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Continued
Now to my last theme. Despite the success of reforms in Massachusetts, there is still political pressure there to weaken the content guidelines and the MCAS tests. This social and political fact is just as important to us in practical terms as the psycholinguistic facts I have just been analyzing. So I now want to turn to the historical reasons why the only method that has ever achieved high achievement and equity — that is, a common core curriculum with tests to match — has had such a very hard time in the United States. This not so much a change of subject as the key subject in practical terms, because unless we can overcome the historical and political barriers to acting upon what science and common sense have to say, we simply will not raise achievement and narrow the fairness gap.

Here is the recent history of the Verbal SAT.

You 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 scores have remained rather flat. It is claimed that this precipitous drop in the 60s and 70s was due to an increase in the numbers of low-income students taking the SAT, but Christopher Jencks has shown that this explanation is inadequate. He cut to the nub when he observed that the state of Iowa, like the rest of the nation, also suffered a steep decline in verbal scores during the 1960s and 70s. Yet Iowa was 98 per cent white and 98 per cent middle class. So a sharp increase in the number of low-income test takers couldn’t explain why Iowa showed a big decline in verbal skills like every other state during the 1960s. Jencks showed by examples from textbooks that the chief cause was what had been happening in the nation’s schools.

What did happen to school instruction that lowered American verbal scores in the 1960s and thereafter? To answer that we have to ask what was going on in the 1950s when the 12th graders whose achievement is reflected in this chart were going through school. What had happened to the schools was not so much an influx of low-income students as the coming to power of a new, post-World-War-II generation of educators trained in the anti-curriculum ideas of the 1930s, along with new textbooks reflecting that view. Several analyses have shown that textbooks were being greatly watered down in that era. This new point of view was called progressivism or constructivism, and its key feature was its vigorous opposition to a curriculum set up in advance — the very thing that, as I’ve been indicating, is necessary for quality and equity in verbal achievement.

Back in 1939, a brilliant scholar at Teachers College, Isaac Kandel, summarized what had been happening to his profession in the 20s and 30s when the progressive view came to dominate. He said this:

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. (Repeat last sentence)

Kandel went on to describe the ferocity with which this view was supported through ethical and political polemics. Back in the 30s, those who favored a definite core curriculum were called “authoritarian.” They were inducers of passivity and docility rather than independent-mindedness. They claimed that under a definite curriculum “Individual differences are disregarded, and promotion is determined by a standardized lockstep.” Proponents of a core curriculum were called “reactionary in political and social affairs” whereas progressive educators are “radicals who advocate their educational theories and practices to reconstruct society and change the social order.”

Kandel made these observations in 1939, but I read them only a year or so ago, and was struck by its incisive and accurate account of the attack that my own views received from the education world 50 years later during in the 1980s and 90s. Kandel made me realize that few of the reasons marshaled in opposition to the Core Knowledge initiative are the real objections to it. It’s not a weakening of local control, nor a claimed insensitivity to other cultures, nor a closing off of creativity, nor elitism, nor Eurocentrism. People who pronounce such complaints without having seen the Core Knowledge curriculum no doubt believe them. But they aren’t the fundamental objections to Core Knowledge or to any other specific curriculum. Reading Kandel, made me realize that the more fundamental, usually hidden, issue is whether there should be any definite core curriculum at all.

If you doubt that that’s the fundamental issue you can make a simple test: When you hear an objection against a definite content curriculum, say cultural insensitivity, or some vast vague need for global literacy, ask yourself whether it is followed up by any definite proposals for an alternative content curriculum. This never happens. For the real objection is to any definite core curriculum planned out in detail and in advance — the very thing that is most desperately needed to narrow the achievement gap.

The dominance of the anti-core-content idea explains why the state-standards movement controlled by the dominant view in state departments of education has been largely ineffectual in raising verbal scores. State language-arts standards contain lots of talk about process, but little or nothing about specific content. The very word “standards” is thus a convenient obfuscation. The public assumes that the word “standards” implies specific content. But the standards movement, with its great potential for progress, was hijacked by the anti-specific-content theology.

Finally, it is time to call a halt to this stubborn resistance to what our children need. We on the left as well as those on the right need to offer criticism and opposition to this anti-specific-content dogma, which has been in the saddle for 60 years and getting a free ride, partly because of the rhetorical bullying that Kandel pointed out. Its scientific poverty and intellectual incoherencies have produced only failure and unfairness. It is high time for people in academia, policy and philanthropy to start pointing this out and insisting that the possession of shared preparatory knowledge by all children in a classroom is the only effective means for raising achievement and narrowing the fairness gap. A core curriculum of 50 per cent leaves plenty of room for whatever other emphases a teacher or school might desire. It is the only way any large scale system has ever been able to achieved both quality and equity. Given the high mobility of our most disadvantaged students, we need to mount a challenge to the current dogma for the sake of the least advantaged among us, and for the country as a whole.

This logic will ultimately lead to a national core curriculum. But that’s a long way off, and won’t happen until our pragmatism and instinct for self-preservation have overcome our longstanding habits of thought. Meanwhile, in the short run, we need to do something right now in our schools. Every year we delay, hundreds of thousands of children are having their life chances curtailed.

Just a few weeks ago, the U S Dept of Education issued a report called K-8 Charter Schools: Closing the Achievement Gap, featuring seven schools from seven geographical regions. The fact that these happen to be charter schools is irrelevant. It’s the curriculum. Two of them, unsurprisingly, were Core Knowledge Schools. As Karen Chenoweth has shown in her recent book: It’s Being Done, we find gap-narrowing effects in non-charter, regular Core Knowledge schools that have been brave enough to resist the opprobrium of their fellow educators.

My aim in starting the Core Knowledge Foundation was to illustrate what a cumulative and specific curriculum could accomplish. Some seven hundred schools in 45 states now follow the Core Knowledge content sequence to good effect. The achievements of the Core Knowledge schools have been outstanding illustrations of the virtues of specificity of grade-by-grade core content in narrowing the two gaps.

Here’s an interesting chart. It’s derived from the 2006 report of verbal scores in New York City schools put out by the New York State Dept. of Education. It gives the percentages of students who read at the proficient or advanced levels. I thought it would be informative to compare the average percentages of the two Core Knowledge charter schools in New York City — the Carl Icahn school, and the Harlem Day School (which stops at grade 5) with the average percentages of the three KIPP charter schools in New York City. The KIPP schools, as you may know have received a lot of justified notice. They do much better than the schools in their neighborhoods.

To be fair, the fifth-grade students in the KIPP schools have been in their school just one year, whereas many of the Core Knowledge students have been in their school for several years. But that, after all, is my point. It’s the cumulative effect of a coherent curriculum that ultimately makes a big difference in verbal scores. Knowledge of language and knowledge of things need to be fostered productively from the earliest grades. These all-important verbal scores are simply not highly amenable to short-term intensive work in middle and high school. The rightly-admired KIPP schools would be even better if they started in early grades, and adopted a cumulative year-by-year core curriculum set up in advance.

Let me draw to a close. Schools need to adopt a multi-grade core curriculum that uses time productively, and thereby ceases to leave students behind and waste huge amounts of time in the classroom. For years teachers have told me that the first six weeks of school are devoted to so-called review. The word “review” here is a euphemism. It is really an attempt to impart preparatory knowledge students that should have already gained but did not. It is astonishing how hard it has become for an American school to deliver a coherent, cumulative curriculum over several years. Our available textbooks huge and fragmented have been created in a commercial environment that actively discourages a focused, selective, and coherent pattern of instruction which builds up needed preparatory knowledge.

Here are the titles of some typical stories upon which our children are practicing their reading exercises: I list them in sequence from the table of contents of the best-selling reading program by Houghton Mifflin: A Dragon Gets by, Roly Poly, How Real Pigs Act, It’s Easy to Be Polite, Mrs Brown Went to Town, Rats on the Roof, Cats Can’t Fly, Henry and Mudge and the Starry Night, Campfire Games, and Around the Pond. These long mornings devoted to language arts are cognitive wastelands. Schools wishing to take a more coherent approach to imparting preparatory knowledge during the literacy block must make heroic efforts.

Thus one very immediate reform concerns language arts. The greatest wastes of school time occur in the so-called literacy block — the two to three hours spent every day pursing the futile hope that trivial stories and mind-numbing drills offer a shortcut around the need for the broad general knowledge needed for reading. Little coherent knowledge is conveyed in these literacy periods which occur at the freshest time of the day.

So we need both better content standards and better materials. And we specially need coherent knowledge-based programs in language-arts. Creating such a coherent, content-based program is one of the most promising practical undertakings that we could engage in to help schools raise achievement and narrow the fairness gap. That’s why my colleagues and I have been engaged for many months on the arduous task of creating such a program — and seeking funds to complete it.

Thank you for your attention. I’ve presented a lot of material in this talk, but for me it boils down to one big point. (They say that the fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.) The one big thing that our children most desperately need is the one thing that we have been told we must not offer them — namely a highly specific, cumulative, multi-year, core curriculum, oriented to content and planned out in advance. If we were to embrace that one forbidden thing, much else would more readily fall into place, including teacher training, school morale, student discipline, and the narrowing of the gaps.

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