Author Archive for E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

Core Knowledge and the Public Sphere

Published by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. on April 9, 2009 in Core Knowledge. 26 Comments

The question “Whose Core Knowledge?” was the chief question (or implicit accusation against Core Knowledge) that ran through the 1990s on up to the present.

But gradually the fundamental needs of good schooling have tempered those concerns. Both the current U.S. Secretary of Education and the current head of the American Federation of Teachers have called for “national standards,” recognizing the technical need for commonality if we are to educate everybody to a reasonably high standard.

The word “whose” in the “Whose Core Knowledge?” implies that the topics we teach belong to some sort of essential identity and ethnicity that defines a person and transcends what it is to be a functioning American.

But an alternative view is that the ability of all these multifarious ethnic identities in the USA to live in peace (a great legacy to the world) can do so only because we separate the public (American) from the private (ethnic) spheres. This was Jefferson’s thought, and that of other founders. In the private sphere everybody can be what he or she wishes; in the public sphere, everybody is an American. The best-known example of this is the “separation of church and state, where we may have our own religious identities, but temper it in public to enable everyone to get along.  Another example is the separation of family ethnicity, which may be anything at all, as distinct from the publicly shared assumptions of the public sphere where we can interact and connect with each other.

Core Knowledge has taken the view that the schools need to promulgate this public culture (all public cultures are artificial inventions) in order to enable everyone to communicate and learn in the public sphere. The paradox of those who wish to save us all from the imperialism of some dominant school curriculum is that when the disadvantaged children they wish to protect are not able to learn and communicate in the public sphere–especially in the public language and its associated knowledge–they become the very students who are most harmed by our anti-cultural-imperialism.

Our position has been that we need to agree on some defined public sphere sustained by the schools, CK has always said it would be happy to go along with ANY widely agreed-on common core that enables students to understand and learn from newspapers, blogs, and the books in the library.  Critics of CK have not yet come up with specific well-thought out alternatives, nor with any plausible argument against the need for a common core in the public sphere.

People would certainly not pay attention to such an alternative argument unless it were couched in the common language and its shared knowledge, both of which the schools have a duty to teach. This very thread is an example of public speech based on that shared knowledge and convention system. Alas, many disadvantaged students now being turned out by our schools and protected from coherent knowledge by the guardians of their identities cannot participate effectively in this thread, nor learn from it.

A Nation at Risk at 25

Published by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. on April 22, 2008 in Educational Policy. 0 Comments

The following commentary appears in the current issue of Education Week.

In American educational history, A Nation at Risk is significant as a very dramatic official recognition in the 1980s that our schools were declining in effectiveness not only in relation to schools of other nations, but also in relation to our own results in earlier decades. In the 25 years since the report was issued, energetic reform efforts have been put forth, to small overall effect. The best single gauge of overall national school effectiveness—the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test of 12th graders—has remained flat, and has even declined slightly. This persistent lack of significant improvement is owing to the unwavering persistence of the very ideas that caused the decline in the first place—the repudiation of a definite academic curriculum in the early grades by the child-centered movement of the early 20th century. Given the continued content vagueness of state standards in early grades, especially in language arts, that underlying condition has not much changed. There is still no definite, coherent academic curriculum in the early grades. That is the principal source of the low academic achievement of our high school students.

The elementary grades are much more important than is apparently credited by philanthropies like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has recently been giving many millions to high school reform—with negligible results per dollar. For many years, the philanthropic and policy worlds have placed a lot of emphasis on the two ends of precollegiate education—high school and preschool. They are right about preschool—but not about high school. The general knowledge and vocabulary required for effective learning at the high school level are the fruits of a long process. The way to reform high school is to prepare students effectively in the elementary years to thrive there. If, in recent decades, high school has become a place where students are offered a smorgasbord of watered-down subjects, that is because watered-down subjects are all that our ill-educated students are now prepared to understand.

Philanthropies cannot be altogether blamed. In their emphasis on high school, they have followed the lead of A Nation at Risk,which was overwhelmingly concerned with high school. Its assumption was that the elementary years are foundational, and should be spent on the enabling skills of reading, writing, and reckoning. The authors therefore conceived the truly decisive arena for educational improvement to be grades 9-12, where there had been a severe decline in verbal and math scores. Indeed, for most of its length, A Nation at Risk ignored the first eight grades of schooling. Then, in its last pages, the report finally alluded to the early curriculum as follows:

The curriculum in the crucial eight grades leading to the high school years should be specifically designed to provide a sound base for study in those and later years in such areas as English language development and writing, computational and problem-solving skills, science, social studies, foreign language, and the arts. These years should foster an enthusiasm for learning and the development of the individual’s gifts and talents. (Page 72)

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The Knowledge Connection

Published by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. on February 16, 2008 in Core Knowledge and Educational Policy. 0 Comments

Why has the No Child Left Behind law left so many children behind? According to the latest scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the reading achievement of eighth-graders has declined since the law was passed in 2001, and the large reading gap between advantaged and disadvantaged children — “the achievement gap” — has stayed where it was. Today’s eighth-graders had recorded gains in fourth grade, but these have not led to improvements in later grades — when reading scores actually count for a student’s future.

Those in Congress in charge of crafting revisions should understand that the law’s disappointing results owe less to defects in the law than to the methods and ideas schools use in their attempts to fulfill the “adequate yearly progress” mandate for all groups of students; this causes schools, as many complain, to teach to reading tests rather than educate children. But intensive test preparation by schools has resulted in lower reading test scores in later grades. “Teaching to the test” does not effectively teach to the test after all.

Studies of reading comprehension show that knowing something of the topic you’re reading about is the most important variable in comprehension. After a child learns to sound out words, comprehension is mostly knowledge. Many technical studies support the assertion that after students can fluently sound out words, relevant knowledge is the crucial difference between students who are good or poor readers. In light of the relevant science, an analysis of the textbooks and methods used to teach reading and language arts — for three hours a day in many places — indicates some of the reasons for the disappointing later results. These test-prep materials are constructed on the mistaken view that reading comprehension is a skill that can be perfected by practice, as typing can be. This how-to conception of reading has caused schools to spend a lot of unproductive time on trivial content and on drills such as “finding the main idea” and less time on history, science and the arts.

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On Sol Stern’s City Journal Piece: Substance Trumps Structure

Published by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. on January 22, 2008 in Educational Policy. 2 Comments

City JournalI’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.

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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.

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