Core Knowledge trustee Diane Ravitch serves up a stirring and eloquent argument for a national core curriculum over at Bridging Differences:
“I maintain that our diversity makes it hard for us to forge a national core curriculum, but our diversity makes it necessary that we do so. In a nation as diverse as ours, we need a common language and a large fund of shared values and references in order to talk to people who do not share our religious, cultural, ethnic, or racial background. In order to maintain a democratic society, we need to be able to communicate and exchange ideas, to sustain diverse coalitions, and to recognize our common goals and work together with others who are different from us. Collaboration requires some mutuality, and such mutuality is not possible without the ability to communicate and to recognize that ‘we are all in the same boat,’ we are part of the same community even as we are members of many other, different communities.”
Ravitch also performs a nifty bit of intellectual jujitsu, pointing out that we already have a de facto national curriculum whether we like it or not, driven by test and textbook publishers. “In effect, our highly decentralized system of schooling has left the issue of what to teach to commercial interests, those who write the standardized tests and those who compile the textbooks that are sold in every state. So, I would contend that we have a national curriculum; that it is in the hands of the marketplace and the educational publishing industry; and that it is no substitute for the national core curriculum that would emerge if we set our collective minds to the task of writing it. We have a default curriculum. I think we can do much better.”
Hear, hear.
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How much informal or “free choice” science knowledge do children pick up outside of school? We might have a better grasp of the answer this summer when the The National Academies, a congressionally chartered nonprofit group that advises the federal government, will release a report on what’s known about the role in science education played by museums, zoos and aquariums.
It will be interesting to see what the study finds—and if the data will be broken out by socioeconomic group. Educators concerned about the narrowing of curriculum in the age of No Child Left Behind, present company included, worry that advantaged students feel the impact of curriculum narrowing less acutely than disadvantaged children, who are less likely to visit museums and zoos, or have other out-of-school opportunities for free choice science education.
“The report comes as experts bemoan a lack of scientific education and literacy among Americans,” notes the Associated Press. “They warn of a shortfall in homegrown engineers and scientists to keep the nation competitive, a general work force ill-equipped to function in an increasingly high-tech workplace, and a citizenry struggling to grasp complex public issues like stem cell research. While that has led to calls for changes in schools, science museums — broadly defined to include a range of science-oriented places to visit — can also play a big role in teaching and promoting science to both children and adults.”
“If arts education stakes its claim to students’ time and schools’ money on some unproven power to push standardized test scores upward, its position in American schools is bound to be precarious,” notes Ann Hulbert in the New York Times Magazine. She was responding to a claim made by Barack Obama on the campaign trail that “children who learn music actually do better in math, children whose imaginations are sparked by the arts are more engaged in school.”
A direct link between arts education and higher test scores is elusive, Hulbert notes, but that’s not a reason to ignore the arts in school. Citing research by Ellen Winner, a Boston College professor of psychology, and Lois Hetland, who teaches at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, she notes evidence that engaging in in art and music in school helps students develop “persistence in tackling problems, observational acuity, expressive clarity, reflective capacity to question and judge, ability to envision alternative possibilities and openness to exploration.”
Back in the age of Ike, Elvis, and tail fins millions of kids were introduced to great works of literature in a magazine called Classics Illustrated. A new generation of CI books is on the way, and Newsweek writer Malcolm Jones likes what he sees.
Jones waxes rhapsodic about a new version of The Wind in the Willows. In illustrator Michael Plessix, Rat, Mole, Toad and Badger “have met their Michelangelo,” he writes. “Every frame is drawn and colored with meticulous care. Every elegant page is composed with a dual purpose: to enchant the eye and to further the various narratives that make up the loose plot. Plessix knows how to advance and retard the story’s pace. He knows just when to zoom in and when to pull back for a wide shot.”
Teachers have a tortured relationship with “graphic novels,” often dismissing them as mere comic books. Some of us, present company included, reflexively bridle at what we perceive as the dumbing down of challenging classics, or shrug and mumble apologetically about the need to engage students “at their level.” Jones’ perspective is enlightening. Describing the original Classics Illustrated series he notes “that was where I first discovered just how good stories could be.”
“For kids who came of age after World War II, Classics Illustrated was our first encounter with stolen—or, put more mildly, borrowed—goods,” Jones writes. “How many kids, from the ’40s through the ’60s, first encountered Captain Ahab or Jean Valjean or Madame Defarge in the pages of those comics with the unforgettable yellow logo in the top left corner of the cover? Did we know who Charles Dickens was, or Victor Hugo, or Herman Melville? Probably not. We just knew that these were good stories, to be read and reread and passed around. We did not care particularly where they came from, if we thought about that at all. Somebody named Hugo wrote ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame,’ but he didn’t draw the pictures in our comics, any more than he had anything to do with the old black-and-white movie that we sat through every time it came on TV. Which suggests an intriguing esthetic principle: might we say that a truly great novel or movie or play is one that so thoroughly works its way into the culture that we forget who created it in the first place? Are these not ultimately the most potent stories, the ones that belong to everyone, and no one? It’s about as close as we get to myth these days.”
If low performance on reading tests is a function of poor content knowledge, and if broad swaths of the school day are wasted practicing reading strategies on content-free reading, why not solve both problems with reading tests that cover explicit content standards? That’s the “modest proposal” put forth by Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch, Jr. in the new issue of American Educator (PDF).
Hirsch has long argued that content knowledge is the key to reading comprehension, and describes the long periods devoted to language arts, the de rigueur reading block, as a “cognitive wasteland.” Instead he proposes language arts standards that specify literary works and techniques, and directly correspond to the content standards in other subjects—especially science and social studies. Why? Because some of those non-literary topics are going to show up in passages on the reading tests.
“So my modest proposal is that reading tests should contain passages about specific topics taught not just in literature, but in all other subjects taught in that grade, except for math,” writes Hirsch. “For instance, if third-grade language arts standards specify Alice in Wonderland, third-grade science standards call for studying the speed of light, and third-grade social studies standards include the Vikings’ explorations of North America, then passages on the third-grade reading test should cover those same topics. We would then have true curriculum-based reading tests instead of the mysterious tests we now have. This cunning device would make tests fairer and pedagogically more useful, and boost our students’ abilities.”
As long as reading is viewed as a discrete set of skills that can be transferred from text to text, practiced and perfected, schools will continue to spend a disproportionate amount of time on test prep. Hirsch’s proposal is a nifty piece of intellectual jujitsu, which would make test prep make sense.
Everybody on the bandwagon. Instructivism is en fuego!
Sure, Daniel Casse of the White House Writers Group, a Washington consulting firm, writing in the Weekly Standard is merely catching up to Sol Stern’s City Journal piece and the attending sturm und drang. (Aside to Petrilli: See?) But it’s national ink for an important idea, which Casse credits to E.D. Hirsch, Jr.: you either make curriculum content part of the agenda, or you leave it to “bureaucrats, textbook writers, and political activists” to have their wicked way with what gets taught. “That’s not only what parents really care about,” writes Casse, “it is the thing that matters most to educational achievement.”
“That’s why the next political agenda for school reform, if it ever emerges, will be one that figures out how to redefine the notion of the public school so that traditional school authorities lose their grip on local school systems,” Casse concludes. “In other words, school reform will have to be about not just the way we think public schools ought to be organized, but also what we want them to teach in the classroom at every grade level. Neither the incentivist nor the instructionist side of the debate has been willing to take on both sides of the argument. But Sol Stern’s second thoughts suggest that a successful political movement for better American schools will have to do just that.”
I could kiss Michael Petrilli on the mouth.
A perennial, frustrating blind spot among ed reformers, with their monomaniacal focus on systems, structures and accountability, is curriculum. Trying to build good schools without looking at curriculum is like trying to build a winning baseball team by focusing on the parking lot, the stadium and the vendors and assuming the “baseball people” are the experts on the game. My new hero Mr. Petrilli gets this. Read his take in the Fordham Foundation’s Gadfly on the NY Times piece How Many Billionaires Does It Take to Fix a School System?
“In a 5,000 word forum on education, these words did not appear once: instruction, curriculum, reading, math, history, literature,” sayeth Mr. Petrilli, with the clarity of the child pointing out the Emperor is naked. “This ‘incentivist’ thinking is a fair reflection of the state of the ‘new’ education philanthropy. Staffed mostly by smart MBAs and obsessed with structures and systems and processes, their ignorance about the stuff of education leads to agnosticism. And, predictably, to trouble. (See Joel Klein’s embrace of Diana Lam and Lucy Calkins as Exhibits 1 and 2.).” As Petrilli sees it, to remain agnostic on curriculum and pedagogy is “like sending in nation-builders who can’t speak Arabic and never studied Iraqi history.”
He wraps up with a thought exercise. What if a billionaire wants to focus his philanthropy on smart instructionist investments? Petrilli offers three: Support the development of national standards and tests; create a voluntary national curriculum; and fund thousands of high-quality summer workshops.
Not a bad start. Bravo, sir! Discuss among yourselves, billionaires.
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