Common Core State Standards: The promise and peril in a national palimpsest

Applebee, Arthur H. (2013). Common Core State Standards: The promise and peril in a national palimpsest. English Journal, 103(1), 25-33.


Before I could really focus on the points in this thoughtful essay examining the pros and cons of the Common Core State Standards for the English Language Arts, I had to answer one burning question for myself: What the heck is a palimpsest? This word is in the article’s title, so one might assume that it is important to the author’s meaning—a correct assumption, I discovered. That being the case, one might assume that some background might be provided in the article as to what a palimpsest actually is, if not in the article itself, at least in a sidebar, a footnote, or at the very least, a reference to an Internet site. There is a small image on page 26 labeled “A page from the Archimedes Palimpsest”, which led me to surmise that a palimpsest is some sort of ancient manuscript, but it was not clear why Applebee would compare the Common Core Standards to an ancient manuscript.

As a confirmed “wordie” who can leave no word undefined, I had no choice but to dig deeper to make sense of what Applebee was trying to say. There is only one context (besides the title and the caption for the illustration) that provides any clue to what a palimpsest is and what it has to do with the 2010 document, the Common Core State Standards. While providing a brief history of the standards, Applebee states: “. . . the document that has resulted contains the residues of all of our professional disagreements about the teaching of the English language arts” (p. 26). When I first read this piece, I thought about how everything new has echoes of that which has historically occurred before. That is certainly true of education, and particularly when we look at standards and at assessment. As the biblical proverb said, “there is nothing new under the sun.” No matter how hard we try to come up with something new, it still ends up looking remarkably like what we’ve had before. That seems to be especially true of assessments, and Applebee’s discussion of the worries he has about the new assessments due to be implemented in 2014-2015 seem to fit with that line of thought, but if I’d left it there I still would not have fully grasped Applebee’s reference to a palimpsest and what that is.

As it turns out, the most important semantic cue in the bit of context I cited above is the word “residue”. I did not realize that, however, until after I had done some research. There was no help at all provided in the article. I consider myself a confident and able reader who is reasonably well informed about many things; if I were not, I might have entertained self-deprecatory thoughts that a palimpsest was something I “should have known about” as an educated, informed person. I didn’t, though. I don’t know who decided to assume readers would know this important definition and it wasn’t necessary to provide information (or sources to that, at least). Ultimately, this was an editing mistake. A thoughtful editor would have insisted on a reference, at least. Why risk distracting readers from the point of the article? Applebee probably could have discussed his metaphor (which is what he intended this to be, I think) in a brief paragraph and readers would be fine. Barring that, a sidebar or a footnote could have been inserted. If none of those things could be done, the palimpsest references needed to be removed. The article would work without them. That was an editor’s responsibility, and it might cause some readers to miss the point or even skip the article entirely.

That wasn’t me, however. I did what I usually do when a new word pops up: I googled it. It was an interesting side trip that helped me see more deeply what Applebee was trying to say. So, what is a palimpsest? A palimpsest is an ancient text that has been copied onto a piece of parchment that was used for an earlier text that has first been scraped off. Ancient texts were hand-copied by scribes (most people did not have literacy skills) in the days before printing. Scribes dedicated their lives to preserving texts. Parchment was relatively durable, and it could be recycled by scraping off the old text. Vestiges of the old text remained, however, and there are people today who have discovered important, very ancient texts beneath the surface of newer (though still very old) texts. One example that is known is the example in the picture in the article, the Archimedes Palimpsest, which was a third century B.C. text that has been attributed to the mathematician and scientist Archimedes, who was born in Sicily just before the Roman Empire conquered that part of the world. Scholars found important texts by Archimedes under the text of a medieval prayer book, probably copied by a monk who had little use for a scholarly text on mathematics but needed to find a way to write down prayers and found a way to repurpose materials for that. There’s more, of course, and it’s fascinating; the Archimedes Palimpsest is in a museum in Baltimore, and there’s an excellent site at http://archimedespalimpsest.org/about/ if you want to learn more. I spent a couple of hours there, and learned some things, so I don’t regret the side trip, though not all readers would want to do that.

Now that I’ve read about palimpsests, I get Applebee’s point. Not only do the vestiges of past standards and assessments and their surrounding debates keep coming back, they actually hover as indelible images that underlie the new document and can never be completely removed, no matter how hard we try to “scrape” them. I think that’s because no matter how well-intentioned standards documents are (and I believe most are, because who would go to all that work without good intentions to motivate them?), they still have to be implemented in real life, and the same kinds of real-life pressures that led the monks to copy a prayer book atop a priceless ancient text are with us today. There are only so many resources out there—not just money and materials, but time and energy and human expertise. Parchment was the rare commodity when the palimpsests were made. Now it’s our ability to make things happen with limited resources.

Although I think both the author and the journal editors could have helped readers make these interesting connections more easily, I enjoyed the work I had to do to make sense of this article. My apologies if I’ve missed the point, but it was a good journey nonetheless.