Lawmakers in California have had a busy summer deciding what students in the Golden State should be taught in school. A bill requiring that a 1946 court ruling on desegregation be added to the curriculum won strong support, as did a measure that adds the contribution of Filipino-American soldiers. Legislation requiring lessons on the contributions of Italian Americans, Native Americans and the deportation of Mexican citizens during the Depression are pending.
An editorial in one local paper makes sport of the whole miasma:
OK, boys and girls, please turn to page 151 of your state history book and skip down to the section on the contributions of Filipino-American soldiers in World War II. We were going to talk about the contributions of the Chinese, but seeing as how that isn’t mandatory, we’re going to take a pass.
Please be prepared immediately after recess to discuss Myanmar’s failure to adopt U.S. concepts of Democracy. Yes, Jimmy, I know you’re only in fourth grade, but a bipartisan state Senate majority felt California students were getting way behind in their comparative political theory. And we wouldn’t want to argue with bipartisan state Senate majorities, now would we?
Fortunately, we will have time to go over our spelling words a couple of more times this week because the governor vetoed Senate Bill 908, which would have encouraged each California grade level to include a section on global warming.
“They all have merit,” concludes an editorial in the Contra Costa Times, “but it is not the job of individual legislators to alter the public school curriculum on a piecemeal basis. This is the purview of the state Board of Education.”
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“No fewer than seven bills that would alter how history is taught are currently before California’s legislature,” reports The Economist. “One is a measure about Filipinos. The others would encourage or force more lessons about African and Latin American cultures, American Indians, the “secret war” in Laos, the deportation of Hispanics in the 1930s, the desegregation of Mexican pupils and the Italian contribution to California.”
Each of these attempts to legislate content face an uphill slog. The magazine notes that California Democrats tend to support such measures, but Governor Schwarzenegger tends to veto them. But a larger battle looms: “Next month a group of academics and bureaucrats will begin holding public hearings on an overhaul of the curriculum framework—the first full one since 2001,” the Economist reports. “The coalitions that have been formed to push for legislation will no doubt make their feelings known.”
This presages what a debate on national content standards might look like, but that is not an argument against the attempt. In Bridging Differences recently, CK board member Diane Ravitch noted, “I see a national curriculum as the product of a professional consensus, one that involves subject-matter experts, teachers, administrators, and even end-users of the public schools like college professors and journalists. I also see such a curriculum evolving from careful research on international curriculum standards about what students at various ages are expected to know and be able to do. And I envision a curriculum that in toto amounts to not more than 50 percent of the school day, so that there would be many variations and additions depending on the state, region, and locale.”
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.
“Maybe if we start listening, history will stop repeating itself.” — Lily Tomlin
A pair of researchers asked 2000 high school juniors and seniors from across the country to “write down the names of the most famous Americans in history.” The top three most-cited names were Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman. “Three of the top five — and six of the top 10 — are women,” reports USA Today. “It suggests that the ‘cultural curriculum’ that most kids — and by extension, their parents — experience in school,” writes Greg Toppo, “increasingly emphasizes the stories of Americans who are not necessarily dead, white or male.” According to USA Today, the researchers involved in the project believe the prominence of black Americans signals “a profound change” in how students view history. “Over the course of about 44 years, we’ve had a revolution in the people who we come to think about to represent the American story,” says Sam Wineburg of Stanford University, one of the study’s two authors.
A less charitable explanation is that American students have been so deprived of even a rudimentary knowledge of their own history that it doesn’t strike them as odd to name Oprah Winfrey, #7 on the list, as one of the most important people in American history. Other names cited most often by students in the study are Susan B. Anthony, Benjamin Franklin and Amelia Earhart. Marilyn Monroe, not incidentally, beat out both Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein.
Continue reading ‘History Is Bunk’
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