Educational Reform: Slow but Sure vs. Fast and Fail

by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
September 19th, 2011

Posted in Assessment and Testing, Curriculum, Education Practice, Teaching | 10 Comments »

A version of this column, “How to Stop the Drop in Verbal Scores,” by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., appears in today’s editions of the New York Times — rp.

The latest bad news from our nation’s schools is that the verbal scores of our top students – college bound 17-year-olds who sign up to take the SAT – have once again declined. This unsurprising result is consistent with verbal scores for 17-year-olds on the more broadly based National Assessment of Educational Progress, which have remained essentially unchanged for 40 years.

How worried should we be? Very. And our concerns should be particularly acute because nearly nothing in our otherwise laudable and energetic education reform efforts takes direct aim at the Great Verbal Decline that took place among 17-year-olds from (roughly) 1970 to 1980.

Cognitive psychologists, who are rarely heeded in the intense rough and tumble of the education wars, agree that early childhood language learning (age two to ten) is critical to later verbal competence because of something they call the “Matthew Effect,” which determines the rate at which new word meanings are learned. The name comes from a passage in the Book of Matthew: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Those who are language-poor in early childhood get relatively poorer, and fall further behind, while the verbally rich get richer.

In short, the more words you already know, the faster the rate at which you will acquire new words. This sounds like an invitation to vocabulary study for tots, but that’s been tried, and it’s not effective. Most of the word meanings we know are acquired by indirect means — by intuitively guessing new meanings as we understand the overall gist of what we are hearing or reading. The Matthew Effect in language can therefore be restated this way: “To those who understand the gist shall be given new word meanings, but to those who do not understand the gist there shall ensue boredom, frustration and discouragement, but not new words.” Multiply that classroom experience thousands of times over the years, and you get lower vocabularies, lower verbal scores.

But note the first half of the Matthew Effect. “Unto every one that hath shall be given.” Clearly the key is to make sure that from kindergarten on every student is brought along from the first days of preschool to understand the gist of what is heard or read. And that means children need to be offered coherent knowledge about the world around them from the first days of school. This is no mere theoretical notion: a recent article in Science by Professor David Dickenson showed that when children in preschool and kindergarten are taught substantial and coherent content concerning the human and natural worlds, the results show up five or six years later in significantly improved verbal scores. (Five years is the time span by which this kind of educational intervention needs to be judged.) By systematically staying on a subject long enough to make all pre-school children familiar with it, the gist becomes understood by all and the rate of word learning increases. This is particularly important for low-income children who come to school with smaller vocabularies and rely on school to impart the knowledge base that affluent children take for granted. Research conducted in France showed that if disadvantaged children receive coherent and cumulative content from a very early age, and if that practice is sustained through the early grades, verbal scores are higher for all by the time they reach later grades, and the demographic achievement gap is greatly reduced. Daniel Willingham, a cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia puts it simply: Teaching content is teaching reading.

The insights of the Matthew Effect seem simply absent from the most visible current reform strategies, which focus on testing, improving teacher quality, increasing the number of charter schools and other fast-paced structural issues. Attention to these structural issues is good, but not enough–we need to pay equal attention to the substance and year-to-year coherence of what teachers teach and children learn, especially in the critical early years. Under the influence of recent reforms our best public schools – both charter and non-charter — have certainly improved the verbal scores of their students, but not as much as their math scores, and not nearly enough to overcome the huge gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students.

Our national verbal decline transcends this “achievement gap” between demographic groups. The language competence of our high school graduates fell precipitously in the seventies, and has never recovered. What changed—and what remains largely un-discussed in education reform—is that in the decades prior to the Great Decline, a content-rich elementary school experience evolved into a content-light, skills-based, test-based approach that dominates in our schools today. On the surface, this is a paradox. De-emphasizing history, science, art and music in favor of spending time learning to read, and take reading tests should raise scores on those tests. The Matthew Effect explains why it doesn’t work.

Nonetheless verbal scores on the standardized tests taken by 17-year-olds may be the closest thing we have to a crystal ball or a canary in a coal mine. Some firm correlations of life chances with verbal skills have been established over many years of research on the large data sets of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth. Verbal scores of 17-year-olds predict the students’ future and our collective future. An ability to read, write, speak and listen competently correlates with a students’ capacity to learn new things readily, to communicate with others, and to work at a job effectively. It predicts their future income levels. As the verbal competency of each new generation declines or stagnates, so too will our general economic effectiveness. The single most urgent need of our schools is to raise our children’s verbal scores.

The lesson is a simple one for education reform: the administrative structure of a school, and the heroic abilities of the individual teacher, important as they are, matter less than whether a child gradually gains a critical mass of enabling knowledge over thirteen years of schooling. The key to verbal competence is a broad base of knowledge. The best-intentioned reform efforts will not succeed—cannot succeed—without a commitment to ensuring that all children receive such enabling knowledge from the first days of school.

Now Comes the Hard Part

by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
September 27th, 2010

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Posted in Assessment and Testing, Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Education Practice, Literacy | 8 Comments »

Note:  A shorter version of this essay appears today in the New York Daily News under the title “School reform’s next frontier: Translate new standards into good curriculum that puts reading first.” 

Over the summer, 37 states agreed to adopt a single set of K-12 standards in English Language Arts to define the competencies needed for citizenship, productivity, and fairness. It’s a long overdue reform.  But now comes the hard part – figuring out exactly the new standards mean for the day-to-day work of teaching and learning in U.S. classrooms.  It is one thing to insist, as the new standards do, that history and science be taught alongside literature during the many hours spent on literacy in elementary school.   But the ultimate effectiveness of this new effort will turn on another key provision of the new standards – the requirement that literature, science, history and other topics be dealt with coherently from earliest grades, at first in oral form, and that they be integrated with the whole of the K-12 curriculum.  

Any discussion of the new Common Core State Standards must begin with a clear understanding of what the standards do and do not say.  It has been contended that schools in the adopting states will all be teaching exactly the same things at the same time.  Wrong.  The content that teachers teach and children learn is “curriculum.”  Standards and curriculum are not the same thing.  The Common Core Standards do not guarantee a uniformity of educational experience any more than auto safety standards force Americans to drive a single kind of car, or building codes make every house look the same.  The Common Core standards describe the desired outcome only, not precisely what must be taught and how to achieve it.  This distinction between standards and curriculum is no mere pedantry.  It’s not lack of standards but of a coherent and content-rich K-8 curriculum that has created our chronic education crisis.  Curriculum dilution, especially in Kindergarten through fifth grade, has depressed student knowledge levels, caused verbal skills to decline, and perpetuated a competency gap between demographic groups.   If the new standards are carried out well with coherent and substantive curricula, this new reform will begin to reverse the decline. 

The Nobel economist James Heckman has shown that high school graduation rates rose sharply during the first half of the 20th century, then started dropping in the late 1960s.   During roughly the same era — from 1965 to 1980 — American 15-year olds dropped from 3rd to 14th place in reading comprehension on international comparisons.  Our twelfth-graders’ scores on the verbal SAT dropped a dizzying 50 points.  Since the 1980s the verbal scores of American high school seniors have not budged despite multiple system-invigorating efforts like charter schools, accountability systems, and intensive literacy programs, and a meteoric rise in educational spending.  Other nations, whose students experience the same distractions of TV, internet, video games, and sometimes show the same diversity of population, have improved while we have declined. The standard explanation is that our test scores have declined chiefly because of a demographic broadening of the test-taking base.  This claim ignores compelling contrary evidence.  During the period of the big drop, from 1965 to 1980, verbal scores in the state of Iowa – 98 percent white and middle class – dropped with similar sharpness.

What changed was less the demographics of the test-takers than the anti-intellectual ideas that fully took over first teacher-training schools and then the teachers and administrators they trained.   The result was a retreat from a knowledge-based elementary curriculum — as researchers have shown by analyzing the severe watering down of American school books in the period 1950-to the present.  The decline of the elementary curriculum coincided with our sharp decline in verbal ability and test scores.   To cause them to rise again, we will need to adopt contrary ideas – never an easy prospect — and we will have to strengthen the coherence and substance of the K-8 curriculum — exactly as the new standards recommend.  

Why do I focus on verbal scores as an index of our educational decline?  Math is critically important of course, but language ability correlates highly with nearly all our goals for American education.  Verbal scores correlate with general knowledge, with the ability to learn, communicate, and complete jobs effectively — even with an ability to work in teams.   They are a good predictor of productivity and income.   If we were permitted just one wish for K-12 education, a steep rise in verbal scores would be our safest bet. 

And the surest way to insure a rise in verbal scores is to induce a big rise in vocabulary size.  Reading tests and the SAT verbal test are well correlated with vocabulary size.  You don’t effectively build a big vocabulary by studying words, but rather by studying things starting in earliest grades. You cannot do it quickly nor by intensive remediation at the high school level. A large vocabulary is the product of having gained broad general knowledge from earliest years.  Unfortunately, recent reading instruction has devalued the systematic build up of knowledge, assuming wrongly that reading ability is a general skill, rather than an ad hoc skill essentially dependent on knowledge.  To be a good reader in general you have to know a lot and possess a large vocabulary.  

The connection between verbal ability and general knowledge is the firm scientific foundation of the new CCSS standards.  Their most promising feature is their requirement that during the two hours spent on literacy in grades K-5, students shall begin building knowledge that will serve them throughout their lives.  The standards are indeed silent on what constitutes essential, foundational knowledge.  That’s the hard part.  Within a state, specificity and commonality of core topics are critical, particularly considering how often our children change schools.  If students at each grade level across a state are taught some of the same things as other students, are taught those things them thoroughly, and are thus made ready to move to the next grade, their progress in knowledge and language will be cumulative and sure.

This new core-standards effort constitutes, then, a reversal of the basic ideas and policies that since the mid 1960s have caused American education to decline.   Now is a perilous moment.  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.   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.   One already sees signs of this same-old, same-old being set out with fanfare on the web.   Without delay, some private non-partisan philanthropies should get together and form an independent board that will validate claims that school materials and curriculum guides are in conformity with the new standards.   The aim of such a board would not be to determine whether the school materials pass some ideological test, but whether they are likely to be effective in building knowledge and vocabulary coherently, year by year, step by step, and thus recapture equality of opportunity, good citizenship, and a path to prosperity.

 The story of America’s educational decline is the story of verbal decline.  It has a beginning, a traceable arc and, if the states are vigilant, an end.

Common Standards Could Transform School “Literacy Block”

by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
April 6th, 2010

Posted in Educational Policy | 17 Comments »

The results of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress released last month were as predictable as they were dispiriting.  Reading scores for the nation’s 4th graders are unchanged since 2007.  Eighth graders showed a one point uptick, but scores remained essentially flat.  Facts must be faced.  We are making no progress at all in teaching children to read in the United States.  Our massive and well-intentioned national effort to focus the work of our schools on improving reading instruction has failed.   But our failure is less one of education policy, than the simple fact that we are wedded to a demonstrably flawed model of how to teach children to read.  

There is a way we can sail out of the reading doldrums.   The recently released English Language Arts Standards drafted by National Governors Association Center and the Council of Chief State School may provide desperately needed wind we need to move forward.   Released for comment several weeks ago, the document has been criticized by many observers as offering little improvement over the broad and insubstantial individual state standards they would replace.   Indeed, stating that children should be able to “determine central ideas or themes of a text,” for example, would seem to offer little guidance on what teachers should teach, or how to reach this laudable, if obvious goal.

But look closely.   Note the unusual title it carries: “Common Core Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies & Science.”   The title shouts that language mastery requires knowledge of history, and science, (music and fine arts I hope will be included in due course) not just fiction and poetry.  It states explicitly that these non-literary subjects should be generously represented in the long classroom hours devoted to literacy.   This emphasis on non-literary content is defended on the grounds that building “a foundation of knowledge in these fields will give [students] the background to be better readers in all content areas.”   That is an especially important consideration for the early grades, which now spend up to half the school day on literacy.  Here is something new under the sun.  It resists the infamous narrowing of the curriculum. And it is an important reform also for helping to overcome the test-score gap, which is essentially a knowledge gap, between racial and ethnic groups. 

A second advance this document makes over existing ones is to recognize its own limitations.   A whole section is devoted to “What is not covered by the Standards.”   This turns out to be a lot, including teaching methods and the curriculum.   But the concession is critical.  The word “standards” has misled the public into thinking that these documents represent curriculum guides.  Yet not even the best of the current state standards defines a curriculum.   This document is, I believe, unique in stating that it is neither a curriculum nor a curriculum guide.  Rather, it concedes explicitly that proficiency in reading and writing can only be achieved through a definite curriculum that is “coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades.”      This is a welcome acknowledgement that only a cumulative, grade-by-grade curriculum, focused on coherent content, can lead to the high level of literacy which the nation needs.   

In short, the Common Core Standards represent a fundamental and long overdue rethinking of the dominant process-approach to U. S literacy instruction.   To appreciate what a radical transformation it represents, one needs to understand how children are now schooled in literacy.  Reading is taught as if it’s a transferable skill.   It’s assumed that once children learn how to convert printed symbols into sounds and words, or “decode,” they can be taught to read anything by practicing strategies such as “find the main idea” and “question the author.”  But cognitive science has shown that comprehension is “domain specific.”   If you can comprehend this op-ed, it doesn’t mean you can also comprehend Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.     Several studies show that “poor” readers suddenly look quite strong when reading on subjects they know a lot about, and “strong” readers who have weak subject knowledge, suddenly look quite weak.  Despite this finding, students are boringly and time-wastingly taught to practice formal strategies on trivial fictions as though these strategies will somehow replace the subject-matter knowledge needed to become broadly literate.    

Transforming the elementary school “literacy block” into a rich, meaningful and sustained engagement with subject matter would be the single greatest transformation of instructional time in decades.  If there is one Big Idea that can help arrest the decline of reading achievement in American schools, this is the one.  To their credit, the authors of the Common Core standards have taken pains to get this right, and it is a master stroke.   Of course, plenty can go wrong.   If textbook publishers hear the message “more nonfiction” instead of “coherent curriculum” then the effort will have come to little.  Slapping random nonfiction (duly tested for complexity) into existing textbooks will be no more effective than the reading of random fiction has been. 

The draft standards of course leave curriculum decisions to the states, but the message is clear: there must be a curriculum.  And it must be coherent, specific and content-rich.  Truly to adopt these standards means to adopt a curriculum having greater specificity and coherence than any currently followed by a state.   To my mind, the critical factor in a state’s decision to adopt the Common Core Standards would come down to a single question:  Will my state be more or less likely to raise student achievement by adopting the standards and implementing them as recommended?  Cognitive science says unambiguously that the answer is “yes.”  The authors have charted a way out of the incoherence that reading instruction has become.  Whatever further improvements we might decide to suggest we would do well to follow their lead. 

(Note:  A version of this essay appears at The Answer Sheet, the Washington Post’s education blog)

Fanaticism, Factions and SAT Scores

by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
September 24th, 2009

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Posted in Core Knowledge | 8 Comments »

(Ed. Note:  A version of this essay appears in today’s edition of  The New York Daily News.  Both are based on ideas in E.D. Hirsch’s new book The Making of Americans)

In town hall meetings and the Internet people address fellow citizens with whom they disagree as though they were dangerous creatures from another planet.  The animosities on display have an almost tribal flavor — Hutus versus Tutsis, white versus black, Democrats versus Republicans. 

“People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along?”   Rodney King, a man whose beating by the police became a flashpoint in U. S. race relations achieved with those words a place in national memory.  Coming at a moment of tension and resentment, they resonated with Americans’ deep desire for comity – just as we now wish for greater civility at health-care town hall meetings and more cooperation among members of Congress.    

Quasi-tribal domestic hostilities constitute a mortal danger to our nation that the founders of the United States were anxious to overcome.  They believed that the deepest threats to any republic were the two F’s: faction and fanaticism.   When Ben Franklin emerged from the Constitutional Convention in 1787, a lady asked him:  “Well, Doctor, what have we got?”  To which he replied: “A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.”   His remark reflected a worry shared by other delegates to the convention, including George Washington and James Madison.  Washington bequeathed part of his estate to the creation of a system of schooling that would “do away local attachments and state prejudices.”  And Madison acknowledged in the Federalist Papers that we need to develop a new kind of citizen through our schools:  “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust; So there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.   Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”    Unless we could educate citizens and leaders who could rise above personal ambition and special interest to seek the common good, our new republic would fail as had all prior republics in history.     

Throughout the nineteenth century, American schools deliberately fostered a sense of commonality with other Americans.   It was the great era of the common school movement which featured a benign conspiracy among the writers of schoolbooks to teach many of the same things across all subjects in the early grades, and especially in American history. As one early textbook author put it, the aim was “to exhibit in a strong light the principles of religious and political freedom which our forefathers professed . . . and to record the numerous examples of fortitude, courage, and patriotism which have rendered them illustrious.”    During the 19th century, American politics were as hardnosed as now, but compromise in Congress and civility in the public sphere were greater then.   During the 19th century the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville reported that the schools of the United States were being far more successful in the effort at citizen-making and allegiance to the common good than the schools of Europe.   

Today, our schools are failing to raise the language proficiencies of high school students.  We see clear evidence in disappointing scores on college entrance exams like the SAT.  It is no coincidence that we are seeing a rise in public incivility along with this decline in verbal skills.   The key point in understanding the profound connection between the two is that language proficiency is chiefly based on wide knowledge, and more specifically on knowledge that is silently shared by every competent member of a speech community.   This tacitly shared knowledge constitutes the public sphere — the commons upon which civic discourse takes place.  The key to being a good speaker, reader, and writer is the possession of the broad unspoken knowledge that is shared by other effective speakers, readers, and writers within a nation. 

Space won’t permit an elaboration of the strong scientific consensus that explains the connection between shared, unspoken knowledge and effective communication.   I’ve done that at length in various books, most recently in The Making of Americans.   Here I’ll simply assume that basic point about communication and make a further point about the decline of civility.  The shared knowledge that enables communication in the public sphere also induces a sense of community, and helps overcome tribal antipathies.   Horace Mann, often described as the father of public education, said: “The spread of education, by enlarging the cultivated class or caste, will open a wider area over which the social feelings will expand; and, if this education should be universal and complete, it would do more than all things else to obliterate factitious distinctions in society.”   

Mann, and education pioneers like Noah Webster, as well as our brilliant founders understood that shared knowledge and loyalty to the common good could only be fostered through a common elementary education – a shared core curriculum in the early grades.   By 1950, that insight became neglected and, indeed, aggressively rejected in our schools.    The subsequent fragmentation of the elementary-school curriculum is the root cause of our students’ low verbal scores, and of the wide gap in verbal proficiency between our low-scoring white students and far lower-scoring black and Hispanic students.    We will recover verbal proficiency, economic justice, and social comity only if we institute more coherent substance and greater commonality in our elementary schools.

Core Knowledge and the Public Sphere

by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
April 9th, 2009

Posted in Core Knowledge | 26 Comments »

The question “Whose Core Knowledge?” was the chief question (or implicit accusation against Core Knowledge) that ran through the 1990s on up to the present.

But gradually the fundamental needs of good schooling have tempered those concerns. Both the current U.S. Secretary of Education and the current head of the American Federation of Teachers have called for “national standards,” recognizing the technical need for commonality if we are to educate everybody to a reasonably high standard.

The word “whose” in the “Whose Core Knowledge?” implies that the topics we teach belong to some sort of essential identity and ethnicity that defines a person and transcends what it is to be a functioning American.

But an alternative view is that the ability of all these multifarious ethnic identities in the USA to live in peace (a great legacy to the world) can do so only because we separate the public (American) from the private (ethnic) spheres. This was Jefferson’s thought, and that of other founders. In the private sphere everybody can be what he or she wishes; in the public sphere, everybody is an American. The best-known example of this is the “separation of church and state, where we may have our own religious identities, but temper it in public to enable everyone to get along.  Another example is the separation of family ethnicity, which may be anything at all, as distinct from the publicly shared assumptions of the public sphere where we can interact and connect with each other.

Core Knowledge has taken the view that the schools need to promulgate this public culture (all public cultures are artificial inventions) in order to enable everyone to communicate and learn in the public sphere. The paradox of those who wish to save us all from the imperialism of some dominant school curriculum is that when the disadvantaged children they wish to protect are not able to learn and communicate in the public sphere–especially in the public language and its associated knowledge–they become the very students who are most harmed by our anti-cultural-imperialism.

Our position has been that we need to agree on some defined public sphere sustained by the schools, CK has always said it would be happy to go along with ANY widely agreed-on common core that enables students to understand and learn from newspapers, blogs, and the books in the library.  Critics of CK have not yet come up with specific well-thought out alternatives, nor with any plausible argument against the need for a common core in the public sphere.

People would certainly not pay attention to such an alternative argument unless it were couched in the common language and its shared knowledge, both of which the schools have a duty to teach. This very thread is an example of public speech based on that shared knowledge and convention system. Alas, many disadvantaged students now being turned out by our schools and protected from coherent knowledge by the guardians of their identities cannot participate effectively in this thread, nor learn from it.

A Nation at Risk at 25

by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
April 22nd, 2008

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Posted in Educational Policy | No Comments »

The following commentary appears in the current issue of Education Week.

In American educational history, A Nation at Risk is significant as a very dramatic official recognition in the 1980s that our schools were declining in effectiveness not only in relation to schools of other nations, but also in relation to our own results in earlier decades. In the 25 years since the report was issued, energetic reform efforts have been put forth, to small overall effect. The best single gauge of overall national school effectiveness—the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test of 12th graders—has remained flat, and has even declined slightly. This persistent lack of significant improvement is owing to the unwavering persistence of the very ideas that caused the decline in the first place—the repudiation of a definite academic curriculum in the early grades by the child-centered movement of the early 20th century. Given the continued content vagueness of state standards in early grades, especially in language arts, that underlying condition has not much changed. There is still no definite, coherent academic curriculum in the early grades. That is the principal source of the low academic achievement of our high school students.

The elementary grades are much more important than is apparently credited by philanthropies like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has recently been giving many millions to high school reform—with negligible results per dollar. For many years, the philanthropic and policy worlds have placed a lot of emphasis on the two ends of precollegiate education—high school and preschool. They are right about preschool—but not about high school. The general knowledge and vocabulary required for effective learning at the high school level are the fruits of a long process. The way to reform high school is to prepare students effectively in the elementary years to thrive there. If, in recent decades, high school has become a place where students are offered a smorgasbord of watered-down subjects, that is because watered-down subjects are all that our ill-educated students are now prepared to understand.

Philanthropies cannot be altogether blamed. In their emphasis on high school, they have followed the lead of A Nation at Risk,which was overwhelmingly concerned with high school. Its assumption was that the elementary years are foundational, and should be spent on the enabling skills of reading, writing, and reckoning. The authors therefore conceived the truly decisive arena for educational improvement to be grades 9-12, where there had been a severe decline in verbal and math scores. Indeed, for most of its length, A Nation at Risk ignored the first eight grades of schooling. Then, in its last pages, the report finally alluded to the early curriculum as follows:

The curriculum in the crucial eight grades leading to the high school years should be specifically designed to provide a sound base for study in those and later years in such areas as English language development and writing, computational and problem-solving skills, science, social studies, foreign language, and the arts. These years should foster an enthusiasm for learning and the development of the individual’s gifts and talents. (Page 72)

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The Knowledge Connection

by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
February 16th, 2008

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Posted in Core Knowledge, Educational Policy | No Comments »

Why has the No Child Left Behind law left so many children behind? According to the latest scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the reading achievement of eighth-graders has declined since the law was passed in 2001, and the large reading gap between advantaged and disadvantaged children — “the achievement gap” — has stayed where it was. Today’s eighth-graders had recorded gains in fourth grade, but these have not led to improvements in later grades — when reading scores actually count for a student’s future.

Those in Congress in charge of crafting revisions should understand that the law’s disappointing results owe less to defects in the law than to the methods and ideas schools use in their attempts to fulfill the “adequate yearly progress” mandate for all groups of students; this causes schools, as many complain, to teach to reading tests rather than educate children. But intensive test preparation by schools has resulted in lower reading test scores in later grades. “Teaching to the test” does not effectively teach to the test after all.

Studies of reading comprehension show that knowing something of the topic you’re reading about is the most important variable in comprehension. After a child learns to sound out words, comprehension is mostly knowledge. Many technical studies support the assertion that after students can fluently sound out words, relevant knowledge is the crucial difference between students who are good or poor readers. In light of the relevant science, an analysis of the textbooks and methods used to teach reading and language arts — for three hours a day in many places — indicates some of the reasons for the disappointing later results. These test-prep materials are constructed on the mistaken view that reading comprehension is a skill that can be perfected by practice, as typing can be. This how-to conception of reading has caused schools to spend a lot of unproductive time on trivial content and on drills such as “finding the main idea” and less time on history, science and the arts.

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On Sol Stern’s City Journal Piece: Substance Trumps Structure

by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
January 22nd, 2008

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Posted in Educational Policy | 2 Comments »

City JournalI’m so glad that Sol Stern has written this piece.

The comeback to it that I am already hearing from die-hard choice advocates is: well, the non-choice schools haven’t done so well either! This is an argument?

Stern’s point goes far deeper than that — to doubt whether any of the primarily structural approaches to school improvement are promising, after all. His view: we need to talk about substance not structure.

The choice movement is a structural approach. It relies on market-theory to improve outcomes, not venturing to offer guidance on precisely what the schools need to be teaching. That would go against the genius of the market approach, which is to refrain from top-down interference into what needs to be taught and learned in the schools. Stern rightly shows that this is a fundamental failing in the choice movement.

But market-based “choice” is not the only structural reform of the recent past that has refrained from actually concerning itself with the substance of what is taught and learned in school. There was the government-funded whole-school-reform project. It too was a meta-structure that said “Let a thousand flowers bloom,” thus rendering itself superior to any particular substantive notion of what needed to be taught and learned in the school.

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Narrowing the Two Achievement Gaps

by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
November 9th, 2007

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Posted in Essay, Research and Reports | 2 Comments »

Education TrustA presentation at the 18th Education Trust National Conference, Nov. 9, 2007, Washington, D.C., by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

© 2007 Core Knowledge Foundation. Not to be copied or reproduced without permission from the Core Knowledge Foundation, 801 E. High Street, Charlottesville, VA 22902.

I am grateful to the Education Trust for inviting me to give this talk. It’s an honor and a kind of homecoming. We at Core Knowledge feel great affinity with The Education Trust with its focus on narrowing the unfair achievement gap between groups. That injustice was my reason for leaving academic pursuits and entering education reform in the 1970s.

I won’t distract you with the intricate details of my experiments on literacy some 35 years ago beyond observing that they were first done at U VA, and then at a mainly African-American college in Richmond. I described the results in two technical publications that are virtually unknown. But they have colored all of my subsequent work. Anyone who bothers to read those reports might be surprised to discover that it was empirical science and not ideology that originated Cultural Literacy and the Core Knowledge movement. The ideological controversies surrounding Cultural Literacy during the 1980s and ’90s were gripping but, to my dazed mind, essentially off point. For, the key educational issues we faced urgently both then and now are less connected with ideology than with empirical reality.

I’ll very briefly describe the discovery that shocked me into education reform. The African-American students at the Richmond college (It was the Sargeant Reynolds Community College.) could read just as well as UVA students when the topic was roommates or car traffic, but they could not read passages about Lee’s surrender to Grant. Their performance on that particular text shook me up the most. For they had graduated from the schools of Richmond, the erstwhile capital of the Confederacy, but were ignorant of the most elementary facts about the Civil War and other basic information that is normally taken for granted in writing. They had not been taught the various things that they needed to know to understand ordinary texts addressed to a general audience. The results were shocking. (What had the schools been doing???). I decided to devote myself to helping right the wrong that is being done to such students.

Let me explain my title: “Narrowing the Two Achievement Gaps.” The sort of gap usually meant by the phrase “achievement gap” is the one between whites and African Americans or whites and Hispanics, or more generally between high- and low- income students. Let’s call this “the fairness gap.” But there is an equally fateful achievement gap between our students and those in other developed nations. Let’s call this “the quality gap.” My first theme in this talk is that these are not separate problems. The solution to the fairness gap is also the solution to the quality gap, and vice versa.

I will focus on the verbal achievement gap, which is critical to academic performance, later income, and general competence. I want to show that if we raise the average verbal achievement for all groups of students we will, by that very deed, also narrow the fairness gap, killing two birds with one stone.

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