Lots of blogging lately about the 21st Century skills movement. Now, E.D. Hirsch, Diane Ravitch, Dan Willingham and Ken Kay, the President of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills will have at it at a panel discussion in Washington, DC on Tuesday, Feb. 24, titled “What is the Proper Role of Skills in the Curriculum? A critique of the idea of 21st century skills.” Details on the program, which is hosted by Common Core and moderated by its co-chair, Antonia Cortese are here. If you’d like to attend send an email to info@commoncore.org.
Tag Archive for 'E. D. Hirsch'
One of President-elect Barack Obama’s education ideas is to “improve the assessments used to track student progress.” But improving the tests may be tougher than he appreciates ”and the problem may be rooted in the state standards themselves,” says UVA cognitive scientist Dan Willingham. ”Most people underestimate how hard it is to write good test items that are based on state standards.” Writing at Britannica Blog, Willingham notes:
If you want to assess what students know and can do, it is only reasonable to list your expectations. Make the expectations too broad and they do not help students, teachers, and parents understand what is expected. Make them too narrow and you invite teachers to teach the list of expectations at the expense of everything else.
“I don’t see how these problems can be avoided unless you make the expectations more comprehensive,” concludes Willingham. “That is, instead of writing a list of standards, specify the expectations for contents and skills in more detail—in short, base tests on a curriculum. A curriculum would differ from a list of standards because it would include both the broad conceptual ideas and the specific content, and it would describe how the abstract concepts relate to the specific content.”
E.D. Hirsch, Jr. sounded a similar call early this year in a cover story in the American Educator, which argued that reading tests should contain passages about specific topics taught not just in literature, but in all other subjects taught in that grade. It makes all the sense in the world, for the reasons Dan Willingham describes.
Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch is interviewed by Claus von Zastrow of the Learning First Alliance over at the website Public School Insights. While supporting the broad aims of accountability, Hirsch laments the narrowing of the curriculum that has occurred under NCLB, since broad general knowledge is critical to reading comprehension. Thus ”if you push out subject matter, you’re also pushing out reading comprehension.”
Discussing the new Core Knowledge Reading Program, which will be piloted in ten New York City schools this year, Hirsch notes that the “listening and learning” strand of the program is key, since when it comes to taking in information ”reading doesn’t catch up to listening until 7th grade on average. You’re really handicapping yourself in the teaching of general knowledge that’s needed for reading comprehension if you insist on doing it through the decoding process.”
There’s lots more. You can hear the entire interview here.
Does giving a kid an iPod mean you are teaching “21st century skills?”
A Chapel Hill, North Carolina middle school may become the first in the country to give an iPod to every teacher and student, “an experiment that would challenge teachers and administrators to ensure the hand-held devices are used as learning tools, not toys,” reports the News & Observer. The school’s principal defends the iPod plan with a phrase that is rapidly becoming an education cliche: “[Our teachers] state their commitment to teach 21st-century skills, because technology is the future for students and teachers.”
Reporter Matt Dees injects a healthy note of skepticism in his piece, noting “it’s still not clear how the iPod Touches would be used at Culbreth Middle School. And school officials know that students may use the iPod Touches more to download the new Jonas Brothers single than to tap the riches of human knowledge.” Dees quotes Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch, who comments, “There has been a tendency to use technology as a substitute for curriculum.”
Technique and how-to ideas have taken the place of deciding what it is, exactly, we want these children to learn, says Hirsch. But I have nothing against the technology if it’s in the service of grown-ups facing their responsibilities to decide what the students need to know precisely. If they did that, these technical gadgets will be valuable.
I’ve been hearing the phrase a lot, so I ask the question in earnest: What exactly does it mean to ”teach 21st century skills”? Is learning to play an instrument a 21st century skill because you use an iPod? Is writing a research paper a 21st century skill just because you use Google? I’m hard-pressed to think of a single use of the phrase that didn’t conflate the tool and the task.
In a New York Times piece last week, Steve Lohr noted the technology is starting to “turn the corner” in schools, and offered an example of how it can transform learning. “The emphasis can shift to project-based learning, a real break with the textbook-and-lecture model of education. In a high school class, a project might begin with a hypothetical letter from the White House that says oil prices are spiking, the economy is faltering and the president’s poll numbers are falling. The assignment would be to devise a new energy policy in two weeks,” Lohr wrote. But as Joanne Jacobs noted, there’s nothing new about project learning. I would add that neither is working collaboratively intrinsically “21st century.”
Critical thinking? Problem solving? As old as banging rocks together to make fire. Working collaboratively? You mean, like hunting in groups to bring down a antelope? I’m no Luddite, and I’m all for using technology in the service of learning. But what are these uniquely “21st century skills?” Are there any?
E.D.Hirsch opposed to a core curriculum? Yes, but in college. In an essay on Forbes.com Hirsch argues against expecting colleges to do work that ought to be done by K-12 schools. ”The underlying problem is not that our professors are feckless or that our undergraduates are brain-dead addicts of iPods and cellphones who lack curiosity and passion for knowledge, he writes. “The real problem is that these young men and women, through no fault of their own, are showing up on campuses undereducated and unprepared for college-level work. They should have received a good general education before they arrived on campus.”
They need remedial courses–including “core curriculum” courses in science, history, the arts and civics–at the time in their lives when they want to launch out on their own, exploring, discovering and pursuing interests at a high level. A required core curriculum in college is not something to be devoutly wished for, but rather a concession to the consequences of a third-rate preparation for first-rate colleges and universities….But though we may currently need to do so, the last thing we should want to do is impose a table d’hôte of required classes on undergraduates who are enjoying their first taste of academic freedom and a chance to chart their own educational destinies.
“There is a real danger that in making colleges the academic safety net of last resort, we’ll absolve the public schools of their obligation to provide students with a sound, well-rounded education,” Hirsch cautions. ”It’s damaging to our students, to our country and to our higher education system, which is the lone bright star in our educational firmament. Everyone loses.”
Long before I began teaching, I carried on a silent debate with Al Shanker and his “Where We Stand” column. I seethed when he recounted the common question—”is it on the test?”—and then dignified the mindset that produced such a juvenile question. Like so many liberals, my educational philosophy was a hybrid between Dewey’s (and the 1960s’) progressivism and the heroic fantasy created by Hollywood of the charismatic teacher who transforms students by the power of personality and hope. Shanker, however, did convince me that standards were politically necessary and maybe they were educationally valid.
I read Hirsch with the wisdom of half of a decade in the classroom, and I rejected his approach completely… Hirsch sounded too much like a fact-driven traditionalist. He sounded too much like a testing advocate.
My rookie year in an alternative school for felons was a perfect proving ground for my ideals. Our two teachers and our two social workers functioned interchangeably like linebackers in the old “3-4-4″ defense. Class and counseling were recognizably different at times, but mostly we worked seamlessly as student-centered teams. Anytime I wanted adjust my lesson plans, I would dismiss our Social Studies class, and notify the kids that we are now in Science class. And the students were free to do the same. When an emotionally disturbed student barged into class one morning in a particularly agitated state, he directed me, “John, teach me something.” “OK, I replied, today we are studying Psychology,” and I provided a simplified version of autonomic functioning, habit, and choice. The student then scribbled a diary of the day’s thoughts, categorizing them as “auto” and “congo,” which were his spellings of automatic and conscious, and habit. It would have made a great scene on The Wire.
Even as I congratulated myself for my innovative lessons, I started to recognize the impossibility of making the “bricks” of great ideas without the “straw” of information. When I moved to a regular high school, I saw that most of my students had almost no recall from their previous classes. An A.P. student answered that Vietnam was the war we won after dropping the atomic bomb. And it got worse from there.
Continue reading ‘A Progressive Educator Learns to Love Core Knowledge’
“The Dumbest Generation” author Mark Bauerlein has an interesting piece about Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Bauerlein has a good grasp of his work on cultural literacy and curriculum, but his piece is about Hirsch’s career before Core Knowledge–work that set Hirsch “at the forefront of literary study.”
I don’t know of any publication in which Hirsch explains why he stopped doing critical theory; or, indeed, why he exited the whole high-powered/grad school/research humanities world. We may assume, though, that Hirsch simply drew a sweeping conclusion over the course of the 1970s: Literary theory and literary study were drifting ever farther from the pressing intellectual needs of 19-year-olds. Students were coming into college with cultural-literacy deficits, and humanities professors weren’t responding. All the incentives of professional success steered professors away from the freshman classroom, not to mention from the pre-college years, and glamour of a symposium in which theory stars hashed out Derrida’s latest turned a composition class into sheer drudgery. That didn’t change the fact that the help students needed came properly in elementary and middle school, and Hirsch directed his attention accordingly. His example is worth remembering.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was clearly wrong.
From Core Knowledge
An Epoch-Making Report, But What About the Early Grades?
By E.D. Hirsch, Jr.
In the 25 years since A Nation at Risk was issued, writes Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch, Jr., energetic reform efforts have been put forth, to small overall effect. 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.
Best of the Blogs
What Should Happen in Our Houses of Learning? — Diane Ravitch in Bridging Differences
“The goal is not the problem. The implementation is. ”
Gering Public Schools: The School District to Watch — D-ed Reckoning
Direct Instruction turns around a Nebraska district
A Closer Look at School Violence in Chicago — Eduwonkette
What do trends in weapon-carrying and fighting among teenagers in Chicago look like?
Nzeyimana can’t use ‘prowl’ in a sentence — Joanne Jacobs
How do you pass No Child Left Behind, when you don’t speak English?
Teaching, Content and Curriculum
Still at Risk
By Frederick M. Hess, American Enterprise Institute,
When it comes to familiarity with major historical events and significant literary accomplishments, America’s seventeen-year-olds fare rather poorly. When it comes to familiarity with the base of knowledge that enables us to engage in conversations about values and policy, our seventeen-year-olds are barely literate.
Report Calls for Moving Away From K-12 Tests and Sanctions
By David J. Hoff, Education Week
Congress and the next president need to offer a new vision for the federal role in K-12 education, creating a sustained effort to increase the quality of teachers, tailoring accountability systems to measure higher-order thinking, and ensuring that all spending is equalized across school districts, a report from a group of educators and researchers says.
Education Policy
‘Nation at Risk’: The best thing or the worst thing for education?
By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
Twenty-five years ago this week, Americans awoke to a forceful little report that, depending on your point of view, either ruined public education or saved it. “A Nation at Risk” kick-started decades of tough talk about public schools and reforms that culminated in 2002’s No Child Left Behind, the Bush administration law that pushes schools to improve students’ basic skills or face ever-tougher sanctions.
Obama’s Real Bill Ayers Problem
By Sol Stern, City Journal
Barack Obama complains that he’s been unfairly attacked for a casual political and social relationship with his neighbor, former Weatherman Bill Ayers. But the more pressing issue is not the damage done by the Weather Underground 40 years ago, but the far greater harm inflicted on the nation’s schoolchildren by the political and educational movement in which Ayers plays a leading role today.
Education Secretary Offers Changes to ‘No Child’ Law
By Sam Dillon, The New York Times
Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings used her executive powers on Tuesday to propose a series of ninth-inning regulatory fixes to President Bush’s signature education law, No Child Left Behind, including requiring states to use a single federal formula to calculate and report high school graduation rates. Ms. Spellings also wants to require schools to notify parents of their right to transfer students out of failing schools two weeks before the start of each school year, and to explain more fully to parents the opportunities for federally financed tutoring that are available to students attending troubled schools.
Parenting and Homeschooling
‘America’s Worst Mom?’
By Lenore Skenazy, The New York Sun
When I wrote a column in this paper last week, “Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Take The Subway Alone,” I figured I’d get some emails — pro and con. Two days later I was on the “Today Show,” MSNBC, Fox News, and all manner of talk radio with a new title under my smiling face: “America’s Worst Mom?”
California Court to Reconsider Homeschooling
By Michael Coulter, School Reform News
California’s Second Appellate District Court of Appeals touched off a firestorm when it issued an opinion that parents have no right to homeschool their own children–a firestorm so great that on March 25, a full month after issuing its decision, the court agreed to rehear the case, with a decision expected in June.
Homeschool parents, kids oppose bill
By Michael Brindley, Nashua (NH) Telegraph
For the second time in two weeks, homeschool parents and their children turned out in droves to oppose a bill that would require parents to submit a curriculum plan to the state. The legislature passed a bill in 2006 that eliminated the requirement for parents to submit such a plan on an annual basis.
Homeschooling notification is not an undue burden
Editorial, The Press & Argus Livingston, MI
Parents have every right to homeschool their children, and Lansing needs to be very careful whenever it considers legislation that might inhibit that right. That said, we don’t feel that it’s an undue burden on homeschooling parents to be required to notify their home school district that they’re educating their children at home.
E.D. Hirsch, Jr., a slightly awkward man with a quick smile, seems an unlikely combatant in the culture wars. Once best known in academic circles as a literary critic, author, English professor, and scholar of hermeneutics, the theory and methodology of interpretation of texts, Hirsch was catapulted to the center of the culture debate with the publication of his 1987 book Cultural Literacy (Houghton Mifflin).
Since then, Hirsch has become a lightning rod for criticism from multiculturalists in the academy. Said Harvard professor Howard Gardner in 1997: “[Hirsch] has swallowed a neoconservative caricature of contemporary American education. If this kind of angry, stereotypical thinking is what results from a ‘core knowledge’ orientation, then I want no part of it.” But Hirsch’s supporters, including national organizations such as the American Federation of Teachers, argue that his work espousing a coherent and content-rich curriculum for American students has been an indispensable part of school improvement.
Hirsch is professor emeritus of education and humanities at the
… In May, 2006, Education Sector Co-director Andrew J. Rotherham sat down with Hirsch in
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