Tag Archive for 'Mark Bauerlein'

A Place at the Standards Table for Content?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 2, 2009 in Curriculum and Educational Policy. 18 Comments

One of the early criticisms of the emerging “Common Core standards” initiative has been the question of who is writing them–and who isn’t.  The groups behind the multi-state effort, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, have set up a website that includes a list of the individuals working on math and English standards. As Edweek notes the list is “dominated by three organizations:” Achieve Inc., the College Board, and ACT Inc.

What’s new and interesting is the announcement of a pair of “Feedback Groups,” to offer expert input on the draft standards, which are due at the end of this month.  “Final decisions regarding the common core standards document will be made by the Standards Development Work Group,” notes the NGA announcement. “The Feedback Group will play an advisory role, not a decision-making role in the process.”

If you believe that content matters as much as process in crafting standards–that any attempt to write national standards should outline the specific material to be covered, not just describe the skills children should master–then the inclusion of Emory University’s Mark Bauerlein is a welcome name among the members of the English-language Arts Feedback Group, along with Fordham’s Checker Finn.  Bauerlein, author of the best-seller The Dumbest Generation, has been a consistent voice in favor of cultural literacy and teaching broad background knowledge.  Ironically, he may have presaged the debate he’ll find himself drawn into when he wrote recently about the difficulty of reaching consensus in college curriculum meetings.  Traditionalists, he observed, ”want to identify core texts, events, figures, and ideas….Progressivists want to enlarge the canon and contexts, to give representation to other cultures and identities, and explode the reigning ‘normativities,’ and they resist a core knowledge of any kind being set down as official.”

There doesn’t seem to be any way out of the impasse, however, which I think partly explains the rise of the “skills” movement in education circles. What the skills emphasis does is neutralize the culture-wars conflicts inherent in any knowledge selections in a curriculum. It speaks about abstract cognitive abilities such as “critical thinking,” “higher-order thinking skills,” and “problem solving.” No disturbing questions about representation of female authors on a syllabus or about Thomas Jefferson’s racial attitudes. Instead, the skills approach promises to empower students to handle those questions better later on — not here in the classroom, but after they have graduated from the skills curriculum.

Whether the feedback process is genuine or merely a way to blunt criticism remains to be seen, of course.  For now, the entire enterprise can be viewed with guarded optimism–the willing suspension of disbelief that anything of use will emerge.

It’s Not Your Fault, But It Is Your Problem

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 11, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Students and Teaching. 11 Comments

Mark Bauerlein has a piece on the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Brainstorm blog that should give pause to those whose definition of achievement in public education starts and stops with reading and math scores. 

Bauerlein spins a fictional tale of a top Emory University law school student interviewing at one of the leading law firms in Atlanta.  Over lunch with the senior partners, the conversation turns toward the older gentlemen’s memories of the Cold War. “It’s not a test, and it’s not planned,” Bauerlein notes.  ”For them, the Cold War is simply one of those realities that any intelligent person is familiar with and has some opinions about.”  But the overachieving young man has nothing to add and is conspicuously out of his depth.   

The others have the tact to move on, but they note the deficiency. It doesn’t cost the young man the job, but the senior fellows make a judgment. This guy, they think, is sharp and hard-working, but get out of his training and he doesn’t bring much to the table. The deeper awareness that makes for a sober judgment and wider perspective is missing…This is the professional value of cultural literacy. It counts a lot more in professional spheres than academics and educators realize. The measure is informal, yes, but it makes a difference in how peers and superiors regard you.

Bauerlein’s piece reminded me of a conversation I had with an unusually bright student a few years ago.  She blew away every math and reading test she’d ever taken, but her walking around knowledge of even basic history, geography and current events was virtually nonexistent (Granted, she was a 5th grader, but she was under the impression that New Jersey was a country).  Discussing the gaps in her education, I told her, “This is not your fault, but it is your problem.”  Indeed, this young lady had done absolutely everything asked of her in school.  Her lack of breadth was not something she chose, but something we had allowed to happen to her.   If the gaps in her knowledge persist into adulthood, I knew, the world would certainly judge her skeptically, even harshly, for precisely the reasons Bauerlein describes–especially as a person of color from the South Bronx. 

Crucially, this was a kid with top scores on standardized tests–one of my school’s rare ”double 4s” in both math and reading.  By that measure–but only by that measure–a screaming success story of public education.  But what the data doesn’t show, and Baurlein’s piece reminds us, is that out in the real world there are very different metrics at work.  There’s too often far less to our current definition of success than meets the eye.

The Best and the Brightestest

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 8, 2008 in Assessment and Testing and Education News. 4 Comments

It is a generational right, and probably a compulsion, to look at the generation in the rear view mirror and pronounce them unfit to lead.  Hence books like Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, and Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason.  But look at the data, and you’ll see something surprising.  The short of the stick in the brains department is being held, not by today’s 20-somethings and teens, but by those born from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s.  “Compared with every other birth cohort,” writes author Neil Howe in the Washington Post, “they have performed the worst on standardized exams, acquired the fewest educational degrees and been the least attracted to professional careers. In a word, they’re the dumbest.”

Want proof? Let’s start with the long-term results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is housed within the U.S. Department of Education. Considered the gold standard in assessing K-12 students, the NAEP has been in continuous operation for decades. Here’s the bottom line: On both the reading and the math tests, and at all three tested ages (9, 13 and 17), the lowest-ever scores in the history of the NAEP were recorded by children born between 1961 and 1965.

Same story, different test:  “The SAT reached its all-time high in 1963, when it tested the 1946 birth cohort,” says Howe.  “Then it fell steeply for 17 straight years, hitting its all-time low in 1980, when it tested the 1963 cohort.  Ever since, the SAT has been gradually if haltingly on the rise, paralleling improvements in the NAEP.”

Using Video Games as Bait

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 6, 2008 in Education News. 0 Comments

Book publishers are increasingly using video games to “extend the fictional world” of novels for young readers.  By doing so, the New York Times reports, authors and publishers are hoping to lure gamers who might not otherwise pick up a book.  And that’s just a start.

Spurred by arguments that video games also may teach a kind of digital literacy that is becoming as important as proficiency in print, libraries are hosting gaming tournaments, while schools are exploring how to incorporate video games in the classroom. In New York, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is supporting efforts to create a proposed public school that will use principles of game design like instant feedback and graphic imagery to promote learning.

“But doubtful teachers and literacy experts question how effective it is to use an overwhelmingly visual medium to connect youngsters to the written word,” the Times notes. 

Mark Bauerlein, the Emory University professor and author of the recent best-seller The Dumbest Generation is not among those  quoted by the Times.  But it’s a safe bet he would cast a skeptical eye on the piece.  In a recent essay he wondered whether digital literacy is reading at all. ”Yes, it’s a kind of literacy,”he cautioned, ”but it breaks down in the face of a dense argument, a Modernist poem, a long political tract, and other texts that require steady focus and linear attention.”

For publishers, the lure of appealing to gamers is obvious: enhanced sales and — as they say in marketing-speak — multiplatform merchandising.  For educators?  Proceed with caution.

You’re Not Going to Read This Post

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 20, 2008 in Education Theory, Higher Education and Literacy. 4 Comments

Digital technology has become an imperial force in education, and it should meet more antagonists argues Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein.  Clearly he’s among those antagonists.  Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, he makes a strong case for reading online as a lesser kind of literacy, with profound implications for teaching and learning.  

Pointing to the work of Web researcher Jakob Nielsen, who has studied the eye movements of readers, Bauerlein notes that people read online in a physically different pattern than text on a printed page.   Online, readers eyes move in a pattern resembling the upper case letter F.  ”At the top, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a slowdown around the middle of the page,” says Bauerlein.  ”Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored.” 

In the eye-tracking test, only one in six subjects read Web pages linearly, sentence by sentence. The rest jumped around chasing keywords, bullet points, visuals, and color and typeface variations. In another experiment on how people read e-newsletters, informational e-mail messages, and news feeds, Nielsen exclaimed, “‘Reading’ is not even the right word.” The subjects usually read only the first two words in headlines, and they ignored the introductory sections. They wanted the “nut” and nothing else.

In short, online literacy is simply not literacy as we conventionally understand it.  “Yes, it’s a kind of literacy,” Baurlein writes, ”but it breaks down in the face of a dense argument, a Modernist poem, a long political tract, and other texts that require steady focus and linear attention — in a word, slow reading. Fast scanning doesn’t foster flexible minds that can adapt to all kinds of texts, and it doesn’t translate into academic reading,” he writes.

Bauerlein is writing from the persepective of a college professor, and he concerns himself with higher education, but his arguments pertain to all classrooms where we are worshipping at the altar of technology.  “Given the tidal wave of technology in young people’s lives, let’s frame a number of classrooms and courses as slow-reading (and slow-writing) spaces,” he concludes.  “Pencils, blackboards, and books are no longer the primary instruments of learning, true, but they still play a critical role in the formation of intelligence, as countermeasures to information-age mores. That is a new mission for educators parallel to the mad rush to digitize learning, one that may seem reactionary and retrograde, but in fact strives to keep students’ minds open and literacy broad. Students need to decelerate, and they can’t do it by themselves.”

Good, smart stuff from an iconoclastic thinker.  Of course, you stopped reading two paragraphs ago.

A Second Act In American Life

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 4, 2008 in Core Knowledge and Higher Education. 0 Comments

“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.