Tag Archive for 'E. D. Hirsch'

“The Most Important Education Reformer of the Last Century”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 22, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum and Educational Policy. 9 Comments

[Update:  In the comments to this post, Paul Hoss questions Sol Stern giving credit to Hirsch for Massachusetts's Education Reform Act.  Stern responds below.]

In the new City Journal, Sol Stern files a comprehensive dispatch on the career of E.D. Hirsch, Jr. and judges the Core Knowledge founder to be “the most important education reformer of the last century.”   Stern writes that “Hirsch’s theories, long merely persuasive, now have solid empirical backing in Massachusetts’s miraculous educational reforms.”  So why, he wonders, isn’t Washington paying attention? 

At his Senate confirmation hearing in February, Arne Duncan succinctly summarized the Obama administration’s approach to education reform: “We must build upon what works. We must stop doing what doesn’t work.” Since becoming education secretary, Duncan has launched a $4.3 billion federal “Race to the Top” initiative that encourages states to experiment with various accountability reforms. Yet he has ignored one state reform that has proven to work, as well as the education thinker whose ideas inspired it. The state is Massachusetts, and the education thinker is E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

“Hirsch’s theories, long merely persuasive, now have solid empirical backing in Massachusetts’s miraculous educational reforms,” Stern writes.  One element of the state’s 1993 Education Reform Act was a “Hirschean knowledge-based curricula for each grade.”

In the new millennium, Massachusetts students have surged upward on the biennial National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—“the nation’s report card,” as education scholars call it. On the 2005 NAEP tests, Massachusetts ranked first in the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade reading and fourth- and eighth-grade math. It then repeated the feat in 2007. No state had ever scored first in both grades and both subjects in a single year—let alone for two consecutive test cycles.

Hirsch spoke at a luncheon event at the Manhattan Institute Wednesday, which was recorded for future broadcast by C-SPAN.  In the meantime, a podcast of a lively conversation between Stern and Hirsch is on the City Journal website here.

E.D. Hirsch on the Air

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 1, 2009 in Core Knowledge. 1 Comment

If you’re online (or live in the Northeast and by a radio) at 1pm ET this afternoon, E.D. Hirsch will be on WAMC-FM/Albany the Northeast’s NPR station talking about his new book The Making of Americans.  Listen here.   There’s also a Hirsch essay on “How Schools Fail Democracy” in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Too many Americans are in the linguistic shadows now—possibly close to a majority. Despite intense efforts driven by the No Child Left Behind Act, the language abilities of our 17-year-olds have remained stuck at the steeply declined levels of the 1970s, while the language gap between white students on one side and black and Hispanic students on the other remains distressingly and immovably large. This language gap represents more than a civic disability that prevents full participation in a democracy. It also represents a bar to general prosperity and social justice.

Fanaticism, Factions and SAT Scores

Published by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. on September 24, 2009 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 Promising Start for Core Knowledge Early Literacy Program

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 23, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Education News and Research and Reports. 22 Comments

One year after announcing a pilot program to test a new Core Knowledge Early Literacy program in ten New York City Schools, Joel Klein Tuesday announced very strong early results.  As a news release from the New York City Department of Ed puts it: 

The progress of students in the ten participating schools was more than five times greater than the also-significant performance of students at ten peer schools with comparable student populations, and was reflected among students at all levels of literacy.  Additionally, teachers surveyed as part of the pilot rated the program highly, and nine of the ten participating schools have selected to use the Core Knowledge program with their new kindergarten classes in addition to continuing the program with their first graders, who remain in the pilot.

Speaking at a press conference at a South Bronx elementary school — one of the pilot schools – E.D. Hirsch noted thatwhile the initial results were gratifying, the bigger payoff could come later, since the program is designed to build broad background knowledge across the curriculum, which pays off in improved reading comprehension in the years ahead:

Kindergarten is just a start.  There is always the danger of fade out in later years, as we know from Headstart research.  Elsewhere in the nation, and right here in New York, schools have made noticeable progress in raising reading scores in the early grades according to NAEP, the Nations Report Card.   These improvements reflect better teaching of decoding.   But the improvements in scores are still confined to the early grades.   Verbal scores in the later grades of NAEP have stayed unacceptably low.   Yet these later verbal scores are the ones that predict a student’s ultimate success in life.     

The program consists of two strands: a phonics-heavy decoding strand, and a “listening and learning” strand to build content knowledge.  “Assuming that we will get funding to develop materials for the later grades,” Hirsch noted, “I am predicting that even more dramatic results will show up further on. Instead of the current flat or even declining verbal scores among middle and high school students we will see in students who follow a program like this significantly higher scores, and we will see a narrowing of the language gap between races and ethnic groups. ”

More coverage of the pilot program results can be found here and here.

Common Knowledge and Democracy

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 9, 2009 in Core Knowledge and Education Theory. 8 Comments

“Citizenship spins upon the axis of common information; its responsibilities require, at their base, the sense of security that comes from knowing that what I know is fundamentally similar to what you know.”

While this quote may sound as if it’s ripped directly from the pages E.D. Hirsch’s new book, The Making of Americans, it actually appears in a remarkable essay in the Columbia Journalism Review.  “Common Knowledge,” by Megan Garber, examines the fragmentation of news and its potential impact on our democracy.  News, writes Garber, is “democracy’s common denominator.”

Our political system demands not only that citizens receive a steady flow of information that will, in turn, allow them to be democratic decision-makers—but also that the information in question be, in a profound sense, shared. “A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it,” James Madison wrote, “is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both.” Madison wasn’t one to mince words; and it’s telling, here, that popular information, shared information—rather than simply information itself—was his concern. Without “popular information,” we lose not only our baseline of knowledge about the political world, but also our bearings within it. We risk becoming subject, as it were, to subjectivity itself—and ending up with a society, as William James had it, in which “people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”

The parallels between education and news are striking.  As news consumption increasingly defines itself “according to cliques rather than commons,” Garber points out, “cognition itself becomes ever more customizable.”

An infrastructure of information consumption that fosters homophily—that allows us to cocoon ourselves in our own worldviews—compromises our ability to relate to each other, discursively, as citizens of a diverse nation. It fosters distance and dissonance, rather than resisting them. It compromises that nebulous yet necessary space in democratic discourse: the public sphere. And it highlights a paradox of the digital age—that the diversity of our news outlets threatens the broader diversity of public discourse. The democratization of information, it turns out, is in some ways at odds with democracy itself.

Garber’s concerns are ultimately identical to Hirsch’s.  And her question–How do we determine which information will keep us broadly synchronized with everyone else?–is a question with equal potency for education and journalism.

Of what value is discourse, after all, when we’re unable able to talk about, and act upon, the same things? Imagine a book club in which everyone shows up having read different books—one person having read The Brothers Karamozov, another having read Pride and Prejudice, another having read Twilight. Or a town hall meeting in which one citizen comes prepared to talk about teacher tenure in the local schools, another to talk about improving a neighborhood park, another to talk about rewriting local zoning laws. There may be some discussion, sure—but that discussion will be crippled to the point of absurdity.

“Democratic discourse requires the core commonality of shared information,” Garber concludes.  “Otherwise, what’s the point?”

The Making of Americans

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 1, 2009 in Core Knowledge and Education Theory. 4 Comments

The official publication date is still two weeks away (Sept. 15), but copies of E.D. Hirsch’s new book, The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools, have started to hit the bookstores.  Jay Mathews gets a jump with his review in the Washington Post.  “If the inventive 81-year-old had been a business leader or politician or even a school superintendent, his fight to give U.S. children rich lessons in their shared history and culture would have made him a hero among his peers,” Mathews shrewedly observes. ”Instead, he chose to be an English professor, at the unlucky moment when academic fashion declared the American common heritage to be bunk and made people like Hirsch into pariahs.” 

Mathews notes (correctly, I think) that Hirsch’s new book makes the case for a common curriculum “in the clearest form since his ground-breaking 1987 book, Cultural Literacy.”

“The Making of Americans” puts the most troublesome elementary school subject, reading, at the center of its argument. Reading achievement and language proficiency generally have been disappointing for decades, particularly in schools full of the children of immigrant or impoverished parents. Progressives have called for engaging students with lessons that celebrate their real lives and their cultural heritages. Old books about dead white guys don’t hack it, they say. Hirsch’s research convinced him that this approach cut children off from the shared background they all must have to understand the words in front of them.

Richard Kahlenberg, reviews the book in the Autumn issue of The American Scholar, not yet available online:

In The Making of Americans, Hirsch…widens the lens to connect his ideas on education reform to the fundamental rationales for our system of public schools in the United States. Citing the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Horace Mann, Hirsch identifies two central reasons for the American “common school”: to create social mobility, allowing bright, hard-working students of all origins to enjoy the American dream; and to create social cohesion, binding children of diverse economic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds into citizens of a single nation. Hirsch makes a highly cogent case to support the concept that a common curriculum is necessary in elementary schools to further both goals. The American focus on skills, rather than on content, has left low-income students bereft of “unspoken background knowledge” that is explicitly taught in countries like France and Finland, where levels of academic inequality are much lower. “It does not seem to occur to the intellectual descendants of Rousseau,” Hirsch writes, “that the four-year-old children of rich, highly educated parents might be gaining academic knowledge at home that is unfairly being withheld (albeit with noble intentions) from the children of the poor.”

“American education would be far better off if leaders heeded Hirsch’s sound advice to restore a common-core curriculum, Kahlenberg concludes.  “Our system would do even better still if leaders went one step further and reinvented Horace Mann’s economically integrated common school for the 21st century.”

Nineteen Points and One Very Bad Idea

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 24, 2009 in Assessment and Testing, Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Education Practice, Educational Policy and accountability. 6 Comments

Near the end of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson sought to reassure Americans that what was known at the time as “The Great War” was a just cause.  In a speech to Congress, he outlined America’s war aims in “Fourteen Points” that were as broad as insuring freedom of navigation on international waters and fair trade, and as specific as redrawing the borders of several European nations and restoring their pre-war populations.  French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, in one of history’s finer bon mots, quipped, “Fourteen points?  Why, God Almighty has only Ten!” 

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan goes Wilson one better.  Five, actually.  He has Nineteen Points.  God has fallen nine back, well off the pace.

According to detailed guidelines being released today in Washington, states that hope for a piece of the $4.35 billion Race to the Top Fund will have to abide by 19 detailed criteria on academic standards, data-tracking, teacher recruitment and retention, and turning around low-performing schools.  “You can’t pick or choose here,” Duncan tells USA Today.

EdWeek’s Michele McNeil notes the guidelines “send a strong message that any state hoping to land a grant must allow student test scores to be used in decisions about teacher compensation and evaluation.”  While opposition to that will be summarily dismissed as the product of accountability-averse teachers unions, Dan Willingham has cogently described why this particular reform is not ready for prime time.  Still, states like New York and California, which currently forbid by law using test data to evalute teachers will not be eligible for Race to the Top funds, as McNeil points out:

Being able to link teacher and student data is “absolutely fundamental—it’s a building block,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in an interview. “We believe great teachers matter tremendously. When you’re reluctant or scared to make that link, you do a grave disservice to the teaching profession and to our nation’s children.”

To be sure, there is much to like about this Ed Reform Early Christmas, and the sense of urgency is welcome and laudable.  But let’s be clear, No Child Left Behind, however well-intentioned, did little to advance the idea that children benefit from a robust, well-rounded curriculum.  It did much to advance the idea that children must be taught whatever might appear on a year-end test. If time was limited, anything that did not contribute to this near-term payoff was jettisoned. Thus, aggressive accountability measures actively worked against the patient, steady development of background knowledge that creates both well-educated children and, ultimately, higher test-scores.  It beggars credulity to think that using data to hold individual teachers directly responsible for student gains will result in a sudden outbreak of big picture thinking in classrooms across the country. 

The idea that reading comprehension is a function of background knowledge has not taken deep hold in America’s classrooms.  And what teacher — especially the new, young and relatively inexperienced teachers who disproportionately fill struggling urban schools — will have the wherewithal to insist on the steady buildup of knowledge across the curriculum?  Indeed, if we are to have 19 points, why not round up to 20 and insist that a Race to the Top cannot happen without attending to a well-rounded curriculum?   Instead we are almost certain to have more — much more — of the deleterious effects of our data-driven, muscular accountability age:  endless focus on reading strategies that have limited impact, mind-numbing test prep, and no attention to the essential long-range development of background knowledge that will make reading gains possible years down the road.

“Language comprehension is a slow-growing plant,” observes E.D. Hirsch.  “Even with a coherent curriculum, the buildup of knowledge and vocabulary is a gradual, multiyear process that occurs at an almost imperceptible rate. The results show up later.” 

This is clear, this is obvious, and this is certain.  But there is simply no room for this kind of thinking in an accountability system that insists –for every good reason under the Sun–on results right now and encourages individual teachers to compete instead of cooperate.

Fast-forward.  It is 2016.  After a years of holding teachers accountable for short-term gains, and creating incentives that actively work against the buildup of knowledge, with disappointing results, we wake up and realize we are going about this the wrong way.  A few look back and say we should have listened to our Cassandras.  But other energetic, well-meaning  reformers see it another way.  Instead of realizing we have fatally neglected a robust curriculum, that we are reaping what we have sown, they will conclude that as a nation we simply have no good 8th grade reading teachers.  Aggressive, immediate action is needed.

Because after all, the data doesn’t lie, does it?

Voluntary National Standards Dead on Arrival

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 22, 2009 in No category. 21 Comments

A draft of the newly developed common core state standards purports to offer “sufficient guidance and clarity so that they are teachable, learnable and measurable,” however the ELA guidelines offer almost no specific content and little that would be of use to teachers in planning lessons–or parents in understanding what their child is expected to know.

Copies of the draft, an effort spearheaded by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association (NGA) have begun circulating among reviewers.  A copy found its way to me without any restrictions on its use or circulation.  I have posted the draft document here.  (Trouble with the link?  Try here instead)

The draft insists that the voluntary standards be “coherent” but defines coherence to mean they “should convey a unified vision of the big ideas and supporting concepts within a discipline and reflect a progression of learning that is meaningful and appropriate.”  Framed as a series of benchmarks students must reach “to be college and career ready,” the draft enumerates standards such as the ability to “determine what text says explicitly and use evidence within text to infer what is implied by or follows logically from the text.”

To put this as blandly as possible, this is neither a revelatory insight nor a meaningful standard.  Educators hoping for guidance on what particular texts are expected to be taught, or how to get students to reach the bland and obvious standards will be disappointed.  On specific “texts” the draft says merely:

The literary and informational texts chosen should be rich in content….This includes texts that have broad resonance and are referred to and quoted often, such as influential political documents, foundational literary works, and seminal historical and scientific texts.

“At first glance, these language standards are, despite the brave descriptors, very similar to the dysfunctional state standards already in place,” notes Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch, Jr.  “Like most state standards, they naively take a formalistic approach to language ability.   They assume that the ability to understand literary and informational language is chiefly a how–to skill, whereas it is chiefly a topic-dependent skill that varies with specific topic familiarity.”   

 A sample scientific text on covalent bonds in the draft document, Hirsch notes, is a “a good illustration of this general point.  Will it be more useful for understanding such texts to spend class time teaching some will-o-the-wisp language proficiency or to impart a good general education in science and the humanities?  

“One begins to despair,” Hirsch concludes.

And While You’re At It, Drop Off a Copy of “The Knowledge Deficit”…

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 24, 2009 in Assessment and Testing and Core Knowledge. 1 Comment

Dr. Yvonne Fournier, an education columnist for Scripps Howard, takes up E.D. Hirsch’s common sense call for state reading tests to reflect the content taught in each grade.  Responding to a mother who complains that her A-student son’s poor performance on a reading comprehension test is keeping him out of his school of choice, Fournier notes the advantage conferred by the content knowledge accumulated by higher SES kids — “the type of kids who get to learn not just through school but through the vocabulary their educated parents use, the trips they can take, the camps they attend, the extracurricular activities their parents can pay for, weekends at the lake house, Internet access and more.”

Fournier’s advice for the parent?  Clip Hirsch’s recent New York Times op-ed on testing and march to the district office:

Take a copy of Hirsch’s article to the person in charge of setting policy as to who gets into the better schools. Notify your school board and, if need be, the NAACP and your newspaper. Insist on your child’s report card to be taken as proof of his intellectual ability. He needs no further testing unless the school board wants to infer that your son’s teachers gave him his grades.

E.D. Hirsch on “Reading Test Dummies”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 16, 2009 in Assessment and Testing. 1 Comment

Earlier this week, Kathleen Dunn of Wisconsin Public Radio hosted E.D. Hirsch for an hour-long discussion of his recent New York Times op-ed, “Reading Test Dummies,” which called for aligning the reading passages on standardized tests with specific curricular content taught in each grade.  The interview is now archived on WPR’s website here.