Archive for the 'Curriculum' Category

Not Either/Or…It’s AND

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 28, 2009 in Curriculum and Educational Policy. 2 Comments

At Eduwonk, Andy Rotherham catches up to Russ Whitehurst’s paper, Don’t Forget Curriculum.  But he misses the boat when he writes, “I’m not sure when curriculum and reforms like choice, teacher quality, etc…became either/or.”   I’m not sure where Andy’s getting that message, but it’s not from Russ Whitehurst, who went out of his way NOT to say that.  Here’s the relevant quote from his paper:

This is not to say that curriculum reforms should be pursued instead of efforts to create more choice and competition through charters, or to reconstitute the teacher workforce towards higher levels of effectiveness, or to establish high quality, intensive, and targeted preschool programs, all of which have evidence of effectiveness. It is to say that leaving curriculum reform off the table or giving it a very small place makes no sense.

Over at the American Enterprise Institute’s blog, Charles Murray adds his voice to the curriculum choir.

Farms, Field Trips and Test Scores

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 26, 2009 in Assessment and Testing and Curriculum. 6 Comments

The New York Times rode along with 75 Harlem kindergarteners last week on a field trip to the Queens County Farm Museum to  gaze at cows and sheep “not only for a glimpse of rural life, but to rack up extra points on standardized tests.”

New York State’s English and math exams include several questions each year about livestock, crops and the other staples of the rural experience that some educators say flummox city children, whose knowledge of nature might begin and end at Central Park. On the state English test this year, for instance, third graders were asked questions relating to chickens and eggs. In math, they had to count sheep and horses.

The Harlem Success Academy has “invented a form of test preparation,” in the Times’ telling. “The schools haul their students to a farm each year, hoping to expose them to the rural life and lift their scores.” 

Someone here may be doing a teeny bit of overselling.  If HSA has taken to heart the connection between their students’ background knowledge and reading comprehension, that’s terrific.   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.  Unfortunately, the Times story doesn’t shed any light on the school’s overall approach to building background knowledge apart from its ostensibly novel “field study” idea.

Mind you, I’m thrilled to see the Times point out that “prior knowledge of a subject can significantly improve a child’s performance on tests.” It’s a connection that can’t be made too often. It might have been more helpful however, had they substituted “reading comprehension” for “performance on tests” in that sentence.   Creating the impression that kids should see cow or pick a pumpkin because farming might come up on a test years later strikes me as a bit of a stretch (whether it’s on the part of the Times or the school is unclear).   Background knowledge and vocabulary move in mysterious ways, creating unexpected and unpredictable connections.  At the Early Ed Watch Blog, Lisa Guernsey offers a somewhat more nuanced take:

A child who has explored a pumpkin patch will have a much easier time in the future when he or she comes across paragraphs about vines and tendrils, maturing fruit and harvest time. And it’s not just children’s reading skills, of course, that can improve. Their grasp of science and social studies becomes more sophisticated too.

Indeed, if there’s anything that rankles about the Times account, it’s viewing a field trip through the simple—and simplistic—lens of testing.  “I want to do better on homework and tests,” five-year-old Julliana Jimenez tells the paper.  At the risk of being retrograde, it’s a bit dispiriting to hear a kindergartener expressing any concern at all about tests, which don’t start until 3rd grade in New York.  One wonders where she picked it up.  Build broad general knowledge in children.  That will lead to broad language competence.  Let the testing take care of itself.

“The Most Important Education Reformer of the Last Century”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 22, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum and 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.

The Silence of the Wonks

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 18, 2009 in Curriculum. 20 Comments

Hey, did you hear the one about how curriculum effects are the most impactful ed reform lever? 

Nah, didn’t think so.  No one did.  If you really want to set tongues wagging in the ed policy world, then do like Nicholas Kristof and write how children are “cemented into an underclass by third-rate schools” and blame teachers unions.  Then sit back and watch the fur fly as edubloggers trade attaboys, brickbats, and snappy comebacks like Ben’s Adler’s at Newsweek’s Gaggle blog:

Ah yes, if I were a kid in East St. Louis I’d much rather be homeless but have teachers with merit pay than housing subsidies. I remember when I went to Cambodia—Kristof’s favorite country—and all those kids with missing limbs were begging by the side of the road for an end to teacher tenure.

See?  Bashing teachers is fun, easy and never fails to liven things up.  Try it!

On the other hand, if you want to bore people to tears and guarantee that you get zero bloggerly love, do like Russ Whitehurst and point out that curriculum effects dwarf teacher quality (as well as charter schools, early childhood ed and academic standards) as a reform lever, and suggest maybe we should be looking at what kids are actually doing in class.  (Cue sound of crickets chirping). 

At Public School Insights (the only other edublog that has mentioned Whitehurst’s work so far) Claus Von Zastrow zeroes in on the money quote in the report that explains the silence of the wonks:

[P]olicy makers who cut their teeth on policy reforms in the areas of school governance and management rather than classroom practice…may be oblivious to curriculum for the same reason that Bedouin don’t think much about water skiing….The disciplinary training, job experience, professional networks, and intuitions about what is important hardly overlap between governance and curriculum reformers.”

It could takes years — lifetimes, even — before we have a “great teacher” (by whatever definition you favor) in every classroom.  But a strong curriculum might mitigate some of the worst effects of subpar teaching, it would have little cost and you can put it in place today.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.  Oh, sorry.  Must have nodded off.  Curriculum?  It’s not nearly as much fun as bashing teachers and teachers unions, but thankfully everyone agrees that we need to put the interests of children ahead of the interests of adults.  Right?  We do agree, don’t we? 

Curriculum: More Reform for Less Money

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 15, 2009 in Curriculum and Research and Reports. 22 Comments

From Day One, among this blog’s raisons d’être has been to say to ed reformers of  every stripe “don’t forget curriculum.”  So it’s great to hear Brookings’ Russ Whitehurst say the same thing–and with cold, hard data to back it up.   In his latest Letter on Education, Whitehurst lays out an argument that should catch the eye of everyone who is focused on charter schools, teacher quality, early childhood ed and standards as the means of boosting student achievement.  He looks at the effect sizes of those reforms and reports curriculum effects have a much greater impact than all of them:

Further, in many cases they are a free good. That is, there are minimal differences between the costs of purchase and implementation of more vs. less effective curricula. In contrast, the other policy levers reviewed here range from very to extremely expensive and often carry with them significant political challenges, e.g., union opposition to merit pay for teachers. This is not to say that curriculum reforms should be pursued instead of efforts to create more choice and competition through charters, or to reconstitute the teacher workforce towards higher levels of effectiveness, or to establish high quality, intensive, and targeted preschool programs, all of which have evidence of effectiveness. It is to say that leaving curriculum reform off the table or giving it a very small place makes no sense. Let’s do what works for the kids, and let’s give particular attention to efficient and practical ways of doing so.

“We conclude that the effect sizes for curriculum are larger, more certain, and less expensive than for the Obama-favored policy levers,” writes Whitehurst, the former director of the Institute of Education Sciences.  He recommends the Administration “integrate curriculum innovation and reform into its policy framework.”

The Department of Education, through the Institute of Education Sciences, should fund many more comparative effectiveness trials of curricula and other interventions, both through its National Center for Education Evaluation and through competitive grants to university-based researchers. The Obama administration has clearly recognized the importance of comparative effectiveness research in health care reform. It is no less important in education reform.”

Can I get an amen?

‘Scuse Me, Great Nations Comin’ Through!

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 12, 2009 in Curriculum. 1 Comment

The Wall Street Journal notes the tradition of honoring Christopher Columbus for sailing the ocean blue in 1492 “is facing rougher seas than the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria” and wonders if the holiday is in danger of sailing off the calendar. 

Columbus’ stature in elementary school classrooms has declined through the years.  The Associated Press notes “many teachers are trying to present a more balanced perspective of what happened after Columbus reached the Caribbean and the suffering of indigenous populations.” In Texas, the idea that Columbus “discovered America” is out.  Instead, 5th graders learn about the “Columbian Exchange” — the widespread exchange of people, plants, animals, goods, ideas and diseases that occurred after Columbus landed in the Americas.   Fourth graders at one Pennsylvania school held a mock trial and found the navigator guilty of thievery, the AP reports.  They sentenced him to life in prison.   “In their own verbiage, he was a bad guy,” said teacher Laurie Crawford.

Over at Jay Greene’s Blog, Jay points out that ”many of the new answers offered are at least as simplistic and historically false as the established answers they are meant to replace.”  Describing the people from whom Europeans confiscated lands as “Indigenous Peoples or First Nations” is inaccurate, since those people had previously confiscated it from earlier groups.  “You can’t just declare that history starts whenever it suits you,” Greene writes. 

These arguments aren’t going away anytime soon.  For a decidely arch take on the “Columbian Exchange,” here’s Randy Newman’s wry  ”The Great Nations of Europe.”

Columbus sailed for India, found Salvador instead.
He shook hands with some Indians and soon they all were dead.
They got TB and typhoid and athlete’s foot, diptheria and the flu,
‘Scuse me great nations comin’ through!

<a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=ua0pR06pevU">http://youtube.com/watch?v=ua0pR06pevU</a>

The Thomas Sowell Affair

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 9, 2009 in Curriculum and Teaching. 20 Comments

The letter syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell received from a Michigan 5th grader that prompted him to go off on the boy’s teacher and the education system at large was not even a school assignment. 

A debate in the comments section of this blog on the merits of having students write letter to prominent people–the practice blasted by Sowell–prompted me to put in a call to Jennifer Murphy, the principal of Sayre Elementary School, the Michigan school Sowell cited in his column.  I wanted to ask a simple question: “What was the assignment?”

Two surprising facts emerged:  No one at the school was aware that Sowell had singled them out in his column as as an example of how “our children are frittering away time on trivia, other children in other countries are acquiring the skills in math, science, or other fields.”  Even more interesting:  The letter in question was not even a school assignment.

Ms. Murphy sent the following email explaining how the letter arrived in Thomas Sowell’s mailbox:

There appears to have been some misinformation concerning the letter written by a Sayre Elementary student to Dr. Sowell.

At Sayre Elementary, the Habits of Mind, developed by Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick, are part of our district curriculum.  Students work on strengthening those habits both at school and at home.  A Habit of Mind is knowing how to behave intelligently when you DON’T know the answer to question or problem.  As a school, we highlight one or more of the habits each month, and students are given an optional list of activities that they can do at home to practice those featured habits.  In September, students worked on questioning skills.  One of the optional activities directed students to “Think of an important person you would like to meet.  If you could ask them to try to solve a problem, what problem would you choose?  What questions might they ask when trying to solve the problem?  Make a sign with the name of your person, the problem you chose, and the questions they might ask.” 

Writing a letter to that expert was not a part of the assigned task, although one particular student chose to extend the activity and do so on his own.   The “important person” was kid language for a successful person they admired (in this case, Dr. Sowell) and was meant to have students learn how such a person used this “habit” to help him/her succeed.  In this way, the student can see that habits of mind have a place in the world beyond school.

I wish to make it clear that no instructional time was used for the writing of this letter; it was completed independently of the school, with parent guidance, at home. 

I encourage you to learn more about the Habits through a simple Google search or specifically at http://www.habits-of-mind.net/ .  I have also attached an evaluation tool that can be used as a self-assessment of the habits.

Jennifer Murphy
Sayre Elementary Principal
(248) 573-8500
murphyj@slcs.us

Grading the Common Core Standards

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 8, 2009 in Assessment and Testing, Curriculum and Education News. 5 Comments

A new report from the Fordham Foundation gives a grade of “B” to the draft of the proposed “Common Core” standards in ELA and Math.

Fordham’s report, Stars by Which to Navigate: Scanning National and International Standards in 2009, asked subject-matter experts to review the “content, rigor, and clarity of the first public drafts of the ‘Common Core’ standards” as well as the reading, writing and mathematics frameworks of NAEP, TIMSS, and PISA.  How’d they do?

Common Core Reading/Writing/Speaking & Listening: B
Common Core Math: B
NAEP Reading/Writing: B
NAEP Math: C
TIMSS Math: A
PISA Reading: D
PISA Math: D

The executive summary (I have not read the full report, which was just released this morning) makes a couple of important points, explaining and justifying the “B” grade for the common standards:

The document properly acknowledges that essential communication skills must be embraced and addressed beyond the English classroom….These skill-centric standards do not, however, suffice to frame a complete English or language arts curriculum. Proper standards for English must also provide enough content guidance to help teachers instill not just useful skills, but also imagination, wonder, and a deep appreciation for our literary heritage. Despite their many virtues, these skills-based competencies cannot serve as a strong framework for the robust liberal arts curricula that will prepare young Americans to thrive as citizens in a free society. States adopting these standards must, therefore, be very careful about how they supplement them so as to achieve that goal.

 Hard to disagree with any of that, and the B grade sounds fair.  “The Common Core standards are off to a good start,” says Fordham’s Checker Finn, “though there’s room for improvement—and a sound English curriculum will require plenty more than the valuable skills set forth here.”

Breaking the ELA Skills vs. Content Logjam

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 5, 2009 in Curriculum, Educational Policy and Higher Education. 14 Comments

If the authors of the draft national standards are unwilling to name specific works of literature children should read, they should at least name specific literary movements, writes Dan Willingham.

The draft ELA standards floated by the Common Core State Standards Initiative focus almost exclusively on skills–what students should be able to glean from written texts, for example–but remain silent on content.  Dan Willingham floats an intriguing way to split the difference in his latest post at the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog.  He points out  it’s not a problem to specify what kids should learn in other subjects.  “In science, for example, we expect that students will acquire certain skills– methods of scientific analysis–but we also believe that there is a body of scientific knowledge that students will learn,” he notes. “The same is true of history and mathematics.”  Why, he wonders, should literature be any different? 

Perhaps a better method would be to select literary movements based on their influence.  Specifying literary movements (e.g., Modernism, The Lost Generation, Harlem Renaissance) rather than specific authors would better parallel standards in other disciplines.We might expect a national body to recommend that students study Colonial American History in 3rd grade. We would not expect that national body to specify the particular events that must be studied (and by inference, what ought to be excluded).

“Influence is likely a less arbitrary criterion than aesthetic value, and it is more useful to students. Influential movements changed how future authors wrote, their subject matter, how they thought about literature, and so on,” writes Willingham, who argues understanding something of various literary movements is a key to understanding individual works of literature.

Is it really impossible for literature experts to agree on a set of major literary movements with which American high school graduates ought to be familiar? It would not be an easy task, surely, but I think that, if given the chance, a group of literature experts (teachers, editors, professors, writers, and critics) could rise to the occasion, especially if the criterion—literary influence—were made clear.

There is more at stake in getting the balance between process and content correct if the national standards movement is to succeed.  “A stated goal of the common core standards is to prepare students for college,” Willingham concludes.  ”If the standards leave the selection of literary works utterly to chance, they are unlikely to meet that goal.”

Work Hard, Be Good

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 29, 2009 in Curriculum and Education Practice. 5 Comments

Schools should stop telling children to be nice and start teaching them to be good.

So writes Diana Senechal at DoubleX.  Reviewing Charles Murray’s recent book Real Education, she seizes on an unremarked upon quote in which the controversial author observes that schools “tell children to be nice but not how to be good. It tells children to be happy but does nothing to help children think about what happiness means.”  When Murray is right, she notes, “he is awfully right.”

Being nice is something of a bromide in education.  It’s enshrined in KIPP’s “Work Hard. Be Nice” slogan, and is the focus of a lot of group activity that revolves around “pleasant, uncontroversial subject matter” with familiar social messages  “Being good is more complex than being nice,” Diana observes. “It requires that we recognize our own faults and complexities; that we forgive each other; that we say what we think; that we make difficult decisions and face the consequences.”

When we read literature and history, we begin to glean what it means to be good. We see how people with the best intentions can fail; how people struggle with conflicting desires and values and make the best choices they can; how people overcome their limitations when put to the test. From works like Antigone, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Chekhov’s short stories, we learn about selfishness, cruelty, cowardice, and confusion, as well as grace, generosity, and patience. We come to see elements of all these traits in ourselves.

When the curriculum has substance, “students learn not only how to behave, but how to think and feel deeply,” Diana writes. ”They come to understand what humans are made of, what choices we have, and what reason, artistic gift, and imagination can do.”  By contrast, when the emphasis is on group work for its own sake, ”it becomes more important for students to work together than to learn something important.” 

If we only teach children to be nice, they will be at a loss when life calls for more than niceness. They will be at a loss when faced with problems—intellectual, practical, or emotional—that they have to solve on their own. And when the niceness wears out, they will reach for the next thing they know, the knee-jerk reaction. Murray is right: There is a wide gulf between being nice and being good—and while no curriculum can produce goodness, an excellent curriculum can give students a vision of what it might be.