The Common Purpose of Core Knowledge and Classical Education

by Robert Pondiscio
November 23rd, 2010

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Posted in Core Knowledge, Curriculum | 23 Comments »

The following post is by Dr. Florian Hild, principal of Ridgeview Classical Schools in Fort Collins, Colorado.  Ridgeview uses the Core Knowledge curriculum from K-8,  and an advanced liberal arts curriculum in its high school.  U.S. News and World Report recently ranked Ridgeview’s high school #15 in the country, as well as the #4 open-enrollment school and the #4 charter school.  This piece originally appeared on Ridgeview’s website and runs here with Dr. Hild’s permission

E. D. Hirsch’s The Making of Americans showed us that the godfather of Core Knowledge now posits a purpose for a Core Knowledge education. The Making of Americans, more so than his previous books, reveals an intellectual kinship between Hirsch and classical education. In my reading, Hirsch has done more than add logic and rhetoric to the grammar of Core Knowledge: He has joined the academic trivium to its moral, civic purpose. Aiming for intelligence and character is what sets classical education apart from a well-executed Core Knowledge education. The Making of Americans presents the good citizen as the goal of American K-12 education. Citizenship is our public virtue; character our private. Together they create a life worth living for the individual and her society. Together they provide the trivium’s academic excellence with a civic purpose.

The Grammar Stage

The Core Knowledge Sequence functions as the grammar stage of classical education’s trivium (the “three ways” of grammar, logic, and rhetoric). In the grammar stage, learners acquire the vocabulary of a discipline. This grammatical learning is not restricted to certain age-groups; whenever we learn something new, we have to understand its grammar. In biology, we need to know what a cell is before we can learn what cells do. In history, we need to know the words of the Gettysburg Address before we can debate its merits. Education has a grammar: Here, I’m trying to explain the ideals of classical education by drawing on your understanding of Core Knowledge. Even baseball has a grammar: Just try explaining to a foreigner what “walking” a star player means. (See also the attached article, “E.D. Hirsch’s Curriculum for Democracy.”)

Every discipline, every form of life, has a grammar. Without it, we are excluded from that discipline or form of life just as a stranger from an inside joke. Ridgeview students—as well as Core Knowledge students elsewhere—slowly (“glacially slow,” according to Hirsch) learn the grammar of their academic subjects and are thus given entrance to many ways of knowing the world. It is in the grammar stage when our academic houses are built on rock or sand depending on the quality of our teachers and our curriculum.

The Logic Stage

Classical education then builds on the grammar of Hirsch’s sequence. (Ridgeview does so in his spirit: The Core Knowledge website has a link to ridgeviewclassical.com in an article about where to go after CK.) When students know the grammar of a subject, they can engage it with logical questions. Why do some cells’ mutations cause diseases, others benefits? What is “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”?  What is wrong about saying that “there were grammatical differences between Dr. Hirsch and I”?  The Socratic “What is?” challenges us to explain the knowledge we think we have.  The logical testing of grammar lets us know what to think of it.  The logic stage thus follows quite naturally on the grammar stage, because we are curious and ask questions about what we learn.  The trivium accounts for this human inquisitiveness. Every class at Ridgeview takes students from grammar to logic. Already kindergartners ask questions about the things they learn and few Ridgeview teenagers just accept information without testing it.

The Rhetoric Stage

In their senior theses, Ridgeview seniors articulate their view of a good life. Their judgments are based on the grammar they learned at Ridgeview, the many questions they have asked, and the many arguments they’ve had. This articulation of a thesis is the rhetoric stage: It is an argument about the grammar one has learned and logically tested. Our senior thesis is the final goal of a Ridgeview education, but many prior classes include rhetorical elements in the form of papers, exams, and presentations. While mastery of grammar and conversing about and testing this grammar is the bedrock of a classical education, the final goal is to arrive at reasoned judgment. And while many classes in a K-12 school can hardly claim to produce students who have prudential judgment, each class knows it is trying to move students towards this end.

The Continual Cycle through the Trivium

Each stage, therefore, needs the others. Grammar without logic and rhetoric is information without judgment. Computers possess a vast amount of grammar, but we wouldn’t call a computer prudent. To ask “What is?” without grammatical knowledge is a meaningless, though popular, exercise. Rhetoric without tested knowledge works for stand-up comedy but not for the more serious parts of our lives. One of the misunderstandings regarding classical education is to assign grammar to elementary, logic to middle, and rhetoric to high school. As parents well know, very young students ask lots of logical questions and grown-ups are in desperate need of grammatical knowledge about many things. The trivium is a process that goes on in all learning, all the time. I might be in the rhetoric stage regarding classical education, but I’m in the grammar stage regarding late antiquity or modern baseball. Students here and learners everywhere continually cycle through the trivium. Classical education understands that every effort in the classroom is a step on the trivium’s long road towards rhetorical mastery of a subject. Kindergarten teachers need to know what kind of human beings they want to graduate and high-school teachers need to know where their students come from. No class takes place in isolation and without the vision of the whole. Classical education is teleological.

From Trivium to Character and Citizenship

The trivium is the method of classical education, but without a moral purpose it aims only at intelligence. While Core Knowledge without a civic purpose is still much better than anti- curriculum, anti-intellectual, anti-traditional education, it is like a powerful engine without a steering wheel, a great athlete without a competition: It lacks a destination. Hirsch’s The Making of Americans knows where it is taking Core Knowledge. Intelligence, gained by studying the Core Knowledge sequence, needs to be coupled with character, gained by learning what it means to be a good citizen. Ridgeview’s founders drew extensively on Hirsch’s first two books to realize their dream of a classical school. Now we can proudly see him return the compliment as he writes that our “success stands as a sharp rebuke to the dominant anti-intellectual pedagogy of most American schools.” Dr. Hirsch and Ridgeview have become educational soulmates, united by the shared purpose of making Americans.

Growing Up Gadgety

by Robert Pondiscio
November 22nd, 2010

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Posted in Education News, Education Practice, Parents, Students, Teaching | 12 Comments »

Is prolonged, focused attention a 21st Century skill? 

“Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters,” notes the New York Times.  ”But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.”

“Growing Up Digital, Wired For Distraction,” a major Times thumbsucker, is long enough to challenge the attention span not just of teens but Trappist monks.  But it’s must-reading for educators.  Behind the undeniable lure of technology is a risk that “developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.” 

“Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,” says Michael Rich of Harvard Medical School, the executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. “The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.”

The tension, of course, is at the same time researchers are raising red flags about raising children immersed in a digital bath, education is redoubling efforts to increase technology use in the classroom for engagement, customization and efficiency.  The Times makes much of a research study, familiar to readers of this blog, that reading and academic works goes down not up, when computers arrive in the home.

The result is one of those Rorschach tests of an article, virtually guaranteed to confirm your biases  (The world is going to digital hell!  We’ll never engage kids if we don’t embrace technology!).  The most interesting section of the piece is the Times look at current research on ”what happens to the brains of young people who are constantly online and in touch.” 

The researchers looked at how the use of these media affected the boys’ brainwave patterns while sleeping and their ability to remember their homework in the subsequent days. They found that playing video games led to markedly lower sleep quality than watching TV, and also led to a “significant decline” in the boys’ ability to remember vocabulary words. The findings were published in the journal Pediatrics.

Other studies cited by the Times suggest that “periods of rest are critical in allowing the brain to synthesize information, make connections between ideas and even develop the sense of self.”  “Downtime is to the brain what sleep is to the body,” observes Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. “But kids are in a constant mode of stimulation.”

“The headline is: bring back boredom,” says Dr. Rich, who the Times points out, recently gave a speech to the American Academy of Pediatrics entitled, “Finding Huck Finn: Reclaiming Childhood from the River of Electronic Screens.”

“ican going to graduate to now”

by Robert Pondiscio
November 16th, 2010

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Posted in Higher Education | 13 Comments »

Meet Ed Dante, academic mercenary.  Since 2004, he has worked full-time writing “original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students.”  On any given day, he writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education, he’s working on 20 or more papers.  “My customers are your students,” he writes.  “Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can’t detect, that you can’t defend against, that you may not even know exists.”

I’ve written toward a master’s degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I’ve worked on bachelor’s degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I’ve written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I’ve attended three dozen online universities. I’ve completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.

“Do you ever wonder how a student who struggles to formulate complete sentences in conversation manages to produce marginally competent research?” Dante asks. It’s a devastating, yet fascinating piece describing in painful detail a career borne of the ”desperation, misery, and incompetence” that the educational system has created.  “You would be amazed by the incompetence of your students’ writing,” writes the pseudonymous Mr. Dante.  “They couldn’t write a convincing grocery list, yet they are in graduate school.”

To the inevitable question–which department has the worst incidents of cheating?–the  inevitable answer: Education.

“I’ve written papers for students in elementary-education programs, special-education majors, and ESL-training courses. I’ve written lesson plans for aspiring high-school teachers, and I’ve synthesized reports from notes that customers have taken during classroom observations. I’ve written essays for those studying to become school administrators, and I’ve completed theses for those on course to become principals. In the enormous conspiracy that is student cheating, the frontline intelligence community is infiltrated by double agents. (Future educators of America, I know who you are.)

Dante is clear that his work makes him “vulnerable to ethical scrutiny” but he insists pointing the finger at him is too easy. “Why does my business thrive? Why do so many students prefer to cheat rather than do their own work?  Say what you want about me, but I am not the reason your students cheat,” he observes.  Tellingly, he notes that not one of his customers has had the originality of his or her work questioned, or been caught. 

The most wince-producing aspect of Dante’s long and withering piece are the semi-literate communications he reproduces from his customers. After completing a 160-page graduate thesis, “every word of which was written by me,” Dante got a thank you note from his grateful client. 

“thanx so much for uhelp ican going to graduate to now.”

Sandra Stotsky on Ed Schools

by Robert Pondiscio
November 15th, 2010

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Posted in Teacher Training | 26 Comments »

Mike Petrilli’s complaint that ed reform is in danger of morphing into the compliance police brought an interesting rejoinder from Sandra Stotsky in the comments section of this blog last week.  Stotsky, a leading authority on standards and teacher quality,  suggests that reforming education means reforming our schools of education.   Dr. Stotsky prescribes the following:

1.  Eliminate education schools as they now exist. Place the preparation of 5/6-12 subject matter teachers under the control of the academic departments whose content they should master to the extent the department itself can justify (for the grade levels they will teach). Each academic department should have funds for hiring pedagogical faculty adjuncts (preferably good teachers of the subject) for the methods coursework they need and student teaching supervision. Grades 9-12 teachers today should be required to have a MA or MS in the subject they teach. State governments can require and make these changes.

2. Place the preparation of primary grade teachers in 3-year dedicated pedagogical institutes, with candidates drawn only from the top 25% of high school graduates.

3. Eliminate all federal funding and regulations for K-12. Federal agencies should focus on faculty research and training of graduate students.

4. Eliminate the single-salary schedule.

Stotsky has more than a point in her indictment of ed schools.  I suspect you’d be hard pressed to find many teachers who strongly agree with the statement “my ed school thoroughly prepared me for my classroom experience.”  And it’s curious that many who think the answer to fixing education is “just fire bad teachers” aren’t equally adamant about fixing the pipeline that produced those “bad” teachers.

Veteran’s Day Quiz

by Robert Pondiscio
November 11th, 2010

Posted in Core Knowledge Quiz | 4 Comments »

1. What was the original name of Veterans Day?

2. Why is Veterans Day celebrated on November 11? 

3. What was World War I called prior to World War II?

4. True or false: Since becoming an official U.S. holiday Veterans Day has always been celebrated on November 11?   

5. Which President was the first to have the Secretary of Veterans Affairs as a member of his cabinet?

6. The motto of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is “To care for him who shall have borne the battle.”  What famous speech is the source of the motto? 

7. Who is the current Secretary of Veterans Affairs?

8. Two of the last three Presidents (Obama, Clinton) are not military veterans.  Before Obama and Clinton, who was the last U.S. President not to serve in any branch of the military?

9. Who was the first U.S. President who was not a military veteran? 

10. What is the difference between Veterans Day and Memorial Day?

(Answers below)

Read the rest of this entry »

Confirmation Bias: When Educators Underestimate Children

by Robert Pondiscio
November 10th, 2010

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Posted in Curriculum, Education Practice, Parents, Teaching | 42 Comments »

Guest blogger Katharine Beals, PhD is the author of “Raising a Left-Brain Child in a Right-Brain World: Strategies for Helping Bright, Quirky, Socially Awkward Children to Thrive at Home and at School.”  She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and at the Drexel University School of Education, specializing in the education of children on the autistic spectrum.  She blogs about education at Kitchen Table Math and on her own blog, Out in Left Field.

By Katharine Beals

Why underestimate what children understand?

Recent anecdotes from parents and recommendations from educators suggest that the underestimation of American children is alive and well in the world of K-12 education. In particular, more and more teachers and education experts  seem convinced that kids don’t really understand the words they read or the numbers they manipulate nearly as well as their parents claim they do. Thus, one mother learns from her daughter’s 2nd grade teacher that her child doesn’t understand the chapter books she’s been reading for pleasure since kindergarten. She should be reading picture books instead. Another mother learns that the multi-digit arithmetic that her 3rd grade son has been doing since preschool is mere calculation, devoid of conceptual understanding. He should be doing simpler calculations using manipulatives and repeated addition.

How, and why, have so many educators become so skeptical about children’s understanding?

How to become skeptical is child’s play. Simply ask the child a question that ostensibly probes comprehension, but is either vague enough, open-ended enough, or verbally challenging enough that the child is unlikely to give the “correct” answer: What is that? What is it about? Why did you do that? If further probing seems necessary, ask equally difficult follow-up questions.

Ground-breaking math education theorist Constance Kamii  has shown how this works with place value in particular:

1. Show the child a number like this: 27

2. Place your finger on the left-most digit and ask the child what number it is.

3. When the child answers “two” rather than “twenty,” immediately conclude that he or she doesn’t understand place value.

4. Banish from your mind any suspicion that a child who can read “27″as “twenty seven” might simultaneously (a) know that the “2″ in “27″ is what contributes to twenty seven the value of twenty and (b) be assuming that you were asking about “2″ as a number rather than about “2″ as a digit. 

How might you convince yourself that a 3rd grader doesn’t understand multi-digit arithmetic? Why not tap into her immature verbal skills? Ask her to elaborate how she subtracted 562 from 831. When she stumbles, ignore any suspicion that articulating why one borrowed from the 8 in the hundreds place and reduced the 8 to a 7 is beyond the verbal skills of your typical 8 or 9-year-old.

How might you convince yourself that a 2nd grader doesn’t understand his above-grade level chapter book? Here, a sufficiently open-ended question may do the trick. Ask him what the book is about, or what will happen next, or how the text relates to himself. Then interpret any hesitation, stumbling, vagueness, or reluctance to respond as an unequivocal sign of deficient comprehension. Dismiss any suspicion that this line of reasoning implies that a teenager who answers “What did you do today?” with “I don’t know” doesn’t comprehend his day.

Perhaps less obvious is why some educators seem determined to underestimate understanding. Here are a couple of possibilities. First, doing so may level the range of apparent abilities in a class of twenty-something children. Parents might think their children are ahead academically, but if they don’t really understand what they are doing, there’s less pressure to provide them with an accelerated curriculum. There’s also less of an apparent achievement gap to be troubled by.

Underestimating comprehension may also serve to avoid or postpone teaching harder material that, frankly, can be a pain in the neck to teach. Believing that children don’t understand place value, for example, gives you an excuse not to teach those pesky standard algorithms of arithmetic. Why? Because if children don’t understand place value, then they can’t understand borrowing and carrying (regrouping), let alone column multiplication and long division. And unless they understand how these procedures work from the get-go, educators claim (though mathematicians disagree), using them will permanently harm their mathematical development.

What’s particularly striking about this underestimation is how much it seems to have permeated the establishment’s take even on those children it itself identifies as “gifted.” For example, at the recent New England Conference on the Gifted and Talented, most of the math talks either expressed concerns about children’s comprehension of place value, and/or advocated the use of manipulatives in place of abstract math. The mathematically gifted kids I know, however, grasp place value and other aspects of arithmetic with only minimal exposure to manipulatives, and quickly advance to higher levels of abstraction by the time they hit first or second grade. 

So, indeed, do children in other developed countries around the world (see examples on my blog, Out in Left Field here, here and here)–whether or not we’d consider them “mathematically gifted.”

To stop holding our students back relative to their international peers, we need to stop asking them the wrong questions. Sometimes, indeed, no questions are necessary. If a child enjoys reading a particular book, then even if she fails to tell you what it’s about, she probably has a reasonable understanding of its content.  If his multi-digit calculations are error-free, then even if he can’t clearly explain his steps in words, he probably has a reasonable understanding of his calculations. Comprehension may not be perfect—when is it ever so? — but the fact that it may need refinement is reason to encourage a child forward, not to stand in his or her way.

 

The Achievement Gap Is Worse Than You Think

by Robert Pondiscio
November 9th, 2010

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Posted in Assessment and Testing, Parents | 9 Comments »

The achievement gap is worse than generally known–and poverty alone does not explain the difference, according to a report out today from the Council of Great City Schools.  The New York Times gets early word on the report, which says only 12 percent of black 4th grade boys are proficient in reading, compared to 38 percent of white boys. The same percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys.  The report is based on NAEP figures.

“Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences,” the Times reports.  “Poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches.” 

The report’s authors say the figures should “spark a new sense of urgency.”  However, the most provocative comments in the Times piece come from Harvard’s Ronald Ferguson who points to accumulating evidence of “racial differences in what kids experience” before they even enter school. “They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces,” Ferguson says. “In order to address those, we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have.” 

That includes “conversations about early childhood parenting practices,” says Ferguson.  “The activities that parents conduct with their 2-, 3- and 4-year-olds. How much we talk to them, the ways we talk to them, the ways we enforce discipline, the ways we encourage them to think and develop a sense of autonomy.”

Here’s one way to get that difficult conversation started.

Ed Reform as the Compliance Police

by Robert Pondiscio
November 8th, 2010

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Posted in accountability, Educational Policy | 12 Comments »

Has the battle cry of ed reform evolved from “Just win, baby!” to “Just comply, baby?”

Time was when ed reform had a single focus:  accountability for results, observes Fordham’s Mike Petrilli.   But now, frustrated with the glacial pace of improvement and results, the impulse is to push for “change anywhere, anytime, anyhow—even if that means engaging in the same sort of regulating and rule-making and program-creating and money-spending  that we once abhorred.”

The most obvious example Petrilli cites is Race to the Top which, rather than reward results, “lavished money on those jurisdictions willing to pledge themselves to a set of prescriptive reforms.”   Then too, there are reformers pushing teacher quality who ”rightly point out that today’s evaluation systems are a total joke,” Petrilli writes. 

“But here’s their mistake: they are doing this pushing primarily at the state level, even though states don’t employ teachers—districts do. Of course, the reformers understand this, and thus have started to worry about how to “implement” statewide teacher evaluation systems. How do you make sure that districts, and principals, actually use the new evaluation instruments that the state develops? That they truly differentiate among teachers, and take action accordingly? There’s only one way to be sure: we’d better have a strategy to enforce compliance.”

The choice reformers face is between results-based reforms like charter schools or process-based reforms, like improved teacher evaluations,” Mike argues. 

“A smart person once said that the true test of one’s character isn’t how one handles adversity, but how one handles power. The school reform movement performed magnificently when facing adversity. But now that it has power, is it going to stick to its focus on results, or is it going to become the compliance police instead? Hold on to power (for benign purposes, of course!) or give it away?”

Tight on ends, loose on means do it my way.