Archive for the 'Essay' Category

A Measure of Privacy

Published by Diana Senechal on February 11, 2009 in Essay, Teaching and accountability. 1 Comment

Shhh…. Stop thinking, spout out some keywords, earn us some points, and be done with it! What are you waiting for? You have been sitting there for like a minute saying nothing! Say something, anything, just get some words out there for the group! Hello? Hello? What are you, a mummy or something? Come on, it’s so easy, just read these words! That’s it, we’re getting a new group member. You’re bringing down our stats! Oh, look, Miss Cameron’s coming our way! She’s onto you!

Recently Robert Pondiscio sent me a link to an article about new software enabling teachers to monitor small-group online discussion in the classroom. Developed by European and Israeli researchers involved in the “Argunaut project,” this software offers real-time statistics on students’ patterns of conversation during class. Teachers can view instantaneous data on groupwork and receive automated alerts. The new software can:

… alert the teacher when one student is not contributing, or is being ignored, or is dominating the conversation. It also renders exchanges in a graphic manner, readily describing the ongoing discussion at a glance. And teachers can program the software to signal when certain keywords occur, such as when Napoleon appears in a conversation about the French revolution.

I will leave aside the implications for the future. The present is grim enough. The software casts light on conditions in our classrooms today, for instance: (a) the emphasis on process over content; (b) the changes to the teachers’ role; and (c) the influence of technology on curriculum. All of these merit analysis, but I will focus on a problem rarely discussed: (d) the erosion of privacy in the classroom. It is not that the teachers can read students’ thoughts, but rather that students are prevented from thinking privately in the first place.

The problem of lost privacy is elusive and rampant. We have become more isolated and less private at once. On the train we are treated to rude and raging cell phone conversations. On internet networks like Facebook, users keep their “friends” informed of their latest actions: taking a sip of coffee, confronting an employee, patching a leak in the ceiling, or calling an ex-spouse. We must step back from this revelatory muddle in order to keep something to ourselves. We must teach children to do the same.

Can schools teach privacy or even honor it? For the most part, a school is not a private place, nor can it be. Students regularly submit their work to their teachers. Administrators visit classrooms and observe lessons in progress. Visitors come to evaluate schools. Schools send reports to their districts. Adults must look out for the welfare of the children; nothing should escape their eye. Yet much learning takes place in the seclusion of the mind. To think independently and well, we must think alone, removing ourselves from distractions and passing influences. We do this when solving a math problem, pondering a historical question, or memorizing a poem. Schools may have forgotten the importance of this. In their mania for “student engagement,” they blithely discard private thought with no regard for consequences.

Classrooms around the country, from kindergarten into college, have replaced teacher-led instruction with the “workshop model,” typically a short lesson followed by small-group activity in which each group member has a specific task. One member may be the note-taker, another the timer, another the spokesperson, and another the moderator. As the group busies itself, the teacher actively monitors the groups and records their behavior on forms and checklists. Is everyone engaged? Are they practicing Accountable Talk®? Does everyone have a specific role? Are they producing evidence of their work?

Teachers must submit to the same model in their professional development sessions. In a typical PD, teachers are placed in small groups with chart paper and a task to complete. The facilitator moves from group to group, looking over teachers’ shoulders and making sure they are working. The session is supposed to serve as a model for the teachers’ own classroom processes. Everyone is supposed to be active all the time; everyone is accountable to the task.

When I was growing up, teachers did not peer over our shoulders or take notes on our behaviors. We were expected to participate, but we had the option of retreating into our minds. The subject was the main focus. Class time was not task-heavy; it was mainly devoted to the learning of new concepts and information. If, on a given day, we chose to stay silent, we could. Even if the teacher called on us, that would only last a few minutes, and then we could return to our thoughts. Certain classes (such as language classes) demanded more active participation, but others let us stay quiet for stretches of time.

Of course this had its own drawbacks: some students would participate much more than others. Some might make the most of their mental autonomy; others might doodle, pass notes, or hold back from asking questions. In a large class it is hard for the teacher to call on everyone or keep track of everyone’s understanding. Some students slip behind and then have difficulty catching up. Others pull through but with little interest.

For these reasons, some believe that the “workshop model” offers something that the “traditional” classroom cannot. It promises to involve all children in the lesson and to bring out those who rarely speak. Proponents of the workshop model sincerely believe that children will come to a better understanding of the subject through small-group discussion and activity. Not only that, but they see the model improving with technology. Soon teachers will be able to keep track of everyone at all times!

This is already happening. M.I.T. has abandoned introductory physics lectures in favor of Technology Enhanced Active Learning (TEAL), a variant of the workshop model combined with technology. According to a New York Times article, TEAL relies heavily on handheld gadgets:

One of the newer professors, Gabriella Sciolla, who arrived in 2003, was teaching a TEAL class on circuits recently. She gauged the level of understanding in the room by throwing out a series of multiple-choice questions. The students “voted” with their wireless “personal response clickers” – the clickers are essential to TEAL – which transmitted the answers to a computer monitored by the professor and her assistants.

If any students value the life of the mind, M.I.T. students likely do. Do M.I.T. students regard these clickers lovingly? The article sings only praises of the program, but some comments clang dissent. One student scoffs: “‘Personal response clickers’? Ask any student how they feel about them and discover that they’d much rather hurl them into the Charles than actually use them, if not for the fact that participation points are oftentimes given out as inducements for clicking.” Another student observes: “The clickers, which have receivers positioned around the room on the ceiling, distract students from the physics concepts themselves.”

Ah, the concepts themselves! Students of all ages need privacy of mind. It may vary by grade, subject, or student, but it should not go away. Workshops and gadgets must not take over education, even if they have a modest role in it. If privacy of mind brings some risk of failure, we need that risk. Otherwise we give up the sanctuary of thought: the slow struggle with a problem, the frustrations and breakthroughs, the questions and insights, the romance with the subject. This is too great a loss. In the classroom we need just a measure of privacy, but that measure we must defend.

Diana Senechal teaches theatre and ESL at P.S. 108, an official Core Knowledge school in New York City.  She has a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale. Her translations of the Lithuanian poetry of Tomas Venclova appeared last fall in a new volume, The Junction.

Handwriting Is Still Alive!

Published by Kitty Burns Florey on January 29, 2009 in Curriculum, Education Practice, Essay and Teaching. 13 Comments

I wrote a book about handwriting because I was concerned about the fact that handwriting is not being adequately taught in many schools. And as I researched the topic, and spoke to a lot of educators, what struck me was the amount of pressure teachers are under in the 21st century.

It’s tempting to be nostalgic about the days when students were drilled in the Palmer Method and most of them graduated from high school writing a legible script. But today’s classroom is immensely more complicated; teachers have to cope not only with endless testing but with a much wider range of material to cover. And along with everything else, they have to teach computer skills! The more research I did, the less wedded I became to the idea (always a dubious one, anyway) that because things were done a certain way back in the good old days, they should be done that way now.

Students need to learn typing – they even probably need to call it “keyboarding.” Hardly a one of them will escape a future in which they earn their livings by sitting at a computer. I write my own books directly on the keyboard, use computer programs for editing, keep on top of a substantial email correspondence, pay bills online – and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But I think it’s too soon to declare legible penmanship a lost art. Maybe the problem lies in calling it an art rather than a simple necessity like knowing how to add and subtract. Hardly a day goes by when the average person doesn’t have to write something on paper. We take notes at meetings, we make lists, we address an envelope, we send a thank-you letter, we keep diaries. A radio talk show host who interviewed me this morning had jotted down some things he wanted to discuss but confessed he couldn’t read it back so had to wing it. In more extreme (but not entirely far-fetched) scenarios, the computer crashes, the power goes out, we start to get shooting pains in our wrists….

We need to use our handwriting, just as most of us need to cook dinner every night. Why not try to do it well? The “slow food” movement is gaining momentum. Why not “slow writing”? Is it so hard to write legibly?

I believe that devising a readable, even beautiful script for ourselves isn’t really very difficult, nor must it resemble the dear old Palmer Method, with its curlicues and flourishes. In the course of writing Script and Scribble, I became smitten with a variation of the 16th-century script known as Italic – a partly printed, partly cursive style that’s famous for its elegance, legibility, and speed. (And if it’s taught in schools, kids don’t have to learn printing in first grade and make the transition to cursive a year or two later: it’s all one script.) Like most people’s, my handwriting had deteriorated through lack of use, but in a week or so of casual practice, I reformed it completely.

I’ve managed to retain what I learned by using my new Italic as often as I can. Even making a grocery list presents an opportunity, not because it matters that “onions, bread, coffee” be beautifully written, but because it keeps me in practice for times when good handwriting is important – like the note of sympathy I had to write a few days ago. It takes a little longer, but – once you’ve mastered it – not much. We’re a nation of printers, a nation of apologizers for our penmanship, but we don’t have to be. It’s just not that big a deal to write well!

But kids are another story. I understand the time pressures teachers face, and I know that follow-up and reinforcement are not easy to build into the school day. Compared to other items in the curriculum, handwriting can seem pretty trivial – and there’s no standardized test to evaluate it. Still, I can imagine an ideal classroom, one in which the students write a fluent Italic script from first grade onward, they’re encouraged to use it daily for short periods, and what they write is pleasing to them, a source of pride, a skill that will serve them well for as long as they need it.

Who knows what the years ahead have in store for any of us? Home computers drain more energy than almost any other usage, and it’s increasing. Repetitive stress injuries and carpal tunnel syndrome aren’t going away. Most college students still take notes with pen and notebook. The pleasure of curling up with a diary seems to be an enduring one. Love letters will never stop being written, by hand, on paper, and sealed with a kiss.

Penmanship isn’t dead. It’s not feeling great, it’s struggling to breathe, it’s limping along. But we can keep it alive. And we should.

KITTY BURNS FLOREY is the author of Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences. A veteran copy editor, she has also written nine novels and many short stories and essays. She lives in Connecticut.  Her web address is www.kittyburnsflorey.com/

Exhilarating Drudgery

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 21, 2008 in Curriculum and Essay. 3 Comments

The Internet puts the world’s knowledge at the ends of our rapidly twitching fingers, yet the academic research skills of “average” students are poorer today than when they “had to trek to a library, sift through periodicals, muddle through card catalogs, and blow off dust from stacks of books, just to access potential material for a term paper,” observes ed.org columnist Ron Isaac, who wonders “What has replaced this exhilarating drudgery?”

Too often a student will go online, key in, say, “Shakespeare,” double click, and then muster the energy for one more click so that their ready-made dissertation will be printing while they split to check out YouTube or to surf some video channel. At the next commercial break they will scoop up their term paper from the tray, sandwich it between colored covers, and adorn it with some “photoshop” work and computer graphics. They may also type a preface to the teacher along the lines of “I hope you like this. Have a nice day!” and add the finishing touch of an “emoticon” smiley-face.

He’s painting with a broad brush, obviously, but Isaac raises a legitimate point with his observation that “everyone professes a passionate belief in the importance of teaching students critical thinking, but generally it’s left at that. The ability to think critically is not a secondary sexual characteristic that happens involuntarily. Nor does it materialize from the study of a non-existent curriculum. It is, rather, the product of many years of literal note-taking ( sometimes a lonely endeavor) and reflection.”

 

 

 

A Progressive Educator Learns to Love Core Knowledge

Published by John Thompson on August 5, 2008 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Essay and Teaching. 0 Comments

Long before I began teaching, I carried on a silent debate with Al Shanker and his “Where We Stand” column. I seethed when he recounted the common question—”is it on the test?”—and then dignified the mindset that produced such a juvenile question. Like so many liberals, my educational philosophy was a hybrid between Dewey’s (and the 1960s’) progressivism and the heroic fantasy created by Hollywood of the charismatic teacher who transforms students by the power of personality and hope. Shanker, however, did convince me that standards were politically necessary and maybe they were educationally valid.

I read Hirsch with the wisdom of half of a decade in the classroom, and I rejected his approach completely… Hirsch sounded too much like a fact-driven traditionalist. He sounded too much like a testing advocate.

My rookie year in an alternative school for felons was a perfect proving ground for my ideals. Our two teachers and our two social workers functioned interchangeably like linebackers in the old “3-4-4″ defense. Class and counseling were recognizably different at times, but mostly we worked seamlessly as student-centered teams. Anytime I wanted adjust my lesson plans, I would dismiss our Social Studies class, and notify the kids that we are now in Science class. And the students were free to do the same. When an emotionally disturbed student barged into class one morning in a particularly agitated state, he directed me, “John, teach me something.” “OK, I replied, today we are studying Psychology,” and I provided a simplified version of autonomic functioning, habit, and choice. The student then scribbled a diary of the day’s thoughts, categorizing them as “auto” and “congo,” which were his spellings of automatic and conscious, and habit. It would have made a great scene on The Wire.

Even as I congratulated myself for my innovative lessons, I started to recognize the impossibility of making the “bricks” of great ideas without the “straw” of information. When I moved to a regular high school, I saw that most of my students had almost no recall from their previous classes. An A.P. student answered that Vietnam was the war we won after dropping the atomic bomb. And it got worse from there.

Continue reading ‘A Progressive Educator Learns to Love Core Knowledge’

Correcting the Student: A Quiet Argument

Published by Diana Senechal on May 4, 2008 in Education Practice, Essay and Teaching. 4 Comments

When I was in kindergarten, my teachers were worried about me because I never brought my paintings home. When my parents asked me why I didn’t, I told them that the paintings weren’t good. This horrified the teachers, who had marked “Great!” on every single one of them (I can still see the handwriting). I knew the paintings weren’t great, and didn’t know how to make them better. No one at school was willing to teach me.

Fast-forward thirty-eight years to a professional development session on the arts in education. We are provided with long sheets of chart paper and instructed to trace and then portray each other, in groups of two or three. We have about thirty minutes to complete this slipshod activity. When this is done, we hang the portraits around the room and circulate for a “gallery walk.” We are given Post-its for making observations, not criticisms. Observation is greater than judgment, we are told. I feel ill. My horrible drawing must now endure cheery “observations.” I want to go home.

Extremist doctrines tumble upon teachers continually, in education programs, training sessions, and so-called literature. Today I will examine a recurring shibboleth: “Teachers should not correct student errors explicitly.” Trainers and administrators discourage correction for at least three reasons: (1) they are concerned for the students’ self-esteem and self-celebration; (2) they believe that correction could exacerbate existing inequities in the classroom; and (3) they are anxious about the difficulties and uncertainties inherent in correction.

I have dealt with anti-correction dogma on numerous occasions. I have been told not to mark up a student’s sacrosanct compositions, but to write comments on post-its (which, of course a student is entitled to throw away). On one occasion, the facilitator of a PD session said, “As a constructivist I don’t believe in telling a student, ‘that’s right,’ because that would invalidate another student’s answer.” I have visited classes with “Socratic Seminars” or “cooperative learning” in which the student discussions got muddled and the teacher refused to intervene.

Continue reading ‘Correcting the Student: A Quiet Argument’

What is the Purpose of America’s Schools?

Published by Daniel A. Heller on February 3, 2008 in Essay. 4 Comments

For over two decades almost every constituency has attacked public education. The last seven years have been particularly demoralizing, characterized by federal and state governments’ atomizing curriculum and then judging the success of individual schools by tests which may or may not provide accurate, useful information.

We frequently hear that the purpose of schools is to prepare students for high paying jobs or to continue their education after high school, both worthy goals, but are they the primary purposes of our educational system? Preparing students for the work force reduces them to a commodity for sale to the highest bidder. This goal equates being the greatest nation in the world with being the richest. What about quality of life? How can the greatest nation in the world have children who go to bed hungry every night?

Continue reading ‘What is the Purpose of America’s Schools?’

Hallway Culture

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 20, 2008 in Essay and Opinion. 0 Comments

Gazette.netBefore we can do our jobs as educators, students must see what’s going on in our schools and classrooms as a means to some viable end. That many do not is the powerful subtext of Lynn H. Fox’s essay (“Getting students out of the halls and into the classrooms”) in Maryland’s gazette.net. A tip of the hat to Joanne Jacobs for pointing out this gem.

A high school teacher, Fox finds the story of contemporary education in a single moment — a choice his student makes between “classroom cuture” and “hallway culture” as class begins one morning. “So much depends on the choice David, and every other American student, will make. In or out? Classroom or hallway?”

Hallways, Fox observes, are “the meeting and greeting ground where young people play out popular fantasies of violence, sexuality, and, especially, consumerism. The hallway rules are easy, the rewards immediate, and the rituals provide culturally approved media roles young people have been fed since birth.” By comparison classrooms “for most of our school’s young people, are places of crushing boredom.” David — predictably, inevitably — chooses the hallway.

What Fox knows that we need to come to terms with is that delayed gratification, the essential valuable proposition of education, is a heroic choice in a world that seldom reinforces it. It’s a brilliant, powerful essay that deserves a wide audience.

What is Core Knowledge?

Published by Russ Spicer on November 27, 2007 in Core Knowledge School and Essay. 0 Comments

Liberty Common SchoolWhen people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them that I am the headmaster of the best school in Colorado. The next question that comes my way is, “What makes your school so great?” My reply is, “We have awesome teachers, awesome students, awesome parental support and an awesome Core Knowledge curriculum.” “What exactly is Core Knowledge?” is often the question that follows.

Most people think that Core Knowledge is just an approach to learning and not an actual curriculum. They often say that it is a back to basics approach to education. While this is partially true, it is not entirely true. The purpose of this blog posting is to provide assistance in answering the question of “what is Core Knowledge?” I am including a description of the Core Knowledge program that is found in our Liberty Common School Student/Parent handbook. I hope this helps and I encourage anyone who is considering attending a Core Knowledge school or starting a Core Knowledge school to do it. The curriculum is outstanding.

Liberty has selected the Core Knowledge Foundation’s Curriculum Sequence as the framework of its curriculum. The Core Knowledge Sequence is distinguished by planned progression of specific knowledge in history, geography, mathematics, science, language arts, and fine arts.

Children learn by building on what they already know. Thus, it is important for them to begin building foundations of knowledge in the early grades when they are most receptive to attaining an organized body of knowledge. Children are by instinct driven to construct a contextual view of the world. Thus, it is important to provide them an educational framework that assists them in developing the constructs upon which their viewpoints will be based. Academic deficiencies in these areas in the first nine grades can permanently impair the quality of later schooling.

By specifying the knowledge that all children should share, all students can achieve equal access to that knowledge. At-risk children especially suffer from low expectations, which often translate into watered-down curricula. In schools using the Core Knowledge Sequence, however, all children are exposed to a coherent core of challenging, interesting, interwoven knowledge. This knowledge not only provides a foundation for later learning but also defines a common heritage and establishes a common ground for communication and cooperation in a diverse society.

In addition to its specificity, the Core Knowledge curriculum is characterized by knowledge that is solid, sequenced, specific, and shared. Literacy in every subject requires a set of mechanical skills and a shared background. The shared, many-cultured knowledge that promotes effective classroom learning also promotes cooperation and respect among students, both in the classroom and in society. Liberty’s teachers are able to rely on shared background knowledge about the students, which enables them to build sequentially on that knowledge year by year. The ninth grade classical honors curriculum continues the goals of the Core Knowledge curriculum with solid knowledge and skills that build on the previous knowledge and prepares students for further high school study.

As used above we define knowledge not in the simplistic sense of mere facts but in the broader sense of the word, as follows: Knowledge consists of the facts, the relations between them, the thinking about them, and the effort to understand and connect them. It is not out of ignorance that we discover understanding. It is exactly because of what we already know that we can know more, that we can discern organizing principles make and test hypotheses, and act rationally.

Liberty Common School teaches 100% of the Core Knowledge curriculum and is a certified Core Knowledge Visitation Site. Our credential was established the hard way by digging in years ago and selecting a thorough, meaningful curriculum — one that is certainly solid, sequenced, specific and shared.

Blog: Moral/Spiritual Leadership For Multicultural Education

Published by CKF on November 20, 2007 in Education Leadership, Education Practice and Essay. 0 Comments

Barbara McCauley Lovejoy wrote to Linda Bevilacqua, President of the Core Knowledge Foundation:

Last spring I was accepted into BYU’s (Brigham Young University) Ed Leadership doctoral program. My focus is going to be on how to better serve our diverse learners. For this reason I am very interested in E.D. Hirsch’s work and support it wholeheartedly. In fact, my postings the last two days at www.principlecenteredme.blogspot.com are related to his work so thought you might like to see it.

Also, I have written and self-published a book called My Years As A Hispanic Youth Advocate… and The Lessons I Have Learned.

Linda Bevilacqua responded:

You articulated the underlying principles of Core Knowledge and Dr. Hirsch’s work beautifully in your blog posting. We need your help in making these concepts more widely understood and welcome your ongoing, active participation in advocating for social equity using these principles.

An excerpt from Barbara’s blog, Moral/Spiritual Leadership for Multicultural Education, Facts Plus, on Nov. 15:

If facts are important as a foundation, then the questions arise:

  • Which facts?
  • Who decides which facts?

The next post at Moral/Spiritual Leadership for Multicultural Education, E. D. Hirsch and Closing the Achievement Gap, on Nov. 16:

Before answering these two questions, the following are some other questions to consider:

  • Why does the learning gap for the haves and have nots grow wider as students move through the school in the U.S. while the opposite occurs in other countries?
  • Why do more 2nd and 3rd generation immigrant students drop out of school than 1st generation immigrant students?
  • What makes our schools unfair?
  • What does educational justice mean?
  • Some points to consider while pondering the answers to these questions:
  • Educational justice means equality of educational opportunity
  • Imparting a universally shared core of knowledge helps overcome inequality
  • Classroom learning can go forward more effectively when all students share some common points of reference
  • ALL children will learn relatively well in an effective school — High quality tends to be correlated with high equity
  • Some students are learning less than others because of systematic shortcomings in their schooling and social and economic differences rather than because of their own innate lack of academic ability
  • New knowledge expands exponentially
  • There is a “Matthew Effect” — the more background knowledge and the richer the vocabulary a learner has, the greater will be his/her ability to accumulate more knowledge
  • Detailed guidelines provide clarity
  • A diverse country has a greater need of a core-knowledge system than does a homogeneous one

The work of E. D. Hirsch’s, Cultural Literacy, has been criticized not only in the multicultural education arena, but also in the general education arena. Yet, before criticizing him too harshly and “throwing the baby out with the bath water,” it is my opinion that we need to have an understanding of why his work on core knowledge could be helpful to diverse learners:

  • It addresses the snowball effect that allows a small knowledge difference in kindergarten to become a huge gap in learning within a few years
  • It builds from year to year on the background knowledge learners need to be academically successful
  • A teacher can identify what background knowledge a learner is missing
  • It does not stipulate everything a learner should know. In fact, it is meant to comprise only 50% of the school’s curriculum leaving ample time to address other learning needs, including more ethnically-centered curricula
  • Because cosmopolitanism is a true friend to diversity, core knowledge has adopted a cosmopolitan approach to history and literature in order to reinforce the fact that no longer are Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and other ethnic groups invisible in the past or the present
  • In order to be fair to diverse learners, it is critical that schools not neglect or reject the current dominant culture
  • The Hirsch core knowledge is not the work of one person, but the work of many, including multicultural advisors, who combined scholarly research with grassroots experience to develop this sequence consensus
  • It was empirical science and not ideology that originated cultural literacy and the core knowledge movement
  • There is evidence that supports the connection between core knowledge and educational justice. In fact, the correlations between fairness and core knowledge are 100 percent.

As the U.S. becomes more diverse it is critical that we find ways to not only acknowledge the diversity and benefit from the richness that diversity brings, but also find ways to bring us together. It is my opinion that the principles of Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy and core knowledge can help do both.

Read the blog, Moral/Spiritual Leadership for Multicultural Education!

Narrowing the Two Achievement Gaps

Published by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. on November 9, 2007 in Essay and Research and Reports. 2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading ‘Narrowing the Two Achievement Gaps’

Pages: 1 2 3 4