Archive for November, 2007

Press release: The Savvy Source

Published by CKF on November 30, 2007 in Education Practice, Parents and Preschool. 0 Comments

The Savvy Source for ParentsThe Savvy Source, in partnership with Core Knowledge, launched a free, online Learning Guide on Nov. 28 to give parents a relatively simple process for identifying the best books, toys and activities to meet their child’s developmental strengths and needs. All parents of toddlers and preschoolers have to do is answer a simple set of questions about their child’s development and then Savvy Source provides parents with a customized set of recommendations of the very best educational books, toys and activities to engage a child’s imagination and development at this particular moment of their growth. The free program was launched around the holidays so that parents can share the recommended gift list with family and friends.

Some of the preschool activities are adapted from the upcoming workbook to be published as a part of What Your Preschooler Needs to Know, to be published by Random House in March, 2008.

Read the complete Reuters press release

Visit the Savvy Source website — click “start here” to start the Learning Guide questionnaire

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What is Core Knowledge?

Published by Russ Spicer on November 27, 2007 in Core Knowledge School and Essay. 0 Comments

Liberty Common SchoolWhen people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them that I am the headmaster of the best school in Colorado. The next question that comes my way is, “What makes your school so great?” My reply is, “We have awesome teachers, awesome students, awesome parental support and an awesome Core Knowledge curriculum.” “What exactly is Core Knowledge?” is often the question that follows.

Most people think that Core Knowledge is just an approach to learning and not an actual curriculum. They often say that it is a back to basics approach to education. While this is partially true, it is not entirely true. The purpose of this blog posting is to provide assistance in answering the question of “what is Core Knowledge?” I am including a description of the Core Knowledge program that is found in our Liberty Common School Student/Parent handbook. I hope this helps and I encourage anyone who is considering attending a Core Knowledge school or starting a Core Knowledge school to do it. The curriculum is outstanding.

Liberty has selected the Core Knowledge Foundation’s Curriculum Sequence as the framework of its curriculum. The Core Knowledge Sequence is distinguished by planned progression of specific knowledge in history, geography, mathematics, science, language arts, and fine arts.

Children learn by building on what they already know. Thus, it is important for them to begin building foundations of knowledge in the early grades when they are most receptive to attaining an organized body of knowledge. Children are by instinct driven to construct a contextual view of the world. Thus, it is important to provide them an educational framework that assists them in developing the constructs upon which their viewpoints will be based. Academic deficiencies in these areas in the first nine grades can permanently impair the quality of later schooling.

By specifying the knowledge that all children should share, all students can achieve equal access to that knowledge. At-risk children especially suffer from low expectations, which often translate into watered-down curricula. In schools using the Core Knowledge Sequence, however, all children are exposed to a coherent core of challenging, interesting, interwoven knowledge. This knowledge not only provides a foundation for later learning but also defines a common heritage and establishes a common ground for communication and cooperation in a diverse society.

In addition to its specificity, the Core Knowledge curriculum is characterized by knowledge that is solid, sequenced, specific, and shared. Literacy in every subject requires a set of mechanical skills and a shared background. The shared, many-cultured knowledge that promotes effective classroom learning also promotes cooperation and respect among students, both in the classroom and in society. Liberty’s teachers are able to rely on shared background knowledge about the students, which enables them to build sequentially on that knowledge year by year. The ninth grade classical honors curriculum continues the goals of the Core Knowledge curriculum with solid knowledge and skills that build on the previous knowledge and prepares students for further high school study.

As used above we define knowledge not in the simplistic sense of mere facts but in the broader sense of the word, as follows: Knowledge consists of the facts, the relations between them, the thinking about them, and the effort to understand and connect them. It is not out of ignorance that we discover understanding. It is exactly because of what we already know that we can know more, that we can discern organizing principles make and test hypotheses, and act rationally.

Liberty Common School teaches 100% of the Core Knowledge curriculum and is a certified Core Knowledge Visitation Site. Our credential was established the hard way by digging in years ago and selecting a thorough, meaningful curriculum — one that is certainly solid, sequenced, specific and shared.

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Blog: Moral/Spiritual Leadership For Multicultural Education

Published by CKF on November 20, 2007 in Education Leadership, Education Practice and Essay. 0 Comments

Barbara McCauley Lovejoy wrote to Linda Bevilacqua, President of the Core Knowledge Foundation:

Last spring I was accepted into BYU’s (Brigham Young University) Ed Leadership doctoral program. My focus is going to be on how to better serve our diverse learners. For this reason I am very interested in E.D. Hirsch’s work and support it wholeheartedly. In fact, my postings the last two days at www.principlecenteredme.blogspot.com are related to his work so thought you might like to see it.

Also, I have written and self-published a book called My Years As A Hispanic Youth Advocate… and The Lessons I Have Learned.

Linda Bevilacqua responded:

You articulated the underlying principles of Core Knowledge and Dr. Hirsch’s work beautifully in your blog posting. We need your help in making these concepts more widely understood and welcome your ongoing, active participation in advocating for social equity using these principles.

An excerpt from Barbara’s blog, Moral/Spiritual Leadership for Multicultural Education, Facts Plus, on Nov. 15:

If facts are important as a foundation, then the questions arise:

  • Which facts?
  • Who decides which facts?

The next post at Moral/Spiritual Leadership for Multicultural Education, E. D. Hirsch and Closing the Achievement Gap, on Nov. 16:

Before answering these two questions, the following are some other questions to consider:

  • Why does the learning gap for the haves and have nots grow wider as students move through the school in the U.S. while the opposite occurs in other countries?
  • Why do more 2nd and 3rd generation immigrant students drop out of school than 1st generation immigrant students?
  • What makes our schools unfair?
  • What does educational justice mean?
  • Some points to consider while pondering the answers to these questions:
  • Educational justice means equality of educational opportunity
  • Imparting a universally shared core of knowledge helps overcome inequality
  • Classroom learning can go forward more effectively when all students share some common points of reference
  • ALL children will learn relatively well in an effective school — High quality tends to be correlated with high equity
  • Some students are learning less than others because of systematic shortcomings in their schooling and social and economic differences rather than because of their own innate lack of academic ability
  • New knowledge expands exponentially
  • There is a “Matthew Effect” — the more background knowledge and the richer the vocabulary a learner has, the greater will be his/her ability to accumulate more knowledge
  • Detailed guidelines provide clarity
  • A diverse country has a greater need of a core-knowledge system than does a homogeneous one

The work of E. D. Hirsch’s, Cultural Literacy, has been criticized not only in the multicultural education arena, but also in the general education arena. Yet, before criticizing him too harshly and “throwing the baby out with the bath water,” it is my opinion that we need to have an understanding of why his work on core knowledge could be helpful to diverse learners:

  • It addresses the snowball effect that allows a small knowledge difference in kindergarten to become a huge gap in learning within a few years
  • It builds from year to year on the background knowledge learners need to be academically successful
  • A teacher can identify what background knowledge a learner is missing
  • It does not stipulate everything a learner should know. In fact, it is meant to comprise only 50% of the school’s curriculum leaving ample time to address other learning needs, including more ethnically-centered curricula
  • Because cosmopolitanism is a true friend to diversity, core knowledge has adopted a cosmopolitan approach to history and literature in order to reinforce the fact that no longer are Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and other ethnic groups invisible in the past or the present
  • In order to be fair to diverse learners, it is critical that schools not neglect or reject the current dominant culture
  • The Hirsch core knowledge is not the work of one person, but the work of many, including multicultural advisors, who combined scholarly research with grassroots experience to develop this sequence consensus
  • It was empirical science and not ideology that originated cultural literacy and the core knowledge movement
  • There is evidence that supports the connection between core knowledge and educational justice. In fact, the correlations between fairness and core knowledge are 100 percent.

As the U.S. becomes more diverse it is critical that we find ways to not only acknowledge the diversity and benefit from the richness that diversity brings, but also find ways to bring us together. It is my opinion that the principles of Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy and core knowledge can help do both.

Read the blog, Moral/Spiritual Leadership for Multicultural Education!

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A Core Knowledge music teacher’s blog: Eine Feisty Berg

Published by CKF on November 20, 2007 in Opinion and Teaching. 0 Comments

“I Don’t Baby-sit. I Raise Future Presidents”

I teach music; in a Core Knowledge Charter School. From time to time I am accosted or confronted by angry parents who think I am picking on their child, or just too plain strict in general. I have heard parents say such things as, “Why should the kids have to be quiet in the halls? That’s only for the teacher’s convenience.” “Why should the kids have to keep their eyes on the director?” “Music should be fun. Why are there any rules at all?”

I don’t baby-sit. I raise future presidents.

I don’t GIVE students a grade. The student EARNS a grade.

If the ability to sing is a natural, genetic gift; then I would be wholly in error to GIVE a grade based on singing ability.

The ability to perform music correctly is a learned behavior; therefore any one can earn a good grade through giving one’s best effort.

Read the blog!

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Top-Achieving Nations Beat Top U.S. States in Math and Science

Published by CKF on November 14, 2007 in Research and Reports. 0 Comments

American Institutes for Research

Sean Cavanagh of Education Week reports:

Students in the highest-performing U.S. states rank well below their peers in the world’s top-achieving countries in mathematics and science skill, according to a new study that judges American youths on an international scale.

The study, published Nov. 14 by the American Institutes for Research, compares the performance of 8th graders in individual American states not against each other, but against students in top-performing foreign nations, such as Japan and South Korea, as well as against children in recent lower-scoring ones, such as Bulgaria, Jordan, and Romania.

The analysis found that, on the one hand, most American states are performing as well as, or better than, most foreign nations in the study in math and science.

But it also concludes that even students in states such as Massachusetts, Minnesota, and North Dakota, which have scored well on recent U.S. exams, do not match students in top-performing foreign countries.

Read the complete Education Week article

Read the complete American Institute for Research press release

Read the complete American Institute for Research report

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The Pangloss Index: How States Game the No Child Left Behind Act

Published by CKF on November 13, 2007 in Educational Policy, Podcast and Video and Research and Reports. 0 Comments

Education SectorAuthor: Kevin Carey

Despite the poor performance of Birmingham City Schools,

The Alabama Department of Education … says everything is fine, that Birmingham City Schools made “adequate yearly progress” last year under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). And only five of the district’s 65 schools are “in need of improvement.” The serious consequences and strong interventions that NCLB’s authors envisioned for chronically underperforming districts like Birmingham are nowhere to be found.

The reason is simple: While NCLB was designed to raise achievement standards … , the Alabama Department of Education has lowered standards annually, to the point where even abjectly failing districts like Birmingham make the grade. And it’s not alone — every one of the accountability-avoidance gambits used in Alabama has been adopted in many other states. Indeed, the most noteworthy thing about Alabama’s elaborate plan to avoid NCLB accountability, and the impact of those actions on Birmingham, is how mundane they really are. Similar stories could be written about states and districts across the nation.

Collectively, these states and districts provide a case study in how determined states can undermine even tightly constructed laws like NCLB. And, as importantly, they provide a cautionary tale for members of Congress working to write the next version of the nation’s most important education law.

Download the full report

Read the full article on Education Sector’s website

icon for podpress  Interview with Kevin Carey, author of The Pangloss Effect: Download (28)
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Narrowing the Two Achievement Gaps

Published by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. on November 9, 2007 in Essay and Research and Reports. 2 Comments

Education TrustA presentation at the 18th Education Trust National Conference, Nov. 9, 2007, Washington, D.C., by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

© 2007 Core Knowledge Foundation. Not to be copied or reproduced without permission from the Core Knowledge Foundation, 801 E. High Street, Charlottesville, VA 22902.

I am grateful to the Education Trust for inviting me to give this talk. It’s an honor and a kind of homecoming. We at Core Knowledge feel great affinity with The Education Trust with its focus on narrowing the unfair achievement gap between groups. That injustice was my reason for leaving academic pursuits and entering education reform in the 1970s.

I won’t distract you with the intricate details of my experiments on literacy some 35 years ago beyond observing that they were first done at U VA, and then at a mainly African-American college in Richmond. I described the results in two technical publications that are virtually unknown. But they have colored all of my subsequent work. Anyone who bothers to read those reports might be surprised to discover that it was empirical science and not ideology that originated Cultural Literacy and the Core Knowledge movement. The ideological controversies surrounding Cultural Literacy during the 1980s and ’90s were gripping but, to my dazed mind, essentially off point. For, the key educational issues we faced urgently both then and now are less connected with ideology than with empirical reality.

I’ll very briefly describe the discovery that shocked me into education reform. The African-American students at the Richmond college (It was the Sargeant Reynolds Community College.) could read just as well as UVA students when the topic was roommates or car traffic, but they could not read passages about Lee’s surrender to Grant. Their performance on that particular text shook me up the most. For they had graduated from the schools of Richmond, the erstwhile capital of the Confederacy, but were ignorant of the most elementary facts about the Civil War and other basic information that is normally taken for granted in writing. They had not been taught the various things that they needed to know to understand ordinary texts addressed to a general audience. The results were shocking. (What had the schools been doing???). I decided to devote myself to helping right the wrong that is being done to such students.

Let me explain my title: “Narrowing the Two Achievement Gaps.” The sort of gap usually meant by the phrase “achievement gap” is the one between whites and African Americans or whites and Hispanics, or more generally between high- and low- income students. Let’s call this “the fairness gap.” But there is an equally fateful achievement gap between our students and those in other developed nations. Let’s call this “the quality gap.” My first theme in this talk is that these are not separate problems. The solution to the fairness gap is also the solution to the quality gap, and vice versa.

I will focus on the verbal achievement gap, which is critical to academic performance, later income, and general competence. I want to show that if we raise the average verbal achievement for all groups of students we will, by that very deed, also narrow the fairness gap, killing two birds with one stone.

Continue reading ‘Narrowing the Two Achievement Gaps’

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Washington Elementary receives NCLB award

Published by CKF on November 2, 2007 in School Honors and School News. 0 Comments

By Christina Killion Valdez

Post-Bulletin, Rochester MNPost-Bulletin, Rochester MN

Washington Choice Elementary Principal Linda Stockwell received a letter last month from the U.S. Department of Education that was cause to celebrate. Their hard work had paid off.

For the past several years, the school has ranked in the top 10 percent in the state on standardized reading and math tests. That high level of achievement earned the school a spot among 287 schools in the nation receiving the 2007 No Child Left Behind-Blue Ribbon Schools award.

…Washington became a Choice school in 1996 when it adopted the core knowledge curriculum, Stockwell said. That means the curriculum is focused on building a solid foundation of knowledge in world and American history, classic literature, science and fine arts.

The school also uses a spiraled learning system that builds on students’ knowledge, she said. Having that background information improves students’ vocabulary and reasoning skills, which translates into increased reading comprehension, Stockwell said.

It’s an approach that draws students from all over the city, who tend to stay through fifth grade, she said. Currently, the school has about 350 students with just as many on the waiting list, Stockwell said.

Read the complete article

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Education Sector: Explaining NCLB policy issues

Published by CKF on November 1, 2007 in Educational Policy, Research and Reports and Testing. 0 Comments

Education SectorFrom an Education Sector newsletter:

Education Sector’s Explainer series unpacks key school accountability issues!

Current education news and debates all seem to revolve around the federal No Child Left Behind Act and school accountability. Education Sector’s Explainer Series will help you make sense of these confusing education policy issues.

Education Sector’s Explainer series gives lay readers insights into important aspects of education policymaking. Explainers are designed to bring clarity to key, but complex, concepts and terms within the education landscape that often are misunderstood by the public. They are straightforward, cut-through-the-jargon guides that can be used alone, or as a reference when reading education news stories or research on related topics.

Recent Explainers have focused on deciphering some of NCLB’s fundamental features including how states set “cut scores” on their tests, what it means for states to make “adequate yearly progress” under the federal law, and how the controversial National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) works.

Read, reference, and share these Education Sector Explainers:

Making the Cut: How States Set Passing Scores on Standardized Tests

Passing or “cut” scores are a key factor in determining the rigor of state tests, which matter more than ever before under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Yet, when states and the media report student results on exams, they rarely include information on passing scores or the process by which they are determined. This Explainer describes how states set cut scores and why they matter.

States’ Evidence: What It Means to Make ‘Adequate Yearly Progress’ Under NCLB

Under NCLB, states must set performance targets for schools to meet, known as “adequate yearly progress,” or “AYP.” And those schools that do not meet these goals or “make” AYP face considerable consequences. But what does it really mean for a school to make AYP? This Explainer describes how NCLB’s complex accountability system works overall and in different states and discusses the basics of “making” AYP and the multiple routes schools can take to get there.

Understanding NAEP: Inside the Nation’s Education Report Card

The National Assessment of Educational Progress is one of the most trusted resources for comparing student achievement across states and demographic groups. But it is also one of the most complex tests in existence, leading to difficulty in interpreting and reporting its results. This Explainer is a guide to understanding NAEP’s complex features and the challenges ahead for the test in an era of increased accountability.

Education Sector
1201 Connecticut Ave., NW, Suite 850
Washington, DC 20036
Phone: 202.552.2840 - Fax: 202.775.5877
www.educationsector.org

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