Archive for the 'Core Knowledge' Category

Nineteen Points and One Very Bad Idea

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 24, 2009 in Assessment and Testing, Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Education Practice, Educational Policy and accountability. 6 Comments

Near the end of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson sought to reassure Americans that what was known at the time as “The Great War” was a just cause.  In a speech to Congress, he outlined America’s war aims in “Fourteen Points” that were as broad as insuring freedom of navigation on international waters and fair trade, and as specific as redrawing the borders of several European nations and restoring their pre-war populations.  French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, in one of history’s finer bon mots, quipped, “Fourteen points?  Why, God Almighty has only Ten!” 

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan goes Wilson one better.  Five, actually.  He has Nineteen Points.  God has fallen nine back, well off the pace.

According to detailed guidelines being released today in Washington, states that hope for a piece of the $4.35 billion Race to the Top Fund will have to abide by 19 detailed criteria on academic standards, data-tracking, teacher recruitment and retention, and turning around low-performing schools.  “You can’t pick or choose here,” Duncan tells USA Today.

EdWeek’s Michele McNeil notes the guidelines “send a strong message that any state hoping to land a grant must allow student test scores to be used in decisions about teacher compensation and evaluation.”  While opposition to that will be summarily dismissed as the product of accountability-averse teachers unions, Dan Willingham has cogently described why this particular reform is not ready for prime time.  Still, states like New York and California, which currently forbid by law using test data to evalute teachers will not be eligible for Race to the Top funds, as McNeil points out:

Being able to link teacher and student data is “absolutely fundamental—it’s a building block,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in an interview. “We believe great teachers matter tremendously. When you’re reluctant or scared to make that link, you do a grave disservice to the teaching profession and to our nation’s children.”

To be sure, there is much to like about this Ed Reform Early Christmas, and the sense of urgency is welcome and laudable.  But let’s be clear, No Child Left Behind, however well-intentioned, did little to advance the idea that children benefit from a robust, well-rounded curriculum.  It did much to advance the idea that children must be taught whatever might appear on a year-end test. If time was limited, anything that did not contribute to this near-term payoff was jettisoned. Thus, aggressive accountability measures actively worked against the patient, steady development of background knowledge that creates both well-educated children and, ultimately, higher test-scores.  It beggars credulity to think that using data to hold individual teachers directly responsible for student gains will result in a sudden outbreak of big picture thinking in classrooms across the country. 

The idea that reading comprehension is a function of background knowledge has not taken deep hold in America’s classrooms.  And what teacher — especially the new, young and relatively inexperienced teachers who disproportionately fill struggling urban schools — will have the wherewithal to insist on the steady buildup of knowledge across the curriculum?  Indeed, if we are to have 19 points, why not round up to 20 and insist that a Race to the Top cannot happen without attending to a well-rounded curriculum?   Instead we are almost certain to have more — much more — of the deleterious effects of our data-driven, muscular accountability age:  endless focus on reading strategies that have limited impact, mind-numbing test prep, and no attention to the essential long-range development of background knowledge that will make reading gains possible years down the road.

“Language comprehension is a slow-growing plant,” observes E.D. Hirsch.  “Even with a coherent curriculum, the buildup of knowledge and vocabulary is a gradual, multiyear process that occurs at an almost imperceptible rate. The results show up later.” 

This is clear, this is obvious, and this is certain.  But there is simply no room for this kind of thinking in an accountability system that insists –for every good reason under the Sun–on results right now and encourages individual teachers to compete instead of cooperate.

Fast-forward.  It is 2016.  After a years of holding teachers accountable for short-term gains, and creating incentives that actively work against the buildup of knowledge, with disappointing results, we wake up and realize we are going about this the wrong way.  A few look back and say we should have listened to our Cassandras.  But other energetic, well-meaning  reformers see it another way.  Instead of realizing we have fatally neglected a robust curriculum, that we are reaping what we have sown, they will conclude that as a nation we simply have no good 8th grade reading teachers.  Aggressive, immediate action is needed.

Because after all, the data doesn’t lie, does it?

Reading Strategies and Cargo Cult Science

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 16, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Educational Policy and Literacy. 6 Comments

The idea that it’s enough to simply ”find what works, adopt it, and spread it around,” notes scientist/blogger Allison over at Kitchen Table Math is an example of what physicist Richard Feynman called “Cargo Cult Science“:

In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

“Cargo Cult education seems to be all the rage in lots of communities,” Allison notes.  “Sure, districts could just start grabbing lessons from high performing schools but that won’t make the students suddenly read or write.  Unless they understand what’s underneath the ‘lessons of the high performing school’ then it won’t matter.”

I had never heard this Feyman anecdote but I may have to start calling our reliance on “reading strategies” instruction “Cargo Cult Reading.”  Its entire point  is to teach children “what good readers do” and the habits of mind that are reflexive to able readers.  It’s the exactly the same thing–you teach kids to mimic the behaviors that lead to comprehension–but without the background knowledge that actually makes it possible.  Indeed, a staple of strategy instruction is to teach children that good readers ”activate their prior knowledge to create mental images, ask questions, and make inferences.”  How exactly does that work in the absence of prior knowledge to activate? 

One of the things that more advantaged students typically bring to school is a lifetime of background knowledge (or “schema” as reading strategy enthusiasts prefer to call it) that makes comprehension possible.  Without it you’re sitting in the jungle waiting for the planes to land.

Empty Buckets

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 15, 2009 in Core Knowledge and Teaching. 0 Comments

“Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire” — William Butler Yeats.

Ever try to light a fire in an empty bucket?

And While You’re At It, Drop Off a Copy of “The Knowledge Deficit”…

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 24, 2009 in Assessment and Testing and Core Knowledge. 1 Comment

Dr. Yvonne Fournier, an education columnist for Scripps Howard, takes up E.D. Hirsch’s common sense call for state reading tests to reflect the content taught in each grade.  Responding to a mother who complains that her A-student son’s poor performance on a reading comprehension test is keeping him out of his school of choice, Fournier notes the advantage conferred by the content knowledge accumulated by higher SES kids — “the type of kids who get to learn not just through school but through the vocabulary their educated parents use, the trips they can take, the camps they attend, the extracurricular activities their parents can pay for, weekends at the lake house, Internet access and more.”

Fournier’s advice for the parent?  Clip Hirsch’s recent New York Times op-ed on testing and march to the district office:

Take a copy of Hirsch’s article to the person in charge of setting policy as to who gets into the better schools. Notify your school board and, if need be, the NAACP and your newspaper. Insist on your child’s report card to be taken as proof of his intellectual ability. He needs no further testing unless the school board wants to infer that your son’s teachers gave him his grades.

It’s Not Your Fault, But It Is Your Problem

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 11, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Students and Teaching. 11 Comments

Mark Bauerlein has a piece on the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Brainstorm blog that should give pause to those whose definition of achievement in public education starts and stops with reading and math scores. 

Bauerlein spins a fictional tale of a top Emory University law school student interviewing at one of the leading law firms in Atlanta.  Over lunch with the senior partners, the conversation turns toward the older gentlemen’s memories of the Cold War. “It’s not a test, and it’s not planned,” Bauerlein notes.  ”For them, the Cold War is simply one of those realities that any intelligent person is familiar with and has some opinions about.”  But the overachieving young man has nothing to add and is conspicuously out of his depth.   

The others have the tact to move on, but they note the deficiency. It doesn’t cost the young man the job, but the senior fellows make a judgment. This guy, they think, is sharp and hard-working, but get out of his training and he doesn’t bring much to the table. The deeper awareness that makes for a sober judgment and wider perspective is missing…This is the professional value of cultural literacy. It counts a lot more in professional spheres than academics and educators realize. The measure is informal, yes, but it makes a difference in how peers and superiors regard you.

Bauerlein’s piece reminded me of a conversation I had with an unusually bright student a few years ago.  She blew away every math and reading test she’d ever taken, but her walking around knowledge of even basic history, geography and current events was virtually nonexistent (Granted, she was a 5th grader, but she was under the impression that New Jersey was a country).  Discussing the gaps in her education, I told her, “This is not your fault, but it is your problem.”  Indeed, this young lady had done absolutely everything asked of her in school.  Her lack of breadth was not something she chose, but something we had allowed to happen to her.   If the gaps in her knowledge persist into adulthood, I knew, the world would certainly judge her skeptically, even harshly, for precisely the reasons Bauerlein describes–especially as a person of color from the South Bronx. 

Crucially, this was a kid with top scores on standardized tests–one of my school’s rare ”double 4s” in both math and reading.  By that measure–but only by that measure–a screaming success story of public education.  But what the data doesn’t show, and Baurlein’s piece reminds us, is that out in the real world there are very different metrics at work.  There’s too often far less to our current definition of success than meets the eye.

Go Ask Alice

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 20, 2009 in Core Knowledge. 1 Comment

We’re pleased to welcome a new voice to the blog this week.  Alice Wiggins, Early Childhood Program Director of the Core Knowledge Foundation, directs early childhood programs including the development and management of preschool curriculum, materials, and professional development.  Before joining CK in 2007, Alice served as the Associate Director of the University of Virginia Preschool Language and Literacy Lab.

She is the author of Preschoolers at Play: Building Language and Literacy through Dramatic Play,  and contributing author to Scaffolding With Storybooks: A Guide for Enhancing Young Children’s Language and Literacy Achievement, and  Assessment in Emergent Literacy.

This week marks the observation of the National Association for the Education of Young Children’s Week of the Young Child.  Alice will blog on five specific recommendations to improve early childhood education, starting with a call for clear and specific early childhood learning standards later today.

Library of Congress on YouTube

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 15, 2009 in Core Knowledge and Teaching. 2 Comments

The Library of Congress has begun putting portions of its vast audio and video collections on YouTube.  So far there are fewer than 100 videos–an eclectic collection including Thomas Edison kinetoscopic movies, oral histories of Pearl Harbor, and a documentary on the poetry of Langston Hughes.  But the potential certainly exists for this to be a terrific teaching resource.

 <a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=hnpItYHdP8Q&#038;feature">http://youtube.com/watch?v=hnpItYHdP8Q&#038;feature</a>

The Library of Congress also makes historic photographs available on Flickr.  Good stuff.

Only Connect

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 10, 2009 in Core Knowledge. 4 Comments

This blog is one of the Top 20 education blogs, according to PostRank, which ranks blogs based on “engagement,” a formula that purports to measure how thoroughly readers interact with a blog’s content:  bookmarking, commenting, sharing or writing about a particular blog’s content.  It’s a nice validation of the main purpose of this forum, which is to create and sustain a dialogue among smart people with a passion for education.

Tech whiz Scott McLeod at Dangerously Irrelevant is confused by the rankings and raises many valid points.  Many blogs that I follow faithfully are not ranked at all, which suggests that PostRank is not casting a wide enough net.  But regardless, this is a good opportunity to thank everyone who takes the time to stop by, read, post, contribute, opine and argue. 

Engagement, indeed!

Core Knowledge and the Public Sphere

Published by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. on April 9, 2009 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.

Whose Core Knowledge?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 8, 2009 in Core Knowledge. 11 Comments

The normally thoughtful and engaging Clay Burell swings and misses at E.D. Hirsch’s recent New York Times op-ed about reading tests, painting with an uncharacteristically broad brush.   Relying on the standard misperception of Hirsch and Core Knowledge as promoting ”the white male-privileged narrative of history,” Burell writes that such a curriculum is “unfair to those very disadvantaged students Hirsch claims will benefit from his model.”  This ignores the fact that the curriculum has had its greatest success with low-SES students.  Pay a visit to schools like the Carl Icahn Charter School in the South Bronx; P.S. 124 in Queens; Atlanta’s Capitol View Elementary; among others.  I don’t believe you’ll find much evidence of unfairness.

There are a couple of problems with Clay’s analysis of Hirsch’s piece.  First, the immediate benefit of teaching a broad, content-rich curriculum is not cultural (although no apologies need to be made for familiarizing students with the history and culture of their own country and the broader world) but structural.  Reading comprehension suffers in disadvantaged children exactly because they lack the background knowledge to make sense of what they read.  Indeed, Burell himself underscored the crucial role of content knowledge in creating strong readers in a post a few months ago praising Dan Willingham’s Teaching Content is Teaching Reading YouTube video.  Hirsch has been making the same argument for decades. 

Clay wants Hirsch’s essay to address critical thinking, but that wasn’t the point of the piece.  Hirsch’s singular service to education has been to attempt to define the broad body of background knowledge that speakers and writers assume their audience knows, and point out that literacy (as well as critical thinking and other so-called “21st Century” skills) depends on sharing it.  The curse of this contribution is that it is easy to dismiss it, as Alfie Kohn typically does (and I fear Burell does too) as “a bunch o’ facts” and “rote memorization” even though Hirsch has never even so much as hinted that kids should memorize lists of names and dates.  Clay wants the curriculum infused with critical thinking questions, but where is the disagreement?  There’s absolutely nothing in the Core Knowledge curriculum that suggests or implies it has come down from Mt. Sinai on stone tablets and must be taught, unquestioned, in a specific way.  Good teachers like Burell, an Apple Distinguished Educator, have always–will always–infuse their teaching with thoughtful perspectives and critical thinking.  How does a set curriculum prevent them from doing so?  How does defining what to teach determine how to teach it?  The answer is simple: it doesn’t.  

He also takes issue with Hirsch’s criticism of reading strategy instruction.  Allowing for Clay’s personal experience, I think he underestimates the damage done to children by a heavy over-reliance on such instruction in the elementary grades.  In many disadvantaged schools, strategy instruction IS reading instruction, at the expense of science, history, art and music.   The result is a vicious circle where kids robotically search for the main idea or “question the author.”  But their lack of content knowledge prevents them from meaningfully answering the ”metacognitive” questions they are trained (speaking of rote memorization) to pose. 

We’re never going to get away from the rhetorical questions with which Burell challenges Core Knowledge (”Knowledge of what? From whose perspective? In whose interests?”) nor should we.  But it’s dispiriting that smart educators like Burell are chary about a specific curriculum out of some misperception of balance, fairness or perpective.  If you want students to be critical thinkers–and to his credit Burell clearly does–what better way than to give them the background knowledge they need to grapple with precisely the questions he suggests?

Clay is on more solid ground, I think when he suggests “If we can talk leaving high school content under the control of local teachers, not dictated by national content tests, then maybe  – high school teachers could fill in the silences left by the national(istic) 3-8 standards, teach race, gender, and class-based perspectives in history that almost surely wouldn’t be covered earlier.”   Not a bad idea, that.  If every kid comes to high school with a shared body of knowledge that is both strong and subtle, then those high school classes could be rich in critical thinking and challenging perspectives.  Without it, we’re frozen forever at the starting line, searching for some shared subject or common ground to engage with and argue about. 

Email me your address, Clay (Seriously).  I’ve got a copy of the Core Knowledge Sequence with your name on it.  See what’s in it, and see how pedagogically prescriptive it’s not, and ask yourself which students would get the most out of your high school humanities class: those who walked in with a firm grasp of the content it describes?  Or those whose sense of history, science and the arts was left to chance?