Whole language or phonics? Skills or content? Equity or excellence? In visits to successful schools, Karin Chenoweth has “been struck by how free they are from the frustrating controversies other schools get mired in.” Chenoweth who works for the Education Trust, writes in Education Week that high-achieving schools with significant populations of low-income children ”tend to avoid questions about the philosophy of reading instruction. Rather, they approach the issue with what I consider a cheerful empiricism.”
One such school is PS/MS 124, a Core Knowledge school and a past winner of Ed Trust’s “Dispelling the Myth” award. As part of the New York City school system, “it is expected to teach its students a district curriculum that emphasizes skills rather than a set body of content,” writes Chenoweth. But principal Valarie Lewis, noticed “teachers would teach skills, but if [the children] didn’t have background knowledge, it didn’t stick.”
She and the school’s then-principal, Elain Thompson, brought the Core Knowledge program to the school. Its curriculum, developed in part by E.D. Hirsch Jr., focuses on providing students with a great deal of background knowledge, from nursery rhymes to Newton’s Laws. ‘Teachers still need to teach the skills,’ said Judy Lefante, the school’s Core Knowledge coordinator, ‘but we’ve worked hard through professional development to make sure they teach skills through content.’ Skills such as making inferences, drawing conclusions, and separating facts from opinion, for example, are all worked on within the science and social studies content areas.”
Student achievement at PS/MS 124 is “almost indistinguishable from that of wealthy, white schools,” Chenoweth notes, “despite the fact that more than 80 percent of its mostly African-American, Latino, and South Asian students qualify for free lunches,”
“The point is this,” she concludes. “Arguments that for too long have fostered false dichotomies, pitting one practice against another, can be resolved—but only if educators have as their clear goal ensuring that all their students become educated citizens, and then focus closely on what it takes to help them reach that goal.”
Absolutely! This is so common-sense but so hard to grasp for some educators and administrators. Some approaches work well for some children, some teachers, with some material; other approaches work best for others. Choose the approach that’s best suited to the content area, the teacher, the child–heck, the day, minute, and hour!–and really and truly, everything will work out for the best.
Chenoweth is of course spot on here. I would add to Miss Eyre’s comment that many educators find Chenoweth’s approach hard to grasp because they have to work amidst the cacophony of interest groups and sometimes even business groups that all believe they have THE answer to what ails schools.
So the first example shows that “balanced literacy” was a failure and that kids did better when teachers started filling kids in on how to actually read words. The second example just as clearly shows that focusing on “skills” was a failure, and that teachers had to start teaching actual content.
Another thought that hits me after reading this is that good schools/districts focus on long term solutions and not temporary fixes. They don’t just ask “what works?” but they ask “what will work for years to come?” Successful schools (like PS/MS 124) don’t settle for a little bit of success; they want the best, highest level of instruction for students. This trait cannot be packaged and replicated–it CAN be instilled and maintained.
Thank you, Robert, for talking about my Ed Week piece. The only thing I thoght I would add is that many of the folks I talk about in my books and the Ed Week article will be presenting at the Education Trust conference, which is November 12-14. If someone is interested in hearing from the folks who are really getting this work of educating all children done, it isn’t too late to come to the conference. Go to http://www.edtrust.org for more information.
Karin