The Core Knowledge Blog

I’m so glad that Sol Stern has written this piece.

The comeback to it that I am already hearing from die-hard choice advocates is: well, the non-choice schools haven’t done so well either! This is an argument?

Stern’s point goes far deeper than that — to doubt whether any of the primarily structural approaches to school improvement are promising, after all. His view: we need to talk about substance not structure.

The choice movement is a structural approach. It relies on market-theory to improve outcomes, not venturing to offer guidance on precisely what the schools need to be teaching. That would go against the genius of the market approach, which is to refrain from top-down interference into what needs to be taught and learned in the schools. Stern rightly shows that this is a fundamental failing in the choice movement.

But market-based “choice” is not the only structural reform of the recent past that has refrained from actually concerning itself with the substance of what is taught and learned in school. There was the government-funded whole-school-reform project. It too was a meta-structure that said “Let a thousand flowers bloom,” thus rendering itself superior to any particular substantive notion of what needed to be taught and learned in the school.

The No Child Left Behind law uses carrots and sticks to induce gains in reading and math. But it too is a structural approach, grandly leaving the details regarding what is to be taught and learned to the states. (The one area where the administration of the law did have something substantial to say — regarding the teaching of phonics — was the one area where there has been genuine improvement in the earliest grades.)

Let’s not forget the structural approach of the state-standards movement (in my view potentially the most promising reform project.) Regarding language arts, the most important area for early schooling, the state standards have also taken a structural approach, and have declined to state what in the way of substance needed to be taught and learned in the school. A typical state standard:

Students will comprehend, evaluate, and respond to works of literature and other kinds of writing which reflect their own cultures and developing viewpoints, as well as those of others. Students will demonstrate a willingness to use reading to continue to learn, to communicate, and to solve problems independently. Students will use prior knowledge to extend reading ability and comprehension. Use specific strategies such as making comparisons, predicting outcomes, drawing conclusions, identifying the main ideas, and understanding cause and effect to comprehend a variety of literary genres from diverse cultures and time periods.

And let’s not forget the structural orientation of the dominant theories within the educational establishment — the idea that activities rather than “mere facts” or a “rote-learned” academic curriculum will structurally induce academic learnings. The natural development of the child will gain or “construct” needed world knowledge.

All of these ideas leave the grade-by-grade specifics of the curriculum as a problem to be solved by some quasi-divine agency — the magic of the market, the wisdom of the locality, the nature of the child — in short somebody else, not me. Who me? I would not presume to say what precisely needs to be taught and learned in the schools. That’s to be left to something far deeper like the market, or far more democratic like the locality, or far more natural like the nature of the child, all much wiser than we mere policy makers are.

The grade-by-grade core substance of the curriculum is what schooling is. If there is no coherence from one grade to the next, children’s education will be second rate, especially the education offered to disadvantaged children, who more than advantaged ones, depend on school for their education. The educational incoherence is especially marked for the many students who move from school to school — the forgotten 30 per cent.

Moreover, there is a profoundly structural aspect to this situation which the various structural approaches of the recent past have ignored: When the curriculum is left to laissez-faire forces, the concrete decisions are being made by textbook publishers, and there is no guidance for the substance of teacher training, or for curriculum-based testing, or for the making of classroom materials. All suffer in quality as a result.

While America may be declining in workforce competence and in cohesion, the miracle to me is that this country has been able to sustain itself as well as it has despite the poor and unjust performance of the schools. But we had better pay attention to what Sol Stern is saying.