Archive for November 11th, 2008

Core Knowledge: A “21st Century Skill”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 11, 2008 in Assessment and Testing and Core Knowledge. 5 Comments

“The common idea that we can teach thinking without a solid foundation of knowledge must be abandoned, notes Lauren Resnick, a professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, in a new report from Education Sector, Measuring Skills for the 21st Century.  “So must the idea that we can teach knowledge without engaging students in thinking. Knowledge and thinking must be intimately joined.” The report is by Ed Sector’s senior policy analyst, Elena Silva, who notes:

The belief that there should be a solid, specific, and shared core curriculum, an idea advanced most notably by the nonprofit Core Knowledge Foundation, founded and led by former professor and literary scholar, E.D. Hirsch Jr., is not at odds with this approach. The Core Knowledge curriculum supports the point that learning factual knowledge and the ability to apply, analyze, and solve problems go hand-in-hand. Teachers using the Core Knowledge approach do not stress rote memorization of facts; they use an array of strategies including workshops, research projects, dramatizations, and collaborative learning groups because they know that students will learn best if they are exposed to both subject knowledge and ways to apply this knowledge at the same time.

The full report is here.  Silva is hosting a weeklong online discussion on it with Eva Baker, director of UCLA’s Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing, and Paul Curtis, chief academic officer of New Technology Foundation, on Ed Sector’s website here. 

 

 

“Universal Proficiency is Unattainable. Period”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 11, 2008 in Assessment and Testing, Curriculum and Educational Policy. 8 Comments

The current economic climate make it unlikely that President-elect Obama can enact the full range of education intitiatives his campaign promised, but one pressing issue cannot be deferred, writes Diane Ravitch on Forbes.com.  The reauthorization and redesign of NCLB.  Six years after its bipartisan passage, she notes, we have nothing to show for it.

NCLB has turned every school into a test-preparation factory, focused solely on reading and mathematics. They are the only subjects that count in a school’s ranking, so teachers routinely reduce attention to history, science, foreign language, literature, geography, the arts and other non-tested subjects. With this narrowing of the curriculum, students may be getting dumbed down even if their scores go up. Do we really want a society where our fellow citizens know nothing of history, literature, science and the arts?

First, Ravitch says, the Obama administration should “eliminate the goal of universal proficiency by 2014, because it is unattainable. Period. No state or nation has ever achieved 100% proficiency.” 

Second, it should recognize that the federal government is best at providing accurate information, such as what children in each grade need to know to be abreast of international standards (that is known as the curriculum) and whether our children are meeting those standards (that is, testing); third, the administration should expect states and districts to fashion appropriate reforms and remedies for their schools.

Congress, Ravitch concludes, is not the right place to decide how to fix our schools. And more money isn’t the answer if we don’t have the right vision for improving education.