Tag Archive for 'cultural literacy'

It’s Not Your Fault, But It Is Your Problem

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 11, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Students and Teaching. 11 Comments

Mark Bauerlein has a piece on the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Brainstorm blog that should give pause to those whose definition of achievement in public education starts and stops with reading and math scores. 

Bauerlein spins a fictional tale of a top Emory University law school student interviewing at one of the leading law firms in Atlanta.  Over lunch with the senior partners, the conversation turns toward the older gentlemen’s memories of the Cold War. “It’s not a test, and it’s not planned,” Bauerlein notes.  ”For them, the Cold War is simply one of those realities that any intelligent person is familiar with and has some opinions about.”  But the overachieving young man has nothing to add and is conspicuously out of his depth.   

The others have the tact to move on, but they note the deficiency. It doesn’t cost the young man the job, but the senior fellows make a judgment. This guy, they think, is sharp and hard-working, but get out of his training and he doesn’t bring much to the table. The deeper awareness that makes for a sober judgment and wider perspective is missing…This is the professional value of cultural literacy. It counts a lot more in professional spheres than academics and educators realize. The measure is informal, yes, but it makes a difference in how peers and superiors regard you.

Bauerlein’s piece reminded me of a conversation I had with an unusually bright student a few years ago.  She blew away every math and reading test she’d ever taken, but her walking around knowledge of even basic history, geography and current events was virtually nonexistent (Granted, she was a 5th grader, but she was under the impression that New Jersey was a country).  Discussing the gaps in her education, I told her, “This is not your fault, but it is your problem.”  Indeed, this young lady had done absolutely everything asked of her in school.  Her lack of breadth was not something she chose, but something we had allowed to happen to her.   If the gaps in her knowledge persist into adulthood, I knew, the world would certainly judge her skeptically, even harshly, for precisely the reasons Bauerlein describes–especially as a person of color from the South Bronx. 

Crucially, this was a kid with top scores on standardized tests–one of my school’s rare ”double 4s” in both math and reading.  By that measure–but only by that measure–a screaming success story of public education.  But what the data doesn’t show, and Baurlein’s piece reminds us, is that out in the real world there are very different metrics at work.  There’s too often far less to our current definition of success than meets the eye.

Obama’s Inauguration and the Limits of Symbolism

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 20, 2009 in Opinion. 14 Comments

“We will achieve a just and prosperous society only when our schools ensure that everyone commands enough shared knowledge to communicate effectively with everyone else.” — E.D. Hirsch, Jr., The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them

President Barack Obama spoke to two different groups of Americans today.  One group understood the deep historical significance of the words in his inaugural address and grasped fully the moment in history to which they were bearing witness. A second group, no doubt moved and caught up in the excitement of seeing an African-American take the oath of office, saw merely an historic “first.”  And that’s a shame.

“It’s an amazing event for our students who are under 18 and haven’t fully formed their consciousness,” one school administrator told the Los Angeles Times. ”They see Obama and say, ‘This is a president who looks like me, I can be president.’”  It’s a true and earnest observation that has been made many times in the last few months.  But as uplifting as that sentiment is, it’s bittersweet to consider that many students–indeed, many Americans–lack a full appreciation of the moment and their new President’s inaugural address.  President Obama’s speech was rich in historical, literary, and biblical references, lending meaning, resonance and emotional weight to his words.  Yet these allusions were almost certainly unfamiliar to many of those watching. 

To have endured an education where history was a second-tier subject was to be left to wonder today: Who were these people Obama mentioned, who “toiled for us in sweatshops and settled the West?” Who were these people who “endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth?”  If you were not taught our nation’s rich history, then the President’s description of those who “packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life” may have failed to move you.   If you do not know what happened at Concord, Gettysburg, Normandy and Khe Sahn, then the sacrifices of those who “fought and died for us” in those places is lost upon you.  As uncomfortable as it is to consider, if our children are ignorant of that history then at least some measure of that sacrifice was, alas, in vain.   

President Obama’s inaugural address placed us — all of us — in the flow of history.  With its references to the “rights of man,” our “common defense,” ideals that “light the world,” and a generation that “faced down communism and fascism,” the address was surely met with either nods or blank stares.  If our children do not know the events and phrases to which Obama referred, they cannot fully appreciate the significance of this moment or even what this President is asking of them.   How is it possible for them to be “the keepers of this legacy” — why should they value it and seek to keep it at all? — unless they understand the  thing they are being asked to keep?  Obama’s most poignant observation was that “a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.”  How many of his younger listeners fully appreciate the price that has been paid to make this moment possible?  How many of our children, instead of seeing mere novelty, comprehend fully and viscerally the improbable closing of a historical loop they have just witnessed?  A black man took the oath of office with his hand on a bible belonging to the President who signed the Emancipation Proclamation.  He turned to deliver his inaugural address facing the site where another great American dreamed out loud of the day when his children would be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. He then delivered his inaugural address to millions of Americans who had rendered that very judgement.   

It in no way diminishes the significance of this day to observe with a touch of sadness that too many of our nation’s children — especially those who look with pride at this President who looks like them — were able to appreciate this day only on a superficial level.  Too many can appreciate the symbolism of the moment, but no more. Some saw history.  Others, poorer by far, saw a symbolic ”first.” 

President Obama called upon us today to enter a “new era of responsibility.”  It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.  For educators, perhaps the noblest duty that we might accept ”not grudgingly but seize gladly” is to ensure that in the very near future our nation’s children are able to judge this President not by the color of his skin, or even the content of his character, but by the full weight of his words.

We Need to Be A ‘Water Cooler Nation’ Again

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 14, 2009 in Interview. 10 Comments

America desperately needs to become a “water cooler nation” again, with a common set of cultural references, says historian Richard Norton Smith.  “It shouldn’t be Britney Spears or the latest celebrity divorce or even last week’s box office grosses,” he notes in an interview on the Public School Insights blog, but rather ”Gettysburg and Rosa Parks–and an endless source of possibilities. And I think the common culture, the popular culture, has both a lot to answer for and, correspondingly, a lot to give.”

Claus von Zastrow, Executive Director of the Learning First Alliance, asks Smith if American students are getting enough civic and history education. Smith, a reknowned presidential historian and biographer, offers a weary laugh then replies, “No. They are not.”

And the moment I say that, I qualify it with an expression of sympathy for any teacher, at any level, who is competing with a mass culture that encourages historical and civic illiteracy, if indeed not illiteracy generally. It’s important to get that right up front. No, they’re not. And the evidence of that is to be found in every survey that’s been taken for as long as I can remember….The evidence is overwhelming that we are not imparting to young people a sense of not only where we came from, but, as a result, who we are. And who we might become.

Smith makes a passionate case for teaching history as a means of enhancing civic engagement.  “I have always been bewildered by people who say, ‘Oh god, history, it’s so dull.’ Now, maybe it seemed dull because, to be honest, maybe it was taught badly. Maybe it was reduced to mind-numbing treaties and irrelevant battles and dates. But that’s not history. That’s a calendar. History is the most colorful, dramatic, emotional, inspiring, outraging subject I can think of. It is life. And if we walk away from it or if we minimize it or over-simplify it, it seems to me we’re doing a great disservice to ourselves.”

Great stuff.  The full interview is available here.  A edited transcript is on the LFA blog here.

Core Knowledge Cultural Literacy Quiz

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 20, 2008 in Core Knowledge. 4 Comments

More examples of how speakers and writers presume background knowledge on the part of their audience.

1)   In a recent New York Time Op-Ed column, Gail Collins wrote “If the Obama brain trust seems relatively serene compared with its seething base, it’s because they live in the Electoral College world, where the presidential race only takes place in a third of the country. They don’t care about national polls – a concept as quaint as measuring one’s wealth by caribou pelts.”   What is the Electoral College?  Explain why would “living in an Electoral College world” make Obama unconcerned with national polls? 

2)   “Catch a look at next year’s spring men’s wear and you might find yourself saying, ‘What the Dickens?’” wrote fashion writer Patrick Huguenin in the New York Daily News. In a review of Fashion Week in New York, he described “roguish ensembles that call to mind the scrappy urchins of a Charles Dickens novel” and labeled the new look “Oliver Twisted.” Explain the reference.

3)   Supporters of Barack Obama have been wearing this button:

 

Why do you think the creator of this button thought this would be an effective message? Justify your answer based on what you know about the personal histories of the presidential candidates, their running mates, and their political parties.

Matt Davis on Core Knowledge Reading Program

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 9, 2008 in Core Knowledge and Education Practice. 1 Comment

There’s a good, in-depth interview on ednews.org with Dr. Matt Davis, the head of the Core Knowledge Reading Program, which will be piloted in New York City this year.  He talks about the two major strands of the program: a unique phonics-based “Skills” strand, and a “Listening and Learning” strand that enables very young children to build up vocabulary and background knowledge, through read-alouds of classic literary selections, fairy tales and poems, as well as a non-fiction selelctions in history, science, art, and music.

“We think the two strands together will be a great one-two punch.  The Skills Strand should teach the students to decode fluently, while the Listening and Learning strand should help ensure that they have the breadth of background knowledge they will need to understand what the words they decode.”

Davis also makes a good, if little appreciated point about Core Knowledge in general.  “Although people have been slow to see this, it is a curriculum designed for social justice,” he notes. ”The well-off kids, the ones whose parents read to them, teach them about numbers and letters, take them to New York and Washington, DC in the summer, visit museums, listen to public radio, and so on – those kids are going to tend to soak up a lot of cultural literacy in the home environment, and they will be able to make sense of a lot of what they read. But other kids are not as fortunate.  These children need to get their cultural literacy in the schools. These are the children the Core Knowledge Foundation is looking to help, and they are also the children we are hoping to help with the reading program.”

Text, Yes, But Is It Reading?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 28, 2008 in Assessment and Testing and Literacy. 3 Comments

Are the hours kids and teenagers spend prowling the Web a threat to literacy?  Or is it simply a new form of reading and writing?  A sprawling New York Times thumbsucker notes that “as teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.”

Clearly when kids go online instead of turning on the TV, they read and write instead of passively consuming video.  But critics of reading on the Internet say they see no evidence that increased Web activity improves reading achievement. “What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading,”  Dana Gioia, the chairman of the N.E.A., tells the Times.  “I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests.”

“Reading a book, and taking the time to ruminate and make inferences and engage the imaginational processing, is more cognitively enriching, without doubt, than the short little bits that you might get if you’re into the 30-second digital mode,” adds Ken Pugh, a cognitive neuroscientist at Yale who has studied brain scans of children reading.

According to the paper, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers reading, math and science tests to a sample of 15-year-old students in more than 50 countries, will add an electronic reading component to next year’s tests. The United States, among other countries, will not participate. “A spokeswoman for the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the Department of Education, said an additional test would overburden schools,” the Times notes.

Spot the Looney

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 6, 2008 in Curriculum and Education Theory. 2 Comments

School children should no longer be taught traditional subjects at school because they are “middle-class” creations, and “mere stepping stones to wealth,” says an adviser to the British government (Finder’s fee: Joanne Jacobs).

Lessons will cover a series of personal skills, if Professor John White gets his way, reports the Daily Mail. “Pupils would no longer study history, geography and science but learn skills such as energy- saving and civic responsibility through projects and themes.”

White, a member of a committee set up to advise Government curriculum authors on changes to secondary schooling for 11 to 14-year-olds, favors a shift away from single-subject teaching to theme or project-based learning. Aims should include fostering a student who “values personal relationships, is a responsible and caring citizen, is entrepreneurial, able to manage risk and committed to sustainable development.”

Tory schools spokesman Nick Gibb said Professor White’s view was “deeply corrosive”.

“This anti-knowledge, anti-subject ideology is deeply damaging to our education system. It is this sort of thinking that has led to the promotion of discredited reading methods, the erosion of three separate sciences and the decline of mathematics skills. I just find it astonishing that someone with his extreme views has been allowed to advise the Government on education policy.”

Words fail me.

It’s Greek to Me

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 18, 2008 in Core Knowledge. 4 Comments

A paragraph in this morning’s paper about Nelson Figueroa, a pitcher for my beloved New York Mets, perfectly illustrates the link between content knowledge and reading comprehension:

“The 33-year old right-hander has put the journey in journeyman. It’s just 20 miles from his Lincoln High School alma mater to Shea, but his trek from his Brooklyn upbringing to Queens would daunt Odysseus.”

You don’t have to know baseball to make sense of this delightful paragraph. But you need a solid vocabulary (journeyman, trek, daunt), some Greek mythology and even a phrase or two of Latin. Perhaps you think this writer is striving for erudition to impress his educated readers? The passage is in the sports pages of this morning’s New York Post, a NYC tabloid with a decidedly blue-collar readership.

Content With Not Knowing

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 28, 2008 in Curriculum, Podcast and Video and Teaching. 1 Comment

The Common Core survey by Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, which shows a troubling lack of historical background knowledge among American 17-year-olds, is enjoying a nice run this week, with stories in USA Today, the New York Times, and lots of broadcast coverage. But alas, the coverage has been all cause and no effect. At best, it irritates people that students are ill-informed. At worst, it’s seen as irrelevant. There’s a lot of “tsk-tsk” reporting. How embarassing! It would be nice to see a few journalists take the next step and look at the impact of a content-free education on outcomes.

The CBS Evening News did a piece on the Common Core report which started out as a standard issue “tsk-tsk” piece. In the words of correspondent Ben Tracy, “A lot of educators say all this talk about the ‘dumbest generation’ is quite stupid…students don’t need to know a litany of dates because they can just Google them.” The problem here is twofold: the continued absurd association of content knowledge with rote memorization of dates (does any school do that?) and the idea that content and critical thinking are mutually exclusive. One high school teacher in the CBS piece says, “I know that this generation is the smartest that we’ve had.” Based on what empirical evidence, exactly?

“Students are expected to analyze concepts rather than memorize dates,” Tracy reports knowingly. I continue to await an example of a concept that can be analyzed in the absence of content knowledge. This kind of thinking by educators (and uncritical reporting by journalists) implies a content-free education that infantilizes the learner. Some years ago, I was marched off to a social studies professional development session. The theme of the session was “No More Trivial Pursuit.” “It doesn’t matter if your students don’t know when the War of 1812 happened,” the staff developer said. “It’s more important to grapple with ‘essential questions’ like ‘Is war ever justifiable?’” Clearly no meaningful response would be possible without a solid grasp of history to bolster one’s point of view.

Linda Bevilacqua, the President of the Core Knowledge Foundation, was a guest on G. Gordon Liddy’s Radio America show yesterday to weigh in on the Common Core study. A caller described how he was taught in school that Martin Luther and Martin Luther King were the same person. It’s not merely embarrassing to not know the difference between Martin Luther and Martin Luther King. Even those—especially those—who believe that critical thinking is the purpose of school should be alarmed. How much critical thinking about the Reformation and the Civil Rights movement is a student capable of who doesn’t know that Martin Luther and Martin Luther King are two different people separated by 500 years, language, culture and the Atlantic Ocean?

Until and unless we start to make a connection between content knowledge, reading comprehension, and critical thinking, I fear we’re not going to move the level of concern above the level of “tsk-tsk…these kids today!”

Are You Smarter Than a Boston Latin Student?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 22, 2008 in Curriculum. 1 Comment

On Sunday, the New York Times published a lovely, uplifting piece about how The Great Gatsby still resonates with striving immigrant students at the prestigious Boston Latin School. One recent immigrant featured in the story is “inspired by the green light at the end of the dock, which for Jay Gatsby, the self-made millionaire from North Dakota, symbolizes the upper-class woman he longs for.” Says the student: “My green light is Harvard.”

Seemingly in direct response to the Times own ed blogger Will Okun, who recently questioned the relevance of teaching classic literature to inner city youth, Sara Rimer writes: “Some educators say the best way to engage racially and ethnically diverse students in reading is with books that mirror their lives and culture. But others say that while a variety of literary voices is important, ‘Gatsby’ — still required reading at half the high schools in the country — resonates powerfully among urban adolescents, many of them first- and second-generation immigrants, who are striving to ascend in 21st-century America.”

Fordham’s Gadfly took note of the piece yesterday, hailing, “three cheers for dead, white men,” and remarking with approval how urban adolescents “still identify with the book’s main characters and its themes of aspiration and striving.”

Leave it to a pair of bright high schoolers to rain on the feel-good parade in letters to the Times. Robinson G. Meyer, a junior from Pennington, New Jersey wonders if those Boston Latin strivers, their teachers and the Times have missed the point of the novel. “The Great Gatsby is no Great American Fable of accomplished dreams, it is a cautionary tragedy. Its characters discard their morals to attain pleasure or to quench their ambitions, and, by the novel’s end, they all wind up hollow and disaffected.”

Nathaniel Eiseman, himself a Boston Latin student, pointedly writes, “If F. Scott Fitzgerald knew that today’s high school students would be comparing Jay Gatsby’s elusive green light to admission to Harvard he would be shaking his head in disdain.

“The Great Gatsby’ is not a novel that glorifies the rags-to-riches American dream. It is, in fact, the very opposite, and I find it most surprising that the students and faculty of the Boston Latin School featured in the article could be so misinformed,” says Eiseman. “The light does give Gatsby hope, but between West Egg, where Gatsby is, and East Egg, where his hope is, there lies an insuperable cultural divide. The green light represents all of what we want, but that we never can attain. Jay Gatsby would never reach that light, for the end of his American dream saw him face down in his swimming pool.”

Ouch! Well, thanks for clearing that up, gentlemen. Somewhere today, there are a couple a proud English teachers smiling quietly to themselves.