Archive for the 'Core Knowledge' Category

A Promising Start for Core Knowledge Early Literacy Program

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 23, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Education News and Research and Reports. 22 Comments

One year after announcing a pilot program to test a new Core Knowledge Early Literacy program in ten New York City Schools, Joel Klein Tuesday announced very strong early results.  As a news release from the New York City Department of Ed puts it: 

The progress of students in the ten participating schools was more than five times greater than the also-significant performance of students at ten peer schools with comparable student populations, and was reflected among students at all levels of literacy.  Additionally, teachers surveyed as part of the pilot rated the program highly, and nine of the ten participating schools have selected to use the Core Knowledge program with their new kindergarten classes in addition to continuing the program with their first graders, who remain in the pilot.

Speaking at a press conference at a South Bronx elementary school — one of the pilot schools – E.D. Hirsch noted thatwhile the initial results were gratifying, the bigger payoff could come later, since the program is designed to build broad background knowledge across the curriculum, which pays off in improved reading comprehension in the years ahead:

Kindergarten is just a start.  There is always the danger of fade out in later years, as we know from Headstart research.  Elsewhere in the nation, and right here in New York, schools have made noticeable progress in raising reading scores in the early grades according to NAEP, the Nations Report Card.   These improvements reflect better teaching of decoding.   But the improvements in scores are still confined to the early grades.   Verbal scores in the later grades of NAEP have stayed unacceptably low.   Yet these later verbal scores are the ones that predict a student’s ultimate success in life.     

The program consists of two strands: a phonics-heavy decoding strand, and a “listening and learning” strand to build content knowledge.  “Assuming that we will get funding to develop materials for the later grades,” Hirsch noted, “I am predicting that even more dramatic results will show up further on. Instead of the current flat or even declining verbal scores among middle and high school students we will see in students who follow a program like this significantly higher scores, and we will see a narrowing of the language gap between races and ethnic groups. ”

More coverage of the pilot program results can be found here and here.

Mr. Wilson, You Lie!

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 17, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum and Teaching. 2 Comments

Over at Curriculum Matters, Sean Cavanagh gets a response from NEA executive director John Wilson to the Common Core letter about the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.  It’s an eyebrow-raiser.

This group continues to amaze me,” he said of the letter-writers, “that they would pit core knowledge against 21st-century skills, when our students need both. … I have witnessed first- hand teachers using 21st-century skills and new technology to enhance the teaching of core subjects. To relegate today’s students to rows of desks, a teacher at the front of the classroom espousing content, and a textbook with paper and pencil is to guarantee that our students will be left with the lowest skills and the lowest-paying jobs.”

So a rich, well-rounded core curriculum means kids in rows, and a teacher in the front of the room droning on from a textbook?  Says who?  Visit a Core Knowledge school, Mr. Wilson.  Over half of them are public schools.  You’ll see some dynamic teaching and learning going on, not the picture of 19th century drudgery you paint.  You know what else you’ll see in some of those schools?

Your members.

You’re forgiven for not recognizing them, though.  They’re not standing at the front of the classroom, droning on from textbooks to neat rows of students. 

Here’s what continues to amaze me:  that people who should know better equate a robust curriculum with boring teaching.  And that a leader of our largest teachers union would bash teachers as mindless automatons.

All Together Now….Sing!

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 16, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum and Education Theory. 1 Comment

If the signers of the Common Core missive want to consider a singing telegram instead of a letter, I humbly suggest the following, sung to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s “Love and Marriage” (that’s the theme song to “Married With Children” if you’re under 40):

Skills and content, skills and content
Go together like a nun and convent
Problem solving’s dandy
But content knowledge comes in handy!

Skills and content, skills and content
It’s a fact that you just can’t circumvent
Teaching innovation
Won’t work without a strong foundation.

Try! Try! Teach skills without content.
You’ll be frustrated.
You’ll just have to learn the hard way, it
Can’t be debated.

Skills and knowledge, skills and knowledge
Kids need both if they’re to get to college
Facts are thinking’s mother
You can’t have one without the other!

Saying “content is important”
Just makes me nervous.
Without a solid core curriculum
It’s just lip service.

Skills and knowledge, skills and knowledge
Kids need both if they’re to get to college
Facts are thinking’s mother
You can’t have one
You can’t have one
You can’t have one
Without the other!

Horses and Carts

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 16, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum and Education Theory. 30 Comments

A who’s who of educators and reformers have signed a letter from Common Core reminding the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) that attempts to teach skills apart from knowledge have failed repeatedly.  Randi Weingarten, E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Dan Willingham, Diane Ravitch, Checker Finn, John Silber, Kevin Chavous and Whitney Tilson are among those urging P21 “and other advocates of 21st century skills to reshape their effort by putting knowledge and skills together at the core of their work.”

Under Lynne Munson, Common Core has done a bang-up job raising questions about the value and validity of P21’s advocacy.  But as surely as the sun will rise in the East tomorrow, P21 and its advocates will scratch their heads and say, “But we do think content is important and we’ve said so consistently.”  To a certain degree, they’re right.  The difference is one of orientation–whether you take a skills-oriented view of teaching and learning or a knowledge-based orientation.  The case needs to be made that a skills-based orientation puts the cart before the horse.  It’s possible P21 might even agree.  If skills are the cart and knowledge the horse, they have no reason to insist on going first. 

Let’s say your goal is to teach a critical thinking skill like comparing and contrasting.  You might ask your student to fill out a Venn diagram.  Students might compare and contrast deserts and tundra; others will look at igneous and sedimentary rock, or the two houses of Congress.  A content advocate will look at what you’re doing and say “See! You don’t care about content!”  Confused, the skills advocate will reply in dead earnest, “What are you talking about?  It’s geography!  It’s geology!  And civics!  That’s content!”

In a skills-oriented classroom, content is content is content.  It’s a mere delivery mechanism for the skill.   It could just as easily be apples vs. oranges or baseball vs. football, since what matters is the skill.  If the content drives the instruction, however, you might assign the compare and contrast exercise as an organic part of your unit on colonization, perhaps asking students to compare English and Spanish settlements in the New World.  The skill serves as a way of thinking about and organizing the content, which is seen as intrinsically important. 

This is not an arbitrary difference. Those of us who favor rigorous curriculum make the case for a clearly defined, grade-by-grade, sequenced core curriculum  for many reasons: it boosts reading comprehension by building background knowledge, it eliminates gaps and repetitions and helps address issues associated with student mobility.  Without an agreed upon sequence, a student might end up studying the rain forest three times in elementary school and never get the Bill of Rights, for example.   Broad background knowledge also helps create critical thinkers and problem solvers.  But the sequence matters.  With a sequenced curriculum–the horse before the cart–you get all those good things AND a framework for teaching skills effectively.   Put the cart before the horse and you have incoherence, superficiality, gaps, repitition and confusion. 

As advocates for a rich, robust curriculum, we need to start making the case not just for rigor and common knowledge, but for a sequenced curriculum.  Otherwise 21st century skills advocates will continue to scratch their heads and say “but look we agree with you about content” and both sides will continue to talk past each other.

Common Knowledge and Democracy

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 9, 2009 in Core Knowledge and Education Theory. 8 Comments

“Citizenship spins upon the axis of common information; its responsibilities require, at their base, the sense of security that comes from knowing that what I know is fundamentally similar to what you know.”

While this quote may sound as if it’s ripped directly from the pages E.D. Hirsch’s new book, The Making of Americans, it actually appears in a remarkable essay in the Columbia Journalism Review.  “Common Knowledge,” by Megan Garber, examines the fragmentation of news and its potential impact on our democracy.  News, writes Garber, is “democracy’s common denominator.”

Our political system demands not only that citizens receive a steady flow of information that will, in turn, allow them to be democratic decision-makers—but also that the information in question be, in a profound sense, shared. “A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it,” James Madison wrote, “is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both.” Madison wasn’t one to mince words; and it’s telling, here, that popular information, shared information—rather than simply information itself—was his concern. Without “popular information,” we lose not only our baseline of knowledge about the political world, but also our bearings within it. We risk becoming subject, as it were, to subjectivity itself—and ending up with a society, as William James had it, in which “people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”

The parallels between education and news are striking.  As news consumption increasingly defines itself “according to cliques rather than commons,” Garber points out, “cognition itself becomes ever more customizable.”

An infrastructure of information consumption that fosters homophily—that allows us to cocoon ourselves in our own worldviews—compromises our ability to relate to each other, discursively, as citizens of a diverse nation. It fosters distance and dissonance, rather than resisting them. It compromises that nebulous yet necessary space in democratic discourse: the public sphere. And it highlights a paradox of the digital age—that the diversity of our news outlets threatens the broader diversity of public discourse. The democratization of information, it turns out, is in some ways at odds with democracy itself.

Garber’s concerns are ultimately identical to Hirsch’s.  And her question–How do we determine which information will keep us broadly synchronized with everyone else?–is a question with equal potency for education and journalism.

Of what value is discourse, after all, when we’re unable able to talk about, and act upon, the same things? Imagine a book club in which everyone shows up having read different books—one person having read The Brothers Karamozov, another having read Pride and Prejudice, another having read Twilight. Or a town hall meeting in which one citizen comes prepared to talk about teacher tenure in the local schools, another to talk about improving a neighborhood park, another to talk about rewriting local zoning laws. There may be some discussion, sure—but that discussion will be crippled to the point of absurdity.

“Democratic discourse requires the core commonality of shared information,” Garber concludes.  “Otherwise, what’s the point?”

The Making of Americans

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 1, 2009 in Core Knowledge and Education Theory. 4 Comments

The official publication date is still two weeks away (Sept. 15), but copies of E.D. Hirsch’s new book, The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools, have started to hit the bookstores.  Jay Mathews gets a jump with his review in the Washington Post.  “If the inventive 81-year-old had been a business leader or politician or even a school superintendent, his fight to give U.S. children rich lessons in their shared history and culture would have made him a hero among his peers,” Mathews shrewedly observes. ”Instead, he chose to be an English professor, at the unlucky moment when academic fashion declared the American common heritage to be bunk and made people like Hirsch into pariahs.” 

Mathews notes (correctly, I think) that Hirsch’s new book makes the case for a common curriculum “in the clearest form since his ground-breaking 1987 book, Cultural Literacy.”

“The Making of Americans” puts the most troublesome elementary school subject, reading, at the center of its argument. Reading achievement and language proficiency generally have been disappointing for decades, particularly in schools full of the children of immigrant or impoverished parents. Progressives have called for engaging students with lessons that celebrate their real lives and their cultural heritages. Old books about dead white guys don’t hack it, they say. Hirsch’s research convinced him that this approach cut children off from the shared background they all must have to understand the words in front of them.

Richard Kahlenberg, reviews the book in the Autumn issue of The American Scholar, not yet available online:

In The Making of Americans, Hirsch…widens the lens to connect his ideas on education reform to the fundamental rationales for our system of public schools in the United States. Citing the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Horace Mann, Hirsch identifies two central reasons for the American “common school”: to create social mobility, allowing bright, hard-working students of all origins to enjoy the American dream; and to create social cohesion, binding children of diverse economic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds into citizens of a single nation. Hirsch makes a highly cogent case to support the concept that a common curriculum is necessary in elementary schools to further both goals. The American focus on skills, rather than on content, has left low-income students bereft of “unspoken background knowledge” that is explicitly taught in countries like France and Finland, where levels of academic inequality are much lower. “It does not seem to occur to the intellectual descendants of Rousseau,” Hirsch writes, “that the four-year-old children of rich, highly educated parents might be gaining academic knowledge at home that is unfairly being withheld (albeit with noble intentions) from the children of the poor.”

“American education would be far better off if leaders heeded Hirsch’s sound advice to restore a common-core curriculum, Kahlenberg concludes.  “Our system would do even better still if leaders went one step further and reinvented Horace Mann’s economically integrated common school for the 21st century.”

Must Be a Slow News Day

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 28, 2009 in Core Knowledge and Interview. 3 Comments

Why else would ednews.org interview this guy?

Social Promotion? Easy as A, B, C!

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 18, 2009 in Assessment and Testing, Core Knowledge and Educational Policy. 1 Comment

Can you earn a promotion to the next grade in New York by simply guessing the answers on state tests?   It’s easy as A, B, C according to a provocative experiment by former Core Knowledge teacher Diana Senechal.   

In a call for tougher tests in the New York Post last week, Diane Ravitch revealed that the points needed to earn a “Level 2″ — the lowest “passing” score on the state’s tests–have dropped dramatically.  On the 6th grade English language-arts test, for example, the cutoff to earn a Level 2 in sixth grade dropped from 41 percent of the points in 2006 to just 17.9 percent in 2009.  “Ending social promotion, as the [New York City] rightly wants to do, is thus meaningless, because students can reach Level 2 by just guessing,” Ravitch concluded.

Struck by Ravitch’s observation, Senechal tried an experiment to see if it’s possible to pass the test by simply guessing.  She posts the results over at Gotham Schools. 

I first tried my experiment with the sixth grade ELA test. I “guessed” all the answers on the multiple-choice portion and left the written portions blank. Or, rather, I didn’t “guess,” but filled in the answers as follows: A, B, C, D, A, B, C, D, and so on, all the way through the 26 questions. I didn’t read one of them.

Naturally, Senechal got a zero on the written portion of the test.  But her multiple choice guesswork earned 12 out of 39 “raw points” and a scale score of 622–a rock-solid “2″ on the state’s four-point system.  A “2″ is described as “approaching grade level” and good enough to earn promotion to the next grade.  “I got a 2 without looking at a single test question or writing a single word,” she writes.   Repeating the experiment with the 7th grade math test, Senechal also scored a 2 “without solving a single math problem, or even looking at one.”

While this approach does not result in a 2 for all the tests, it comes a bit too close for comfort, and another guessing system might work. A fifth grader told me that his father had told him, “Just mark ‘C’ for all of the answers, and you will pass.” On the fifth grade ELA test, this would indeed have resulted in a 2.  Yes, it is possible to guess your way to promotion. You may not even have to look at the questions or write a word on the written sections.

“It may not be called social promotion, but it amounts to the same thing,” concludes Senechal, a frequent contributor to the Core Knowledge Blog.  “You do not need to know or understand much to move along.”

The “Curse of Knowledge”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 18, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Literacy and Research and Reports. 8 Comments

Try this experiment: Find a friend and tell him you’re going to tap out the rhythm of a famous song that everyone knows.  Without telling him what the song is, tap out the notes for “God Bless America,” “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” or “Happy Birthday to You.”  No singing or humming along; just taps.  Before you begin make a prediction: Do you think he’ll guess the song correctly based on your ability to tap it out?

Nearly 20 years ago, a Stanford graduate student named Elizabeth Newton did her dissertation in psychology on this simple game and discovered something remarkable.  Given a list of 25 well-known songs to tap out, the listeners’ success rate was only 2.5 percent—one out of 40 attempts.  However the tappers were so sure the listener would know the song, they predicted a 50% success rate. 

Why the disconnect? In the experiment, the tapper hears the song in his or her mind and thinks it’s so obvious that the listener can’t possibly fail to understand it.  The tapper mentally sings the words and hears the melody to “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” while the listener merely hears “tap tap tap tap tap tap tap.”   The tapper can’t understand why the listener doesn’t get it; the listener gets frustrated that the tapper thinks he should.  Chip Heath and Dan Heath describe the phenomenon in their book Made to Stick: 

The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it’s like to lack that knowledge. When they’re tapping, they can’t imagine what it’s like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us.  And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.

As a listener, the task is hard because even though you are getting valid information, it’s incomplete.  You’re not getting the whole song.  Newton’s experiment offers as good a model as you’re likely to find as to why background knowledge is the key to reading comprehension— for struggling readers, what’s on the page is useful, but it’s not enough. 

This is also one of the most difficult concepts to wrap your mind around.  When you read, your background knowledge is the melody playing in your head.  Like the tapper in the experiment, it’s impossible to forget what you know and force your mind NOT to make the connections that create understanding.    Proficient readers hear the music, the lyrics, even a full orchestra.  Students, especially those from low-income families or households lacking in enrichment, hear only tap, tap, tap, tap, tap tap.  

The tapping experiment also shows why reading strategies don’t help.  Try to determine the author’s (tapper’s) purpose.  Tap, tap, tap.  Can you find the main idea (melody)?  Tap, tap, tap.   When meaning breaks down, reread (relisten) for clarity.  No matter what “strategy” you employ, if you don’t know the song, it still sounds like tap, tap, tap.  Seen through this lens, reading strategies are worse than useless, only compounding the listener’s frustration.  You might as well instruct students “don’t just listen to the tapping, try to hear the song in your head!”  They can’t.

We all know background knowledge matters.  As teachers, even devotees of strategy instruction tell students to “activate your prior knowledge” to aid in comprehension.  However, we are assuming that there is background knowledge to activate.  If we don’t teach the explicit content needed to guarantee comprehension, we are hearing the melody in our heads and refusing to share it. 

Our students, on the other hand, hear only “tap tap tap tap tap tap.”

They’re Baaaaack!

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 18, 2009 in Core Knowledge. 5 Comments

It’s been a bewildering and frustrating couple of weeks, but it looks like our technical problems are finally behind us.  We now rejoin the Core Knowledge Blog, already in progress…