Pascal’s Wager on Curriculum

by Robert Pondiscio
March 14th, 2011

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Posted in Curriculum, Educational Policy | 5 Comments »

“Stop seeking curricular solutions to instructional problems,” urges Kathleen Porter-Magee at Fordham’s Flypaper blog.   Entering the fray over last week’s Call for Common Content, Porter-Magee’s says curriculum is essential, however, assessment and accountability matter more. 

Unfortunately her piece is a bit of a strawman-fest.  She confuses the core curriculum manifesto’s call for guidance on what students should learn with a call to pick winners and losers among published curricula, or prescribe the methods by which children should be taught.  The Call for Common Content is merely a sensible proposal to describe the common, knowledge-building content that all children must have in order to be fully literate. 

A case can be made that a content-rich approach to the critical elementary school years is the educational equivalent of Pascal’s Wager.  The French mathematician famously argued that even nonbelievers should live as if they have religious faith.  Why?  If there is a God, your potential upside is eternal life vs. damnation.  You win.  And if God doesn’t exist you’re dead anyway.  You have everything to gain and nothing to lose.

The former head of curriculum and professional development at Achievement First, Porter-Magee describes a misstep  in mandating Saxon Math at her schools.  “By focusing our energies on convincing teachers and principals to use a particular curriculum, we were, on some level, taking ownership over student achievement results and shouldering it ourselves,”  she recalls.  Note that Porter-Magee and her colleagues didn’t throw up their hands and decide to stop teaching multiplication, fractions and geometry.  They simply rallied around a different program.  The challenge for educators ought to be the best way to teach material to their students–not to decide whether to teach it at all. 

No one is talking about mandating specific programs, pedagogical approaches or delivery systems.  The call for a common curriculum is a call for a unified scope and sequence, nothing more.  It takes seriously the essential idea that what schools teach is critical and ought not, for reasons of fairness and equity, be left to chance.  Betting on coherent accumulation of knowledge is the safest wager and one with no conceivable downside.  As Dan Willingham has pointed out knowledge grows exponentially.  “Those with a rich base of factual knowledge find it easier to learn more — the rich get richer. In addition, factual knowledge enhances cognitive processes like problem solving and reasoning,” he writes.   Pascal 1, Porter-Magee 0.

She also argues that a curricular focus runs the risk of “distracting states from allocating their now very scarce resources towards policies that have the potential to much more dramatically impact student achievement.”  Wrong again. As Russ Whitehurst has pointed out, curriculum is a ”free good.”  Something is going to get taught, and there are no discounts for bad or ineffective curricula; the implementation costs are essentially fixed.  Thus a coherent, content-rich approach to curriculum costs the same as an inferior content-neutral approach.  Why bet on incoherence?  Pascal 2, Porter-Magee 0.

“States would do better to create or adopt rigorous assessments and a strong state accountability system, and then to devolve ownership over student achievement results—and that includes curricular decisions—as closely as possible to the classroom,” Porter-Magee asserts.  However, this overlooks the inconvenient truth that reading tests are de facto knowledge tests (“poor readers” outperform “good readers” when the topic of the reading test is familiar to the ostensibly poor readers) and at present are utterly disconnected from curriculum.   The correlation between accumulated knowledge and reading comprehension makes it irresponsible not to have some manner of content guidelines in place, at least at the district or state level.  Cumulative buildup of enabling knowledge literally cannot happen if curricular content decisions are left to chance and whim.   And as always, the ones who disproportionately suffer from a hands-off view of curriculum are those who can least afford gaps in their knowledge base.  

Worst of all, Porter-Magee implies that one must choose between improving teacher quality, accountability and curriculum.   Rather, they are mutually reinforcing–each is more likely to succeed supported by the others.  In fact, teacher quality advocates have the most to gain from a common curriculum.  Reading tests, as currently conceived, are poor vehicles for measuring teacher effectiveness, since they are not curriculum-based.  There is simply no correlation between what the teacher teaches in a given year and the reading passages on a typical state reading test.  A common core curriculum will make it much easier to measure teacher effectiveness. 

Pascal breaks the game open.

Unlike Pascal’s Wager, those who bet on the curriculum wager are already way ahead.  There’s no empirical proof of God’s existence, but there’s a mountain of data to support the idea that teaching content is teaching reading.  It costs exactly the same as a content-neutral approach, there is no conflict whatsoever with structural reforms, be they teacher quality, accountability, school type or management.  

It’s a very smart bet.

The Flawed Logic of Reform

by Robert Pondiscio
March 21st, 2010

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Posted in accountability, Curriculum, Educational Policy | 14 Comments »

Dan Willingham, having failed to receive the memo that ed reform is for policy wonks, not for people who, er, you know…work in education, has the temerity to wonder why people are so excited about proposed revisions to NCLB.  “The bedrock of the bill follows the flawed logic of No Child Left Behind,” Willingham writes at the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog. In short, there’s a whole lot of describing what schools need to do — Raise test scores! Close achievement gaps! — and a whole lot of silence on how to do it.  Willingham writes:

To the extent that the plan includes any “how,” it’s primarily making someone else take on the job if it’s being done poorly. For failing schools, fire the principal and rehire some teachers, or turn it into a charter school. If schools can’t close the achievement gap, the state is to take over the school’s Title I funding. States have greater flexibility in how to intervene in troubled schools, which many see as positive. Again, this assumes that states know what to do.

Willingham is promising to weigh in with his proposed solutions next week.  He’d better include a heaping dose of non-curriculum prescriptions if he wants to get any love from policy types.  Witness some of the curious criticism Diane Ravitch has faced in response to her book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System.  At the New Republic, Andy Rotherham says Ravitch’s book fails because it doesn’t offer a policy agenda, “outside of a call for better curriculum.”    Likewise, Kevin Carey criticizes Ravitch’s book as “painfully short on non-curricular ideas” to improve education, which is a bit like describing the armed services as “painfully short on non-military ideas to win battles.”

Ed Reform’s Redheaded Stepchild

by Robert Pondiscio
March 16th, 2010

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Posted in Curriculum, Educational Policy | 7 Comments »

Over at Gotham Schools, New York City parent and occasional Core Knowledge Blog commenter Matthew Levey points out an inconvenient truth about teacher quality as an reform lever:  the numbers are fanciful.  He imagines an educational utopia in the Big Apple, where the perfect teacher assessment tool has been invented, the state assembly “rescinds the tenure provisions of the Taylor law, and the UFT cooperates.”  Even in this best of all imagined worlds, it’s still not enough. 

New York City alone would need to recruit and hire 27,000 superb teachers by Year Three for teacher quality to work as a reform lever, raising logistical problems we’re not ready to solve, he says. 

“Knowledgable reformers know we cannot build and maintain an army of superteachers ready for 10- or 20-year careers in Red Hook, Mott Haven and Washington Heights. While teacher quality is important, can the city responsibly assume that it will be able to develop effective tools, win (or roll) over the unions and fix today’s Albany disaster?

Curriculum reform, Levey concludes, must play an equal role in reform efforts. In New York City, he writes, curriculum can be developed and replicated at almost no marginal cost, “earning a far greater return on investment than merit bonuses for every qualifying teacher or hiring 10,000 high-quality teachers.”  Where teacher quality is a long-term, expensive, and politically difficult fix, he notes, curriculum is “fast, cheap, and also effective.” 

“Teacher quality advocates may ask:  ‘How does a good curriculum help a poor teacher?”  I would rephrase the question: “Does a good curriculum make a poor teacher worse?” Lesson planning, delivery of instruction and classroom management — how to teach — are daunting enough without having to develop good content every week. A solid, coherent curriculum improves the odds for new or struggling teacher, and allows master teachers to focus on their kids’ needs or mentoring colleagues.”

Levey doesn’t mention it, but it’s difficult to imagine why our best and brightest would agree to take up the chalk to begin with at pay levels far below other professions, at a time when the President thinks firing entire staffs of schools is a good idea, and ill-informed ed reform Aldo Raines are braying for teachers’ scalps.  In short, we’re making the teaching profession ever less compelling, which doesn’t inspire confidence that our army of superteachers can be mustered without an absurdly large infusion of public money (another nonstarter).   Levey concludes his analysis with a call for New York City to use its enormous leverage to lead the charge on curriculum reform.  “The content we want our kids to learn is the fraternal twin of teacher quality,” he writes “and it is high time we stopped treating it like a redheaded stepchild.”

Not Either/Or…It’s AND

by Robert Pondiscio
October 28th, 2009

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Posted in Curriculum, Educational Policy | 2 Comments »

At Eduwonk, Andy Rotherham catches up to Russ Whitehurst’s paper, Don’t Forget Curriculum.  But he misses the boat when he writes, “I’m not sure when curriculum and reforms like choice, teacher quality, etc…became either/or.”   I’m not sure where Andy’s getting that message, but it’s not from Russ Whitehurst, who went out of his way NOT to say that.  Here’s the relevant quote from his paper:

This is not to say that curriculum reforms should be pursued instead of efforts to create more choice and competition through charters, or to reconstitute the teacher workforce towards higher levels of effectiveness, or to establish high quality, intensive, and targeted preschool programs, all of which have evidence of effectiveness. It is to say that leaving curriculum reform off the table or giving it a very small place makes no sense.

Over at the American Enterprise Institute’s blog, Charles Murray adds his voice to the curriculum choir.

Thermopylae, Agincourt and….21st Century Skills?!?!?

by Robert Pondiscio
March 5th, 2009

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Posted in Core Knowledge, Education News | 5 Comments »

Greg Toppo of USA Today and Eduflack wander into the 21st Century Skills debate this morning.  Eduflack gets to the heart of the false dichotomy in the skills vs. content idea, noting “this isn’t core knowledge versus soft skills.  No, our focus should be on how we teach those core subjects that are necessary…And most importantly, how do we ensure all students are graduating with the content knowledge and skills needed to truly achieve in the 21st century economy?”

Hear, hear.  But then Eduflack drops in this observation about the deeply funded and broadly-backed movement:

If anything, 21CS is guilty of bad messaging and bad PR.  In a time when everyone is concerned about both academic quality and relevance to the economy, many 21CS advocates remain focused on the need for soft skills, believing they have discovered some long, lost map to student success.  In reality, they are calling for a reinforcement of the relevance of core instruction.  Their message has been off, and as a result, they’ve painted a nice, large target on the back of a well-meaning concept.

I’m not sure P21′s ”message” is off.  They’ve articulated worthwhile goals, but have loopy ideas on how to achieve them, and now they’ve been called on it.  That’s not a message problem–it’s a product problem.  That said, let’s not list the Battle of 21st Century Skills alongside Agincourt and Thermopylae quite yet.  A thoughtful discussion has emerged about the best way to achieve 21CS.  And that’s a good and important accomplishment.   Up until now, as Toppo writes, “if someone told you that kids need to think critically and creatively, be technologically savvy and work well with others, you’d nod in agreement, right?”

But a small group of outspoken education scholars is challenging that assumption, saying the push for 21st-century skills is taking a dangerous bite out of precious classroom time that could be better spent learning deep, essential content. For the first time since the P21 push began five years ago, they’re pushing back.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers! 

P.S. If you’re wondering why I just quoted an ad for the Playstation 3, count yourself a 21st Century Skills casualty.

21st Century Skills Fadbusters

by Robert Pondiscio
February 25th, 2009

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Posted in Curriculum, Educational Policy | 22 Comments »

Who you gonna call?

Diane Ravitch, E.D. Hirsch and Dan Willingham played FadBusters at a panel discussion on 21st Century Skills hosted by Common Core in Washington, DC on Tuesday afternoon, along with Ken Kay, who heads the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21). 

For those who have only just arrived on our planet this morning, the highly visible and well-financed 21st Century Skills movement seeks to put information and communications skills, critical thinking and problem solving “at the center of US K-12 education.” Ravitch pointed out that the zippy name notwithstanding, most of the ideas promoted by P21 have been with us for over a century.  “After examining the materials associated with P21,” she quipped, “I concluded, to quote the noted philosopher Yogi Berra, that ‘it’s like déjà vu all over again.’”

There is nothing new in the proposals of the 21st century skills movement. The same ideas were iterated and reiterated by pedagogues across the twentieth century. Their call for 20th century skills sounds identical to the current effort to promote 21st century skills. If there was one cause that animated the schools of education in the 20th century, it was the search for the ultimate breakthrough that would finally loosen the shackles of subject matter and content.

Bending over backwards to applaud its motives and goals, Hirsch nonetheless observed that the entire premise of 21st Century skills rests on a flawed assumption about critical thinking, problem solving and innovation:  “The error at the heart of P21 is the idea that skills are all-purpose muscles that, once developed, can be applied to new and unforeseen domains of experience,” he noted.  “This error is fundamental, and it is fatal,” he said. 

It will lead to the same disappointments as the idea that reading comprehension is a how-to skill that can be developed through strategy drills. On the contrary, reading comprehension, communication, critical thinking, and the rest are inherently constituted by specific knowledge. More than that, if you have domain knowledge yet lack mere technical proficiency, you will nonetheless perform more skillfully than a proficient person who lacks relevant knowledge. There are many experiments supporting this, going back to de Groot’s famous 1946 experiments with chess masters. Incautious claims about the transferability of 21st-century skills from one domain to another are very misleading. No, let me put it more strongly. The how-to concept is just plain wrong.

The fallback position of 21CS proponents has become something to the effect of “we’re not saying academic content doesn’t matter.  Kids need content AND skills.”  But Dan Willingham pointed out that it’s inaccurate even to conceive of skills and factual knowledge as separate.

I often hear people say ‘Yes, yes, of course, knowledge is important. After all, you need something to think about.’ But there is more to it than that. Knowledge is not just something that skills operate on-knowledge is what enables skills to operate in the first place.

“Everyone understands that memorizing facts without skills is not enriching,” Willingham noted. ”People forget that training skills without facts doesn’t work.” 

All credit and praise to Kay for taking on the challenge of defending 21st century skills in the face of such skepticism.  He nonetheless found himself backpedalling, continually reminding the audience that P21 believes content is important.  Ultimately, he conceded that the principal contribution of the 21st Century skills movement is ”offering a vision of a desired outcome.” Students need to be prepared to be more engaged civic participants and highly skilled workers. “It’s not our job to develop the model,” he said. 

Alas, there was little in Kay’s comments that suggests he gets the idea that his vision cannot be realized by the specific methods he is promoting.  Indeed, it’s not hard to imagine a Middle Ages version of Ken Kay, “offering a vision” of alchemy as the proper purpose of education.  “It’s not our job to develop the model,” he might have said.  “We’re merely articulating a vision that says the transmutation of lead into gold and discovering the elixir of life are vital 14th century skills.”

Good luck with that. 

A broad, solid knowledge-based curriculum is square one for developing “21st Century Skills.”  Inspired, creative teaching–not wish fulfillment codified by squishy, ill-defined standards–gets us the rest of the way.  That might not fit on a bumper sticker, but it might work.

Student Mobility: Good Answer, Bad Question

by Robert Pondiscio
November 19th, 2008

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Posted in Curriculum | No Comments »

Having a supportive teacher who encourages other students to accept newcomers “can go a long way toward helping children make a smooth transition” and perform better when they change elementary schools, a new study shows. 

It’s not news that high rates of student mobility lead to a decline in academic performance and classroom participation. Researchers from Western Washington University and the University of Washington followed 1,040 elementary school students for four years “to determine how moving disrupts children’s attitudes toward school and their behavior in the classroom, such as how much they participate and whether they are cooperative,” Science Daily reports. 

In an effort to identify protective factors, they looked at the role of students’ ties with teachers and peers at school. They found that children who are accepted by their peers are more likely to do well academically and have better attitudes toward school. But perhaps the most important factor in the equation was that of the teacher: Teachers who were supportive of mobile students had an especially strong influence on their attitudes toward school, particularly for children who moved a lot. In addition, teacher support had a positive influence on children’s behavior in the classroom.

Did the researchers attempt to figure out if a coherent, sequenced curriculum – students’ ability to pick up where they left off in their old school — was a “protective factor?”  I suspect not.  You can’t study a condition that doesn’t exist.

Attention Seeking Behavior

by Robert Pondiscio
April 24th, 2008

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Posted in Educational Policy | No Comments »

“No fewer than seven bills that would alter how history is taught are currently before California’s legislature,” reports The Economist. “One is a measure about Filipinos. The others would encourage or force more lessons about African and Latin American cultures, American Indians, the “secret war” in Laos, the deportation of Hispanics in the 1930s, the desegregation of Mexican pupils and the Italian contribution to California.”

Each of these attempts to legislate content face an uphill slog. The magazine notes that California Democrats tend to support such measures, but Governor Schwarzenegger tends to veto them. But a larger battle looms: “Next month a group of academics and bureaucrats will begin holding public hearings on an overhaul of the curriculum framework—the first full one since 2001,” the Economist reports. “The coalitions that have been formed to push for legislation will no doubt make their feelings known.”

This presages what a debate on national content standards might look like, but that is not an argument against the attempt. In Bridging Differences recently, CK board member Diane Ravitch noted, “I see a national curriculum as the product of a professional consensus, one that involves subject-matter experts, teachers, administrators, and even end-users of the public schools like college professors and journalists. I also see such a curriculum evolving from careful research on international curriculum standards about what students at various ages are expected to know and be able to do. And I envision a curriculum that in toto amounts to not more than 50 percent of the school day, so that there would be many variations and additions depending on the state, region, and locale.”

A Nation at Risk at 25

by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
April 22nd, 2008

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Posted in Educational Policy | No Comments »

The following commentary appears in the current issue of Education Week.

In American educational history, A Nation at Risk is significant as a very dramatic official recognition in the 1980s that our schools were declining in effectiveness not only in relation to schools of other nations, but also in relation to our own results in earlier decades. In the 25 years since the report was issued, energetic reform efforts have been put forth, to small overall effect. The best single gauge of overall national school effectiveness—the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test of 12th graders—has remained flat, and has even declined slightly. This persistent lack of significant improvement is owing to the unwavering persistence of the very ideas that caused the decline in the first place—the repudiation of a definite academic curriculum in the early grades by the child-centered movement of the early 20th century. Given the continued content vagueness of state standards in early grades, especially in language arts, that underlying condition has not much changed. There is still no definite, coherent academic curriculum in the early grades. That is the principal source of the low academic achievement of our high school students.

The elementary grades are much more important than is apparently credited by philanthropies like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has recently been giving many millions to high school reform—with negligible results per dollar. For many years, the philanthropic and policy worlds have placed a lot of emphasis on the two ends of precollegiate education—high school and preschool. They are right about preschool—but not about high school. The general knowledge and vocabulary required for effective learning at the high school level are the fruits of a long process. The way to reform high school is to prepare students effectively in the elementary years to thrive there. If, in recent decades, high school has become a place where students are offered a smorgasbord of watered-down subjects, that is because watered-down subjects are all that our ill-educated students are now prepared to understand.

Philanthropies cannot be altogether blamed. In their emphasis on high school, they have followed the lead of A Nation at Risk,which was overwhelmingly concerned with high school. Its assumption was that the elementary years are foundational, and should be spent on the enabling skills of reading, writing, and reckoning. The authors therefore conceived the truly decisive arena for educational improvement to be grades 9-12, where there had been a severe decline in verbal and math scores. Indeed, for most of its length, A Nation at Risk ignored the first eight grades of schooling. Then, in its last pages, the report finally alluded to the early curriculum as follows:

The curriculum in the crucial eight grades leading to the high school years should be specifically designed to provide a sound base for study in those and later years in such areas as English language development and writing, computational and problem-solving skills, science, social studies, foreign language, and the arts. These years should foster an enthusiasm for learning and the development of the individual’s gifts and talents. (Page 72)

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