Ed Reformers for Illiteracy

by Robert Pondiscio
March 8th, 2011

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Posted in Education News, Education Practice, Educational Policy | 44 Comments »

“A common curriculum (whatever that means) is the wrong idea when we’re about ready to develop school of one–not just a 6th grade math program, but fully customized engaging learning sequences for every student,” writes Tom Vander Ark.   His post at EdReformer.com is in response to yesterday’s call signed by 250 educators, civic and business leaders for a common core curriculum. 

There are fewer ideas more seductive than the vision of customized education, where all children remain blissfully engaged solely by the ideas and subjects that interest them, and soar to ever-higher standards on tech-driven wings.  But this splendid vision ignores an inconvenient truth:  all of our most cherished goals for education are a function of the knowledge we possess and have in common with others.  To say that a common curriculum is the wrong idea is to say literacy is the wrong idea.  Let me not mince words:  If you don’t think  a common body of knowledge is important for all children, you don’t think it’s important to teach children to read with understanding, think critically, collaborate, or solve problems.  You can’t have one without the other.

You may not like it, but you cannot ignore it.  Want to build your reform agenda around technology, structural changes, or accountability but take a hands-off approach to curriculum and content?  May I suggest a name for your group?  Try  ”Ed Reformers for Illiteracy.” 

Vander Ark is obviously a smart guy.  But his vision for education is all about delivery systems. Like many would-be reformers, he tacitly endorses a false and content-neutral, skills-driven notion that how children learn is more important than what they learn. 

“Rather than a common curriculum, learning platforms to come will support not just ‘multiple pathways’ but customized playlists.  Customized learning will be facilitated by comprehensive learning platforms surrounded by application and service ecosystems. Learning platforms will replace today’s learning management systems (LMS) that run flat and sequential courseware.  Like iPhone and Android, these platforms will unleash investment and innovation.

Dazzled yet?  Before you call your broker and load up on Apple and Cisco stock understand that if we don’t attend to what we put through these brave new pipelines, playlists and service ecosystems–or say it doesn’t matter–we will make no progress.  Zip.  Zilch. Nada. 

In a speech in Virginia last month, E.D. Hirsch, Jr. invoked Jefferson’s admonition that we “follow truth wherever it may lead.”  Where it leads — inevitably, incontrovertibly — is to understand that ”a coherent and cumulative early curriculum will raise in a systematic way the knowledge and the language of our students to a much higher level, and greatly narrow the unacceptable achievement gap between blacks and whites and between other demographic groups.”   If you want to raise a child’s general level of reading skill, you must raise his or her “domain specific” knowledge.  There is no way around it.  As Hirsch put it,

“The domain specificity of skill is one of the firmest, and educationally most important, findings in modern cognitive science.   It means that if you have learned a lot about chemistry, that won’t help your critical thinking skills in history.   Cognitive scientists have become quite skeptical of concepts like “critical thinking skills” as though they were a formal acquisition that can be applied to all subject matters.   Science has pulled the rug out from under the entire edifice of the anti-fact, how-to theory of education which has dominated in our schools for many decades, and was the chief cause of the verbal decline that appeared in the sixties that gravely weakened our nation.”

As Hirsch noted, you may not like where this leads, but you can’t pretend the facts aren’t there and the path isn’t clear.  “Consider then what the principle of domain specificity means for educational policy,” he said.  “It implies specific content in the curriculum, and a cumulative building up of the most enabling knowledge and language for all students.   The human capital of our people, the skills that our students will have will be dependent on the specific knowledge they have.  We cannot afford to leave the choice of specific topics and their cumulative sequence up to chance and whim.” [Italics mine.]

Hirsch was being polite.  I will be less so.  If you are opposed teaching a common body of shared knowledge to all children, you are opposed to teaching children to read.  You are in favor of illiteracy, either by choice or indifference.  You favor damaging our most vulnerable children by denying them the most critical thing: the functional knowledge they need to succeed. 

Deal with it, don’t ignore it.  Follow the facts where they lead.  Not just where you want them to take you.

A Curriculum Manifesto

by Robert Pondiscio
March 7th, 2011

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Posted in Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Education Leadership, Education News | 29 Comments »

A call for voluntary common curriculum has been issued today by a surprisingly diverse group of education, business and civic leaders.  The “Call for Common Content” issued by the Albert Shanker Institute, calls for a ”coherent, sequential set of guidelines in the core academic disciplines, specifying the content knowledge and skills that all students are expected to learn, over time, in a thoughtful progression across the grades.”

Among the dozens of signatories are Kati Haycock of the Education Trust, Linda Darling-Hammond, Tom Payzant, IBM Chairman Lou Gerstner, the Fordham Institute’s Checker Finn, and Harvard’s William Julius Wilson.  Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch, Jr. and President Linda Bevilacqua also signed. 

The statement supports Common Core State Standards, but makes the point long argued on this blog that while such standards are praiseworthy, they are not a curriculum–and are unlikely to amount to much in the absence of a shared curriculum.  “To be clear, by ‘curriculum’ we mean a coherent, sequential set of guidelines in the core academic disciplines, specifying the content knowledge and skills that all students are expected to learn, over time, in a thoughtful progression across the grades,” reads the statement.  “We do not mean performance standards, textbook offerings, daily lesson plans, or rigid pedagogical prescriptions.”

The manifesto addresses head-on the fear of “centralization, institutional rigidity, and narrow-minded political orthodoxy” that typically strangles any discussion of a common curriculum in its crib.  “Common curriculum guidance does not represent a straitjacket or a narrowing of learning possibilities,” it reads.  The proposed curriculum guidelines would be “purely voluntary, comprising only about 50 to 60 percent of what is to be taught”—leaving room for state, regional, and local variations.

One of the most practical arguments for a common curriculum has long been the extraordinary rates of student mobility, especially among low-SES students.  And one of the most valuable contributions of the document is its contextualization of the role of poverty in student achievement—lifting the debate from narrow and needlessly polarized arguments about whether “demographics is destiny” or “teachers can overcome all obstacles”   Economically advantaged children come to school with a head start in knowledge and language acquisition.  “It is not poverty in itself, but poverty’s accompanying life conditions that help to explain performance gaps that begin at home and extend into secondary school and beyond,” the statement notes.

“Today, the information we need to minimize these performance gaps is in our hands, waiting to be used. Thanks to advances in cognitive science, we now understand that reading comprehension — so essential to almost all academic learning — depends in large part on knowledge. In experiments, when students who are “poor” readers are asked to read about a topic they know well (such as baseball), they do much better on comprehension measures than “good” readers who know less about the subject.

“The systematic effort to establish common, knowledge-building content must therefore begin as early as possible. The younger we start, the greater the hope that we can boost achievement across all schools and classrooms, but especially among our most disadvantaged students. Further, by articulating learning progressions linked to a grade-by-grade sequence for how learning should build over time, a defined curriculum will better enable each teacher to build on what students have already been taught. Students will also benefit, as they will be much less likely to find themselves either struggling to overcome gaps in their knowledge or bored by the repetition of what they have already learned.”

The manifesto also anticipates and addresses other knee-jerk objections that typically derail discussions of a common curriculum.  Critical thinking skills, highly prized as a goal of schooling, for example, “requires a curriculum that builds knowledge upon knowledge.”

“Finally, some may fear that common curriculum guidance will neglect important cultural referents or ignore the diversity of student experiences. However, as national curriculum standards in several high-performing nations illustrate, a modern conception of curriculum in a diverse nation is explicitly mindful of how to attend to cultural connections, and how to leave room for local adaptations and resources that enable students to connect to the curriculum from their different vantage points.”

The New York Times previewed today’s release of the statement, noting that previous calls for common academic standards, curricular materials and tests for use nationwide have been “beaten back” by those who favor local control of schools. “But last year’s successful standards-writing movement was a departure, leaving the outlook for this proposal uncertain,” writes the Times’ Sam Dillon.

I’m as sanguine about a common curriculum and convinced of the need as anyone.  Still, there will continue to be those who resist calls for common anything – standards or curriculum.  What’s encouraging about the statement and the Who’s Who of heavyweights who have lent their names to it, is its recognition that the preponderance of evidence is on the side of knowledge and language acquisition as the difference maker in raising achievement.  In that regard, it is an implicit challenge to would-be ed reformers to embrace not just structural change but instructional imperatives. 

I’ll resist the worn-out phrase “game changer.”  I’ll settle for “conversation changer.”

Fanaticism, Factions and SAT Scores

by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
September 24th, 2009

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Posted in Core Knowledge | 8 Comments »

(Ed. Note:  A version of this essay appears in today’s edition of  The New York Daily News.  Both are based on ideas in E.D. Hirsch’s new book The Making of Americans)

In town hall meetings and the Internet people address fellow citizens with whom they disagree as though they were dangerous creatures from another planet.  The animosities on display have an almost tribal flavor — Hutus versus Tutsis, white versus black, Democrats versus Republicans. 

“People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along?”   Rodney King, a man whose beating by the police became a flashpoint in U. S. race relations achieved with those words a place in national memory.  Coming at a moment of tension and resentment, they resonated with Americans’ deep desire for comity – just as we now wish for greater civility at health-care town hall meetings and more cooperation among members of Congress.    

Quasi-tribal domestic hostilities constitute a mortal danger to our nation that the founders of the United States were anxious to overcome.  They believed that the deepest threats to any republic were the two F’s: faction and fanaticism.   When Ben Franklin emerged from the Constitutional Convention in 1787, a lady asked him:  “Well, Doctor, what have we got?”  To which he replied: “A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.”   His remark reflected a worry shared by other delegates to the convention, including George Washington and James Madison.  Washington bequeathed part of his estate to the creation of a system of schooling that would “do away local attachments and state prejudices.”  And Madison acknowledged in the Federalist Papers that we need to develop a new kind of citizen through our schools:  “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust; So there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.   Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”    Unless we could educate citizens and leaders who could rise above personal ambition and special interest to seek the common good, our new republic would fail as had all prior republics in history.     

Throughout the nineteenth century, American schools deliberately fostered a sense of commonality with other Americans.   It was the great era of the common school movement which featured a benign conspiracy among the writers of schoolbooks to teach many of the same things across all subjects in the early grades, and especially in American history. As one early textbook author put it, the aim was “to exhibit in a strong light the principles of religious and political freedom which our forefathers professed . . . and to record the numerous examples of fortitude, courage, and patriotism which have rendered them illustrious.”    During the 19th century, American politics were as hardnosed as now, but compromise in Congress and civility in the public sphere were greater then.   During the 19th century the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville reported that the schools of the United States were being far more successful in the effort at citizen-making and allegiance to the common good than the schools of Europe.   

Today, our schools are failing to raise the language proficiencies of high school students.  We see clear evidence in disappointing scores on college entrance exams like the SAT.  It is no coincidence that we are seeing a rise in public incivility along with this decline in verbal skills.   The key point in understanding the profound connection between the two is that language proficiency is chiefly based on wide knowledge, and more specifically on knowledge that is silently shared by every competent member of a speech community.   This tacitly shared knowledge constitutes the public sphere — the commons upon which civic discourse takes place.  The key to being a good speaker, reader, and writer is the possession of the broad unspoken knowledge that is shared by other effective speakers, readers, and writers within a nation. 

Space won’t permit an elaboration of the strong scientific consensus that explains the connection between shared, unspoken knowledge and effective communication.   I’ve done that at length in various books, most recently in The Making of Americans.   Here I’ll simply assume that basic point about communication and make a further point about the decline of civility.  The shared knowledge that enables communication in the public sphere also induces a sense of community, and helps overcome tribal antipathies.   Horace Mann, often described as the father of public education, said: “The spread of education, by enlarging the cultivated class or caste, will open a wider area over which the social feelings will expand; and, if this education should be universal and complete, it would do more than all things else to obliterate factitious distinctions in society.”   

Mann, and education pioneers like Noah Webster, as well as our brilliant founders understood that shared knowledge and loyalty to the common good could only be fostered through a common elementary education – a shared core curriculum in the early grades.   By 1950, that insight became neglected and, indeed, aggressively rejected in our schools.    The subsequent fragmentation of the elementary-school curriculum is the root cause of our students’ low verbal scores, and of the wide gap in verbal proficiency between our low-scoring white students and far lower-scoring black and Hispanic students.    We will recover verbal proficiency, economic justice, and social comity only if we institute more coherent substance and greater commonality in our elementary schools.

A Sobering Assessment of National Standards

by Robert Pondiscio
March 6th, 2009

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Posted in Curriculum, Educational Policy | 12 Comments »

The Fordham Foundation’s Checker Finn is a longtime proponent of national standards, but he sounds a strong cautionary note in the latest Education Gadfly.  “Evidence is mounting that those who take curricular content seriously may not like what we find at the end of this road,” Finn writes, ”and I worry that America could be headed toward another painful bout of curriculum warfare.” 

Checker details seven worries. He’s suspicious that unions, especially the NEA, are getting on board the bandwagon and the conflation of academic standards with “21st Century Skills.”  He also frets that if common standards is limited to English and math, “it may further narrow what’s seriously taught in school–with a malign effect on states that have a decently rounded curriculum that gives due weight to science, history, even art.” His biggest concern is what he calls institutional instability.

The United States of America in 2009 lacks a suitable place to house national standards and tests over the long haul. Who will “own” them? Who will be responsible for revising them? Correcting their errors? Ensuring that assessment results are reported in timely fashion? Nobody wants the Education Department to do this. There’s reason to keep it separate from the National Assessment of Educational Progress and its governing board. Yet the awkward ad hoc “partnership” now assembling to pursue this process could fall apart tomorrow if key individuals retire, die or defect, if election results change the make up of participating organizations, if the money runs out, or if their working draft runs into political headwinds like the “voluntary national standards” of the early 90s. This is no way to run something as important as national academic standards for a big modern country.

Can this idea be salvaged?  Yes, if we can figure out how.  “Use available tools and models to simplify and expedite this process,” Finn argues.  “The U.S. doesn’t need to start from scratch. Several states have fine standards.But don’t pretend to prescribe the whole curriculum….A common standard is the skeleton of learning, not all the flesh. It outlines the core skills and knowledge that young Americans need to acquire and should be accompanied by a reasonable assessment system to determine, at various grade levels, how well they’ve learned those things.”