The Core Knowledge Blog

Long before I began teaching, I carried on a silent debate with Al Shanker and his “Where We Stand” column. I seethed when he recounted the common question—”is it on the test?”—and then dignified the mindset that produced such a juvenile question. Like so many liberals, my educational philosophy was a hybrid between Dewey’s (and the 1960s’) progressivism and the heroic fantasy created by Hollywood of the charismatic teacher who transforms students by the power of personality and hope. Shanker, however, did convince me that standards were politically necessary and maybe they were educationally valid.

My rookie year in an alternative school for felons was a perfect proving ground for my ideals. Our two teachers and our two social workers functioned interchangeably like linebackers in the old “3-4-4″ defense. Class and counseling were recognizably different at times, but mostly we worked seamlessly as student-centered teams. Anytime I wanted adjust my lesson plans, I would dismiss our Social Studies class, and notify the kids that we are now in Science class. And the students were free to do the same. When an emotionally disturbed student barged into class one morning in a particularly agitated state, he directed me, “John, teach me something.” “OK, I replied, today we are studying Psychology,” and I provided a simplified version of autonomic functioning, habit, and choice. The student then scribbled a diary of the day’s thoughts, categorizing them as “auto” and “congo,” which were his spellings of automatic and conscious, and habit. It would have made a great scene on The Wire.

Even as I congratulated myself for my innovative lessons, I started to recognize the impossibility of making the “bricks” of great ideas without the “straw” of information. When I moved to a regular high school, I saw that most of my students had almost no recall from their previous classes. An A.P. student answered that Vietnam was the war we won after dropping the atomic bomb. And it got worse from there.

I adjusted by aggressively probing into the gaps in my students’ knowledge, and questioning how the gaps would undercut the students’ efforts to grasp my lessons. Meticulous planning allowed me to teach just enough background information to provide just enough scaffolding for them to learn something “real.” It was a perfect time to synthesize E. D. Hirsch’s new work on cultural literacy with my process-oriented progressivism.

I read Hirsch with the wisdom of half of a decade in the classroom, and I rejected his approach completely. While reading about cultural literacy, I reverted back to the respectable ideology of a left-wing academic, which I had been. I ignored his lyrics, reacting only to the “music.” Hirsch sounded too much like a fact-driven traditionalist. He sounded too much like a testing advocate. He sounded too much like the Al Shanker who I defeated in our private debates on testing, not the Al Shanker iconoclast who I admired.

Fortunately, the American Federation of Teachers journal, The American Educator, kept publishing Hirsch, and eventually I had to address his actual words and arguments. I also was wrong about NCLB. Years of wrestling with Shanker’s ideas made me amenable to a compromise with the compassionate conservative who we thought had been the relatively moderate governor of Texas. But I only gave critical support to NCLB, and it was never central to my values. When I ask reformers who have been deeply committed to a national system of accountability to reconsider, I am asking them to rethink a core belief.

That’s why I want to be completely open about the blatant manner in which I misjudged Core Knowledge. When I say I blew it on this one, I mean that I really blew it.

John Thompson teaches at Centennial High School in the Oklahoma City Public School System. He was the OKCPS runner-up Teacher of the Year this year, and the First Annual Champion of the Centennial Buffalo Chip Throwing Contest, wearing the plastic glove on his left hand and throwing with his right. He has a PhD from Rutgers in history, and his major work, Closing the Frontier, won the Western Historical Association Athearn Award for the nation’s best 20th century history published over a two-year period.