Tag Archive for 'curriculum reform'

Not Either/Or…It’s AND

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 28, 2009 in Curriculum and 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?!?!?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 5, 2009 in Core Knowledge and 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

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 25, 2009 in Curriculum and Educational Policy. 21 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

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 19, 2008 in Curriculum. 0 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

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 24, 2008 in Educational Policy. 0 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

Published by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. on April 22, 2008 in Educational Policy. 0 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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