by Robert Pondiscio
August 25th, 2008
Tags: core knowledge, Core Knowledge Reading Program, Joel Klein, New York City
Posted in Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Literacy | No Comments »
Richard Whitmire dropped a hint last week calling it “the biggest development in reading instruction that won’t make the front pages of any national newspaper. But it should.” Today came the announcement: a three-year, $2.4 million pilot project to test a new Core Knowledge Reading Program in New York City Schools. Chancellor Joel Klein made the announcement, along with Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch, Jr., and Amida Gentile of the UFT. The DOE’s press release is here.
Lots to say about this initiative, but here’s coverage in the New York Times, Edweek, and New York’s WABC-TV.
by Robert Pondiscio
August 14th, 2008
Tags: college, core curriculum, core knowledge, E. D. Hirsch
Posted in Curriculum, Higher Education | 6 Comments »
E.D.Hirsch opposed to a core curriculum? Yes, but in college. In an essay on Forbes.com Hirsch argues against expecting colleges to do work that ought to be done by K-12 schools. ”The underlying problem is not that our professors are feckless or that our undergraduates are brain-dead addicts of iPods and cellphones who lack curiosity and passion for knowledge, he writes. “The real problem is that these young men and women, through no fault of their own, are showing up on campuses undereducated and unprepared for college-level work. They should have received a good general education before they arrived on campus.”
They need remedial courses–including “core curriculum” courses in science, history, the arts and civics–at the time in their lives when they want to launch out on their own, exploring, discovering and pursuing interests at a high level. A required core curriculum in college is not something to be devoutly wished for, but rather a concession to the consequences of a third-rate preparation for first-rate colleges and universities….But though we may currently need to do so, the last thing we should want to do is impose a table d’hôte of required classes on undergraduates who are enjoying their first taste of academic freedom and a chance to chart their own educational destinies.
“There is a real danger that in making colleges the academic safety net of last resort, we’ll absolve the public schools of their obligation to provide students with a sound, well-rounded education,” Hirsch cautions. ”It’s damaging to our students, to our country and to our higher education system, which is the lone bright star in our educational firmament. Everyone loses.”
by Robert Pondiscio
August 11th, 2008
Tags: core knowledge, critical thinking, Daniel T. Willingham, Jay Mathews, narrowing of the curriculum
Posted in Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Review | 3 Comments »
Here’s a plan for eliminating the national debt: Charge a tax of one dollar on anyone who says ”teaching critical thinking skills” should be the goal of schools. One person less likely to idly toss around the phrase in the future is none other than The Washington Post’s Jay Mathews, arguably our most influential education writer. He concedes today that critical thinking programs “don’t work very well, except as a measure of the gullibility of even smart educators.” How did he come to see the light?
A remarkable article by Daniel T. Willingham, the University of Virginia cognitive scientist outlines the reasons. Critical thinking, he explains in a summer 2007 American Educator article, overlooked until now by me, is not a skill like riding a bike or diagramming a sentence that, once learned, can be applied in many situations. Instead, as your most-hated high school teacher often told you, you have to buckle down and learn the content of a subject–facts, concepts and trends–before the maxims of critical thinking taught in these feverishly-marketed courses will do you much good.
“The processes of thinking are intertwined with the content of thought (that is, domain knowledge),” Willingham says. “Thus, if you remind a student to ‘look at an issue from multiple perspectives’ often enough, he will learn that he ought to do so, but if he doesn’t know much about an issue, he can’t think about it from multiple perspectives.”
Willingham’s work builds the strongest case I know for why narrowing the curriculum to load up on reading and math at the expense of other subjects is ultimately self-defeating. If we want kids to be critical thinkers, they need the broadest possible education. Describing Willingham’s upcoming book, Why Don’t Students Like School? — A cognitive scientist answers questions about how your mind works and what it means for the classroom, Mathews says “Willingham’s own work is, in my view, a triumph of critical thinking because he knows his content so well….We need to do our homework and remember that no matter how brilliant we think we are, we can be useful critics only after we master the facts.”
by John Thompson
August 5th, 2008
Tags: Al Shanker, core knowledge, E. D. Hirsch, standards
Posted in Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Essay, Teaching | No Comments »
Long before I began teaching, I carried on a silent debate with Al Shanker and his “Where We Stand” column. I seethed when he recounted the common question—”is it on the test?”—and then dignified the mindset that produced such a juvenile question. Like so many liberals, my educational philosophy was a hybrid between Dewey’s (and the 1960s’) progressivism and the heroic fantasy created by Hollywood of the charismatic teacher who transforms students by the power of personality and hope. Shanker, however, did convince me that standards were politically necessary and maybe they were educationally valid.
I read Hirsch with the wisdom of half of a decade in the classroom, and I rejected his approach completely… Hirsch sounded too much like a fact-driven traditionalist. He sounded too much like a testing advocate.
My rookie year in an alternative school for felons was a perfect proving ground for my ideals. Our two teachers and our two social workers functioned interchangeably like linebackers in the old “3-4-4″ defense. Class and counseling were recognizably different at times, but mostly we worked seamlessly as student-centered teams. Anytime I wanted adjust my lesson plans, I would dismiss our Social Studies class, and notify the kids that we are now in Science class. And the students were free to do the same. When an emotionally disturbed student barged into class one morning in a particularly agitated state, he directed me, “John, teach me something.” “OK, I replied, today we are studying Psychology,” and I provided a simplified version of autonomic functioning, habit, and choice. The student then scribbled a diary of the day’s thoughts, categorizing them as “auto” and “congo,” which were his spellings of automatic and conscious, and habit. It would have made a great scene on The Wire.
Even as I congratulated myself for my innovative lessons, I started to recognize the impossibility of making the “bricks” of great ideas without the “straw” of information. When I moved to a regular high school, I saw that most of my students had almost no recall from their previous classes. An A.P. student answered that Vietnam was the war we won after dropping the atomic bomb. And it got worse from there.
Read the rest of this entry »
by Robert Pondiscio
August 4th, 2008
Tags: core knowledge, E. D. Hirsch, literary studies, Mark Bauerlein
Posted in Core Knowledge, Higher Education | No Comments »
“The Dumbest Generation” author Mark Bauerlein has an interesting piece about Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Bauerlein has a good grasp of his work on cultural literacy and curriculum, but his piece is about Hirsch’s career before Core Knowledge–work that set Hirsch “at the forefront of literary study.”
I don’t know of any publication in which Hirsch explains why he stopped doing critical theory; or, indeed, why he exited the whole high-powered/grad school/research humanities world. We may assume, though, that Hirsch simply drew a sweeping conclusion over the course of the 1970s: Literary theory and literary study were drifting ever farther from the pressing intellectual needs of 19-year-olds. Students were coming into college with cultural-literacy deficits, and humanities professors weren’t responding. All the incentives of professional success steered professors away from the freshman classroom, not to mention from the pre-college years, and glamour of a symposium in which theory stars hashed out Derrida’s latest turned a composition class into sheer drudgery. That didn’t change the fact that the help students needed came properly in elementary and middle school, and Hirsch directed his attention accordingly. His example is worth remembering.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was clearly wrong.
by Robert Pondiscio
August 1st, 2008
Tags: afterschool, core knowledge, direct instruction, incentives
Posted in Curriculum, Education Leadership | 1 Comment »
A reader of this blog has come up with an intriguing idea for a Core Knowledge-based afterschool center that uses incentives to motivate reluctant learners–and an unusual funding source. She’s put her proposal on a website called ideablob.com, and is in the running for a grant, based on users voting for her plan in an open competition. Think American Idol meets The Apprentice–one idea every month win $10,000 in seed money
Carol Glenn, a 22-year old African American who graduated from Cornell University describes her afterschool center, known as “Bronze, Inc.,” in her business plan:
Bronze is a place for students (particularly older students) to hang out after school. Students are expected to come in and learn something new each day. They will be given assignments that have a point value, and expected to earn a minimum number of points each day. This prevents students from moving on without learning the things they need to. Once the assigned period for study ends and students have met their daily quotas, they will be able to use their points to play video games, watch movies, play indoor miniature golf, use computers, or just grab a hot meal in a cafe (Think Dave & Busters meets the freedom of a college campus). This provides incentives that are more immediate than college or a good job in the future, but not so immediate that they crowd out academic rigor.
Black and Latino students frequently face the possibility of being ostracized for doing well academically. Bronze helps fix this by creating a large cohort of students who value education, preventing these minority high achievers from having to choose between getting good grades and having a social life. Finally, Bronze hopes to make systemic change by seeking out the best academic programs (like Core Knowledge and Direct Instruction), repeatedly proving they work, and then explaining these practices to parents and leaders in the community. Instead of parents simply advocating for “better schools” or “better teachers,” they will have clear objectives and results with which to approach school boards and politicians. Since these students will still be a part of the mainstream system, instead of placed in separate charter schools, the results of parental involvement will likely be seen across districts where Bronze operates.
Vote to support Carol’s idea here.
by Robert Pondiscio
June 30th, 2008
Tags: American Education, core knowledge, Literacy
Posted in Core Knowledge | 2 Comments »
While at the Grand Canyon last week, I spent time reading the journals of the members of the 1869 Powell expedition down the Colorado River. It’s impossible not to be struck by the everyday erudition of Americans of even modest educational attainment of earlier times.
George Bradley described how he “would be willing to explore the River Styx” if it meant getting out of the Army. Later he described a particularly rough night on the river. “We need only a few flashes of lightning to meet Milton’s most vivid conceptions of Hell,” he wrote.
It’s hard to imagine such allusions finding their way into the diaries of even the best educated contemporary Americans, let alone a sixth-grade dropout like Bradley. Spend some time reading the letters of ordinary Americans of the 19th century and you immediately grasp how much poorer our discourse is for a lack of a common set of references. It’s lack makes the lowest common denominator not merely lamentable, but necessary for us simply to understand each other.
