Ed in ‘08 chairman Roy Romer weighs in helpfully (mostly) on the issue of curriculum narrowing and NCLB.
A report from the Center on Educational Policy last year showed 44% of school districts had increased instructional time spent on ELA and/or Math in elementary schools since the passage of No Child Left Behind, cutting time from science, social studies, art and music, physical education, recess, or lunch. According to a followup report this week, districts increasing time for ELA and Math had done so by an average of three hours each week. To make room for the added time, they’ve cut of about two and a half hours each week from one or more other subjects.
“I don’t believe that time should come at the expense of other academic areas like science, history, or the arts,” blogs Romer. “We at ED in ’08 have long advocated for more time for learning in America’s schools. States like Massachusetts have already followed the lead of many other developed nations and put in place a longer school day, and their students are proving all the more successful from it. That extra time is helping to balance out the school agenda so that students all receive the diverse range of subjects – and support – they deserve.”
All well and good, but it would be even more helpful in Governor Romer and others concerned about the narrowing of curriculum would look more closely at the link between content knowledge and reading comprehension, rather than continuing to treat reading as an independent academic subject.
“We at ED in ’08 have long advocated for more time for learning in America’s schools.”
Crazy. Everyone thinks we can just “add more time” to a broken system to fix it. Insanity. I currently homeschool half days yet run roughly 2-3 grades ahead. And don’t tell me America couldn’t teach like this; at $10k per student, teachers could teach 6 kids at out of their home and get paid about $50k, and produce a superior product. But of course, this would ruin the whole education scam, eh?
So I disagree that lack of time is the problem. Rather, it’s a broken institutional system with a bad learning environment, one that treats every child as a clone. More time will merely lead to burnout. Typical ed solution.
Regarding the teaching content IS teaching reading claim: why not turn this around? How about “reading IS teaching content?” I’ve found reading good books about the Civil War has a much higher retension rate than mere memorizing names/dates/places from some dry “history” textbook. So I disagree, and believe one should master reading, vocabulary, and math first, and then practice these skills by becoming well read. The content comes naturally to the agressive reader.
It’s hard to ignore the reality that many children are merely pushed forward in our schools based on age only, not subject mastery. If one can’t read or do math well, learning via content becomes very painful to the slow learner and just doesn’t happen. So the kid tunes out and drops out. Slower kids get lost in the “content over reading” system and fall further and further behind every year because they lack the core fundamentals.
Comment by vital core — February 26, 2008 @ 11:36 am