Continued
The slow cumulativeness of verbal growth explains why verbal scores have proved so much less malleable than math scores, which are far more quickly responsive to school interventions — even when verbal interventions are as highly intensive as in the admirable KIPP schools. In the latest KIPP annual report, one finds this chart on the opening page showing average test score growth over three years:
And we see a similar pattern in the large scale NAEP scores, where math has proved to be more amenable to intensive study than reading has. Here is the NAEP pattern in math:
Notice that scores are rising in both grade 4 and grade 8.
But a very different pattern occurs in NAEP verbal scores:
Not only is the gain very slight and level in grade 4, but it is not followed by a comparable gain 4 years later in grade 8. This contrast is striking if we show the math and reading patterns side by side:
Why don’t the grade-8 scores in reading follow the same path as the grade-4 scores in reading? It’s because the term “reading” is a very misleading way of describing what is actually being measured here. We tend to think that once the mechanics of reading are mastered, reading improvements follow a normal path simply by virtue of students having more and more reading experiences. That’s a partial truth. But the 4th-grade and 8th -grade tests are fundamentally different. What’s being measured on the NAEP 4th-grade test is demanding with respect to mechanical skill, but undemanding with respect to the general knowledge needed for mature comprehension. But what’s being tested on the grade 8 test is far more challenging with respect to general knowledge, as was well demonstrated by Joseph Torgesen and his colleagues. The thing that is chiefly lacking in our eighth graders (and this harks all the way back to my empirical work of the 1970s) is not decoding skill, but general knowledge and vocabulary.
The knowledge-building process I described in the little classroom scene about Egypt is the only underlying process that has been proposed for describing how verbal gap-narrowing occurs in untracked classes. It can only work if the learning preconditions are present for all the children in a class. For all students to understand the general sense of the Nile passage they all had to have been taught essential preparatory facts about Egypt and farming. They all had to know that Egypt was a country in olden times, that the year has seasons, that farming depends on planting seeds in moist soil, and that plants need nutrients and water to grow.
We can’t just assume that children will have naturally absorbed this preparatory knowledge. The school had to insure in advance that students were familiar with the basic processes of farming, and knew enough history and geography to make sense of the words “desert,” “Ancient Egypt” and “the Nile.” The ground for understanding just that one Egypt lesson had to have been carefully prepared by a whole series of earlier lessons. We are led willy-nilly to the conclusion that the only reliable way to improve verbal scores for all children, advantaged and disadvantaged alike, is to prepare them all for understanding classroom discourse by cumulatively building up the background knowledge they need to understand each day’s classroom discourse. Without such advance preparation, some of the students will remain mystified and the dread Matthew Effect will come into play.
The benefits of coherent and cumulative knowledge preparation accrue to advantaged students as much as to disadvantaged ones. Everyone in a classroom benefits if all have the background knowledge needed to understand the gist of classroom discourse. The class moves forward in an absorbing way, and all students make gains. School time is used more productively. Achievement is higher, and the fairness gap is narrowed. That, in a nutshell, is the basis for the quality-equity nexus. Progress is made by all students, only when the groundwork has been carefully laid to make classroom topics familiar to all. The late great Harold Stevenson once observed that the chief problem in American education is not diversity of income, race and ethnicity, but diversity of preparation.
Many of you will quickly see where this analysis is taking me, because you know that I have long been an advocate of a common core curriculum for all students. But I hope you will understand that my preference for a shared core curriculum is not the origin of the analysis. It is the other way round. The nature of verbal growth is the basis for my advocacy of a core curriculum. A carefully sequenced core curriculum is the only known way of insuring that all the students in a classroom will be sufficiently familiar with the context of classroom discourse to be able to learn new words and things from it.
Now we are in a position to see why Finland, and, in our own country, Massachusetts have racked up high scores on the fairness plus quality metric. Finland has instituted a specific core curriculum that comprises about 60 percent of the whole curriculum, leaving the other 40 percent to the localities. School tests are based on this core curriculum. Of all the states in the nation, Massachusetts has come closest to that pattern. It has fairly specific knowledge guidelines, and has instituted challenging tests — the MCAS — which genuinely follow the guidelines. There is a great deal of room for improvement in the Massachusetts guidelines and tests, but their basic structure, and the seriousness with which that structure has been realized under strong leadership over the past decade have caused Massachusetts to rise to the top in both quality and fairness.
Your analysis is completely off-the-mark in my opinion. My sisters children went to school in ‘the best’ programs New Hamshire had to offer, were at the top of their respective classes, and found themselves struggling to catch up to the curriculum base they were offered when they relocated to California (Irvine). We have two close friends who have studied (one still their doing research)at Harvard, who will tell you how openly racist the environment there is. People don’t progress well academically in such environments. We would all do much better to follow Dr. Montessori’s philosophy and stop trying to re-invent the wheel.
BML