Whole language or phonics? Skills or content? Equity or excellence? In visits to successful schools, Karin Chenoweth has “been struck by how free they are from the frustrating controversies other schools get mired in.” Chenoweth who works for the Education Trust, writes in Education Week that high-achieving schools with significant populations of low-income children ”tend to avoid questions about the philosophy of reading instruction. Rather, they approach the issue with what I consider a cheerful empiricism.”
One such school is PS/MS 124, a Core Knowledge school and a past winner of Ed Trust’s “Dispelling the Myth” award. As part of the New York City school system, “it is expected to teach its students a district curriculum that emphasizes skills rather than a set body of content,” writes Chenoweth. But principal Valarie Lewis, noticed “teachers would teach skills, but if [the children] didn’t have background knowledge, it didn’t stick.”
She and the school’s then-principal, Elain Thompson, brought the Core Knowledge program to the school. Its curriculum, developed in part by E.D. Hirsch Jr., focuses on providing students with a great deal of background knowledge, from nursery rhymes to Newton’s Laws. ‘Teachers still need to teach the skills,’ said Judy Lefante, the school’s Core Knowledge coordinator, ‘but we’ve worked hard through professional development to make sure they teach skills through content.’ Skills such as making inferences, drawing conclusions, and separating facts from opinion, for example, are all worked on within the science and social studies content areas.”
Student achievement at PS/MS 124 is “almost indistinguishable from that of wealthy, white schools,” Chenoweth notes, “despite the fact that more than 80 percent of its mostly African-American, Latino, and South Asian students qualify for free lunches,”
“The point is this,” she concludes. “Arguments that for too long have fostered false dichotomies, pitting one practice against another, can be resolved—but only if educators have as their clear goal ensuring that all their students become educated citizens, and then focus closely on what it takes to help them reach that goal.”
The principal and teachers at Atlanta’s Capitol View Elementary School know that most people expect their students to fail. Nine of 10 live in poverty. Their parents are not well traveled, their bedrooms lack shelves sagging with books. When they walk to school, they might step around drug paraphernalia.
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