By Richard D. Kahlenberg
… Though Shanker held no public office, he became supremely influential, his name constantly invoked in education circles. “In the course of the past two decades,” educator and author E. D. Hirsch Jr. wrote in 1997, “Albert Shanker made himself the most important figure in American education.” While secretaries of education came and went, as did presidents of the much larger NEA, Shanker endured, and he outdid and out-thought all of them. If Horace Mann was the key educational figure in the nineteenth century and John Dewey in the first half of the twentieth century, Albert Shanker has stood as the most influential figure since then. As a central thinker, writer, and player in all the great education debates of the last quarter century — whether school vouchers, charter schools, or education standards — he was, journalist Sara Mosle argues, “our Dewey.”
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By Bob Zaslavsky
… It is possible to formulate a good curriculum that is rigorous, sequential, concrete and communally significant. One such curriculum is the Core Knowledge Foundation’s “Core Knowledge Sequence: Content Guidelines for Grades K-8.” For each grade level, skills are stated generally and specifically. In Language Arts, there is a detailed list of the poems, books and proverbs that each student is expected to study at that level. There is no duplication. The goal of the curriculum is culturally shared knowledge that promotes excellence and equity.
A small number of schools has adopted this curriculum with impressive results. Yet whenever I have tried to introduce this curriculum to school system administrators, the resistance is fierce. Instead of reaching for something new, they are content to cling to the nothing they have.
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By Kathleen Kennedy Manzo
A long-awaited review of beginning-reading programs by the federal What Works Clearinghouse found few comprehensive or supplemental programs that have evidence of effectiveness in raising student achievement. But what is missing from the review may be even more telling: None of the most popular commercial reading programs on the market had sufficiently rigorous studies to be included in the review by the clearinghouse.
“Some of the very prominent, full-year reading curricula weren’t prioritized for this review,” said Jill Constantine, the principal director of the review. “They tended not to have studies with randomized-control trials or with experimental designs that met the clearinghouse’s evidence standards.”
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For most, curriculum isn’t narrowing, despite focus on math, reading.
If children aren’t solid readers by third grade — the time students go from “learning to read” to “reading to learn” — their chances of becoming successful students are limited.
… Some schools in low-income neighborhoods have indeed gone too far in focusing on math and science to the exclusion of other subjects. But it doesn’t have to be that way:
- Nearly 600 public schools using the innovative “Core Knowledge” program wrap reading and math skills into an unusually rich curriculum that teaches elementary students about everything from Egyptian culture to the Italian Renaissance. At P.S. 124 in Queens, near New York’s JFK Airport, 97% of the students are minorities and 90% live in poverty. And yet this school turns in math and reading scores that rival schools in middle-class areas.
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Liberty Academy Charter School is a charter school in Salem, UT. They are currently a K-10 school with plans to go to 12th within the next 2 years. Their curriculum is based on traditional learning using Core Knowledge, Riggs, Shurley English, Singapore and Saxon math, and Latin from the Roots Up. They also use a Values Program to ensure their students are well rounded.
Get more information on the Core Knowledge Jobs page.
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