Yes.

Content is very tough for a student to imbibe unless a child is well read ouside of school and has a framework to hang this content on. Bluntly, a lot of content teaching never gets absorbed because:

1) it is given in a disjointed way (year after year of overlap or missing parts, the bane of institutional school with changing teachers and admin)
2) the students lack the core skills needed to absorb this information (reading/vocaulary/writing/basic math) because they jump to content as it’s more fun to teach
3) our culture lacks any core agreement on what is worthy content – is it the Civil War or the American War of Independence? It’s hard to teach content when we don’t all agree on much, and this “content” changes yearly

the idea that content and critical thinking are mutually exclusive [is false].

Excellent point. It applies to learning the basics, too. This is especially true in math. Many children do not have the basic skills needed the think mathematically because they jump right into “understanding” without knowing the basic skills first. Hey, the basics are no fun. So 1950s.

One high school teacher in the CBS piece says, “I know that this generation is the smartest that we’ve had.” Based on what empirical evidence, exactly?

This same argument follows with “content” education. We can’t test, because we can’t even agree on said content. Fact: we are not a unified culture. Heck, we can’t even agree on the purpose of education – is it a job factory, or place of higher learning? Hence, there is no easy way to get empirical evidence for content-based learning…except via looking at univerity performance, and thus the SAT is the best deal going…and it has zero content. This test works because one can’t ace the SAT without picking up content on the way.

I would love to see the results of content tests given to kids graduating from high school, and correlate the demographics. I’d bet some serious cash the only kids who remember content taught years ago are kids who read on their own. All the rest dump this force-fed content as soon as the test is over. These kids would do better mastering the basics year-in-year-out, and picking up content on the way via reading.

Your line: Based on what empirical evidence, exactly? is so very apropos. Oh, if education could only enter the free market, this question would be asked every school year.