Strategic Thoughts
Undelivered Remarks, Philanthropy Roundtable. Nov. 10, 2006
© 2006 Core Knowledge Foundation. Not to be copied or reproduced without permission from the Core Knowledge Foundation, 801 E. High Street, Charlottesville, VA 22902.
I will speak for about 30 minutes and will try to live up to the billing of “A Conversation with E D Hirsch,” which is not the same as a monologue. I’ve called these introductory conversational comments “Strategic thoughts.” We need to find strategies for leveraging our huge educational system through carefully conceived incentives and models of excellence. My focus will be on an area that philanthropy has not traditionally emphasized — K-8 curriculum and the materials to implement it.
This is a group of people I am truly glad to talk to. Philanthropists make up probably the most important group that keeps independent of the educators and official bureaucrats who run our schools. The 1950’s reformer Arthur Bestor called that group an “interlocking directorate,” and said the ideas governing their political and intellectual monopoly have created what he called an “educational wasteland.” He hoped that well-informed philanthropy might counter the monopoly, and introduce better ideas and policies.
I am speaking to you philanthropists as one of you, having personally given over five million dollars to educational reform through the royalties that I have turned over to Core Knowledge Foundation. I haven’t any more significant money to give. I’m particularly grateful to those of you who have sought us out and helped us, especially the Challenge Foundation which discovered us in 1991 and has been helping us ever since. The strategic initiatives that I’m going to outline here may constitute the most promising and efficient way we can now spend money on educational improvement. It has taken me twenty years to gain strategic clarity on what needs to be done in our present circumstances, and I am eager for others to share in my hard-won insight — especially those of you who are in a position to think independently and get something done.
I m going to suggest that encouraging a better K-8 curriculum, and at the same time also encouraging the creation of excellent model materials that impart such a curriculum effectively will be critical to the success of other reform initiatives such as the No Child Left Behind law, the charter-school movement, the state-standards movement, and even the teacher-quality movement. To keep within time constraints in these remarks, my sharp focus will be on enhancing students’ verbal abilities, which are highly correlated with their other academic achievements including those in science and math.
In developing students’ verbal abilities there are two significant achievement gaps in American K-12 education. The first is the gap between our students’ reading levels and the reading levels of students in other developed countries. On this measure we lag behind 16 developed countries, which bodes ill for our continued economic competitiveness. The second reading gap occurs within the United States — between demographic groups. It is a big fairness gap, and on this measure we also lag behind other developed countries — some 20 of them. We can do a lot better in narrowing both of these gaps by paying more attention to curriculum and classroom materials.
Results from current reforms are not encouraging. Granted that recent analyses questioning the superiority of charter schools over regular public schools may be flawed, still nobody would argue that charter-school results are as good as most of us first hoped. We have been similarly disappointed in other reforms meant to improve the quality and equity of schooling — the state-standards movement and the No Child Left Behind law. The results of these reforms have been meager considering our investments in money and time. Elementary schools now spend, under pressure from No Child Left Behind, 90 to 120 minutes each day on language arts, using mainly a how-to approach to reading that, as I point out in The Knowledge Deficit, lacks coherent content. The result of this intensive activity has been an improvement in 4th grade reading scores, but, to everyone’s disappointment, negligible progress in reading comprehension in the later grades where the scores really count for the nation and a student’s chances in life. Recently, New York State reported a significant drop-off in reading ability in grade 6 and thereafter, a pattern repeated in the other states. A few months ago, the College Board reported another decline in the verbal scores of 12th graders. All told, American educational reform efforts from all quarters since 1983, the date of A Nation at Risk, have had a smaller impact than we had a right to expect, given the energy, time, and money we have expended.
In sketching the reasons for these disappointments, and the place of curriculum in overcoming them, I’ll first provide some historical context to explain the current curriculum situation, then I’ll summarize some of the research findings behind my general recommendations. Finally, I’ll outline what I think the priorities are given the present context.
First, the historical context. If you look at this chart, you will see that there was a sharp decline in the verbal abilities of American 12th graders from a peak in 1963 to a low point around 1980. Thereafter, despite our current modest progress, scores have remained rather flat.
This historic pattern needs to be kept in mind when we hear yearly reports about small ups and downs in verbal scores. Since 1980, the overall pattern of reading skill of 12th graders has remained within a narrow range, never coming close to the levels once achieved in the 1950s and early 60s. Educators claim that the precipitous drop in the 60s and 70s was due to an increase in the numbers of lower-income students taking the SAT, but this explanation has been shown to be inadequate. Cutting to the nub of the issue was a quiet insight by the sociologist Christopher Jencks, who pointed out that the state of Iowa like the rest of the nation, suffered a decline in verbal scores during the 60s and 70s yet Iowa in those days was 98 per cent white, and middle class. Hence an influx of low-income students could not adequately explain why Iowadeclined so sharply in the 1960s. Jencks correctly posited that the chief cause of the verbal decline was what had been happening to instruction in the nation’s schools.
What did happen to school instruction in the 1950s that lowered the scores in the 1960s? I say “1950s” because it takes some years for a student to receive the full benefit or liability of a new educational idea, so when we see 12th-graders declining drastically in the mid 60s, we need to know what changes occurred in schooling during the previous decade. Mostly it was this: a new post-1945 generation of teachers and administrators replaced the older ones, and this new cohort shared strongly-held ideas about curriculum and followed new textbooks reflecting those ideas. Recent analyses of the watering down and fragmentation of textbooks have helped confirm this explanation. In the 1950s, most teachers, administrators and textbooks reflected a new point of view, variously called child-centered education, progressivism, or constructivism. Its key feature was its opposition to subject-centered education and to a grade-by-grade curriculum set up in advance.
We can see what lay behind this change in schooling in an essay written in 1939 by the brilliant Isaac Kandel, an education professor at Teachers College. He crystallized what was happening then to American education and why it was happening. He observed that since the early years of the 20th century an argument had been going on among American education professors whether schooling should center on subject matter or should grow from the needs of the pupil. The latter idea was the one that caught hold. Kandel’s succinct summary of this new scheme of education can hardly be improved upon.
Rejecting … emphasis on formal subject matter, the progressives began to worship at the altar of the child. Children [they said] should be allowed to grow in accordance with their needs and interests. … Knowledge is valuable only as it is acquired in a real situation; the teacher must be present to provide the proper environment for experiencing but must not intervene except to guide and advise. There must, in fact, be “nothing fixed in advance” and subjects must not be “set-out-to-be-learned.”… No reference was ever made to the curriculum or its content. … The full weight of the progressive attack is against subject matter and the planned organization of a curriculum in terms of subjects.
“The full weight of the progressive attack is against subject matter and the planned organization of a curriculum in terms of subjects.” Reading these remarks of Kandel after many years of experience in the field brought all into focus for me. It made me realize finally that none of the familiar reasons currently marshaled in opposition to particular subject matter or “mere facts” are the real objections to substantive school reform. Not the importance of local control, not the ever-changing character of knowledge, not the closing off of creativity, not conservative politics, not slogans about elitism, Eurocentrism, authoritarianism, traditionalism, and other scary objections to a set curriculum. Those who pronounce these views surely believe them, but the more fundamental, often hidden, issue is whether there should be any set curriculum at all.
Anyone who doubts that this is the fundamental issue can make a simple test: Whenever an objection against a particular content curriculum is made, ask yourself: is the objection followed up by a counter proposal for a definite alternative curriculum that removes the supposed objection? In my experience this never happens. If you examine state or district language-arts standards, you will find that specific content is left up for grabs. This strange fact is not owing to indifference, it is the historical result of the doctrine that there shall be no set content curriculum.
This explains why the state-standards movement has been so toothless and ineffectual in enhancing verbal abilities. Most of us take the word “standards” to include the idea of curriculum-guides to content. But that word “standards,” which we have become so used to employing, is often a way of avoiding detailed content without seeming to avoid it. The job of constructing state standards has been put into the hands of people who have been long indoctrinated with the principle that there shall be no set content-curriculum. This view has also affected the charter-school movement. For, typically, our charter schools, lacking content-based materials in language arts, do not follow a specific grade-by-grade content curriculum in that subject. Most charter schools continue to follow materials created on the very principles that led in the 1960s to a sharp decline in our students’ verbal abilities.
Not just state standards and charter schools are affected by the anti-content doctrine. Teacher quality is as well. Teacher quality is considered by many to be the new frontier of educational reform. While the qualities that make a good teacher are varied and complex, we know that an essential one is knowledge of the subject matter being taught. Teacher ignorance is a lesser problem for nations that have a set core curriculum. The way to make sure that teachers know the subject matter of a particular grade level is to train them in that specific subject matter — a thing that is done most effectively when it is known in advance what the subject matter is going to be. An incoherent system like ours wears down teachers even of high quality. As I observe in The Knowledge Deficit, many good teachers leave the profession because of the huge challenges created by curricular incoherence. A much higher percentage of teachers leave from the later grades where there are huge, unmanageable, discrepancies of student preparation which, were caused by the content incoherence of the earlier grades.
So much for historical background. Now let me turn to the underlying scientific reasons why the lack of a coherent content curriculum has led to a decline in student learning and verbal abilities. Take the example of vocabulary, which is a convenient marker for a range of verbal skills. Most word learning occurs slowly and unawares when we encounter new words in an understood context. The direct learning of vocabulary through explicit definitions is usually ineffectual and, pursued too intently, is wasteful of time. As George A. Miller has shown, children often misinterpret explicit definitions, and in their compositions will come up with sentences like these:
- Mrs. Morrow stimulated the soup. (That is she stirred it up.)
- Our family erodes a lot. (That is, they eat out a lot.)
- I was meticulous about falling off the cliff. (That is, I was careful.)
The best way to learn new words is to understand the gist of the discourse in which the words occur. First we learn things; then we learn words. To learn the word “carnivorous” from the sentence “Alligators are carnivorous,” a child should already know something about alligators, such as their having big jaws that chomp creatures. With prior knowledge a child is more likely to make a good guess about the connotations of the new word. When the context is familiar, the learning of new words occurs up to four times faster.
Specific knowledge is more than a means of vocabulary growth. It is central to reading comprehension itself. As an epigraph to The Knowledge Deficit, I used the following quotation from a classic work in psycholinguistics by Kintsch and Van Dyke. Let me quote it again, since it summarizes the issue succinctly.
“One of the major contributions of psychology is the recognition [that] … much of the information needed to understand a text is not provided by the information expressed in the text itself, but must be drawn from the language user’s [prior] knowledge of the person, objects, states of affairs, or events the discourse is about.”
The implications for reading and verbal gains are massive. Knowledge of things not set down on the page is just as important to comprehension as knowledge of the words that are set down on the page. One example I used in my book was the sentence “Jones sacrificed and knocked in a run.” To a typical Englishman that’s a meaningless jumble of words. To understand the sentence about Jones, you have to know a lot about baseball that isn’t explained. Reading always depends on what cognitive scientists call “domain-specific” prior knowledge.
Thus both vocabulary growth and reading comprehension depend on specific prior knowledge of the relevant domain. The how-to approach to language arts, unconcerned with specific grade-by-grade content, has not worked, and is not going to work. A child’s knowledge needs to be built up cumulatively and explicitly, grade by grade. It is the work of years, not months. The only way to do this properly for all children is through a content-specific, grade-by-grade curriculum that stresses the knowledge most useful for comprehension, for school learning, and for communication within the civic life of a society.
To sum up the research findings: cognitive science has established that one’s learning of words depends on one’s prior knowledge of things. Thence, one’s subsequent knowledge of words enables one to learn still more new things, and so on. Those who have a head start in knowledge and vocabulary, will therefore tend to pull ever farther ahead. But as I explain in, The Knowledge Deficit, a systematic and cumulative curriculum can actually reverse this trend, and narrow the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students. If schooling is coherent in building up knowledge of the important domains, then, over a period of three or four years, you will see a remarkable increase of both knowledge and vocabulary, and a narrowing of the gap. But if schooling is incoherent, lacking in a definite curriculum, it will not systematically build up knowledge, and you will see low verbal scores and poor performance in reading and learning, and in equity — that is, you will see what we now have in the United States.
Finally let me turn to some specific policies and initiatives implied by this analysis. It powerfully argues for a set curriculum. It is of course too premature to speak of a national one, or even a state one. And besides that is not something we can now do much about. But a school and preferably a district does need to think in those terms. A set curriculum doesn’t mean that every topic has to be set in advance. In Finland, for example, which recently scored the best of any nation in reading, only the core curriculum is predetermined, consisting of some 60 per cent of the whole. This Finnish core curriculum ensures that no child has glaring gaps in knowledge. But within that 60 per cent structure, Finnish schools and teachers develop their own approaches, filling out the other 40 per cent of the curriculum in their own way, but with careful attention to avoiding repetition. As result, children in Finland all study a definite sequence of topics, with each grade building on the previous one and without big knowledge gaps or time-wasting repetitions.
Let me state very clearly why such a set curriculum is the only means by which overall achievement can be raised and the learning gap between groups narrowed. By avoiding knowledge gaps and unfruitful, boring, and time-wasting repetitions, Finnish schools help children build up their general knowledge, which in turn enables them over the years to gain still more knowledge and learn more words. One should add further that a set core curriculum which contains much of the best that has been thought and said in the world is far more interesting and enabling than a how-to, helter-skelter non-curriculum that wastes time, leaves gaps, imposes huge opportunity costs on children, and that is especially harmful to the most disadvantaged. This is a general argument. It is not a plea for a particular curriculum sequence. Moreover, it doesn’t much matter educationally whether the needed vitamin is delivered by one good pedagogical method or another, or whether it takes place in a charter school, an independent school, or a regular public school. For schools of all types, the cumulative build up of enabling knowledge and words is an essential ingredient in academic effectiveness and equity.
We have to be smart and subtle in creating the conditions for this change. Our strategy needs to take into account the fact the educational community will not readily accept a specific grade-by-grade content curriculum. Every effort to introduce a specific, set content-curriculum mobilizes that community into fierce opposition, as I can testify from direct experience over the past 20 years.
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:
And because of the nature of the market I have also had disappointing experiences with the publishing industry, which is driven of course by current market demand. Those in a position to dictate current market demand — that is, state adoption committees and district administrators do not want to impose a definite set curriculum. Hence publishers offer fragmented materials designed to please as many as possible. Moreover, (for reasons I trace in my book) publishers and those who purchase their products favor the how-to principle of schooling rather than the needed knowledge-based approach.
In sum, it will not be enough for policy makers and philanthropists to interest themselves in encouraging good content curricula and then assessing the results. They will also need to encourage the creation of good classroom materials to impart such a curriculum. In the critical subject of language arts, it is astonishing but true that no such content-based programs currently exist. There is no big market demand for coherent, content-based materials in language arts. It will be up to those of us who see this critical need for model materials, and who are willing to buck current market preferences to do so. Their effectiveness will ultimately stimulate demand and competition in the education market. That is a project on which my colleagues and I at the Core Knowledge Foundation are currently engaged. The No Child Left Behind law has everyone focused on reading scores. So, instead of our continuing to battle the anti-content theology head on, we think the best strategic first step not just for our mission, but also for the system as a whole is to create a language-arts program that imparts general knowledge coherently over several grades. Thanks to the generosity of the Louis Calder Foundation, we have been able to make a start on that big project.
That is the first step in a larger strategy to encourage a change in thinking about curriculum. The clear superiority of a set content curriculum within language arts should encourage schools to adopt a specific, knowledge-based approach in other subjects. With philanthropy successfully showing the way successfully, the market will follow. If we are lucky, textbooks will change in the right direction, just as they changed in the wrong direction in the 1950s. In the competitive environment of the school-choice movement, more schools will turn to the idea of a set core curriculum, because they will see that it brings results. An individual district, even a state may decide that a set curriculum imparting content systematically is a good idea if it wants students to improve. Thus good materials and successful outcomes can gradually change the behavior and the ideas of the educational community, resulting in much enhanced achievement and equity.
Let me quickly summarize. I have offered you an explanation of our recent history of educational decline, and the reasons for the disappointments of our recent structural reforms. I have touched on the causal, nitty-gritty level of verbal comprehension and word learning, arguing that that reading is knowledge-dependent, and not a formal skill like typing; that content incoherence makes our students fare relatively worse internationally the longer they stay in our schools. I’ve indicated how our efforts at structural reforms have been held hostage by an intellectual monopoly. And finally, I have suggested that we in philanthropy can widen our reach and best overcome its magical thinking and its fierce resistance by creating curricula and model classroom materials that really work.
That’s where my research and experience have led me thus far. I welcome your comments.
Thank you.
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Last updated: Fri, May 23 2008
