With the Common Core, the Whole Is More Than the Sum of Its Parts

by Lisa Hansel
June 13th, 2013

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Posted in Curriculum | 21 Comments »

In a new post on Diane Ravitch’s blog, Robert Shepherd makes many insightful observations about the sad state of reading instruction:

Back in 1984, Palinscar and Brown wrote a highly influential paper about something they called “reciprocal learning.” They suggested, in that paper, that teachers conducting reading circles encourage dialogue about texts by having students do prediction, ask questions, clarify the text, and summarize. Excellent advice. But this little paper had an enormously detrimental unintended effect on the professional education community. All groups are naturally protective of their own turf. The paper by Palinscar and Brown had handed the professional education community a definition of their turf: You see, we do, after all, have a unique, respectable, scientific field of our own that justifies our existence—we are the keepers of “strategies” for learning. The reading community, in particular, embraced this notion wholeheartedly. Reading comprehension instruction became MOSTLY about teaching reading strategies, and an industry for identifying reading strategies and teaching those emerged. The vast, complex field of reading comprehension was narrowed to a few precepts: teach kids to identify the main idea and supporting details; teach them to identify sequences and causes and effects; teach them to make inferences; teach them to use context clues; teach them to identify text elements. Throughout American K-12 education, we started seeing curriculum materials organized around teaching these “strategies.” Where before a student might do a lesson on reading Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” he or she would now do a lesson on Making Predictions, and any text that contained some examples of predictions would be a worthy object of study….

The question of how to “make an inference” is extraordinarily complex, and a great deal human attention has been given to it over the centuries, and a quick glance at any of the hundreds of thousands of Making Inferences lessons in our textbooks and in papers about reading strategies by education professors will reveal that almost nothing of what is actually known about this question has found its way into our instruction….

I bring up the issue of instruction in making inferences in order to make a more general point—the professional education establishment, and especially that part of it that concerns itself with English language arts and reading instruction, has retreated into dealing in poorly conceived generalization and abstraction. Reading comprehension instruction, in particular, has DEVOLVED into the teaching of reading strategies, and those strategies are not much more than puffery and vagueness. There is no there there. No kid walks away from his or her Making Inferences lesson with any substantive learning, with any world knowledge or concept or set of procedures that can actually be applied in order to determine what kind of inference a particular one is and whether that inference is reasonable. Why? Because one has to learn and teach a lot of complex material in order to do these things at all, and professional education folks have decided, oddly, that they can teach making inferences without, themselves, learning about what kinds of inferences there are and how one evaluates the various kinds.

But to my way of thinking, he goes too far in indicting the Common Core State Standards:

Have a look at these standards, and what do you see? Well, the standards are abstractions, generalizations: The student will be able to recognize the main idea. The student will be able to draw inferences. The student will be able to determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze in detail its development over the course of the text. In English language arts, the CONTENT of what is studied is treated in the new standards AS AN AFTERTHOUGHT. We are told that students should be reading substantive, grade-level appropriate works. Some examples of these are given in an appendix. But the standards themselves are simply a list of abstract skills and “strategies.” They don’t even include ANY descriptions of procedures that students might learn for carrying out tasks. So, they completely ignore both world knowledge (knowledge of what) and procedural knowledge (knowledge of how), though they occasionally make vague references to what would result if one had (miraculously, by what means they do not say) acquired the latter….

In our rush to make ELA education scientific, in our emphasis on abstract form over content, we’ve forgotten why we read. We don’t read to hone our inferencing skills. We don’t read because we are fascinated by where, in this essay, the author has placed the main idea. Our purpose in reading is not to find out how the author organized her story in order to create suspense. We read because we are interested in what the text has to say, and the metacognitive abstraction about the text is incidental. It grows out of and relates to what this particular text does and takes meaning from that. The Common Core State Standards in ELA is just another set of blithering, poorly thought out abstractions. And starting from there, instead of starting with the text and its content, is a mistake.

One could implement the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts perfectly and have students entirely miss what reading literature is about. They would not come away from their literature classes with the understanding that when they read a literary work well, they enter into an imaginative world and have an experience there, in all its concreteness and specificity, and it is then THAT experience that has significance, that matters, that has “meaning.”

While Shepherd is spot-on regarding the purpose and value of reading, and on the devastating overemphasis on reading strategies, on the CCSS he is making the same mistake that many educators are making—focusing too much on the standards and too little on the text surrounding the standards. The individual standards are abstract goals. Alone, they could inspire more strategy-focused instruction. But they do not stand alone.

To ensure that students acquire the breadth and depth of knowledge needed to read with ease across academic domains, the standards repeatedly call for a content-rich curriculum (the page numbers given refer to the PDF version of the standards):

While the Standards make references to some particular forms of content, including mythology, foundational U.S. documents, and Shakespeare, they do not—indeed, cannot—enumerate all or even most of the content that students should learn. The Standards must therefore be complemented by a well-developed, content-rich curriculum consistent with the expectations laid out in this document. (p. 6)

Through extensive reading of stories, dramas, poems, and myths from diverse cultures and different time periods, students gain literary and cultural knowledge as well as familiarity with various text structures and elements. By reading texts in history/social studies, science, and other disciplines, students build a foundation of knowledge in these fields that will also give them the background to be better readers in all content areas. Students can only gain this foundation when the curriculum is intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades. (p. 10)

The standards also show how to accelerate knowledge and vocabulary growth through a carefully sequenced, grade-by-grade approach to constructing content-area domains:

Building knowledge systematically in English language arts is like giving children various pieces of a puzzle in each grade that, over time, will form one big picture. At a curricular or instructional level, texts—within and across grade levels—need to be selected around topics or themes that systematically develop the knowledge base of students. Within a grade level, there should be an adequate number of titles on a single topic that would allow children to study that topic for a sustained period. The knowledge children have learned about particular topics in early grade levels should then be expanded and developed in subsequent grade levels to ensure an increasingly deeper understanding of these topics. (p. 33)

Word acquisition occurs up to four times faster … when students have become familiar with the domain of the discourse and encounter the word in different contexts…. Hence, vocabulary development for these words occurs most effectively through a coherent course of study in which subject matters are integrated and coordinated across the curriculum and domains become familiar to the student over several days or weeks. (Appendix A, p. 33)

Anyone who brings a checklist mentality to these standards will get checklist results. But they won’t be able to honestly say their approach was in keeping with the spirit or intent of the Common Core.

The CCSS are stronger than states’ previous efforts to produce ELA standards because they do explain the need for domain-based studies organized in a coherent, content-rich curriculum. But in deference to America’s tradition of local control, the CCSS fall short of sealing the deal, of requiring even a few specific texts for each grade.

Just consider what Virginia, a state that did not adopt the CCSS, is currently doing. According to Rachel Levy, VA is clearing content out of the way so students can spend even more time on strategies:

Recently, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell proposed and the General Assembly approved a bill that allows elementary schools to apply for waivers from high-stakes science and social studies testing (aka SOLs) for third graders. So far this testing season, approximately twenty-five public elementary schools have availed themselves of this waiver. The idea is that before struggling readers can learn content they have to master reading comprehension.

Virginia’s Deputy Secretary of Education Javaid Siddiqui thinks this is a good idea:

The law, which expires in 2015, is a kind of a pilot program, Siddiqi said. He said that schools with low reading pass rates often have low pass rates in social studies and science because the two are connected. “It’s not about what they know,” Siddiqi said. “They are struggling with comprehension.”

On the one hand, I am all for reducing standardized testing in Virginia. I also acknowledge that the intention here is worthy: to help struggling students, to not set them up for failure.

However, I’m afraid that the logic is misguided and that that this will mean a decrease in social studies and science instruction and an increase in reading test prep. Yes, reading is a gateway to learning and limited instruction in reading strategies can be helpful, but the reason these students are struggling to comprehend what they read is because they aren’t learning enough content. It’s true that “it’s not about what they know;” it’s about what they don’t know. A valid test of reading would have passages related to the subject matter the students have already learned.

Putting off content-rich instruction to “focus on reading” will only serve to put off progress in reading proficiency.

Sadly, Virginia’s misguided new plan clearly shows that the CCSS are a real step forward. They give states, districts, and schools a strong foundation to build on. So instead of trying to tear down that foundation, let’s help the nation’s educators build up the excellent curriculum, and related materials and professional development, they need.

Brian Pick Gets It

by Lisa Hansel
June 6th, 2013

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Posted in Curriculum | 3 Comments »

Earlier today I had the great pleasure of a blog post that I wrote about the District of Columbia’s approach to the Common Core standards being published on Valerie Strauss’s “The Answer Sheet.” And just a couple of hours ago I had the great honor of speaking with Brian Pick—the man in charge of revamping DC’s approach to curriculum and instruction to meet the new standards.

In my earlier post, I congratulated the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) for being dedicated to implementing the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), and for tackling the necessary changes in a very open, public manner. I also conveyed concerns about the standards being reduced to a checklist, and saw far too much business as usual in the instructional guidance I found online. It appears skills heavy, and content light. I am thankful to Pick for calling me to share his bigger picture and some of his longer-term goals.

Pick is, quite frankly, one of the most impressive educators I’ve spoken with in a long time. He gets it. He gets the cognitive science research on what knowledge does for reading comprehension and critical thinking. He gets teachers and teaching. He gets students’ needs—especially the needs of students who change schools frequently. He gets the importance of domain-based, cross-curricular studies for building broad background knowledge.

Some part of the system may have, as I claimed, checklist mentality—but Pick gets the intent of the Common Core standards.

He also has a correction for me: That District of Columbia Comprehensive Assessment System Resource Guide 2013 that I’m so worried about (because it reduces the CCSS to a list with assessment stems and completely ignores the call for a content-rich curriculum) was published by DC’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education, not the district. I should have noticed that!

He also told me about the curriculum that DCPS is writing. Unfortunately, the units developed thus far are only available to those in the school system. But based on the conversation I had with Pick, I am happy to give him the benefit of the doubt. He agreed with me that the scope and sequence outlines I was able to see, with each unit described with just a bare-bones theme and focus, are too vague and too focused on skills. He explained that the actual units (which are password protected) are very content heavy.

Even better, he told me about a specific change that I found delightful. In my original post, I quoted a second grade “unit focus” that stated, “Students will study the history of, and daily life in, another country (teachers should select which country to study). In reading, students will continue to compare and contrast by making text-to-text connections. Students will also focus on summarizing individual paragraphs and multi-paragraph texts. In writing, students will write an opinion piece. Significant time should be devoted to learning how to peer-edit and peer-revise.” In critiquing it, I noted that this description was far too focused on skills, and not focused enough on the content. I did not add on how bothered I was that the country selection was being left up to each teacher. In other writing I have explained why that bothers me: In brief, I’ve argued that what to teach ought to be a communal, research-based, and experience-based decision. Since knowledge is essential to comprehension and critical thinking, and since there is a body of knowledge that literate adults are assumed to have, I think all of us should be willing to plow through the hard work of agreeing to certain content for each grade. (In contrast, I think that how to teach should be up to the individual teacher.) Finally, the delight: Pick told me that his team has revised that unit. The selection of the country is no longer up to the teacher. They’ve decided to teach about our neighbors, Canada and Mexico.

I am not easily won over, so I quizzed Pick about how the curriculum is being developed and to what extent they are creating domain-based studies. Pick showed that he knows the research on how being immersed in a topic accelerates learning (of knowledge, vocabulary, and skills). He has studied the human body example in the Common Core. And he is driving toward a very rich learning experience for DC’s children.

 

Can the Common Core Standards Reverse the “Rising Tide of Mediocrity”?

by Lisa Hansel
April 26th, 2013

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Posted in Core Knowledge, Literacy, Research and Reports | 25 Comments »

This post originally appeared on April 25, 2013, on the Shanker Blog:  http://shankerblog.org.

Spring 2013 marks the 30th anniversary of two landmark publications. One, an essay by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., in The American Scholar titled “Cultural Literacy,” sparked a small but steadily growing movement dedicated to educational excellence and equity. The other, A Nation at Risk, set off a firestorm by conveying fundamental truths about the inequities in our educational system with prose so melodramatic they have proven unforgettable.

In the 80s, only one leader seemed to fully grasp the importance of both of these publications: Albert Shanker. Shanker, then-president of the American Federation of Teachers, was prominent partly due to his position, and largely due to the force of his intellect. He saw that schools were in trouble. He agreed that, as stated in A Nation at Risk, “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur—others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.”

Mediocrity is what filled the void as schools slowly retreated from teaching all children rigorous content. That retreat happened throughout the 20th century: Progressive educators’ misunderstandings of the essential role of specific, relevant knowledge in reading comprehension and critical thinking resulted in weak curricula being the norm and pockets of excellence typically being reserved for our most advantaged youth.

E. D. Hirsch was a professor who shared that misunderstanding until his own research awoke him to the (now well-established) fact that broad literacy depends on broad knowledge. Shanker was by far the most prominent educator to grasp the veracity and power of Hirsch’s work.

Rigor is the antidote to risk.

According to Richard Kahlenberg’s terrific biography of Albert Shanker, Tough Liberal,* Shanker “believed, with E. D. Hirsch, Jr., that if one really wished to be a political progressive concerned about disadvantaged kids, one needed to be an educational ‘conservative’ who stood for teaching students certain core knowledge that was essential to upward mobility in American society” (p. 10).

It was in the early 1980s, when Shanker read both A Nation at Risk and “Cultural Literacy,” that his particular form of progressivism took shape: Shanker saw that poor children needed a whole array of supports—including a traditional, rigorous curriculum that would give them all the knowledge that wealthier children get from their college-educated parents.

While virtually all education leaders panned A Nation at Risk, Shanker did not. According to Kahlenberg, Shanker’s reaction was “pivotal”:

When the … report was released … Shanker and a group of top union officials sat together and read the document. Sandra Feldman recalled: “We all had this visceral reaction to it. You know, ‘This is horrible. They’re attacking teachers.’ Everyone was watching Al to hear his response. When Al finished reading the report, he closed the book and looked up at all of us and said, ‘The report is right, and not only that, we should say that before our members.’ ” (p. 275)

Shanker did just that in a speech to members less than a week after the report came out. And then he spent the remainder of his life (he passed away in 1997) fighting for several major reforms. A few of the noteworthy ones were peer assistance and review, charter schools, and standards.

Thanks in part to Hirsch, Shanker had a very clear sense of what educational standards needed to accomplish. According to Kahlenberg:

Shanker disagreed with education-school professors who favored general thinking skills over gaining specific-content knowledge. He believed students needed both, and that John Dewey’s education theories had been misinterpreted by some “progressive” educators…. “Dewey himself was shocked when he went into some of these progressive schools and saw what was going on in his name.”

In the 1980s, Shanker became an early advocate of University of Virginia English Professor E. D. (Don) Hirsch Jr.’s argument that American students needed to be “culturally literate”—to master a body of facts that literate American’s know—in order to be successful in mainstream society. A full two years before Hirsch’s bestselling book Cultural Literacy became a phenomenon, Shanker embraced Hirsch’s view that knowing subject matter was important to reading comprehension…. “To read well you need background information that is culture-specific,” Shanker argued. Students needed to be taught Shakespeare and mythology so they could understand common cultural references.

Shanker was also taken by Hirsch’s argument that when students know particular content matter, their interest and curiosity are more likely to be aroused. A student who knows something about dinosaurs is more likely to pick up a book on dinosaurs when browsing through the library. “Subject matter,” Shanker argued, “is the life’s breath of learning.” While some “progressive” educators dismissed Hirsch’s approach as emphasizing “mere facts,” Shanker wrote thirteen separate columns mentioning Hirsch’s theory, invited Hirsch to speak at the AFT’s biennial QuEST Conference, and featured Hirsch on the cover of American Educator….

Shanker … believed that the core knowledge of the dominant culture was essential for all students to master if they wished to advance socioeconomically within the society…. Shanker argued:

Some people have been very critical of Hirsch’s proposals on the grounds that they try to impose the dominant culture on groups that would rather have their children learn their own culture. But the thrust of Hirsch’s proposal is egalitarian. He believes that by starting early and by giving all children the same core knowledge to learn, we can prevent the creation of an educational underclass…. (p. 323-324)

Despite their best efforts, neither Shanker nor Hirsch succeeded in bringing the need for knowledge-building curricula into mainstream reform efforts.

But now, the tide is finally turning.

The Common Core State Standards demand rigor—and a strong curriculum. In the Common Core State Standards for English language arts and literacy, the need for a knowledge-building curriculum is plainly stated and explained:

While the Standards make references to some particular forms of content, including mythology, foundational U.S. documents, and Shakespeare, they do not—indeed, cannot—enumerate all or even most of the content that students should learn. The Standards must therefore be complemented by a well-developed, content-rich curriculum consistent with the expectations laid out in this document. (p. 6)

To build a foundation for college and career readiness, students  must read widely and deeply from among a broad range of high-quality, increasingly challenging literary and informational texts. Through extensive reading of stories, dramas, poems, and myths from diverse cultures and different time periods, students gain literary and cultural knowledge as well as familiarity with various text structures and elements. By reading texts in history/social studies, science, and other disciplines, students build a foundation of knowledge in these fields that will also give them the background to be better readers in all content areas. Students can only gain this foundation when the curriculum is intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades. (p. 10)

Shanker, no doubt, would applaud the effort. Hirsch certainly is. As more and more states take implementation seriously and support schools in creating the content-rich curricula they need, we all should be applauding.

 

* In quoting Tough Liberal, I have not included the endnotes.

 

The Inclusive, Capacious, Diverse, Relevant . . . and Misleading California Reading List

by Guest Blogger
April 8th, 2013

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Posted in Educational Policy, Higher Education, Literacy | 9 Comments »

By Mark Bauerlein

Mark Bauerlein is a professor in the Department of English at Emory University and the author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30.

 

Last month, the California Department of Education issued Recommended Literature: Pre-Kindergarten Through Grade Twelve, an updated reading list of books for teachers of English, science, and social studies to use in their classrooms. The press release states that the list will “help students meet the new Common Core State Standards,” which were adopted by the State of California on August 10, 2010. To produce the list, the Department of Education convened teachers, librarians, administrators, curriculum experts, and college professors who deliberated and crafted the final tally, which Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson declared “a vital resource for students, teachers and parents.”

Sadly, the result falls well short of that description. Worse, this reading list actually works against Common Core and the expectations that inform them. The document

  • Explicitly violates the spirit and letter of the standards;
  • Does not foster college readiness of high school graduates;
  • Does not ensure that students are exposed to our literary heritage.

Why? For two simple reasons: the list is too long and too indiscriminate. It contains 7,800 titles—2,500 for grades 9 – 12 alone—and it sets dozens of classics among thousands of contemporary, topical titles without distinction. Shakespeare’s Macbeth is followed by Macho, a 1991 tale of an illegal immigrant who becomes a field worker. Little Women makes the list, but the description of it says nothing about its historical status. Every work gets the same treatment, a one-sentence statement of content. The field is overwhelmingly wide and it has only one level, ranking Leaves of Grass, Huck Finn, etc. equal to pop culture publications. It has no core, and it ensures that students across California will have un-common reading exposures.

Common Core demands the opposite. One unambiguous standard reads, “Demonstrate knowledge of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early-twentieth-century foundational works of American literature,” requiring that English classes foreground Ben Franklin’sAutobiography, Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, Emily Dickinson’s poetry, etc. The California list does include such classics, but they are buried in a pile of recent works that have yet to face the test of time. When I clicked on one part of the Grade 9 – 12 list, I counted only three American staples among the 100 works provided. With no other guidance, Recommended Literature effectively says, “This is as good as that,” a flattening that contradicts Common Core’s emphasis on foundational texts. At face value, it implies that a year reading Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven, The Breaking Point (cliques in a private school), and The Lost Symbol (sequel to The Da Vinci Code) is just as preparatory as a year of The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid.

The Department’s all-equal approach also undermines college readiness. When students enter college, their professors assume that they possess some cultural literacy, that is, a little knowledge about the Renaissance, the Civil War, ancient mythology, and the American novel from Hawthorne to Ellison. When professors in U.S. history, sociology, or political science mention the American ideal of self-reliance, those who have read Franklin, Emerson, Thoreau, and Washington have a decided advantage over those who haven’t. A high school English teacher who skips those seminal works may feel that contemporary titles speak to the students more immediately, but he or she disadvantages them at the next level (and possibly throughout their lives). Many contemporary works are superb, of course, but they do not provide the background learning that goes with Gulliver’s Travels, Jane Eyre, and 1984. And few of them, too, contain the exquisite sentences of Gatsby, the piercing metaphors of Blake, the characters of Flannery O’Connor . . .

In the American setting, great works from the Puritans to the Beat Generation form an essential stream of our national identity, a lineage as crucial as the lineage of the American presidency. How much of our understanding of the Depression comes from The Grapes of Wrath, of the American South circa 1930 from William Faulkner, of old New England from Hawthorne? Without them, students lose a vital connection to their country. In adding so much contemporary literature, the CDE claims a more culturally relevant curriculum, but the relevance it offers amounts to a thin and haphazard version of the culture they inhabit.

Recommended Literature needs another component, one that ranks works by their literary-historical standing. Californians want the CDE to exercise some judgment, to distinguish the superb from the merely interesting, the foundational from the topical, the timeless classics from the temporarily relevant. Common Core does so, and in producing this gargantuan grab-bag of works, this list without a core, CDE has misaligned with the standards it adopted three years ago.

 

Best of the Blogs: Dumbing Down and Building Up

by Lisa Hansel
March 27th, 2013

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Posted in Curriculum, Education Practice, Research and Reports, Teaching | No Comments »

Good sense, sound research, and cultivated open-mindedness—these three things help us all live healthier, happier lives. But they tend to be in short supply.

Not so yesterday in blogdom: E. D. Hirsch shared his good sense, Daniel Willingham offered a guide to sound research, and Diana Senechal revealed the joys of cultivated open-mindedness. I hope you’ll read their posts in full, so here are just a few highlights.

Over at the Huffington Post, E. D. Hirsch asks, “Are Schools Dumbing Down the Common Core Standards?”

The arguments against [the Common Core State Standards] grow ever more fierce — as if … schools were being forced to descend from their current level of excellence to study “informational texts” like tax codes which will drive Langston Hughes and Emily Dickinson out of the curriculum.

None of the horrid scenarios need happen — given an ounce or even a milligram of common sense. Since the standards do not prescribe a definite curriculum, many different curricula could fulfill them. It’s no more reasonable to claim that Langston Hughes and Emily Dickinson will be excluded as to claim that they will be required. One could easily insist that within language arts courses “informational texts” such as historical ones must qualify as “literature” — a word that is not limited to fiction and poetry, yet does exclude tax codes.

Moreover many of the current criticisms aren’t really directed against the standards themselves but against the frantic directives that principals and superintendents are sending out to teachers. I agree that some school administrators are reacting to the coming of the standards in strange and unproductive ways — just as they did when No Child Left Behind became law. But the standards don’t require folly — against which the gods themselves struggle in vain….

The Core Knowledge example proves that effective curricula can be based on the new standards. It will be up to the critics and the practitioners themselves to create effective curricula. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the standards but in ourselves, if we should fail in this unique new chance to improve our schools.

On his Science and Education blog, Daniel Willingham explores “A New Push for Science in Education in Britain.”

Basic scientific knowledge gleaned from cognitive and developmental psychology (and other fields) can not only help us to interpret the results of randomized trials, that knowledge can be useful to teachers on its own. Just as a physician uses her knowledge of human physiology to diagnose a case, a teacher can use her knowledge of cognition to “diagnose” how to best teach a particular concept to a particular child.

I don’t know about Britain, but this information is not taught in most American schools of Education. I wrote a book about cognitive principles that might apply to education. The most common remark I hear from teachers is surprise (and often, anger) that they were not taught these principles when they trained.

Elsewhere I’ve suggested we need not just a “what works” clearinghouse to evaluate interventions, but a “what’s known” clearinghouse for basic scientific knowledge that might apply to education….

When building a house an architect must respect certain basic facts set out by science. Physics and materials science will loom large for the architect; for educators it might be psychology, sociology et al. The rules represent limiting conditions, but so long as you stay within those boundaries there is lots of ways to get it right. Just as physics doesn’t tell the architect what the house must look like, so too cognitive psychology doesn’t tell teachers how they must teach.

Guest blogging for Joanne Jacobs, Diana Senechal considers “The pull and counter-pull of teaching.”

Education is filled with opposing principles, where neither is absolutely correct…. Most teachers have certain leanings, but those leanings are not the whole of their understanding or of the truth. Often I find that when I tip just a little bit against myself, interesting things happen.

For instance, my philosophy courses have focused on reading and discussion of texts—for good reasons. The texts are compelling, and the students approach them thoughtfully and enthusiastically. Yet when I give students a chance to take off with their own ideas, I find that they bring forth some of their best work. The moral is not that I should abandon the texts, but rather that I should vary the type of assignment now and then.

My ninth-grade students are studying rhetoric and logic. Most recently, they read G. K. Chesterton’s essay “The Fallacy of Success.” We examined how Chesterton takes apart the idea of success, and how his reference to the myth of King Midas enhances his argument. They did well with this.

Then I thought: why not have them take apart a concept themselves? … Much came out of this exercise. Yet it was informed by our reading and discussion of “The Fallacy of Success.” There need not be a contradiction between analyzing someone else’s essay and writing your own (with your own ideas). In the best of scenarios, the two support each other.

 

Six Traps that Could Snare the Common Core Standards

by Linda Bevilacqua
February 28th, 2013

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Posted in Assessment and Testing, Curriculum, Education Practice, Educational Policy | 11 Comments »

This blog is based on remarks I made this morning at “Curriculum Counts: Fulfilling the Promise of the Common Core State Standards,” a forum hosted by the Manhattan Institute and the Fordham Institute. A video of the event is available here.

In thought, word, and deed, the efforts of the Core Knowledge Foundation over the past 25 years, led by E. D. Hirsch, have been devoted to making the case that curriculum counts. So I am excited about the promise offered by the Common Core State Standards (CCSS)—particularly the English language arts standards, which clearly state that, “The Standards must … be complemented by a well-developed, content-rich curriculum consistent with the expectations laid out in this document.” As promising as the standards are, however, in the end, it is the manner in which the standards are interpreted and then implemented by state departments of education, school districts, and classroom teachers that really matters. And it is here that I must confess to a certain level of concern.

Let me be specific. Hopefully everyone is familiar with—or has at least heard of—the “six shifts” (identified by the New York State Education Department and Student Achievement Partners) that the implementation of the Common Core language arts standards will require. The identification of these shifts is helpful; they have become the intense focus of professional development in schools across the country. But they are not enough; we need to take another step.

In the interest of providing further clarity about how the language arts standards must be implemented if they are in fact to realize their potential, I’d like to propose that we focus attention as well on what I call the “six traps,” or obstacles, to effective implementation of the language arts standards. The first five traps are within the reach and influence of every teacher, principal, and district-level administrator. The sixth trap will require the attention of state-level policymakers.

1)  The failure to see the forest for the trees – In states and schools around this country, educators are intently engaged right now in reviewing language arts materials to determine whether or not they are aligned to the CCSS. I come across a new rubric or template for this purpose on nearly a daily basis. My concern is that too many educators are approaching this task with a severe case of myopia—attempting to literally align individual standards from the CCSS document to particular goals and objectives in given curricular materials, while failing to fully understand the “big picture” or true intent of the standards.

Think about the implications of this approach. While the CCSS for ELA consistently call for “a well-developed content-rich curriculum designed to build disciplinary knowledge,” nowhere is this stated in any of the individual standards. Therefore, to focus only on aligning to individual standards leads us into the failing-to-see-the-forest-for-the-trees trap. To avoid this trap, educators must align not just to the letter of the standards but to their spirit. The Core Knowledge Foundation has created a more comprehensive rubric to guide educators in using this approach.

2) The failure to go beyond simply balancing the percentage of fiction and nonfiction texts – After years of E. D. Hirsch writing about the importance of content knowledge for literacy, I am happy to report that I see educators and publishers alike uniformly talking about the importance of informational texts. Actually, many of the large publishing companies began including nonfiction selections in their materials and programs several years ago. The problem, however, is that educators and publishers have only gotten half of the message. An examination of those programs and materials that include nonfiction text reveals a haphazard, random approach to the selection of texts. One single nonfiction text selection on dinosaurs in one unit, Aztecs in the next unit, and Mozart in perhaps the following unit is not an effective way to build knowledge. Children, especially those who are behind, need a coherent, sequenced approach to building knowledge. This can be efficiently and quite easily accomplished by grouping text selections on a single topic and sequencing them to build knowledge and give repeated exposures to key vocabulary.

Here’s a novel idea: Why not expect both publishers and educators to include content-based objectives in all of their lesson plans? Doesn’t it make sense to ask, beyond the language arts skills: What do we want students to walk away with at the end of a lesson? What is the knowledge that we expect students to gain having read a particular selection?

3) The failure to understand the nature of vocabulary growth – E. D. Hirsch has written eloquently about vocabulary growth in detail in the winter 2013 issue of City Journal, so I will just touch on this. So long as vocabulary is not understood as representative of bodies of knowledge, and so long as literacy is seen as a general skill that does not depend on prior knowledge, schools will continue to teach isolated reading comprehension strategies and isolated vocabulary terms. The top researchers in word acquisition agree that most word learning is acquired incidentally in the course of gaining knowledge. Hence, the best way to develop vocabulary is through a systematic approach to gaining knowledge, staying on a single domain for at least two weeks, with repeated opportunities to learn and use new words.

4) The failure to recognize the importance of implementation of the CCSS in the early grades – All of us recognize and want strong reading and language comprehension for all students when they graduate, but few seem to recognize that the knowledge and vocabulary needed are so extensive that we must begin systematically building this knowledge and vocabulary—as well as skills—as early as possible. Children with well-educated parents learn academic content from birth. Research has shown that the achievement gap is already large on the first day of kindergarten. Schools that wait until the upper elementary grades to get serious about academic content are making it virtually impossible to close the gap.

5) The failure to recognize the importance of oral language—listening and speaking—in literacy competency – The Common Core language arts standards recognize that to ensure students achieve college- and career-level literacy by the time they leave school, the schools must stress all facets of language development, including listening and speaking. Unfortunately, many educators continue to think and act as if literacy were comprised only of reading and writing, which is why we continue to hear stories and read newspaper articles about kindergarteners, for example, who are asked to write compositions in various genres. And then we hear stories of the frustrations of those kindergarten teachers, with everyone blaming the CCSS for imposing this practice. Let me be very clear: Nothing could be further from the truth. Such practice represents a complete misinterpretation of the CCSS and a failure to carefully read the progression of anchor standards as they evolve from the earliest grade levels. The CCSS promote the use of read-alouds in the early grades as the only way to address the paradox of the need to expose children to rich, complex text to build coherent knowledge.

6) The failure to recognize the need for curriculum-based assessments – This requires attention at the state level and by our best thinkers. In a typical school, what gets tested is what gets taught. Even a content-rich curriculum is rendered powerless in the absence of curriculum-based tests. Early samples from both consortia reveal a perpetuation of a skills-based approach to assessing reading comprehension. I realize that states are not going to run out and adopt a common curriculum for all schools in their state so that curriculum-based tests can be developed. But there is a middle ground.

Whether they are state or the new consortia tests, reading comprehension is assessed by asking students to read various passages on different topics. But the topics addressed by those passages are never revealed to teachers. These are, in essence, random-content tests. The middle ground would be domain-based tests. The state or the consortia could specify domains that ought to be studied in each grade level, without dictating which texts must be used or how to teach them. The state or consortia would then ensure that the passages assessing reading comprehension for a given grade level are exclusively drawn from those domains. Specifying the domains for each grade would counteract the tendency to narrow the curriculum and focus on comprehension skills as test prep. It would ensure that all students are systematically building knowledge and vocabulary and, as a result, would ensure that no child is knocked off the path to college or career readiness through well-intentioned, but misguided, instruction.

The Skills Stranglehold

by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
February 21st, 2013

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Posted in Research and Reports | 24 Comments »

It’s not like it wasn’t obvious already, but today’s Metlife Survey of the American Teacher confirms that the nation’s teachers are demoralized. How could it be otherwise, with pressure to build the Common Core plane while flying it and also facing new evaluation and accountability requirements?

I don’t want to brush off any of these very real problems, but I do want to suggest that they are not the heart of the matter. Fundamentally, the problem educators face is freeing themselves from the skills stranglehold. It is preventing them from understanding the Common Core standards, preventing them from meeting their own goals as professionals, and preventing them from closing achievement gaps between poor and privileged students.

We see evidence of it everywhere, especially in the MetLife survey. Nine in ten teachers and principals say they are knowledgeable about the Common Core standards, and a majority of teachers say they are already using them a great deal. At the same time, teachers, especially in later grades, are not all that confident about the effect the Common Core will have. The report states (p. 65):

Middle school and high school principals and teachers are less likely than their elementary school counterparts to be very confident or confident that the Common Core will improve student achievement (principals: 73% vs. 85%; teachers: 61% vs. 76%). Middle school and high school teachers are less likely than elementary school teachers to be very confident or confident that the Common Core will better prepare students for college and the workforce (63% vs. 78%); principals’ views on this do not differ significantly by school level.

At all levels, just “two in 10 principals or teachers indicate that they are very confident that the Common Core will have these effects.” How can this be? Teachers could be feeling too downtrodden to have great confidence in anything, but I think the real answer is hidden in the report itself. There’s a hint in the report’s “From the Experts” box (p. 58):

The public education thought leaders interviewed as part of the survey development process … are concerned that some teachers and principals may be underestimating how large a shift in curriculum, teaching, and assessment may be required to implement the new standards fully.

  • “In all but a handful of states around the country, there are new academic standards that are being implemented that will demand very fundamental changes in teaching and learning; very fundamental changes in the instructional practices that teachers use in the classroom. Teachers say they’re aware of the standards and they like the standards; they’re not much different than what they’re doing now, which is generally not the case.”
  • “The rigor is simply much harder or much more demanding than most states have had in the past, so dealing with the real benchmark of where you are as a teacher and your performance and your mastery of these standards and how well your students are going to do is kind of a… I don’t know whether the word is culture shock, when you start seeing the true benchmark as opposed to where you thought you were.”

The fact that so many teachers (62%) say the teachers in their school are already using the Common Core standards a great deal shows that these “thought leaders” are correct: most educators remain unaware of the massive changes that fully implementing the new standards will require. But everyone has been talking about these changes for more than a year. Clearly, the message is not getting through.

It can’t get through: The barrier erected by the skills stranglehold is far stronger than anyone realizes. Consider this, from the very beginning of the report’s section on the Common Core (p. 53):

Middle and high school teachers indicate that the critical components of being college- and career-ready focus more on higher-order thinking and performance skills—such as problem-solving skills, critical-thinking skills and the ability to write clearly and persuasively—than on knowledge of challenging content.

Here we see the skills stranglehold in its purest form. Skills can’t be more important than knowledge for college and career because without knowledge, there are no “higher-order thinking and performance skills.” Skills depend on knowledge. If I don’t know any physics, I can’t think critically about physics. And, the more I know about physics, the more successful I will be in solving physics problems.

Lest you think I’m making too much of this one sentence about middle and high school teachers, let me take you back to the 2010 MetLife survey. On page 21, you’ll see this:

And on page 22, you’ll see this handy summary:

Teachers share remarkably similar views on the importance of these skills, abilities and knowledge areas regardless of grade level taught, years of experience, school characteristics or even subject area. English teachers are most likely to say the ability to write clearly and persuasively is absolutely essential or very important (99%), and 92% of math teachers also rate this ability as highly. While less than half (45%) of English teachers say that knowledge and ability in higher-level mathematics, such as trigonometry and calculus is absolutely essential or very important, math teachers themselves do not rate the necessity of higher-level mathematics much more highly (50%).

I’ll let the executives off the hook for not knowing that the problem-solving and critical-thinking skills they are after depend on the knowledge that they (largely) dismiss. The teachers ought to know better. That just 11% think knowledge of higher-level science and math are essential for college and career readiness is appalling.

But I can’t really blame them. Teachers have themselves been taught that skills are transferrable, independent of particular knowledge or mere facts. The skills stranglehold has been tightening its grip for nearly 100 years. Recently, educators’ focus on skills—particularly so-called 21st century skills—and disparagement of knowledge got so bad that the National Research Council took up the issue, clarifying that skills and knowledge can’t be separated, and then exploring how deepening content knowledge could lead to better skills:

In contrast to a view of 21st century skills as general skills that can be applied to a range of different tasks in various academic, civic, workplace, or family contexts, the committee views 21st century skills as dimensions of expertise that are specific to—and intertwined with—knowledge within a particular domain of content and performance. (p. 3)

Over a century of research on transfer has yielded little evidence that teaching can develop general cognitive competencies that are transferable to any new discipline, problem, or context, in or out of school. Nevertheless, it has identified features of instruction that are likely to substantially support deeper learning and development of 21st century competencies within a topic area or discipline. For example, we now know that transfer [within a discipline] is supported when learners understand the general principles underlying their original learning and the transfer situation or problem involves the same general principles—a finding reflected in the new Common Core State Standards…. (p. 8)

The necessary merger of deep content knowledge and higher-order skills is indeed reflected in the Common Core standards. But sadly, we have a long way to go for it to be reflected in most of our classrooms.

The Two Americas Continued: Schmidt and McKnight

by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
February 15th, 2013

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Posted in Education Theory, Educational Policy | 15 Comments »

In my last post (“Antonio Who?”) about the great Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci (pronounced gram-shee who was cited as a big influence by Michael Gove the British Secretary of Education), I hinted—but didn’t venture to say—that maybe our educational systems would be in better shape if our top authorities followed Gove’s lead and read more challenging books, while holding fewer committee meetings. Albert Shanker, the brilliant union-organizer-turned-educational-statesman, once told me, mournfully: “They don’t read.” I once looked through Al Shanker’s own library now housed at AFT headquarters, and was amazed to see his annotations in a multi-volume set by the philosopher Bernard Bosanquet. But the vision of a top American official reading the Prison Notebooks of Gramsci could happen only in a Woody Allen movie.

On the other side, an argument against reading a lot of books on American education is that it could cause clinical depression. As I peruse the important book by William Schmidt and Curtis McKnight, Inequality for All, I think to myself: this is a companion volume to a whole spate of recent books on American inequality by eminent scholars, including a book by the Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, and a mournfully vivid book by Charles Murray, Coming Apart. The image one gets from Murray is not of red America vs. blue America, but of one zip code full of striving SAT-takers and community-minded citizens vs.  a neighboring zip code of drifting alcoholic semi-literates who lack any sense of community or hope. It is not too much of a stretch to see Inequality for All as identifying a significant cause of these economic and sociological ills. The book is an indictment of the content-incoherence of our schools.

The sad reality is that the American educational system does not provide equal opportunity for all but rather perpetuates vast inequalities in content coverage…. This inequality of opportunity … disadvantages many, perhaps even most, children in the United States….

Variation in content coverage corrupts the entire U.S. educational system, in effect creating an enormous educational lottery in which every student takes part—whatever their racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic background. The system of schooling represents a game of chance that few are even aware is being played.

Given this almost universal curricular incoherence in our schools, students with home advantages are able to overcome ineffectual schooling through home tutoring either direct or indirect. In short, (as Gramsci predicted) the “progressive” American theory of education, with its how rather than what approach to schooling, while it is “advocated as being democratic, is destined not merely to perpetuate social differences but to crystallize them in Chinese complexities” (Notebook 29).  In other words Gramsci predicted the very America described by Stiglitz and Murray as being the effect of the schooling described by Schmidt and McKnight.

Inequality for All focuses on math and science education, showing with authoritative thoroughness the failure of our schools to bring rationality and cumulativeness in the topics taught from year to year.   They make the point that reformers on both the left and right have been consumed with equalizing resources or in fostering competition and accountability, but pay too little heed to the essence of schooling which they see as the delivery of academic content by teachers to students. Hear, hear!

I have tried to make exactly the same point with respect to the general knowledge that students need to gain outside the subjects of science and math. The Gramsci principle that the delivery of academic content is the key to social justice holds even more strongly for general knowledge, which is the key to high literacy and the ability to learn and adapt in the future. Indeed, based on data from the Armed Forces Qualification Test, I’ve argued that general knowledge is approximately twice as important as math in determining a person’s future capacity to function economically and as a citizen, and therefore deserves at least the same care and coherence that Schmit and McKnight want for science and math.  Given their sound view that “the delivery of academic content” is the key to future improvement and to equity, Schmidt and McKnight come out strongly in favor of the Common Core State Standards.

Every day my email inbox fills with relentless attacks on these standards, and renewed attempts to undo the commitments of forty-odd states to follow them. I wish these energies and criticisms could be turned to making the standards function well, rather than to making them go away. They are a work in progress, and instituting them will entail many false steps. But Schmidt and McKnight rightly see them as the best way forward for excellence and equity. They see the issue in educational, not political terms: not as some intolerable imposition of the federal government or the Gates Foundation, but as our best chance to overcome failure, incoherence, and injustice.

Unless the carpers against the common core can come up with an alternative plan that brings coherence to “the delivery of academic content,” they leave us in the unacceptable condition of the status quo.   Let these carpers produce a book half as thorough and authoritative as that of Schmidt and McKnight, with a vision of what needs to be done half as compelling. Then I might be more receptive to their constant stream of mosquito bites against the ambitious vision defended in this important book.

 

Stumping STEM Growth

by Linda Bevilacqua
February 8th, 2013

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Posted in Assessment and Testing, Educational Policy, Research and Reports | 1 Comment »

Like many others, I’ve had high hopes for the Next Generation Science Standards. Right now I’m struggling to keep my spirits up. Having just finished reading the review of the second draft (NGSS 2.0) prepared for the Fordham Institute by nine impressive scientists and mathematicians (who, collectively, have teaching experience at all grade levels), I see more problems than can be fixed between now and March—the arbitrary deadline set for releasing the final draft of these standards.

For a quick take on the many serious problems, see the review’s Forward by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Kathleen Porter-Magee. Or, for an even faster look at the main issues, see Finn and Porter-Magee’s recent blog post. In both, they raise eight “critical problems.” While I agree that all eight are truly critical, I’d like to draw attention to three (the following are quotes from the blog post):

  • In an effort to draft “fewer and clearer” standards to guide curriculum and instruction, NGSS 2.0 (like NGSS 1.0) omits quite a lot of essential content. Among the most egregious omissions are most of chemistry; thermodynamics; electrical circuits; physiology; minerals and rocks; the layered Earth; the essentials of biological chemistry and biochemical genetics; and at least the descriptive elements of developmental biology.
  • As in version 1.0, some content that is never explicitly stated for the earlier grades seems to be taken for granted in the standards for later grades—where it won’t likely be found in students’ heads if the early-grade teachers aren’t prompted by the standards to teach it.
  • A number of key scientific terms (e.g., “model” and “design”) are ill defined and/or inconsistently used.

As E. D. Hirsch, Jr., and the Core Knowledge Foundation have been arguing for the past three decades, students have to build an enormous store of broad background knowledge and vocabulary in order to become literate adults—adults capable of reading about and voting on science-based issues like nuclear power, genetic research, land use, etc. The amount of knowledge to be acquired is so extensive that it must be efficiently and coherently packaged, grade-by-grade, if we are to have any hope of sending young adults into the world ready to make sense of, and dive deeper into, the many issues they will face.

As worrisome as Finn and Porter-Magee’s summative statements are, the review itself may give me nightmares. Take, for example, these quotes from pages 17 – 19:

Using the assertion that it is not a curriculum, the NGSS authors omit most of the chemistry content traditionally found in K–12 classrooms. Missing are topics like gas-law relationships, the chemistry of carbon and its compounds, the mole concept, empirical and molecular formulas, solution preparation, concentration, and dilution, and acid/base neutralization reactions and the pH scale, to mention just a few. When topics are included, they often are somewhat advanced, like bond energy or chemical equilibrium. However, their inclusion is problematic because of insufficient background preparation in lower grade standards, use of low-level vocabulary, or content limits specified in the Assessment Boundaries. And unfortunately, if a topic is not required by the NGSS, it is not likely to be taught.

Numerous concepts that will be developed more thoroughly in high school should first be introduced in middle school. “Ion,” for example, is used in HS PS1-c without explanation, but the testing of “polyatomic ions” was excluded. Then why is the polyatomic “ammonium” ion used in “ammonium chloride” as a recommended reactant in MS PS1-g?

Another example of weak preparation from page 1 of DCI PS.4.B:

Some materials allow light to pass through them, others allow only some light through and others block all the light and create a dark shadow on any surface beyond them (i.e., on the other side from the light source), where the light cannot reach. (1-PS4-d)

Here is a typical missed opportunity to use the appropriate vocabulary: transparent, translucent, opaque.

And here are a couple examples from Appendix A of the review, which covers individual standards (see page 45):

PS3.C: Faster speeds during a collision can cause a bigger change in shape of the colliding objects. (secondary to 2-PS2-a)

“Faster speeds” … is a barbarism. When an object goes faster, we say that it has a higher speed…. In science standards, using scientifically appropriate language is critical.

Similarly, standard (3-PS2-a) indicates: “A system can appear to be unchanging when processes within the system are going on at opposite but equal rates.”

Why not use the proper technical terms, dynamical equilibrium or steady-state equilibrium?

The second draft of the NGSS was anything but slim. Why have so much content and vocabulary been left out? It appears to have been crowded out by a fixation on “practices.” Here’s how Finn and Porter-Magee summed up this critical problem in their blog post: “Real science invariably blends content knowledge with core ideas, ‘crosscutting’ concepts, and various practices, activities, or applications. Well and good. But NGSS 2.0 imposes so rigid a format on its standards that the recommended ‘practices’ dominate them. The authors have forced practices on every expectation, even when they confuse more than clarify.” Here is an example from the review (see page 20):

In the life sciences, … and as elsewhere in NGSS, the central problem resides in the language employed, and it follows from the standards’ preoccupation with “Practices”…. Every standard to focus upon performance expectations that are behaviors (or activities) as opposed to demonstrations of knowledge. Behaviors and activities are legitimate performance expectations; but when all the expectations take that form, a system of standards, which is in principle about knowledge as well as skills, becomes ostentatiously one-sided. The resulting standards statements may not relate in a compelling way to the knowledge that is supposed to be the directing content dimension.

Knowledge, vocabulary, and skills are all necessary, but this draft of the NGSS emphasizes skills to the detriment of knowledge and vocabulary. Ultimately, this constant pushing on “practices” seems to be an effort to force teachers to take an extremely hands-on, project-focused approach to science instruction. While no one would believe that a science classroom without labs, experiments, observations, etc. is offering a strong science education, no one should believe that a science classroom in which activities crowd out content is strong either.

Heeding two of the review’s recommendations (see page 33) would allow for knowledge, vocabulary, and skills to all be pursued together, without any one detracting from the others:

Ban the use of the term “model,” except in familiar scientific contexts such as molecular models or Copernican model or computer modeling (better identified as simulation).

Reduce the insistent “Practices” language in the standards. Science practices certainly need to be taught and learned, but there is no justification for converting all expected science performances to “practices,” and making their substrate, scientific knowledge (including substantive, mathematical, analytical, and vocabulary knowledge) secondary.

One of the great strengths of the Common Core State Standards is that they are goal statements as to what students need to know and be able to do, not dictates as to how teachers should teach. The NGSS should follow that lead by focusing on the science content and vocabulary, and integrating related skills as needed. In effect, this would require stripping away the “practices” language that has more to do with current fads in pedagogy than with developing students’ ability to comprehend science and/or become scientists or engineers.

In their Forward, Finn and Porter-Magee concluded that “if draft 2.0 were to become the final version of NGSS, only states with exceptionally weak science standards of their own would likely benefit from replacing them with these ‘next-generation’ standards.” I hope that the organizations developing with NGSS will drop their March deadline and heed the many cautions raised so that, like the Common Core State Standards, the NGSS can be strongly recommended to all states.

It’s Time to Abandon the Status Quo

by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
February 4th, 2013

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Posted in Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Education Practice | 5 Comments »

Fully implementing the Common Core in the early grades is our best hope for closing achievement gaps

Last week on The Answer Sheet, Valerie Strauss posted “A tough critique of Common Core on early childhood education” by Edward Miller and Nancy Carlsson-Paige. Soon thereafter, she posted the following response (presented in full below) by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. Reading both the critique and response is useful for understanding ways the Common Core could be misunderstood—or could become a vehicle for bringing systematic knowledge development into the early grades.

Earlier this week Edward Miller and Nancy Carlsson-Paige raised some thought-provoking critiques of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). While I don’t know whether early childhood educators were involved in the standards writing process, I do know that many early educators are pleased with the result. As someone who has studied how to best use the early years to close achievement gaps and give all children an opportunity to live happy, productive, engaged lives, I am also a supporter of the CCSS.

I don’t argue that the CCSS are perfect  (I would not even argue that about the Core Knowledge Sequence). And I agree with Miller and Carlsson-Paige that we should all be open to improving the Common Core standards once we have done our best to implement them well. I’ve seen more than a few sets of standards come and go; I will safely bet that the interpretation, the implementation, and most especially the assessments of the CCSS matter far more than the standards themselves. With that in mind, let’s take a look at a few of the critiques Miller and Carlsson-Paige put forth.

The biggest problem with their criticism of CCSS is that they don’t offer anything different or better than what we have now. They call for a rejection of the CCSS because of various perceived faults. But then they call for what, exactly? As far as I can see, they want more of the pre-CCSS status quo. Unfortunately, the status quo isn’t working.  The reading scores of 17-year-olds on the National Assessment of Educational Progress constitute the single most accurate indicator of the effectiveness of our schooling, and as we look at the low reading scores of 17-year-olds over the past few decades of reform, we see no real movement.

Of course, much more goes into reading at age 17 than early childhood education, and there has been some recent improvement among 9-year-olds in reading, especially among our lowest-performing students. Why hasn’t this improvement carried into later grades? As I have argued many, many, many times, the fundamental problem is that American schools, including preschools, typically delay systematic efforts to build students’ vocabulary and knowledge until far too late (usually the end of elementary school or even later).

Building word and world knowledge must begin in preschool if we are to have any hope of closing the enormous language gaps identified by Betty Hart and Todd Risley, or of enabling children to listen and read with comprehension. That’s why the Core Knowledge Foundation has spent the past several years developing a new preschool–5th grade language arts program (grades pre-K–3 will be online, for free download, by summer 2013). Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) is radically different from the most widely used elementary-grades reading programs. Through high-quality fiction and nonfiction, CKLA systematically provides students the broad background knowledge they need to do well in middle and high school. It was developed by researchers and teachers working together. In short, it takes the best of current practice and updates it with solid research: it is nothing like the status quo (and has the results to prove it).

With the troubling results of the status quo in mind, let’s consider the end of Miller and Carlsson-Paige’s critique. They close with this: “Our first task as a society is to protect our children. The imposition of these standards endangers them. To learn more about how early childhood educators are working to defend young children, see Defending the Early Years.”Following that link, I arrived at a website with an open letter to the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC).  The central point of the open letter is that NAEYC is no longer a strong supporter of it’s mid-1980’s statement on developmentally appropriate practice. The open letter states:

NAEYC has long played a valuable role in identifying and supporting best practices in early childhood education. The strong position NAEYC took with its 1986 publication, Developmentally Appropriate Practice, focused attention on respectful, child centered ways of working with young children…. NAEYC appears to have gradually retreated from its strong defense of DAP. The voices of its leadership have not been heard vigorously protesting the proliferation of standards and assessments or offering meaningful alternatives to them.

To NAEYC’s current leadership, I say “Bravo!” NAEYC has recognized that research does not stand still, and the best practices from almost 30 years ago are not considered best practices today. NAEYC has consistently been dedicated to updating its advice on DAP; it issued major revisions in 1996 and 2008. I had the good fortune in the mid-nineties to meet and talk with the authors of NAEYC’s guides on DAP, Sue Bredekamp and Carol Copple (Bredekamp has worked on each of NAEYC’s DAP papers; Copple joined her in the 1990s). At the time, the Core Knowledge Foundation was creating a preschool program. I found them well versed in recent cognitive science, with a deep understanding of how preschool could enhance children’s oral language development, which is critically important for all future learning.

Daniel Willingham, a professor of cognitive psychology, has explained that many long-held, widely shared beliefs about children’s cognitive development—such as Jean Piaget’s notion that it proceeds in discrete stages—have not been supported by newer, more sophisticated studies. Cognitive development is continuous, and a child’s performance will vary day to day and task to task. (Even very young children can engage in critical thinking if they have been taught the necessary background knowledge.) In an article for teachers on DAP, Willingham asks them to “recognize that no content is inherently developmentally inappropriate.” He then explains as follows:

Without trivializing them, complex ideas can be introduced by making them concrete and through reference to children’s experience.

Of course, as teachers, you must also consider the cost if students do not fully understand a concept the way you had intended. The cost may be minimal, and the content may be worth knowing—even if in an incomplete way. For example, suppose your preschool students have learned about Martin Luther King, Jr., but you are having a hard time getting them to understand that he was a real person who is no longer here, and that fictional characters such as Mary Poppins are not here and never were. If it’s hard for a 4-year-old to conceive of people living in different times and places, does that mean that history should not be taught until the child is older? Such an argument would not make much sense to a developmental psychologist. For children and adults, understanding of any new concept is inevitably incomplete. The preschoolers can still learn something about who King was and what he stood for. Their mistaken belief that they might encounter him at a local store, or that he lives at a school that bears his name, will be corrected in time. Indeed, how do children learn that some people are fictional and some are not? Not by a magical process of brain maturation. Children learn this principle as they learn any other—in fits and starts, sometimes showing that they understand and other times not. If you wait until you are certain that the children will understand every nuance of a lesson, you will likely wait too long to present it. If they understand every nuance, you’re probably presenting content that they’ve already learned elsewhere.

I’ll add that if they do not understand anything at all, you’re probably presenting a concept that is entirely new to them. Don’t wait for them to happen to learn it elsewhere; revamp your lesson plan to include the most basic of introductions and then extend your plan so that the children have time to think, explore, ask questions, and absorb related vocabulary.

In addition to their out-of-date concept of what is developmentally appropriate, Miller and Carlsson-Paige have an unfounded fear that under the CCSS, the early grades will be dominated by direct instruction. I would also be upset to see a classroom in any grade that never departs from direct instruction—as I would be sad to see a classroom entirely devoted to discovery learning, project-based instruction, or free play. Decades ago, Project Follow Through clearly demonstrated that direct instruction works well with young children.

Children have a lot to learn about the world, past and present. They need to learn some things as efficiently as possible—through direct instruction. But they also need opportunities to explore—through well-constructed spaces and activities that invite creative problem solving and role playing. There is nothing inherent in the CCSS that discourages early childhood educators from offering rich educational experiences using a variety of pedagogies.

As NAEYC has noted, the CCSS indicate what should be taught in ELA/literacy and mathematics. They do not dictate pedagogy or prevent teachers from offering a well-rounded curriculum, including the arts and social-emotional learning. In its recent paper on the CCSS, which highlighted benefits of and support for the CCSS while also pointing out potential problems with implementation, NAEYC wrote:

Learning standards, or content standards, provide the “what” of education, but they do not describe the “how” of education. The content standards set the goal toward which teaching and learning opportunities are directed for young children.

The “how” of learning should be aligned to the content standard through our understanding of best practices to increase the chances of attaining the goal, even as the goal itself needs to be aligned with our knowledge of children’s learning processes…. Especially critical is maintaining methods of instruction that include a range of approaches—including the use of play as well as both small- and large-group instruction—that are considered to be developmentally appropriate for young children.

While Miller and Carlsson-Paige seem to think that academic content—gap-closing word and world knowledge—can’t be delivered in a developmentally appropriate way, solid research shows us that it can. For example, the distinguished psychologist Robert Siegler has found that numerical board games (like Chutes and Ladders) can help preschoolers from low-income families increase their numerical skills and concepts. Would a classroom that spends 20 minutes playing Chutes and Ladders and another 10 minutes in a direct math lesson really be such a terrible “drill and grill” place (as Miller and Carlsson-Paige wrote)?

The CCSS do leave room for great teaching, but that does not mean that all interpretations of the CCSS have been either accurate or helpful. A New York Post article stated that “the city Department of Education now wants 4- and 5-year-olds to write ‘informative/explanatory reports’ and demonstrate ‘algebraic thinking.’ Children who barely know how to write the alphabet or add 2 and 2 are expected to write topic sentences and use diagrams to illustrate math equations.” This is a misinterpretation of the CCSS. I am grateful to everyone who is trying to correct such errors. For young children, the focus of the CCSS is—appropriately—oral language.

Such misunderstanding of the CCSS brings me to a final point. All standards, even the CCSS, are goal statements that can be interpreted many ways. If the idea of all children sharing some core content is to come to fruition, somebody needs to come up with a model curriculum along with validated, curriculum-based tests. That curriculum need not say how to teach, but it does need to say what limited core to teach, grade by grade. (That core is  all the more important, since teachers will still need time to address students’ weaknesses and encourage them to pursue their interests.) Without a specific curriculum, and without tests that are drawn exclusively from that curriculum, word and world knowledge will continue to be taught haphazardly and incoherently, and our achievement gaps will not be closed.

I believe Core Knowledge Language Arts is an important step toward such a curriculum, and I would warmly welcome any funder interested in developing a curriculum-based test for CKLA. If we as a nation developed something of equally high quality for the middle grades, then dramatically more students would be able to take AP’s and IB’s curriculum-based courses and exams in high school.

The future of American education hinges on whether CCSS can be made to work. The alternative, despite the protestations of the critics, is more of the same ineffective and unjust practices that have placed the nation and its middle class at risk.

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