (e.g., story, play, novel, biography, retelling of an event), then it is informational text, and I assume that reading time, for this purpose, includes all discussions of the content or genre of the text done in preparation of reading, the reading and rereading itself, and the post-reading discussions and writings about content and form of the text. Thus, if you are having kids review plot structure prior to reading Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, and then have the students read part of it at school and part of it at home, and then follow up with three days of activities in which kids answer questions, participate in discussions, and write a critical review of the story—all of the minutes devoted to these steps in school are what we are talking about with CCSS. 

  The amount of academic school time devoted to reading at school would depend on all of the classes, not just English Language Arts class. Let's say, collectively across the school day that your kids spend 1 hour per day reading (including the preparations and follow up noted above). Personally, I think that is on the low side, but for the sake of argument let's go with it. That would mean kids would be reading about 300 minutes per week on average, and 90 minutes of that (2 class periods in English) would need to focus on literature. That doesn't mean that the other three periods must be devoted to informational text, since some of that time might be for language study (e.g., mechanics, usage, grammar, spelling) or writing or oral language instruction (including listening comprehension, discussions, or presentations). But if the English teacher only focused on literature in this scenario, with no teaching of informational text at all, the rest of the classes would have to pick up the other 210 minutes per week (the 70% noted by CCSS). That sounds formidable, but it means that if the social studies and science teacher were to devote two periods per week to reading/studying history and science materials, we would only need to pick up 30 minutes per week in any of their other courses (math, electives, and in those remaining English periods).

School might rightfully push kids to spend even more time in communion with text… in which case, the proportions don't change, but the amounts do. What if your school went wild and decided that half the school day was to be aimed at the reading and analysis of text… that sounds great (if a bit fanciful), but it would mean that kids would be reading and working with text approximately 150 minutes per day, and that would mean the entire (45 minute) English period could only be devoted to literature (no space for working with essays or rhetoric in that scenario), unless we could get the math teacher to add a poetry unit (just kidding).

I'm not prescribing a particular number of minutes for all of this (nor is CCSS), but I think I have sketched out the extremes that you will need to work within. On what I think is a low end of the amounts of school reading, the English Department would spend 40% of its class time on literature (that is about 14-15 weeks per year—see, I told you it was low)… On the high end (which is likely an impossible stretch), the English Department would spend every minute of every class on literature (with no time for informational text, writing, or anything else for that matter). I think if schools strove to engage kids in about 90 minutes of reading/comprehension time across their classes each day on average, the English Department would end up with approximately 22 weeks of poetry and narrative reading across a school year—which seems like plenty of literature study to me within the current school day. 

PARCC Framework

PARCC's instructional frameworks don't focus on time, but on the numbers of texts (and they do place some narrative texts into the informational text slot). They maintain the idea that these reading experiences are not just the responsibility of the English Department. For Grade 9, they divide the school year into four modules, which I assume are each 9 weeks long. Across the year, PARCC suggests that students should read 2 extended literary texts, 2 extended informational texts, 10 shorter literary texts, 4-5 informational texts, 1-2 historical documents. Their definition of "extended text" includes  "text such as a novel or book-length informational text, a magazine with a series of related articles or stories, or even a website with multiple related pages."

I can easily imagine an English class reading a short novel like, To Kill a Mockingbird or The Red Pony, and 10 poems and short stories across a school year (if an entire report card marking period were spent on the novel, and one week each was devoted to the shorter pieces, that would be 19 weeks of literature (which seems generous—how often do you spend an entire week on a short poem?, and fits easily within the time parameters sketched out above). The 4-5 informational texts could include science or history chapters, or freestanding texts on those subjects; and these days it is getting to be the rare history class that doesn't deal with multiple historical documents each unit (not each year). 

That just leaves the recommendation for the reading of an extended informational text. That actually could be done in any class, including English (and would still fit the times set above). What kind of book would fit in that space? Books like:  Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: Or What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, or James Watson's The Double Helix, or Every Bone Tells a Story by Jill Rubalcaba, etc.

Of course, there are other ways that this framework could be implemented, including having the English Department taking on some rhetorical historical texts (Gettysburg Address, Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms speech, etc.), and/or some texts about rhetoric and literary criticism (such as some selections from Readings in Rhetorical Criticism), or perhaps the English teacher will teach a unit on the essay complete with readings from E.B. White, George Orwell (Politics of the English Language?), Lewis Thomas (something from Lives of a Cell), or the Federalist Papers.

Hope that helps. The key to making this work is sitting down the heads of the different departments to determine who will do what and how much of it will they do.