E.D. Hirsch, Jr., the founder of the Core Knowledge curriculum, wrote an article opposing value-added teacher evaluation, especially in reading. Hirsch supports the Common Core but thinks it may be jeopardized by the rush to test it and tie the scores to teacher evaluations. He knows this will encourage teaching to the test and other negative consequences.
Hirsch believes that if teachers teach strong subject matter, their students will do well on the reading tests. But he sees the downside of tying test scores to salary and jobs.
He writes:
“The first thing I’d want to do if I were younger would be to launch an effective court challenge to value-added teacher evaluations on the basis of test scores in reading comprehension. The value-added approach to teacher evaluation in reading is unsound both technically and in its curriculum-narrowing effects. The connection between job ratings and tests in ELA has been a disaster for education.”
He is right. Will the so-called reformers who recently became Hirschians listen?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
My school, a high poverty LAUSD high school, just broke the 800 API mark. We found out yesterday. Our English Department refuses to follow ridiculous district mandates and curricula. We teach whole texts, generally eschew textbooks, and get the kids excited about learning. Of course, we can’t say that out loud or we’ll be in trouble. But it is the truth.
I taught reading and language arts to intellectually gifted students. It was impossible to get “value added” as most of them scored consistently in the mid to high 90’s. And I did not teach to the test.
Mr. Hirsch
You must know a “younger’ colleague that will take up the mantle and launch an effective court challenge. APPR and VAMs will not stand a chance under objective scrutiny.
Not only that, now Teacher Preparation Programs will hinge on the results of the standardized test scores of future students.
They have not even figured out the if the tests are any good – but everything will be based on the results. This is madness.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324324404579043311787197976.html
I believe Hirsch is correct with this theory: “The solution to the test-prep conundrum is this: First, institute in every participating state the specific and coherent curriculum that the Common Core Standards explicitly call for. Then base the reading-test passages on those knowledge domains covered in the curriculum.”
Google the title if the link doesn’t work: Teacher-Training Schools Face Tougher Accreditation Standards
I especially love this line: “Elizabeth Hinde, who oversees the teacher preparation at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, said her program hasn’t sought national accreditation in part because it lacks rigor.” ???
This article by Dr. Hirsch may well be the wisest thing anyone has written on the subjects of the Common Core State Standards in ELA and the tests and evaluation systems that are to be based upon those standards. Of particular importance in this article is the distinction that Dr. Hirsch draws between the math and ELA standards and the consequences of that distinction for summative testing. Once again, E.D. Hirsch, Jr., shows himself to be one of the clearest thinkers on education issues in the history of this country. I very much hope that his piece is widely read and understood. It’s extremely important that people understand what he is saying here.
cx: Of particular importance in this article ARE . . .
I wish one could edit these posts!
The CCSS in ELA were poorly conceived. They are self-contradictory. On the one hand, the ancillary materials around the ELA standards call for reading of substantive texts and provide examples of what is meant by that. On the other hand, the standards themselves–what will be tested–are content-free lists of general, vague, abstract skills. Dr. Hirsch does a brilliant job of explaining, in brief compass, just why that is a problem. If these standards had been properly vetted, Dr. Hirsch and others would have been able to make it clear why that’s disastrous for education in the “English language arts.” I have written hundreds of posts on this blog attempting to explain what Dr. Hirsch makes clear in a few carefully considered paragraphs. Let’s hope that his piece is widely read and understood.
Although I did find his conclusion a bit confusing, or at least I have trouble reconciling it with Diane’s statement that Hirsch opposes VAM evaluations because they “encourage teaching to the test.” The way I read his final paragraph, he’s saying that the states should require teachers to teach from a specific Common Core-aligned curriculum and then to base the Common Core tests on what was covered in the curriculum. I agree it makes no sense to test stuff that hasn’t been covered yet, but how is what Hirsch recommends not “teaching to the test”? And of course the bigger question, do we really want this kind of curriculum uniformity?
Yes, the conclusion of the article requires some clarification. My reading is that he is calling for test questions to be based on substantive CONTENT, not vague lists of skills, which is precisely what the current plan does NOT do. He is also saying, I believe, that any tests that are created should NOT be used for VAM purposes.
Instead, based explicitly on this value-added data, Cuomo will identify failing teachers and failing schools and impose a death sentence on public education. Here’s video:
ww.democratandchronicle.com/article/20130830/NEWS01/308300041/Andrew-Cuomo-New-York-failing-schools-education
This links to a nice report on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of VAM. http://epi.3cdn.net/b9667271ee6c154195_t9m6iij8k.pdf
My favorite paragraph:
“A study designed to test this question used VAM methods to assign effects to teachers after controlling for other factors, but applied the model backwards to see if credible results were obtained. Surprisingly, it found that students’ fifth grade teachers were good predictors of their fourth grade test scores. Inasmuch as a student’s later fifth grade teacher cannot possibly have influenced that student’s fourth grade performance, this curious result can only mean that VAM results are based on factors other than teachers’ actual effectiveness.”
LOL
It will take a band of teachers getting hurt first, in order to file suit. Someone must get ‘hurt’ first.
There was suit filed in Houston, but there were very few teachers involved in Amrein-Beardsley’s study. In fact, I think only one teacher was involved – I cant remember.
Reputations and careers will be damaged (hurt); teachers will suffer from anxiety and stress – far beyond the normal part of the job. teachers will be denied tenure; careers will be derailed; personal lives will be disrupted. This whole teacher evaluation syndrome (like our APPR here in NY) tied to standardized testing is wrong on so many levels. There are approximately 215,000 public school teachers about to affected by VAMs just here in NYS.
I hope everyone who reads Hirsch’s article on Common Core testing also reads his strong endorsement of the CCSS in his previous piece: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/e-d-hirsch-jr/why-im-for-the-common-cor_b_3809618.html
Part of that endorsement hinges on a belief that we can’t predict whether the standards will work or not. To which I’d answer 1) That’s what pilot projects are for, and 2) there’s such a thing as “highly predictable unintended consequences,” such as the ones that played out in Iraq, and in the implementation of NCLB. It’s not just that well informed people predicted them in advance but were drowned out by the poorly informed herd. It’s that we can analyze the assumptions behind the Common Core Standards right now and identify the logical–and ideological–fallacies that point to failure.
Check out this paragraph from Hirsch’s earlier piece (dated August 27):
“Not even most prescient among us can know whether the Common Core standards will end in triumph or tragedy. That will depend on what the states actually do about developing rich content knowledge ‘within and across grades.’ To do so will take the courage to withstand the gripe-patrols that will complain about the inclusion of say Egypt, in the second grade. But who can be sure that the required political courage to withstand such gripes won’t be forthcoming once the absolute need for specific, cumulative content is understood. As Niels Bohr said: ‘Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.’ If just one state or district shows the way, with big, unmistakable gains resulting, those results will influence many others.”
Gripe patrols? Is he referring to the early childhood experts that had no role in writing the standards? Anyway, Hirsch is saying that the Common Core Standards might not work, but if somebody CAN get them to work, everyone else should follow their lead. This might have been a tenable position BEFORE almost every state adopted the standards (if you believe in standardization, that is). Still, he has no problem at all with running a long-range experiment using the bulk of the nation’s kids as test subjects!
Also note his reference to Egypt for second graders, which I take to be a slap at Diane’s blog post that questioned a crazy list of outcomes expected of six year olds from their study of Mesopotamia, Egypt, comparative religion, ancient languages, and what all: https://dianeravitch.net/2013/08/23/can-you-explain-the-code-of-hammurabi-and-a-ziggurat/comment-page-1/ based on this… http://www.engageny.org/resource/grade-1-ela-domain-4-early-world-civilizations
I don’t share Mr. Hirsch’s belief that intense, sequenced instruction in all prescribed content areas is the key to helping young children improve their reading comprehension, or to inspiring a lifelong love of learning, for that matter. I don’t believe in “the absolute need for specific, cumulative content.” I think it’s impossible, and counterproductive, to conjure up a body of knowledge that every child has to master–that is, a detailed scope and sequence of facts, concepts, and vocabulary–in order to be considered educated. (Now, if we’re talking about training–in neurosurgery or air traffic control–that’s a different story.) Admittedly, that’s a philosophical difference. But I think we should look at research, too. Here’s the comment I left on his Huffington Post entry on Common Core Testing:
“Where did you get the idea that forcing advanced subjects on young kids is the best way to improve reading comprehension? I got good at English by reading what I liked. This has been borne out by research. Stephen Krashen reports on the value of “sustained silent reading”: http://successfulenglish.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/81-Generalizations-about-FVR-2009.pdf and the importance of “narrow reading”: http://www.sdkrashen.com/articles/narrow/all.html
Looks like background knowledge is more effectively built when a student selects his own reading material within a limited range (than when the teacher assigns a variety of unfamiliar short passages). I went through phases as a kid: mystery, adventure, nature, war. Sure, I also read the encyclopedia, but it wasn’t just learning academic subjects that built my background knowledge. It was all those Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and We Were There books.
You’re right that “value added” models shouldn’t be used to evaluate teachers, but really good teachers will finesse the bad mandates as best they can. Their main concern isn’t to keep their jobs. It’s to help children learn. The “many teachers” that you report “were still going to do test prep, as any sensible teacher should” might not represent teachers as a whole. I’ll bet there are just as many trying to subvert the ill-conceived testing regimes and other bad practices. Lots of teachers will either keep trying to do right by their students, or reluctantly quit.”
I was already a Hirsch skeptic, but I’m even less a fan after reading these two posts. He’s mostly right about the Common Core testing, but otherwise I think he’s barking up the wrong tree, maybe even the wrong forest. Those poor first graders…
There are a lot of issues here, and I don’t have a lot of time for this post. But just a few comments about your thoughtful reply, Randall. My comments will be, perforce, densely packed, so it will pay to attend fairly closely to what I say below.
Content matters. So do skills. Both should largely be conceived in terms of knowledge–knowledge of what (declarative knowledge) and knowledge of how (procedural knowledge).
Making a list of abstract skills, which is what the CCSS in ELA themselves are, the sole desired and tested outcomes for the subject, is a terrible mistake. There are many reasons why this is so, but here are a couple of them:
In his work, Hirsch stresses the importance of knowledge of what because of the demonstrable dependence of readers’ comprehension on that sort of knowledge. There is another reason as well for caring about knowledge of what in ELA: Our brains are organized in such a way that much of our procedural knowledge of language and of thinking is attained not through explicit instruction in procedures but via the implicit learning that occurs when we are focusing on content, on the what. So, for example, our knowledge of the theta assignments of verbs (agent, experiencer, theme, goal, patient, recipient, etc) is not learned through explicit instruction in these but, rather, in the course of active use of the new verb in a meaningful context. So, people who insist on explicit instruction in a list of abstract skills fail to understand how we learn most (but not all) of these skills.
There is, of course, some procedural knowledge that is best learned through explicit instruction–decoding of graphemes, for example. Writing is a recent cultural invention, and there aren’t dedicated structures in the brain for grapheme decoding as there are for learning grammar and spoken vocabulary from context. But even procedural knowledge gets short shrift from the Common Core because that procedural knowledge that does benefit from explicit instruction needs to be formulated operationally, and the CCSS in ELA doesn’t do this and, in fact, encourage people not to so formulate it, if the CCSS-inspired curricula that I have seen is any indication.
The issue of WHAT knowledge of how (declarative knowledge) we should be teaching is another matter altogether. I happen to think that it’s a mistake to mandate a large part of what all kids should learn because I think that our schools shouldn’t be factories for milling students into identical machine parts–that a large, complex, diverse, pluralistic society needs a lot of people with some shared knowledge and a lot of unique knowledge that they have learned by following their bliss, building upon their particular interests, proclivities, potentials, etc. But that’s a VERY large and complex topic in and of itself. I have many, many ideas about what we should do there, but they don’t involve a rigid, proscribed curriculum for all. The 2D Reformy Flatlanders think in that sort of way. I don’t.
cs: “and the CCSS in ELA DON’T do this
another cx: The issue of what knowledge of WHAT (declarative knowledge) we should be teaching
It’s really, really sad that the amateurs who put together the CCSS in ELA could be allowed to get away with this, that their work has not been met with a resounding chorus of derision. These standards seem to have been prepared by people with no deep training in or understanding of what we now know about how kids learn to read, write, think, speak, listen, etc. It’s more than a little shocking that people take them seriously.
That said, for the most part, the state standards that preceded them were even worse.
Another cs: a rigid PRESCRIBED curriculum for all
I REALLY wish there were an editing feature for these posts!
There were so many typos in my post that I am just going to repost it with corrections:
Content matters. So do skills. Both should largely be conceived in terms of knowledge–knowledge of what (declarative knowledge) and knowledge of how (procedural knowledge).
Making proficiencies in abstract skills like those listed in the CCSS in ELA proper (excluding the introductions, the Appendices, and ancillary materials like the Publishers’ Criteria) the sole desired and tested outcomes for the subject, is a terrible mistake. There are many reasons why this is so, but here are a couple of them:
In his work, Hirsch stresses the importance of knowledge of what because of the demonstrable dependence of readers’ comprehension on that sort of knowledge. There is another reason as well for caring about knowledge of what in ELA: Our brains are organized in such a way that much of our procedural knowledge of language and of thinking is attained not through explicit instruction in procedures but via the implicit learning that occurs when we are focusing on content, on the what. So, for example, our knowledge of the theta assignments of verbs (agent, experiencer, theme, goal, patient, recipient, etc) is not learned through explicit instruction in these but, rather, in the course of active use of the new verb in a meaningful context. So, people who insist on explicit instruction in a list of abstract skills fail to understand how we learn most (but not all) of these skills. We learn them, implicitly, when we are engaged in certain ways with significant, meaningful content.
There is, of course, some procedural knowledge that is best learned through explicit instruction–decoding of graphemes, for example. Writing is a recent cultural invention, and we aren’t born with DEDICATED structures in the brain for grapheme decoding as we are with dedicated structures for intuiting grammar and spoken vocabulary from context. But even procedural knowledge gets short shrift from the Common Core because the procedural knowledge that does benefit from explicit instruction needs, for the most part, to be formulated operationally, and the CCSS in ELA don’t do this and, in fact, encourage people not to so formulate it, if the CCSS-inspired curricula that I have seen is any indication.
The issue of what knowledge of what (declarative knowledge) we should be teaching is another matter altogether. I happen to think that it’s a mistake to mandate a large part of what all kids should learn because I think that our schools shouldn’t be factories for milling students into identical machine parts–that a large, complex, diverse, pluralistic society needs a lot of people with some shared knowledge and a lot of unique knowledge that they have learned by following their bliss, building upon their particular interests, proclivities, potentials, etc. But that’s a VERY large and complex topic in and of itself. I have many, many ideas about what we should do there, but they don’t involve a rigid, prescribed curriculum for all. They involve teachers having a lot individual autonomy and a lot of knowledge, themselves, of their subjects, both declarative and procedural knowledge, but not knowledge that is UNIFORM across teachers. The 2D Reformy Flatlanders think in that “one ring to rule them all” sort of way. I don’t. The important thing is that the content be rich and engaging—that it be of inherent value. Expertise is hard won and singular, and the expertise of teachers should be no exception.
I can’t find too much to disagree with in your comment. My opposition to the Common Core has a somewhat different emphasis. But in contrast to what you’re saying, Professor Hirsch is all in favor of the Common Core as written, and he’s advocating that his own prescribed curriculum, or something like it, be adopted to complement the Common Core guidelines.
There’s no dispute that knowledge of all kinds is a key to improving reading comprehension, and learning capacity in general. The question is, How is that knowledge built? I don’t think it’s best done by hitting little kids over the head with Hammurabi’s Code. I’m a Krashen fan, not a Hirsch fan. In fact, I believe Dolly Parton is a more profound educational thinker than Hirsch: http://usa.imaginationlibrary.com/
The Krashen-Parton approach is simple… 1) Read to young children and give them books and other reading materials of their own. 2) Provide easy access to well stocked libraries, especially in poor neighborhoods. This is one way–maybe the best way–to help kids build a powerful knowledge base. For a sampling of research references, see Anthony Cody’s interview with Stephen Krashen: http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2010/05/stephen_krashen_fix_poverty_an.html
Thankfully, teachers across the US have sunk their own funds into classroom libraries. But that isn’t enough. Imagine if the Gates Foundation had poured a billion dollars into book ownership programs and libraries instead of spending at least that much on efforts to raise class size and reduce teacher salaries?
As for the perceived lack of content in the Common Core, it’s interesting that David Coleman has claimed that the standards were needed partly because of a LACK of content. Either way, can you imagine a decent teacher running a content-free classroom? Didn’t happen before the Common Core, won’t happen after it’s long gone.
I like this quote from a talk by Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything: “Geeking out is extraordinarily useful.” I say give kids a chance to go as deeply as they want into the areas of knowledge that fascinate them most. When we enforce the Common Core Standards, or adopt something like the Core Knowledge Program, that’s less likely to happen.
At any rate, the CCSS in ELA were rushed together by a small group of know-nothings. They are not at ALL well thought through. What a pity that such AMATEUR work should have been foisted on the entire country.
Hirsch’s language is as vague as the standards themselves. What exactly does “specific cumulative content” and “rich content across grade levels” mean? Ironically, I was told by a NYCTF coach this summer that, “Our job as teachers is not to teach content.” Apparently skills are the new thing (as if they never previously existed). But what is technique without understanding? What happened to developmental stages and learning styles? How does all this jive with the differentiation and inclusion also being promoted in the classroom? Some people talk as if there was a pedagogical void until they arrived upon the scene, although they somehow got a good enough education to know everything. If only all this money and energy could be put into keeping public libraries open and restoring cuts to arts and enrichment programs…
If you google the Core Knowledge curriculum or the EngageNY site with ELA content, you will find that the Hirsch curriculum is very, very, very specific about content. Nothing vague there.
Read this: https://dianeravitch.net/2013/08/23/can-you-explain-the-code-of-hammurabi-and-a-ziggurat/
This is right out of the Core Knowledge curriculum.
To overstate it, ALL skills are knowledge (content). One doesn’t just play the violin, one plays Chopin, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Schuman, Bach.
Wow! They’ve been hard at work. And all this on, as I was chided about this summer, a maximum of ten minutes of direct instruction, with time out for assessments, per lesson plan! We better start funding Early Childhood Education in vitro!!