If there’s a bright side to the past week’s uproar over President Obama’s speech to schoolchildren it’s this: when was the last time we had a robust national debate about what our kids actually do in school? A Niagara of ink was spilled debating whether the speech and a set of recommended classroom activities represented political propaganda, indoctrination or an abuse of presidential power. But here’s an overlooked, yet indisputably accurate description of Obama’s speech and those controversial lesson plans:
“Standards-based.”
The draft national standards in reading, writing, speaking and listening worked up by National Governors Associations (NGA) and The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), specify only the skills our children should be able to demonstrate. Whether President Obama and the Department of Education realize it or not, they are revealing exactly how empty and meaningless these “standards” are as currently written. For example, in order to be “college and career ready,” the draft standards hold that students must be able to “listen to complex information and understand what was said, identifying main ideas and supporting details.” This is a standard you can apply to today’s speech by President Obama, a Glenn Beck talk show rant, the films of Michael Moore, or the conspiratorial ravings of the 9/11 “truth” movement. So while conservatives can rest assured that Obama’s speech to schoolchildren will not be a part of the emerging national standards, neither is Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” speech, Lincoln’s second inaugural address or Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. In fact, no speech, book, poem or play is required. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all speeches are created equal.
But wait a minute, you might be thinking, “isn’t that what national standards are supposed to do? Doesn’t it mean that kids from Maine to Montana are learning the same thing?” No, that’s what a national curriculum would do. It’s become distressingly clear that even people in education who should know better use the terms “standards” and “curriculum” interchangeably. Yong Zhao, a distinguished professor of education at Michigan State University wrote in the Detroit Free Press last week that national standards “stifle creativity and reduce diversity of talents by instilling a single view of worthwhile knowledge” thereby doing “irreversible damage” to American education. There are many criticisms one can level at the national standards movement. That’s not one of them.
What conservative critics like Beck, Michelle Malkin and others might have focused on but did not is that the Administration’s suggested activities meet literally every one of the draft common core standards. In order to be “college and career ready” students should be able to “sustain focus on a specific topic or argument through careful presentation of essential content;” “support and illustrate arguments and explanations with relevant details and examples;” and “represent and cite accurately the data, conclusions and opinions of others” among other skills. Even the “inartfully worded” suggestion, that students ”write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president” is not in conflict with such standards.
This is the dilemma of process standards: they are aggressively, adamantly agnostic on the content of a good education. Anything goes. What speeches and texts are important to know? Right now, the official answer is “none.” Perhaps that’s a silver lining in this otherwise strange and irritating controversy that has greeted the President’s speech to school children. If you don’t think that listening and responding to a Presidential address is a productive use of school time, the question you need to address is, “What exactly do you think your child should be reading and listening to all day?”
It’s a debate that is worth having. At present, 46 states and the District of Columbia are close to answering the question “What should children learn in school” with “whatever.” If you don’t think “whatever” is a good or helpful answer, then your choices quickly narrow to two: You can fight to define what is (or is not) the appropriate content of a sound, well-rounded public education. Or you can keep your child home every time he or she is assigned a text that you don’t like.
Update: Jay Greene comes at this from a similar angle. “Parents sense a lack of control over what their children are taught in school,” he notes. “This is as true of every day’s social studies lesson as it is of Obama’s speech.”
Robert:
The thing about lesson plans (as one who has spent hours watching focus groups of teachers evaluating them) is that the good teachers don’t need them and the poor teachers ignore them. The fact that someone decided that a motivational speech by the President needed lesson plans makes me worry more than whatever was in them.
leannalandsmann write:
The fact that someone decided that a motivational speech by the President needed lesson plans makes me worry more than whatever was in them.
But this seems to be standard these days — every “curriculum” seems to come with lesson plans (in CA, usually with a list of what state standards it addresses). My sense is that its both a marketing device, and a response to the idea that what teachers do is simply “deliver” curriculum.
It is WAY too soon to know which (if any) of Pres. Obama’s numerous speeches have real historical significance. I suspect his victory speech from Election Night 2008 may very well be considered one by future historians. But we won’t really know for decades.
Studying about a presidential address may be a worthwhile use of class time IF the speech has historical significance (e.g. FDR’s speech after the Pearl Harbor bombing, JFK’s “Ich bin ein Berliner”, or Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”). The jury won’t be in on this speech by Pres. Obama for quite some time…
You mention the discussion that “we” should be having about curriculum – about the content. I’ve followed this blog for a while, and I have a son who goes to a CK school. But I have this nagging question: isn’t this conversation happening at a more local/state level right now? And if its not happening to yours or anyone’s satisfaction at the local level – and there are surely smart and capable people who can come up with good “core curricula” in each state – why are we so confident that if this is done at a national level it will turn out any better? Not to say we can’t have one conversation and not the other, but…
…do you get what I am saying?
Just another person worried about big government I guess.
~Nathan
I would argue that core curriculum needs to be part of the conversation whenever student achievement is discussed at any level — from Miss Jones’ classroom to Mr. Obama’s office. I don’t want to paint with too broad of a brush, but I find that most conversations in schools, at least in elementary ed, tend to focus on how to teach, not what to teach. At the policy level, discussions turn on structural issues like teacher quality, school governance, and accountability. The content of a child’s education is not part of the conversation in any meaningful way. The current standards effort puts this in stark relief.
In terms of fear of big government, I’m agnostic. But I am afflicted with a painfully simple view of the world. My preferred solution for the federal role in education would be sunshine, not sanctions. Describe a national curriculum, provide annual testing based on that curriculum, publish the results. That’s it. Really. It would be up to parents and taxpayers in states and localities that perform poorly on those tests can’t rouse themselves to improve their schools based on those results.
We need sunshine on Hirsch’s ideas. I’m reading The Making of Americans now and I am struck by how he is Copernicus to the establishment’s Aristotle/Ptolemy. Diametrically opposed conceptions of school (almost) and only one of them is correct. Naturally, the establishment feels as threatened as the Renaissance Church and will do what they can to keep Hirsch in obscurity. As an advocate for switching to Core Knowledge in my small California district, I cannot forsee swaying the school board and superintendent until they get a cue from higher up (state or federal level) that Hirsch’s currently-eccentric big idea is kosher.
I would have less of a problem with a standard curriculum if it were not grade-specific but rather a “by the end of [elementary, middle, high] school students will have studied…” and coupled with an exit exam.
So much of what’s on the California grade-by-grade standards strikes me as completely arbitrary. Some of the standards make sense- i.e. kids ought to learn addition and subtraction before tackling multiplication and division. But plenty of other topics don’t have an obvious “place” in the curriculum. We could agree that topic X is an elementary school topic, but not necessarily on the grade in which it should be taught.
I don’t think that judgment call ought to be made by some committee of bureaucrats thousands of miles away in D.C. Ideally, I’d like to see that done by the classroom teacher but at the very least at the individual school level. Have the exit exam to make sure everything does get taught, but empower teachers to decide the sequence that works best for their own students.
That’s a reasonable objection, CW. There might not be any particular magic to learning about Ancient Egypt, for example, before the Greeks or Romans. Or about the water cycle before the states of matter.
One practical reason for a specific grade-by-grade sequence is that’s how schools are organized. And more to the point, given the extraordinary student mobility rates, especially among the low-SES kids least likely to accumulate broad background knowledge outside of school, the risk of gaps and repetitions if teachers chose the sequence would be great. Indeed, that’s pretty much what happens right now.
Robert,
What do you think of the DuFour’s questions they promote with their “Professional Learning Communities”:
What do we want them to learn?
How will we know if they have learned it?
What will we do if they haven’t?
What will we do if they already have?
They seem to be putting the focus on both content and process – what do you think?
~Nathan