The Common Core and Evaluating Aesthetics

For all of their many strengths, the Common Core Standards in English Language Arts have a few quirks, several of which derive from the distinction they make between "Informational Text" and "Literature."

For the purposes of the reading standards, the Common Core creates parallel standards for these two different types of texts. These two sets of reading standards are written to mirror each other and occasionally cross over into what would seem to be the other's terrain.  A craft and structure standard for Informational Text, for example, asks for analysis of the "persuasiveness or beauty of the text"; on the face of it, "beauty" would seem more the realm of literature than the realm of science writing or other obviously "informational" texts.

In other ways, though, the two sets of standards strike different poses. Of particular interest here are their approaches to evaluative criticism. Where the Informational Text standards ask students to "analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of the structure an author uses" (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.11-12.5), the corresponding literature standard drops the word "evaluate," asking only that students, "analyze how an author's choices concerning how to structure specific parts of a text...contributes to its overall structure and meaning" (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.5).

This omission of the verb "evaluate" from the literature standard is a mistake for two reasons.

First, let us acknowledge that the vast majority of students will interact with very little literary or otherwise aesthetic criticism in their lifetime and probably produce even less of it. And this is likely as it should be. While bending the curve a little bit, so that students go on to lives slightly more devoted to, say, The New Yorker than to primetime television seems a reasonable goal, it is neither likely nor probably even to be wished for that a significantly higher percentage of high school students end up as career academics in the humanities. So the amount of serious criticism most students will produce or consume is vanishingly small.

There is though, one obvious exception to this rule: evaluative criticism in the form of TV, movie, and book reviews. That form of criticism makes up by far the majority of textual criticism written in the world and is certainly the most accessible to a general audience. Thus the first error the Common Core makes in deleting the verb "evaluate" from its literary standards is that it directs students away from producing exactly the one kind of critical writing they are likely to interact with regularly over the course of their lives. Whether it be deciding which movie review to trust or discussing in the lobby at intermission what they like about a play, evaluative criticism is something students will benefit from mastering. Thus avoiding it in English classes makes little sense.

The second reason the omission of "evaluate" is an error is that it takes away from students one way to access texts and move toward analytical writing. It would be a mistake to have students spout ill-informed opinions about which poems suck. However, asking students why they found a book boring or why they were put off by a play is a very good way to start them on identifying and then analyzing textual details. If a student finds Hamlet utterly boring and impenetrably dense, and if she can point to the apparent endlessness of Hamlet's musings as one reason for that, then she is solidly halfway to a key aspect of Hamlet's character and at least one of the key themes of the play. Starting that conversation with the evaluation "this play is boring" is not all bad.

There is a counter-argument to be made here: The literature standard in question ends with the phrase "as well as its aesthetic impact," meaning that students are being asked to analyze aesthetic impact, a task which could certainly encompass evaluative criticism. The key verb "evaluate," though, is missing, and as anyone who has been taught to unpack a standard knows, the controlling verb is key to doing so. Common Core is correct to include "evaluate" as a controlling verb in its standards for Informational Text; students should be able to describe an argument as weak or strong and explain how they have come to that determination. But there is nothing wrong with doing the same for literary texts. Doing so would engage students in textual criticism and better prepare them for the kinds of criticism they are likely to interact with once they have left the classroom.