Reading is Believing (And That’s a Problem)

by Robert Pondiscio
August 30th, 2012

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Posted in Education News, Research and Reports | 5 Comments »

When planning class read-alouds as a teacher, I was an unabashed fan of historical fiction.  Christopher Paul Curtis’ Depression-era novel, Bud, Not Buddy; Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars, set in Nazi-occupied Denmark; and the 19th century frontier novel Sarah, Plain and Tall were among the books that allowed me to weave history and geography—sorely needed by my inner city 5th graders– into the literacy block.

With Common Core State Standards calling for more non-fiction in literacy instruction, mixing more academic content into ELA instruction is becoming standard practice.  But not everyone is eager to see fiction and literature loosen its grip on language arts.  Dan Willingham’s science and education blog asks, can’t kids learn about the world through fiction?

They can and do.

“The advantage of fiction is that the narrative can engage students, transport them into the story. The fear is that readers will assume that information in fiction is true, whereas fiction may well contain inaccuracies. We don’t expect fiction to be vetted for accuracy the way a non-fiction source would be. (Certainly Hollywood movies are notorious for playing fast-and-loose with the truth.)”

Research shows inaccuracies in fiction can indeed later be remembered by students as true.  Willingham describes an experiment designed to test whether exposure to accurate or inaccurate information in a fictional story influenced how students responded to a later test about that information.  Exposure to correct information “makes it more likely you’ll get the answer correct on the test,” Willingham writes. “Reading the misleading information makes it less likely you’ll get it correct and more likely you’ll get it wrong.”

Sounds obvious, but there’s more.  “Prior knowledge is not protective. In other words, the misleading information has an impact even for stuff that most of the students knew before the experiment started,” (emphasis added) Willingham observes.   Encountering inaccuracies in fiction, in other words, can override what students knew before they read it.  But all is not lost: alerting students to the specific inaccuracies or misinformation in a story, Dan notes, “is very effective in preventing subjects from absorbing the inaccuracy.”

The takeaway for teachers?  Use fiction to engage and bring history, science and other subjects to life.  But you’ve got know your stuff so you can flag instances of literary license to your kids.

Poles Apart

by Robert Pondiscio
August 29th, 2012

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Posted in Education News | 8 Comments »

“Are we hopelessly polarized, or are we suffering from fatigue?” legendary PBS education correspondent John Merrow asks in a thoughtful blog post. “I think many of us are just tired, worn out from listening to the rants and negativity.”

What he said.

To his credit, Merrow is saying out loud what a lots of folks in the education blogosphere have been saying privately for a while now.  “Debate” has become trench warfare, with the usual suspects saying the usual things, over and over, louder and louder.  They’re merely getting more shrill and strident.  It’s getting tedious out there.  Hearts and minds are not being won.

Merrow’s no fool or squishy appeaser pleading, can’t we just get along?  “Sometimes one position is correct, or largely correct. Sometimes people’s strongly held convictions are just plain wrong,” he writes.

Merrow lists several ways in which education debate is polarized: accountability, the achievement gap, school management and structures, assessment, technology, and our expectations for what we should expect of schools and teachers. Are we also polarized about the purposes of public education? Here Merrow hits his stride:  “The goal of school is to help grow American citizens. Four key words: help, grow, American, citizen.  Think about those words,” he writes

“Help: Schools are junior partners in education. They are to help families, the principal educators.

“Grow: It’s a process, sometimes two steps forward, one back. Education is akin to a family business, not a publicly traded stock company that lives and dies by quarterly reports.

“American: E Pluribus Unum. We are Americans, first and foremost.

“Citizen: Let’s put some flesh on that term. What do we want our children to be as adults? Good parents and neighbors, thoughtful voters, reliable workers? What else?”

“We need to get beyond polarization and figure out what we agree on,” Merrow writes.  Wise and heartfelt words from one of education’s elder statesmen.

Hobson’s Choice

by Robert Pondiscio
August 28th, 2012

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Posted in Educational Policy, Opinion | 14 Comments »

“Hobson’s choice” is one of those wonderful phrases you don’t hear much anymore.  The story is told about one Thomas Hobson, who ran a rental stable in England in the 17th century.  If you wanted to hire one of his horses, Mr. Hobson, who didn’t want his best mounts overused, offered you a choice: you could take the horse he offered or no horse at all.  “Hobson’s choice,” often mistakenly rendered as a “Hobbesian choice,” entered the language as a phrase meaning “no choice at all.”  Take it or leave it.

I thought of Hobson’s choice today when reading Nancy Flanagan’s Teacher in a Strange Land blog over at EdWeek.  “Choice isn’t the answer to building a vision of a high-quality, personally tailored, democratic education for every child in America,” she writes.  “Nor is it evil incarnate. It’s a distraction from the conversation we should be having about improving public education in America.”  The early aspirations of the charter movement notwithstanding, choice has failed to live up to its promise, Flanagan notes.

“While charter promoters talk a great game about families flocking to the innovative, high-quality programming at public school academies, what’s more likely is that the charter represents a more palatable option than the public school–perhaps over something as simple as a grumpy teacher, an inconvenient bus schedule, lack of opportunity for parental control.”

I’m not as troubled as Nancy by parental caprice in exercising choice.  It would be ironic to be in the business of education and have little faith in parents’ ability to make an informed choice—or to correct course if that choice proved untenable.  My personal bottom line, speaking only for myself, is that choice is an intrinsic good.  I like exercising school choice for my child and I want you to have the same options.  And let’s face it, education is fundamentally coercive: you have to educate your child.  Some latitude in how you go about it is to be encouraged.

Flanagan is on stronger ground when she observes that school choice has “not provided a range of options for children in poverty.”

“…and predictable aspects of entrepreneurial school start-ups have intensified: Cutting corners on staff. Relying on private schmoozing and charitable funding rather than community/tax-based support. Focusing on surface features–like uniforms and hall behavior–rather than strong academics. Using public monies for advertising rather than educational quality. Booting kids who don’t burnish the school’s reputation or scores. Inventing bogus politicized agendas like the parent “trigger” for personal and commercial gain.

The points Flanagan raises are debatable but here’s the problem with choice I think she overlooks:  Too often, the “choice” is either false or irrelevant.   To give the most obvious example, if a nearby charter school is wedded to the same content-poor curriculum as a neighborhood school, if writing is taught as pure process, and reading as a set of strategies to be learned and practiced, if test-prep dominates the school day and the curriculum narrowed for that purpose, then issues of staffing, management structures, union contracts and funding mechanisms don’t matter at all.

I’ve argued this before: education doesn’t have a process problem.  It has a product problem.  Having to choose between the same thin gruel, lowest common denominator education in Public School A or Charter School B is a choice.  Hobson’s choice.

Our Lives, Our Fortunes, Our Sacred Honor. And Free Beer!!

by Robert Pondiscio
August 21st, 2012

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Posted in Curriculum, Opinion, Teaching | 8 Comments »

“It strikes me as funny that we call our political organizations ‘parties,” writes Ann Beeson. “Elections and political parties are the antithesis of fun. It’s no wonder that many young people avoid them.”

A lecturer at the University of Texas and former national associate legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Beeson observes in a New York Times op-ed that young people “are some of the most active and committed people I know” yet stay away from the polls in droves.  “Three causes are worth exploring,” she writes.

“First of all, many young people just don’t see the connection between voting and their commitment to improve their communities, advocate for a cause, or change the world. Secondly, there are very real grounds for political cynicism. And finally, let’s face it, civic engagement can be a snore.”

Civic engagement, Beeson writes, lacks “the fun factor.”  It conjures up “images of neighborhood meetings that plod along in rooms with stained carpets, cheap paneling and fluorescent lighting.”

Bummer, dude.

Sure, Beeson want young people “scared straight into voting” by emphasizing the price of their inaction.  But most of all, she says, “it should be terrific fun to vote and to stay involved after election day.”

“What if the average civic gathering – whether it’s a political rally, grassroots group, school task force, or city council – involved cook-offs, improv or gaming? What if we devised clever ways to scale up what’s working, instead of whining for a living? What if we banned Robert’s Rules of Order and actually got to know one another?”

We’ve heard this before in education.  If we want kids to care, we have to make it fun and engaging.  And while I agree with the impulse, there’s something to be said—both in education and in civic engagement—for also acknowledging the idea that we owe a debt to ourselves and history to stir ourselves from the couch and embrace mature responsibility.

“Has the nation become so self-indulgent that we are no longer motivated to act for the greater good or are the issues just less significant and less motivating than in the past?” a friend asked me this morning after reading Beeson’s piece.  It’s a good question.   I don’t have the answer, but I’m reasonably sure that a better grasp of our nation’s history wouldn’t hurt.  If we don’t understand and value the price that has been paid over generations to found, protect, and ensure the viability of our democracy, we can hardly be surprised if our children take its continuance as a given.

Cook-offs, improv and gaming?   The Freedom Riders were not lured onto luxury coaches with DVD players and giddy shouts of “road trip!”  The Greatest Generation won WWII and faced down communism.  D-Day was not, I suspect, positioned as a great way to meet French girls. Unless I’m very much mistaken, the Declaration of Independence did not include the Founders’ pledge to each other of “our Lives, our Fortunes, our sacred Honor…and free beer!”

I’m being churlish, I know.  Forgive me.  But if making voting and civic engagement “fun” is what it takes to stir young people to take act in their own self-interest, perhaps we will be no poorer if we let grownups decide things.

When the Common Core=Teaching Reading Strategies 2.0

by Guest Blogger
August 17th, 2012

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Posted in Education Practice | 16 Comments »

By Rachel Levy

According to its advocates, the Common Core Standards will usher in an era of equal opportunity to higher quality education via better, richer, and more career and college relevant standards. But if the account presented in this post on Education Sector’s The Quick & The Ed is any indication, I fear the Common Core ELA standards will keep us in the same era we’ve been in.

I first came across Susan Headden’s post, “Getting Complicated With Texts: Understanding the New ELA Standards,” describing a hands-on workshop she attended on the Common Core ELA standards, via a John Thompson post “Does Common Core Have It Backwards?” in This Week in Education. The idea that most struck Thompson (who is no Common Core hater) as concerning was:

“The group was left with the overarching message that mastering text complexity is the secret to reading success.” . . . .Teachers were told that “the problem with questions based on experience is that they exclude students who haven’t had those experiences. ‘Text … is the great equalizer.’”

Thompson says that’s wrong:

The key to teaching anything for mastery is understanding the human complexity within our kids. The logic underlaying that conclusion was even worse. Even if the assessment experts who conducted the professional development have never stepped foot in the inner city, they should know that the opposite applies in high-challenge schools.  Our path to success is building on the students’ strengths, based on their real-life learning.

I don’t disagree with Thompson but I would go much further. Vital to teaching anything (okay, vital to teaching reading) for mastery to any students, is background knowledge. The Common Core is supposed to go further than just asking students to learn from text by relating the general themes in the text it to their own personal experiences. As it should, but that doesn’t mean we should limit what they are learning to the content of the texts they are studying. From Headden’s post:

As we did our reading, we kept the hallmarks of complexity in mind. On the high end of the scale, they include: structure that is unconventional rather than expected, ideas that are implicit rather than explicit, and language that is figurative rather than literal, archaic rather than contemporary, and vague rather than clear. Sentences in very complex texts tend to be complicated rather than straightforward, and vocabulary is academic rather than plain.  Informational text that is defined as complex might require specialized knowledge, have multiple meanings, and an obscure purpose. Complex literary texts tend to include references to other texts, demand cultural knowledge, and carry sophisticated, multiple perspectives. (More than one participant noted that such texts might well meet the standard of complexity, but that they might also fit the definition of bad writing.)

The group engaged in a lively discussion about how much context a teacher should supply with a reading selection. “Are you helping [students] understand the more background you give him?” Liben asked. Yes, he said. “But are you making them better readers?” No.  “If you call attention to the ‘hard parts’ are you helping them comprehend?” Yes, he said. “But you are depriving them of the opportunity to find key turning points on their own.”  In short, he asked his audience, “Do you measure success by how much you smooth the road for your teachers, or by how bumpy the road is?” The Common Core clearly leans toward the bumps.

According to this account, teachers and being told that reading comprehension is a transferable skill, that the Common Core will improve reading comprehension by virtue of giving students more complex texts to work through.

Although I’ve been critical of the Common Core Standards, that they focus on reading strategies was not one of my criticisms; to the contrary, that they emphasized content knowledge, a greater study of literature, and more and more complex writing were selling points. But this account makes the Common Core ELA Standards sound as if they are skill-heavy, or at least that teachers are being guided to implement them as if they were. The problem is you can’t really teach something like “text complexity” any more than you can teach something like the “main idea.” Just because the texts are more “complex” doesn’t make using them in the place of simpler texts a superior approach or any different from the reading strategies approach. Apart from the acknowledgement that all teachers have to teach vocabulary (agreed), there’s no nod to background knowledge or context in Headden’s post. And even teaching vocabulary doesn’t do much good if it’s taught in isolation, though certainly explicitly teaching the meaning of morphemes can help students to build and make meaning of vocabulary.

Finally, while the practice of “quality over quantity” in education resonates with me, “reading success” with complex texts even with a lot of content knowledge won’t happen without practice. Besides the fact that it will pretty quickly bore or frustrate the bejesus out of them, you can’t just have students study the patterns and codes of complex text and then imagine they’ll apply those to future complex texts and viola! they’ll be better readers. No, students have to practice. They have to read lots and lots—fiction and non-fiction books, literature, magazines, newspapers, poetry, short stories, blogs—until the patterns and structures in each genre become predictable and recognizable.

The key to reading success is a vocabulary and knowledge-rich curriculum and a lot of practice reading. If the Common Core ELA Standards don’t include this, then they won’t be much of an improvement or change from current ELA standards. However, even if the Common Core Standards result in more content-rich ELA classrooms, which means students with more background knowledge and possibly more productive focus on text complexity, for now, as Thompson points out, text is not the great equalizer. Its divides students rather starkly not based on complexity or structure but according to schema, or what they already know. If teachers don’t or aren’t able to take this into account and scaffold appropriately, students will flounder and the CCSS will fail to help them.

Rachel Levy is a parent, teacher, and writer who lives in Central Virginia, with her husband and three children. She normally blogs at All Things Education.

That Dog Won’t Hunt

by Robert Pondiscio
August 16th, 2012

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Posted in Education Practice, Literacy | 8 Comments »

“How many legs does a dog have if you call its tail a leg?” Abraham Lincoln is famously reported to have asked.   Four, said Abe.  “Because calling it a leg doesn’t make it one.”

And calling your ELA curriculum Common Core aligned doesn’t mean it really is.

At Fordham’s Common Core Watch blog last week, Kathleen Porter-Magee posted a piece that deserves more attention.  It’s an eye-opening look at how literacy guru Lucy Calkins is “rewriting the Common Core” to basically argue for the same old literacy practices that have largely failed our students.  A new book by Calkins, Mary Ehrenworth and Christopher Lehman, Pathways to the Common Core “sounds like a useful resource that ELA teachers can use to figure out how to align their instruction to the new standards,” writes Porter-Magee. However…

“Unfortunately, it misses the mark. Part ideological co-opting of the Common Core (CCSS) and part defense of existing—and poorly aligned—materials produced by Heinemann, the book is the leading edge of an all-out effort to ensure that adoption of the new standards requires very few changes on the part of some of the leading voices—and biggest publishing houses—in education.”

This is as unsurprising as it is dispiriting. “The anti-intellectual monopoly of the education world, combined with the financial power of a few large publishers makes the new common-core initiative highly precarious,” E.D. Hirsch warned two years ago.  “There is every likelihood that the same diluted and fragmented early curriculum will be given a new label and present itself as conforming to the new standards.”

The helpful-sounding mission of Pathways to the Common Core is to help educators “grasp what the standards say and imply—as well as what they do not say—deeply enough that they can join in the work of interpreting the standards for the classroom and in questioning interpretations others may make.”  Here’s Porter-Magee:

“And question the ‘interpretations’ others propose, they do, as they often contradict not only the guidance released by the lead authors of the Standards (including that found in the “publishers criteria” for ELA, something the authors outright dismiss), but also the guidance included within the four corners of the CCSS document itself. Of course with any set of expectations there is room for debate on some of the finer points. But the lengths that the authors go to explain away the parts of the standards with which they are least comfortable is breathtaking.”

Phonics, for example, is derided as “the low-level literacy work of sound-letter correspondence and so on” which has been, “thankfully, marginalized in its own separate section of the CCSS.”  Whoa, says Porter-Magee. “These statements are patently false and represent a damaging misdirection of the expectations laid out in the Common Core standards.”

“The truth is that there is an entire section of the standards—a section that is given the same prominence and importance as the Reading Standards for Literature and the Reading Standards for Informational Text—called “Reading Standards: Foundational Skills (K-5).” There, the standards make the importance of student mastery of these supposedly “low-level” skills abundantly clear, not only by delineating precisely what is expected of students, but also by saying that they “are necessary and important components of an effective, comprehensive reading program designed to develop proficient readers with the capacity to comprehend texts across a range of types and disciplines.”

There’s much more, and I strongly recommend reading Porter-Magee’s smart takedown start to finish.  I’ve just ordered a copy Pathways to the Common Core.  Having been trained in Calkins’ content-hostile approach to reading and writing and forced to implement it in my classroom, I’ll be very interested to see how she explains away CCSS’s insistence that “texts—within and across grade levels—need to be selected around topics or themes that systematically develop the knowledge base of students.”  Or the Standards’ clear and unambiguous call for a content-rich approach to literacy:

“By reading texts in history/social studies, science, and other disciplines, students build a foundation of knowledge in these fields that will also give them the background to be better readers in all content areas. Students can only gain this foundation when the curriculum is intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades.”

“We will never have an honest discussion about the relative merits of one approach versus another if publishers avoid the difficult conversations and merely seek to bend the Common Core to their own will—and self-interests,” Porter-Magee concludes.

N.B.  Kathleen has another piece on CCSS implementation at the Shanker Blog that is also a must-read.  And check out the comments for a surprise appearance by CCSS authors David Coleman and Sue Pimentel, who log in to say, “Kathleen’s got it right.”

It’s on.

Black and White and Red All Over

by Guest Blogger
August 13th, 2012

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Posted in Education Practice, Teaching | 15 Comments »

by Jessica Lahey

I can be very, very stubborn. I am sure my parents, husband, sister, sons, friends, in-laws…pretty much anyone who knows me well can attest to this. When something or someone I love is criticized, my first instinct is to suit up for battle, stare the enemy down until he or she bends to my will while I bash them into submission with my keyboard.

So when my beloved red ink, the ink of choice for teachers everywhere, was implicated as a weapon of teacher cruelty and cause of students’ suffering, I dug in my heels.

So much so that when one of my former students was given her first full-time post as a teacher this year, I searched and searched for the perfect fountain pen, and then, to complete the gift, provided a couple of bottles of lovely red ink.

She sent a lovely thank you note – in red ink, of course – because she has to use all of that ink somewhere. It won’t, she reported, be used at school, because teachers at her new school are not allowed to correct student work in red ink.

I had no idea. Despite my love of researching and reading all things educational, I’d somehow managed to miss this entire controversy.

I looked around, and asked some teacher tweeps and Facebook friends about the situation, and yes, it’s a thing. Apparently, the red ink controversy rears its head every decade or so.  My first reaction was to mock the entire “controversy.” I know, I know -hello haters, I see your ire rising – but many of the early comments I got back from teachers and psychologists egged me on.

From a middle school teacher: “Gosh, heaven forbid we express any sort of disapproval!!”

From an adolescent psychologist: “That is nuts. How much should we coddle kids?”

From a writer and teacher: “Why…. because it hurts kids’ feeeeeelings? Pardon me while I barf.”

From an education writer: “Oh. God. No. I remember sitting through a PD about this and how dispiriting it supposedly was for students to get papers back marked up with red ink. We read a piece about a group of teachers receiving training in this, which concluded with the newly enlightened and chastened teachers dropping their red pens in the trash as they marched out the door. Gag me.”

From a professor: “… boy can I tell which students have never seen red ink before. They also happen to be the same ones who have a nervous breakdown or have their parents call me when they get anything less than an A. One of them actually told me, ‘I don’t like it that you give edits in red ink. It makes me feel like I’m not perfect.’

And again, from that same professor: Two years ago, one of my students told me he preferred red-ink edits. He said it made him pay attention, and it made him see those edits as corrections and learning moments rather than just notes that he might’ve perceived as optional or not important.

As you can see, the overwhelming reaction to the complaints about red ink was a strangled, gagging sound.

But then, a teaching miracle occurred. One of my former students offered up evidence. Actual, real, live evidence. This is sheer heaven for for me, particularly because this former student has become a teacher himself. It turns out that NPR, among other news outfits, covered the red ink controversy a while back. Guy Raz interviewed Abraham Rutchcick on All Things Considered about an article Rutchick published on the subject in the European Journal of Social Psychology.

I listened to the NPR piece, then located the original article. According to Rutchick’s article, “The Pen is Mightier Than the Word: Object Priming of Evaluative Standards:”

Because red pens are closely associated with error-marking and poor performance, the use of red pens when correcting student work can activate these concepts. People using red pens to complete a word-stem task completed more words related to errors and poor performance than did people using black pens (Study 1), suggesting relatively greater accessibility of these concepts. Moreover, people using red pens to correct essays marked more errors (Study 2) and awarded lower grades (Study 3) than people using blue pens. Thus, despite teachers’ efforts to free themselves from extraneous influences when grading, the very act of picking up a red pen can bias their evaluations.

I was torn. I love my red ink. I have a large bottle of it at school, all sorts of red pens in felt-tip, rollerball, ball-point, and some fancy artists’ felt tips I bought for a small fortune in an art supply store in Paris a couple of years ago. I save those for extra-special editing.

I can’t imagine parting with my lovely collection just because a few students might be a little irked by the color. Besides, I have this lovely letter from a former student, decorated with comments I’d written on her papers over the year I taught her, and it just makes me so happy when I look at it. She saved those papers, valued those comments, and used them to become a better writer. How bad could red ink really be?

To seal the deal, I offer up the concluding questions from the NPR interview:

RAZ: Professor Rutchick, you are a psychology professor at Cal State Northridge, right?
Prof. RUTCHICK: I am.
RAZ: And when you grade papers, what color pen do you use?
Prof. RUTCHICK: I use a red pen, actually. It’s – I have to override somehow my urge to be nice and kind.

See! Even the author of the study that reveals the catastrophic psychic harm red ink can do to students is keeping his red pens!

Just when I was determined to hold on to that red pen until someone pried it out of my cold, dead, fingers, a discussion heated up on my Facebook page:

From an editor at a major publishing house: As an editor I was always taught to use pencil, not pen, because authors might balk at the permanence of pen (as if the edits were a mandate and not a suggestion). Now I use Track Changes! I do know of one editor who objected to using red (pen or pencil) for its even more dictatorial connotations–he didn’t want an author flashing back to some horrible childhood experience. Also, I remember a teacher once writing “awkward” in the margin of a junior high writing assignment, and it took me years to get over!

And from my always-logical mother-in-law, Kate, a writer and former law professor: I had no trouble requesting “accommodations” from my students, but only when it made sense. Pissing people off over the color of ink I used just didn’t seem worth it, either personally or pedagogically. [...] The red-ink phobia wasn’t my imagination; I regularly heard students complain about teachers who “bled all over their papers.” I’d rather have a student focus on the content of my comments than on the color of my ink.

There it was: “I’d rather have a student focus on the content of my comments than on the color of my ink.”

I may be stubborn, but I am also a sucker for a reasoned, evidence-based argument. And, as I have been engaged in my own “Classroom Happiness Project” thanks to Gretchen Rubin’s book The Happiness Project and Happiness at Home, I had to recognize the possibility that I might be making my own students uncomfortable rather than sacrifice my precious red ink. Gretchen writes about how important it is to “acknowledge the reality of people’s feelings” in her book The Happiness Project, so I am.

This year, I will be correcting my students’ papers in…drumroll…forest green. It’s my favorite color, and if there’s any possibility that my comments will be more readily heard in green rather than red, I’m willing to retire the red ink.

So if anyone out there needs to dye some clothes or whip up a batch of fake blood for Halloween, I happen to know where you can get about a half-gallon of quality red ink, cheap.

Jessica Potts Lahey is a teacher of English, Latin, and composition at Crossroads Academy, an independent Core Knowledge K-8 school in Lyme, New Hampshire. Jessica’s blog on middle school education, Coming of Age in the Middle, where this piece also appears, can be found at http://jessicalahey.com.

PBS Kids a “Sweet Spot for Feds in Education”

by Robert Pondiscio
August 7th, 2012

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Posted in Educational Policy | 5 Comments »

Small-government conservatives typically argue the less Washington has to do with education, the better.  But Fordham’s Mike Petrilli sees PBS Kids as “a sweet spot for federal involvement in education.”  Petrilli used to agree with conservative pundit George Will that the market can provide children’s programming on its own.  But as the father of two young boys Petrilli has come to believe “there’s no contest when it comes to academic content and quality” if you compare Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel to PBS Kids.

“The best PBS shows in my view—and my elder son’s!—actually teach something. Not something vague like “reasoning skills” but something concrete like science! Yes, his favorite shows are Sid the Science Kid and Wild Kratts, a very clever program about wildlife. At four and a half, he can’t read yet, but he can learn a ton about our world—and with his curiosity on overdrive, he’s eager to learn and learn and learn.”

PBS’s Dinosaur Trains and The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot about That are also strong on content knowledge, Petrilli says. “And the line-up is rounded out with several pleasant if content-free offerings that aim to teach character and the like (Arthur, Caillou, Clifford, and so forth). By contrast, Nickelodeon and Disney have “a few decent offerings.” But Petrilli calls Sponge Bob “poisonous” and Dora the Explorer “the crack cocaine of children’s television.”

“Back to the role of government. The reason the PBS shows are more educationally sound is that one of their major investors—Uncle Sam—demands that they be so. The Department of Education’s Ready to Learn program provides upwards of $30 million a year to develop high-quality programs, as well as related content (web sites, games, etc.). Unlike most federal initiatives—which must work through the states, local school districts, and local schools before getting to actual kids—this one has a much shorter line to the end product: Good stuff for kids to watch. It’s an easy way for the federal government to make a positive contribution.”

I haven’t seen all of the shows to which Petrilli refers, but ultimately the proof is in the programming. Commercial broadcasters have other masters to serve, and any programming that helps build background knowledge in the critical early childhood years certainly can’t hurt.  But remember, the Associated Academy of Pediatricians recently issued a warning saying children should watch no TV whatsoever if they are under two years of age.

First the Mars Rover, and now an unexpected mash note from the right-of-center Fordham Foundation.  Big government is having a good week.