Core Knowledge to Make Curriculum Available for Free

by Robert Pondiscio
February 1st, 2010

Posted in Core Knowledge, Curriculum | 28 Comments »

Over at Education Week, Catherine Gewertz has advance word on a big piece of upcoming news:  After more than two decades of publishing and distributing its K-8 Core Knowledge Sequence exclusively to Core Knowledge schools, the Foundation is planning to make its proprietary curriculum available for free online. 

The decision to publicly release the Sequence comes on the eve of the release of the Common Core State Standards, which are expected to call explicitly for increased attention to nonfiction reading and writing within its ELA standards—a linchpin of the Core Knowledge movement, which from Day One has centered on building literacy through a coherent and systematic build-up of language and content knowledge.  

The move to common standards ”could be bigger than any other reform I can think of,” Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch, Jr. tells Gewertz.  “We’ve had a hell of an incoherent system. It’s been based on a how-to theory, and not enough attention has been paid to the build-up of knowledge. This is a moment when we really could change the direction.”

Understanding the connection between background knowledge and reading comprehension—and failing to address it instructionally–is almost certainly  the weakest link in elementary education.  While many reading programs and publishers include nonfiction selections within their reading programs, they tend to do so in a hit or miss fashion, mistakenly treating nonfiction reading as a transferable skill–as if any science passage will do, for example, whether or not it is connected to science passages read or studied in other grades.  Hirsch and Core Knowledge have pointed out for decades the need for a coherent, sequential approach to avoid gaps and repetitions in curriculum–and that reading achievement must be addressed by systematically building up children’s background knowledge. 

By acknowledging the content/comprehension connection and urging the use of a coherent curriculum, the Common Core Standards could go a long way toward cementing the connection between background knowledge and reading comprehension. “The Core Knowledge Foundation has made the decision to make available this tried and true set of curriculum guidelines at no cost in hopes that it will be of use to schools and publishers as they start searching for ways to infuse nonfiction into language arts,” says Foundation President Linda Bevilacqua.

First published in 1988, the Core Knowledge Sequence represents a systematic effort to identify the foundational knowledge that writers and speakers take for granted their readers know, and to teach it, grade-by-grade, year-by-year, in a coherent, age-appropriate sequence.  It’s currently used in hundreds of schools–public, charter and private– in nearly every state.

More — much more — to come in a few weeks’ time.

Creating a Curriculum for the American People

by Robert Pondiscio
December 18th, 2009

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Posted in Core Knowledge | 5 Comments »

The Winter 2009 issue of The American Educator is out, with a cover story by E.D. Hirsch, adapted from his new book The Making of Americans.   In the excerpt, he lays out his case that a shared base of common knowledge is essential not just to reading comprehension but the functioning of democracy itself:

A lack of knowledge, both civic and general, is the most significant deficit in most American students’ education.  For the most part our students (and teachers) are bright, idealistic, well-meaning and good-natured.  Many students and teachers are working harder in school that their counterparts did a decade ago.  Yet most students still lack basic information that high school and college teachers once took for granted.  This lack of knowledge is is even more important than most people realize….A content-rich core curriculum is the only viable remedy.”

Hirsch also describes how the anti-curriculum movement, the dominant school of thought in education became “tragically and unintentionally” an anti-equality movement.

What Works is Boring

by Robert Pondiscio
December 6th, 2009

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Posted in Assessment and Testing, Core Knowledge, Education Practice | 5 Comments »

Important, but frustrating piece in the Washington Post this morning about the difficulty of sustaining test-score growth in underperforming schools after dramatic one-time boosts.  “Studies across the country show that many low-performing schools falter after big one-year gains in test scores.  Of the seven D.C. public schools that increased proficiency rates by 20 percentage points or more in both reading and math in 2008,” Bill Turque reports, only showed growth in 2009.  “Most of the schools that surged 20 points or more in a single category last year also had difficulty building on the increase this year.”

The piece looks at any number of reasons–from turnover to cheating–why scores might spike in a given year and then plateau or decline.  But if the piece is any indication, DC schools are overlooking the obvious: a key to long-term growth in reading scores is the steady buildup of background knowledge.  Without knowing anything about the particular schools discussed in the Post piece, I’d bet real money that we’re talking about mediocre schools that got religion (or were forced to get religion) about testing and focused on it.  Hard.  But no one should be surprised to see one-time gains.

“Given the relationship between academic background knowledge and academic achievement, one can make the case that it should be at the top of any list of interventions intended to enhance student achievement,” wrote Robert Marzano in his 2006 book Building Background Knowledge for Academic Achievement. ”If not addressed by schools, academic background knowledge can create great advantages for some students and great disadvantages for others.”

E.D. Hirsch has obviously spent much of his life banging on this same drum, pointing over and over that reading tests are essentially tests of background knowledge.  If DC school leaders understand this, the Post piece doesn’t say. 

Test prep and simplistic reading strategy instruction that focus on trivial stories–students learn to predict, to summarize, to infer — does nearly nothing to add to a child’s store of knowledge, making an such a one-time boost nearly inevitable.   An absence of background knowledge is the difference-maker and left unattended it eventually shows up in the test scores. 

At a recent Aspen Institute panel discussion with Hirsch, Randi Weingarten observed that the reason we’re not seeing more of this is because “what works is boring.”  Building background knowledge is a slow, steady process.  Boring as hell.  And absolutely effective. 

Are You Smarter Than a 1954 8th Grader?

by Robert Pondiscio
November 10th, 2009

Posted in Core Knowledge | 6 Comments »

Quick.  How many current members of the President’s Cabinet can you name?  OK, how many Cabinet positions can you name, even if you don’t know the person in the office right now?  You know the 1st and 2nd Amendments, right?  How about No. 3 through 23?  Check out the 98 and 1/2 grade earned on this 1954 8th grade test on the Constitution.   

Oh, wait.  I keep forgetting.  These are just “mere facts” and trivia.   If we ever need to know our rights we can always just Google it. 

[H/T: Matthew K. Tabor via Twitter]

Common Knowledge Newsletter

by Robert Pondiscio
November 1st, 2009

Posted in Core Knowledge | 1 Comment »

The Common Knowledge newsletter, which digests the news about curriculum and teaching, education policy and other subjects of interest to the Core Knowedge community, is published each Friday during the school year.  Here’s this week’s newsletter. To subscribe and receive Common Knowledge via email, click here.

Core Knowledge

E. D. Hirsch’s Curriculum for Democracy
City Journal
If the Obama administration truly wants to have a positive impact on American education, it should embrace E.D. Hirsch’s ideas and urge other states to do the same, writes Sol Stern, who describes Hirsch in this profile as “America’s most important education reformer of the last century.”

Farms, Field Trips and Test Scores
Broad general knowledge certainly correlates with reading ability, but the test of a school’s dedication to that proposition is best measured in its commitment to a rich, well-rounded curriculum day after day, not the occasional field trip. 

Two More Black Eyes for 21st Century Skills

Core Knowledge Quiz: American Symbols and Icons

Best of the Education Blogs

Remembering Ted Sizer
Flypaper
Ted Sizer, who passed away last week, was “a towering figure in American education-and a wonderful guy,” writes Checker Finn. “He viewed education through the eyes of a teacher more than a policymaker and he had boundless faith in the capacity—indeed the necessity—of educators to make and remake their own schools.”

Duncan Puts Education Schools on Blast
ASCD Inservice
Last week, Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s speech at Columbia University’s Teachers College criticized U.S. education schools for failing to prepare K-12 teachers to do their jobs well. The government has also been remiss in setting the licensure bar too low and disinvesting in high-quality mentoring programs, he added.

Is Homework Necessary? 
Washington Post
“I used to be Mr. Homework, frowning at all the hand-wringing softies who said we were hurting our kids by piling on the assignments,” writes Jay Mathews.  “But now I am wondering if my faith in homework for middle and high-schoolers has been misplaced

Teaching and Curriculum

Why We’re Failing Math and Science
Wall Street Journal
The U.S. lags far behind other developed countries at the K-12 level in terms of measured performance in math and science courses.  The Wall Street Journal asks Joel Klein; Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania; and Christopher Edley Jr. of the University of California at Berkeley, what can be done.

Why teach the arts? Art inspires learning
Christian Science Monitor
When American presidents talk about education, they inevitably stress the need to focus on math and science. “Science emphasizes quantities. Art emphasizes qualities,” argues writer and artist David Arzouman. “Their mix, although paradoxical, moves us closer to completeness.”

Turnover in Principalship Focus of Research
Education Week
While research has for years highlighted the large numbers of beginning teachers who leave the classroom in three or four years, no national study has documented the career moves that principals make, according to experts.

School district policy addresses social networking
Upstate Today (South Carolina)
A South Carolina school district is seeking to ensure its employees exercise caution when using Facebook and other social networking sites. A draft policy stipulates that the personal life of an employee, will be the concern to the school board “if it impairs the employee’s ability to effectively perform his or her job responsibilities or violates local, state or federal law or contractual agreements.”

Publisher enters new chapter in textbooks
Boston Globe
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has announced a $40 million, multiyear contract with Detroit public schools to provide a computer-based teaching system it developed with Microsoft Corp. that will connect teachers, students, and administrators.  It represents a radical shift away from the classic textbook publishing model and an industry transformation, as technology supplants books.

Education Policy

Are Teacher Colleges Turning Out Mediocrity?
TIME Magazine
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan delivered a speech blasting the education schools that have trained the majority of the 3.2 million teachers working in U.S. public schools today.  It was a damning, but not unprecedented, assessment of teacher colleges, which have long been the stepchildren of the American university system and a frequent target of education reformers’ scorn over the past quarter-century.

NCES Finds States Lowered ‘Proficiency’ Bar
Education Week
Academic standards became less rigorous from 2005 to 2007 in a majority of states, says a study by the National Center on Education Statistics.

Bill Gates Is Spending Millions To Influence The Nation’s Education Policy
Associated Press
The real secretary of education, the joke goes, is Bill Gates  The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been the biggest player by far in the school reform movement, spending around $200 million a year on grants to elementary and secondary education.

The Turnaround Fallacy
Education Next
For as long as there have been struggling schools in America’s cities, there have been efforts to turn them around.  But turnaround efforts have consistently fallen short.  “Quite simply,” writes Andy Smarick, “turnarounds are not a scalable strategy for fixing America’s troubled urban school systems.”

Parenting and Homeschooling

L.A. Unified to allow parents to initiate school reforms
Los Angeles Times
For the first time in Los Angeles, parents will be able to initiate major reforms at low-performing individual schools, rather than waiting for the school district to make changes, under a plan unveiled Tuesday.

As aid shrinks, more ’stuck’ for day care
USA Today
As budget problems worsen, states are tightening rules, eliminating enriched child care programs, raising fees that parents and providers pay, and halting new subsidies.  “The real impact of these cuts is on families,” says William Eddy, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of Early Education and Care. “Parents are forced to find makeshift care, one day with a neighbor, one day with an aunt, in order to get to work.”

Et Alia

School chooses Kindle; are libraries for the history ‘books’?
USA Today
The 20,000-book library at Cushing Academy, a New England boarding school, was in danger of becoming a relic.  So the venerable boarding school began getting rid of most of the library’s books. In their place: a fully digital collection. Library watchers say it could be the first school library, public or private, to forsake ink and paper in favor of e-books.

Core Knowledge Quiz: American Symbols and Icons

by Robert Pondiscio
October 28th, 2009

Posted in Core Knowledge, Core Knowledge Quiz | 6 Comments »

On this day in 1886, the Statue of Liberty was dedicated by President Grover Cleveland at a ceremony in New York harbor.  This week’s Core Knowledge Quiz is about the Statue of Liberty and other American symbols.  In schools usng the Core Knowledge Sequence, children begin to recognize and become familiar with the Statue of Liberty and other national symbols starting in kindergarten.

  1. How many rays are on the Statue of Liberty’s crown and what do they symbolize? 
  2. The Statue of Liberty holds a torch in one hand and a tablet in the other with the date July 4, 1776.  What lies at the statue’s feet and why? 
  3. Benjamin Franklin described this bird as “a much more respectable bird…and a true original Native of America” and favored it over the bald eagle as America’s national symbol.  What was it? 
  4. Construction of which monument began in 1848, but was stalled for over 20 years by, among other factors, lack of funds and the Civil War? 
  5. An upstate New York businessman who sold beef to the U.S. Army during the War of 1812 was given a nickname that evolved into a symbol for the American government.  Which symbol? 
  6. The 50 stars on the American flag stand for the 50 states.  What do the stripes stand for? 
  7. True or false: The four Presidents depicted on Mount Rushmore appear from left to right in the order in which they served as President.   
  8. On the Great Seal of the United States, what is the eagle clutching in its talons and what do they represent? 
  9. The reverse of the Great Seal, most commonly seen on the back of the one-dollar bill, shows an unfinished pyramid topped by an eye.  What is the eye called and what does it symbolize? 
  10. The bald eagle is the national bird.  The rose is the national flower.  Does the U.S. have a national tree?

  Answers below: Read the rest of this entry »

“The Most Important Education Reformer of the Last Century”

by Robert Pondiscio
October 22nd, 2009

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Posted in Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Educational Policy | 9 Comments »

[Update:  In the comments to this post, Paul Hoss questions Sol Stern giving credit to Hirsch for Massachusetts's Education Reform Act.  Stern responds below.]

In the new City Journal, Sol Stern files a comprehensive dispatch on the career of E.D. Hirsch, Jr. and judges the Core Knowledge founder to be “the most important education reformer of the last century.”   Stern writes that “Hirsch’s theories, long merely persuasive, now have solid empirical backing in Massachusetts’s miraculous educational reforms.”  So why, he wonders, isn’t Washington paying attention? 

At his Senate confirmation hearing in February, Arne Duncan succinctly summarized the Obama administration’s approach to education reform: “We must build upon what works. We must stop doing what doesn’t work.” Since becoming education secretary, Duncan has launched a $4.3 billion federal “Race to the Top” initiative that encourages states to experiment with various accountability reforms. Yet he has ignored one state reform that has proven to work, as well as the education thinker whose ideas inspired it. The state is Massachusetts, and the education thinker is E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

“Hirsch’s theories, long merely persuasive, now have solid empirical backing in Massachusetts’s miraculous educational reforms,” Stern writes.  One element of the state’s 1993 Education Reform Act was a “Hirschean knowledge-based curricula for each grade.”

In the new millennium, Massachusetts students have surged upward on the biennial National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—“the nation’s report card,” as education scholars call it. On the 2005 NAEP tests, Massachusetts ranked first in the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade reading and fourth- and eighth-grade math. It then repeated the feat in 2007. No state had ever scored first in both grades and both subjects in a single year—let alone for two consecutive test cycles.

Hirsch spoke at a luncheon event at the Manhattan Institute Wednesday, which was recorded for future broadcast by C-SPAN.  In the meantime, a podcast of a lively conversation between Stern and Hirsch is on the City Journal website here.

Core Knowledge Quiz: Inventors and Inventions

by Robert Pondiscio
October 20th, 2009

Posted in Core Knowledge, Core Knowledge Quiz | 1 Comment »

130 years ago tomorrow, Thomas Alva Edison perfected the incandescent lightbulb.  How much do you know about inventors and inventions?  Here’s this week’s Core Knowledge Quiz:

1. Which of the following did Edison NOT invent or perfect: the phonograph, the motion picture camera, the stock ticker, or the microphone?

2. The earliest form of writing, using clay tablets and a reed stylus, emerged in the Sumerian civilization.  What was this form of writing called? 

3. The compass, gunpowder, and paper money were the products of which ancient civilization? 

4. It is often said that Alfred B. Nobel bequeathed his fortune and created the Nobel Prizes to improve his reputation, which was damaged by his controversial invention.  What was it? 

5. Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company are widely credited with “inventing” the assembly line, but the first U.S. patent for the process was awarded to another carmaker.  Who? 

6. Which African American inventor discovered over 100 commercial products that could be made from peanuts and was dubbed a “Black Leonardo” by Time Magazine?

7.  Put these inventions or technological developments in chronological order:  the light bulb, the telephone, the internal combustion engine, the airplane. 

8. What invention or advance in transportation are each of the following people associated with:

  • The Wright Brothers
  • The Montgolfier Brothers
  • Elisha Graves Otis
  • James Watt
  • Robert Fulton
  • Robert Goddard

9. The invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793 helped to make cotton cloth cheap and plentiful, which contributed to the rise of slavery as cotton production boomed in the American South.  What exactly did the cotton gin do?

10. Many inventors names are familiar to us today because they have become familiar brand names for the products  they helped develop.  Which inventors are associated with the following products?

  • The Safety Razor
  • Vulcanized rubber 
  • Frozen foods
  • Air conditioning

Answers below:

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Who Knew?

by Robert Pondiscio
October 19th, 2009

Tags: ,
Posted in Core Knowledge | 1 Comment »

The blog Online Schools has compiled a list of “50 Excellent Blogs About Education Reform” and lists the Core Knowledge Blog.  The most surprising news: there are actually 50 blogs about ed reform.

Core Knowledge Quiz: The Age of Exploration

by Robert Pondiscio
October 12th, 2009

Posted in Core Knowledge, Core Knowledge Quiz | 3 Comments »

1. Who was the first explorer to circumnavigate the world?
2. What is a caravel?  Describe its significance
3.  Which Spanish explorer supposedly sought the Fountain of Youth and in the process landed in Florida?
4. If Columbus “discovered” America, why are the continents of the Western Hemisphere called North and South America and not North and South Columbia?
5. Who led the first European expedition down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico?
6. Which English explorer named land on the east coast of North America Virginia, to honor “The Virgin Queen,” Elizabeth I?
7. Which Spanish conquistador’s expedition led to the fall of the Aztec empire and the colonization of much of present-day Mexico?
8. Which European made three voyages to the Pacific Ocean, making contact with Australia and the Hawaiian Islands?
9. Who made the first water voyage from Europe to India, around Africa via the Indian Ocean?
10. What is the Northwest Passage?
11. Which English explorer made four attempts to find the Northwest Passage and died after his crew mutinied and set him adrift in a rowboat?
12. Which European’s 1497 expedition is commonly believed to be the first European voyage to North America since Leif Ericson’s?

Answers below:

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