Randall Hendee is a English teacher in Illinois. He wrote the following comments about E.D. Hirsch’s views about the Common Core. Hirsch is the founder of the Core Knowledge curriculum and author of several books on the importance of establishing a sequential, specific, knowledge-based curriculum.
Hendee writes:
“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.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
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.
Robert, so glad you mention Steve Krashen who is renowned as the USC School of Education, emeritus professor, for his study of reading methods and outcomes. I was recently interviewed on KCRW with Dr. Krashen and 2 LAUSD teachers and we had so much to cover in terms of what was happening to California public education re: privatization etc. that we only touched on his classic and widely accepted views. I hope everyone reads your link. Thanks.
And of course thanks to Diane for this post.
What makes content “rich and engaging”?
A connection to something real in a child’s life–even if just to a literary character they have read about, a song they have sung, or an experience they have encountered.
Understanding “why” and the link to everyday experiences.
I taught the 7th and 8th grade Core Knowledge content sequence and my students were the best educated in English in my school. Some knowledge is better than some other knowledge. My romance novel when I was a teen was Great Expectations. It may be a higher quality romance novel than another student’s. Which is why it is critical for teachers to assign a body of content-rich, and culturally literate material.
You make an excellent point Ginger. I too, as a 12 year old, was transported by Great Expectations which I found in the library, not in school. It helped shape my university choices and lead to the adventure of reading great literature. Every student should be presented with choices including the classics.
Robert,
“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.”
I’m not so sure that we really know that much about brain input, processing, and output to make such a strong statement about a human’s brain operational methods.
Help me out. Would not learning, let’s say, 1-9 multiplication tables through memorization through repetition and self quizzing be a more efficient way to learn them (given the caveat that perhaps we don’t even need to know how to multiply in our heads-not that I agree with that caveat)? And isn’t that explicit instruction and doesn’t the results indicate that perhaps both implicit and explicit teaching and learning occur simultaneously?
Duane
Different sorts of learnings take place in different sorts of ways. It’s important to understand that. Understanding that would prevent a lot of ignorant imposition on teachers of invariant techniques.
Such an important point Duane considering the convoluted methods of the new Common Core math which will drive both teachers and students up the wall. Old fashioned memorization of the tables still works and then this tableau of knowledge prepares non-users of tech in solving complex problems, to add this storehouse to the critical thinking needed for algebra, geometry, trig, and onward.
We know that using computers creates new brain paths for young and old, but so does memorizing poetry, the Bill of Rights, and the times tables.
A agree abut the times tables, BTW! Explicit instruction and practice work for these, and we’ve seen a lot of utter disasters when people tried to deviate from that approach.
I wholeheartedly agree with E.D. Hirsch’s ideas that both skills and content are important in a curriculum. I supplemented my son’s public school curriculum with reading to him from E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge series books. Due to his very high achievement scores in 6th grade, he was asked to take the SAT in 7th grade. He scored at the level of a graduating senior in verbal, and well above that in math.
My son graduated high school as Valedictorian, and did well in college. He is now a successful engineer. I attribute much of his success to Hirsch’s Core Knowedge series, and NOT to the bare-bones Common Core curriculum, which does NOT give enough stress on content.
So how big is the financial gain for Hirsch when states like NY have bought and mandated his Core Knowledge ELA curriculum? And why is no one talking about how much skin in the game this guy has? He is far from being an impartial critic who has no personal interests at stake.
E.D. Hirsch, Jr., isn’t about the money. He has poured a LOT of his own money from his books into trying to get his message out to schools–his message about substantive content versus all-instruction-in-skills-all-the-time.
I know the Common Core Sequence very well. It’s really very exciting for kids. Do I think everyone should have to follow it? No. Do I think it could use improvements? Definitely. There’s a lot I would change if I were redrafting it. But it’s a great model of what can be done to put together a truly engaging, substantive curriculum.
Kids are more likely to learn when they have some interesting content to chew on than if they get a steady diet of content-neutral instruction in abstract skills (e.g., “Today, class, we’re going to be studying how to find the main idea” or “Today we’re going to be practicing inferencing skills”–pardon my use of the gawdawful educationese neologism “inferencing skills”).
I doubt very seriously that E.D. Hirsch, personally, will receive a penny as a result of any school’s adoption of the Core Knowledge Sequence, though his foundation, which exists to promote that curriculum, might and might use that money to promote the curriculum more. I can’t say because I’ve not been following what his foundation has been doing of late.
Cosmic Tinkerer, Hirsch is not making money from Core Knowledge. The Core Knowledge Foundation sold the rights to the ELA curriculum for 20 years to Rupert Murdoch’s Amplify. I have no idea how he plans to make a profit, but he doesn’t buy something without seeing a profit down the line.
And Amplify is no run by Joel Klein…and yes, it is all about profits.
typo…now run by Klein
I’m very familiar with Core Knowledge. I embraced it when it first came out, purchased and paid for the books myself and implemented it enthusiastically in my primary education classroom (comprised of at-risk children). In many ways. I found it to be developmentally inappropriate, not very engaging and irrelevant to most of my students. I thought my districts’ (then optional) standards were much more on target and then chose to use them as guides instead.
So Hirsch and his foundation didn’t make any money from selling the rights to Core Knowledge to NY? Sorry if I’m a bit skeptical about foundations today, but I find it difficult to comprehend how that works. BTW, based on the NY 1st grade standards regarding Mesopotamia, Egypt, etc, it’s not just the ELA component of Core Knowledge that NY bought, but also the History and Geography components.
Anyways, I was not only referring to financial gain when I stated, “He is far from being an impartial critic who has no personal interests at stake.” Hirsch has been trying to sell his curriculum to policy makers in state houses across the country for decades. I think it’s just as much about ideology, as well as his credibility and reputation.
There is little doubt that Hirsch is an ideologue. But who isn’t? My beef is that his ideas are very often narrow and objectionable. I’ve written about his literary critical theories before and why I find them woefully inadequate. And I see the assumptions behind those ideas to be informing the Core Knowledge approach.
On top of that, he has been allied with my mortal enemies in mathematics education – Mathematically Correct and NYC-HOLD since the ’90s. So if I didn’t know him or his work, I’d be skeptical on that basis alone. He’s on the wrong side of the Math Wars, and thus I find it unsurprising that he’s on the wrong side of the literacy wars, too.
One thing for certain: there are countless gurus out there ready and willing to sell their magic solutions to all our educational woes. They crop up here and on EdWeek blogs, always inserting links to their websites and products/services. Hirsch simply got there a lot sooner than most, with a more audacious vision and claim: that he and his foundation can tell you exactly what your (everyone’s) Nth Grade needs to know (for what? To be “culturally literate,” to be on the fast track to college success, to “make it” in a capitalist society, to be socially acceptable in the eyes of E.D. Hirsch and like-minded snobs.
If you don’t find that at all off-putting and deserving of serious skepticism, then we have a clear cut communicate gap that might well be unbridgeable.
It’s really interesting, Michael, that you have read Hirsch on hermeneutics. The arguments for and against the position he takes there are fascinating, and it’s wonderful to hear that you have followed them.
I’ve posted elsewhere about my seriously disagreements with Hirsch’s literary critical theories. The short version will have to suffice here: he pushes the already-debunked (by the New Critics) intentional fallacy as if somehow either their work didn’t exist or can be ignored. What I always found particularly problematic is the notion he pushes that the author’s intent (if known) is the definitive interpretation of a text. There are so many things wrong with this idea beyond the fact that fiction writers and poets as a rule write fiction and poetry so that they needn’t write essays that ostensibly have “the same meaning” as given works of art. There are different reasons for this, and every writer (or artist, movie director, composer, etc.) has his/her own perspective, including something that probably fits Hirsch’s viewpoint. I’m not suggesting, therefore, that no one could possibly agree with him, least of all a novelist, poet, playwright, or screenwriter. There are, undoubtedly, writers who work from a didactic perspective and believe that they “have something to say” and so their own take on their work would settle any and all questions about what was “meant” at any point in their novel, story, poem, play, movie, etc.
However, these folks are either delusional, hacks, or both. Does anyone seriously believe that a complex work of fiction avails itself of a single, timeless interpretation? That even James Joyce could have said with confidence every since reasonable interpretation of, say, the first PAGE of FINNEGAN’S WAKE? And that if some reader in 2013 is able to find a reading that Joyce never considered that this reader is automatically wrong? Please note, I don’t see Joyce’s take on his own work and that of a hypothetical 2013 reader as mutually exclusive, any more than I presume that critical writing I’ve done on works by John Barth, Ernest Hemingway, John Keats, Geoffrey Chaucer, etc., were definitive. They were simply good readings or not, based on whether they are grounded in the text and make sense to other readers who happen to find my reading useful.
It takes a strange, elitist kind of person to push Hirsch’s neo-Intentional Fallacy position. No matter how many times I read his critical theory, I am unable to fathom his narrow-minded arrogance. And as I have contended before, I think that mind set fits his educational ideas perfectly.
Finally, I remain extremely skeptical of his overall thinking given that he long ago threw in with Mathematically Correct and NYC-HOLD, has never to my knowledge backed off that alliance, and is woefully out of his depth in that regard. However, I’m seeing in some of the comments here that Hirsch fans in general also appear, to the extent that they weigh in on the subject, to be educational conservatives when it comes to mathematics education.
Perhaps I’m really failing to see some larger picture, but until I see evidence to the contrary, I’m going to remain a non-fan of Mr. Hirsch’s ideas about education. And I continue to have serious concerns about the narrowness of the Core Knowledge view of what’s worth learning or knowing.
Thanks to Randall Hendee for reminding everyone about pilot projects, which is exactly how those who believe in the Common Core should have proceeded. There is no excuse for this ill conceived experiment that is being foisted on our schools.
E.D. Hisrch, Jr., is a fellow who believes that kids learn more when they are learning about rocks and snakes, poems and plays, Beethoven and the Beatles, than when they are being taught to apply “metacognitive strategies” for “inferencing skills” and “finding the main idea” to ANY RANDOM CRAP they are handed to read. And he’s absolutely right about that. The obsession with content-free skills instruction in this country–instantiated, alas, in the standards themselves that make up the Common Core in ELA, has been a disaster.
I encourage people to have a look at the books in his foundation’s series “What Your [1st-5th] Grader Should Know.” This is wonderful stuff, and unlike the CCSS in ELA, that series of books is absolutely on target developmentally for most kids, though as everyone except those in the reformy crowd understands, KIDS DIFFER. They differ A LOT in proclivities and interests, in the developmental schedules they are on, and in the challenges that they face outside the classroom.
It was surprising and disheartening to me to find that he had endorsed the CCSS in ELA given that these perfectly instantiate the all-skills-all-the-time approach to ELA instruction that he has argued so eloquently against book after book, study after study, opinion piece after opinion piece, for years. I think that he was seduced by the ancillary material around those vague, abstract, pedestrian, amateurish standards–the stuff that calls for reading of substantive texts. What he means by that–look at those books–and what a lof of others have interpreted that to mean differ. I hope that Dr. Hirsch, who is one of the wisest men I have ever had the pleasure to come to know, is rethinking that endorsement or, at least, that his critiques will influence a rethinking of the uninformed, pedestrian standards [sic] we’ve all had foisted upon us.
Robert,
“E.D. Hisrch, Jr., is a fellow who believes that kids learn more when they are learning about rocks and snakes, poems and plays, Beethoven and the Beatles, than when they are being taught to apply “metacognitive strategies” for “inferencing skills” and “finding the main idea” to ANY RANDOM CRAP they are handed to read. And he’s absolutely right about that.”
It seems by your postings on this thread that you view this as a binary oppositional problem-either/or. Can’t both sides of this “problem” be occurring at the same time, much like explicit and implicit learning discussed above?
Thanks,
Duane
I certainly do not view this as an either-or matter. I hope I made that clear above, in my initial note about the different ways in which kids do various kinds of learning. But it’s clear that the CCSS in ELA and the state standards that preceded them encourage skills-based curricula and pedagogy and that doing that, across the board, is a mistake.
I don’t see Shepherd (or Hirsch himself, for that matter) as viewing things in a binary “either/or” fashion as you claim. Indeed, you and many Hirsch opponents tend to oversimplify and pigeonhole his true arguments, no matter how many times and how clearly he lays it out. Reread Shepherd’s first paragraph above. Having been a teacher for some 20 years now in an educational milieu that blindly jumps on the next highbrow fad masquerading as research-based theory, I’ve come to side with Hirsch in his claims that decontextualized skills-based approaches simply do NOT work. Sadly, this argument often lands on the deaf ears of fad-driven educators and intellectuals who don’t want to accept the simple fact that skills can’t get one anywhere when there isn’t any knowledge to back them up. To me, an infinitely more worthy discussion (and challenge) would be to come to an agreement on what knowledge we should be teaching … not whether facts and knowledge should be taught. Of course they should be taught!
Ramin,
You took a leap of faith in assuming that I am against what Hirsch proposes. I was basically asking Robert for some clarification of his statement as what I had perceived what he said didn’t seem to jibe with what I had seen him write before.
I happen to believe that a sound basis in facts of the world, whether historical, biological, mathematical, etc. . . have to be the foundation for those later developed supposedly higher order thinking/skills-based learning. Without a solid foundation there can be no building. Without those “facts” as mentioned children are left being blown about in the wind as there is nothing to anchor them to use those supposed higher order thinking skills (and I’ve never liked that particular concept either).
“. . . the simple fact that skills can’t get one anywhere when there isn’t any knowledge to back them up.”
Exactly!
As a foreign language teacher I rejected the “modern” way, Krashen’s way of just throw a bunch of sounds and marks on a paper (for that is what looking at a reading in a second language when one doesn’t know any of it is-a bunch of marks on a paper with no meaning whatsoever) at the students and they will absorb what it means (by magic I guess) and be able to figure out syntax, inflection, meaning. Horse manure. One must first build a vocabulary, which the best way is through repetition, especially written repetition. Learn what constitutes the various parts, i.e., old-fashioned grammar, of utterances, whether single words or completed sentences so that one can build on ones own language.
To me that “how to teach a second language battle” is quite similar to the “focus on facts and information gathering” before being able to cogently comment on it versus “Oh, teach them how to supposedly comment on”. . . on what? if there is no basis of fact and information.
Thanks for clarifying. You and I actually seem to be on the same page, particularly since I (too) have been a teacher of English Language Learners for most of my educational career. It’s a rewarding but very tough job, isn’t it? Cheers!
Rewarding, yes. Tough, perhaps in some ways. In the sense of having to give it one’s all everyday, every class and every minute. I didn’t start teaching until I was 39 and had some other positions that were “tougher” physically but not mentally/emotionally. If I may give an interesting anecdote.
Kathy Lee Gifford was a host on one of the TV morning shows. She retired and was interviewed by one the “women’s” magazines-Redbook, Good Housekeeping, one or the other that my wife at the time received. One of Gifford’s responses went something like this: “You all don’t know just how hard it is to be “on” in front of the camera for three hours everyday”. And I immediately thought “And she has no clue how hard it is to “be on” for 6 hours a day with minimal breaks, not to mention planning, grading, etc. . . as a teacher does every single day and for a hell of a lot less money than the million or so Gifford was making for those three hours of “being on”.”
Take care, been a pleasure chatting!
Folks, if you want “What Your [1st-5th] Grader Should Know’,” come to my area, and find a garage or rummage sale. You’ll pick up a mint copy for two bits (uh, that’s a quarter for the culturally illiterate.) I got the complete set years ago for my kids; it was the ONLY thing they wouldn’t read. (They’re doing nicely by the way, and they know Latin isn’t the main language of Latin America.) The Chuckster family found them tedious and somewhat preachy, if I remember correctly.
I’d like to know if there are young adults who have fond memories of working with this set—this information might tell us something about the C.C.S.
Oh, and I think you can get Bennett’s “The Book of Virtues” for a dime around here—but you have to promise not to use it on your children—unless they’re really naughty.
Hirsch subsequently added more grades, including Preschool, Kindergarten and 6th Grade. I sold my books on the cheap, too. And my library is one of my most valuable possessions, so I only sell books when I’ve found them to be utterly useless to me or I desperately need the money to pay the rent. These books fell in the former category.
I have visited a Core Knowledge charter school near Sacramento where the kids seem to devour the curriculum avidly. My own experience teaching world history demonstrates that kids have a strong appetite for well-presented knowledge, and that this knowledge fuels creativity. The insight that underlies Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum –that background knowledge, not metacognitive strategies or mere practice, is the key to reading comprehension –seems unassailable to me. Kids’ mental nourishment depends on rich content knowledge. With NCLB (and I fear, Common Core) they’re getting a dreary gruel of metacognitive strategy drills –empty activities and exercises that leave them empty-headed and ignorant of the world they live in. So only those fortunate enough to have knowledge-filled parents get the world and word knowledge that all humans should possess.
Diane, I share your dismay at Hirsch’s dalliance with a Murdoch-owned compay, but it pains me to see you turning on our foremost exponent of teaching content. I know you care about content. If Hirsch is discredited, who else is there to lead the campaign for content? American schools would be much more effective and vibrant places if more teachers understood and embraced Hirsch’s insights. It seems to me that education schools have prejudiced a great number of American teachers against Hirsch; their minds are mostly closed to anything bearing his name. Your support of him would help open their minds.
Perhaps the professors at the ed schools don’t know very much and thus don’t even know what to require of aspiring teachers. It’s a long time since I got certified. It required 15 credits in five areas. Social foundations was a course in which it was announced you got a B for being registered. If you wanted better you could read the books and take an exam. 60 students in the class. Reasonable, but there was no teaching, and a VERY bad example. English methods, a great man, but in a class with 60 summer students. Higher education: again a great man, but teaching 60 lumpish lazy as sin teachers in summer school. Educational Psychology: again a great course, but 60 students at 8 a.m. on Saturday mornings, and we never got to child development. I loved the statistics unit but you had to get it for yourself. Lecturing, yes; teaching, no.
The ONLY substantive requirement was the 1 more credit of History I needed for which I was required to read Herodotus and Thucydides and have a 1 hour debrief with the Chair of the LSA history department. Now that was true Hirsch type knowledge. But for the rest, it was the worst demonstration of teaching I have ever seen. “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. And those who can’t teach, teach teachers.” It’s a canard, but in my experience substantially true.
The best teacher I had for educational issues was my bibliography teacher, who put me on to Nietzsche’s SCHOPENHAUER AS EDUCATOR and Plato’s PHAEDRUS.
As in ALL things, it comes down to what you know, what books you’ve read.
The true education school education would be a major in Philosophy for all. When will that happen?
Harlan, My new theory is that education should only be a graduate level degree. Like law school.
Makes sense to me, while embracing true “reform.” Of course such a change would need to be gradual, but emerging.
I completely agree with you there.
Harlan wrote in part: “As in ALL things, it comes down to what you know, what books you’ve read.”
Sounds awfully simple. If only it had the virtue of being true as well.
Lots of people read the “right” books and come away dumb as rocks. Plenty of very bright, very productive, very “valuable” people haven’t read the “right” books, and I am happy to count some of them among my closest friends.
I don’t know whether you intend to communicate snobbery, but as someone with multiple graduate degrees, one of the best lessons I learned was that degrees and prestigious institutional affiliations are nice for some purposes, but often don’t tell crucial parts of someone’s tale. Some of the worst professors I’ve worked with were Harvard Ph.Ds. Also, some of the best. Being a “valuable” person can never be reducible to education, book lists, or anything like that. I’m much more interested in what kids at a Core Knowledge school make of what they’re reading, how they develop as both critical thinkers (which, despite being bashed a lot lately, has a meaning I personally value: the ability and determination to actively reflect upon new ideas and information with the sort of skepticism needed to escape becoming a passive swallower of other people’s truths) and how they develop as ethical beings. Making kids into repositories of a “bunch o’ facts” without these other qualities and abilities is as sterile an enterprise as I can imagine. And no amount of rhetoric from E.D. Hirsch and his supporters will convince me that: 1) he or anyone has the “right” list of books, ideas, facts, etc. that “everyone” must know; 2) that even if such a list existed, being exposed to it suffices to be anything more than a pedantic bore and possibly and ethical monster; and 3) that any of this is neutral – politically, ethically, or otherwise, which is to say that Mr. Hirsch & Company have an agenda, a world-view, a philosophy that they are promoting, and I, for one, don’t trust or buy into it. Quite the contrary, in fact.
I come away from every discussion about Hirsch and Core Knowledge with the same basic question: Cui bono?
It should not be a graduate degree until the pay is better. We’re in debt enough as it is.
Good point. What the TFA’s should do at a minimum.
Phaedrus! OMG, Harlan, one can learn a lot about how to teach from that amazing little dialogue!!! The most important thing to learn from it is that an educator is PRIMARILY, for his or her students, a model of what a learner is–for example, someone who is humble enough before the truth to be tripped up by his daimon, in front of his student, and to reverse himself. What a very, very moving little play that dialogue is!
So, I am totally with you there. The other piece I do not know. I’ve read a lot of Nietzsche, and with great delight–“On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” The Gay Science, and Zarathustra in particular–but I do not know the essay on Schopenhauer as Educator. I’ll look it up and get back to you.
It is impressive that we all seem to be in agreement with Harlan about Grad Schools of Ed. Rather rare! Good comments Harlan.
Over many decades I have worked across the US with those often self-esteemed folks, and found as most have said, that they are sadly lacking as good teachers. I tend to agree with Joanna that the better way may be to train teachers only in graduate school after they have taken substantive courses in other than education methods as undergrads.
Working with theses and dissertation supervisors and reading the too often simplistic and poorly constructed material and analyses students proffer, it is amazing that anyone gets their advanced degree…and this covers a broad group of universities…from the schools of outer space such as National, even to Harvard and U. of Chicago.
Ellen, I certainly don’t agree.
I had marvelous professors at the U of Michigan School of Education. I also had turkeys. And I was pursuing graduate degrees there, not a bachelor’s or certification. That said, all of the really great teachers I had were intimately involved with the teacher education program. None of the turkeys were. So unless I’m missing the point, I think we’ve got another gross generalization that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.
Michael: Who benefits? Well, kids do, they benefit a lot when they are given something interesting to learn about and not this continual mind-numbing drip of anesthetizing instruction in abstract skills divorced from any particular content.
I think of my friend Andrew, who lived in Chicago, and how he told his five year old about all the stuff that was under the city and how his daughter used to ask him, all the time, “Tell me again about what’s under the city, Dad.” Why? Because thinking about that stuff took her into another world. Wow. Under my feet, right now, this is happening. But then, I suppose, he could have REALLY engaged her with some fascinating discussion of her inferencing skills.
Our kids’ educations should involve a LOT of heading down the rabbit hole or through the wardrobe into stuff they don’t already know about but that is REALLY COOL to know about. No kid gets up in the morning and says, “I just can’t WAIT to get to school and learn more about finding the main idea and the six traits of writing.”
I’ve worked in the ed book industry for a lot of years now, and I dearly wish I had a nickel for every mindless, blithering passage that I have seen in a textbook, a nickel for every passage with no interesting, engaging, substantive content whatsoever that was created solely to provide grist for some sort of abstract skills instruction or practice–(What caused Yolanda to miss the bus? What was the cause and what was the effect?), methods of development (What method of development does this paragraph about the canned food drive at Roosevelt Jr. High School use?), and so on. Drivel. Mountains of it. Rivers of it. So much of it that on an almost daily basis, working in the industry, I wanted to scream.
I am certainly not wedded to E.D. Hirsch, Jr’s particular curriculum. If I were creating one from scratch, it would differ a LOT from the Core Knowledge Sequence. Kids would learn about the Ramayana and the monkey chant, for example, and they would have a lot of fun doing that monkey chant too. But this idea, that kids need substance, that content is important and should be front and center in our classrooms, it’s an extremely important one.
Or to the tune of “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35:
Well they’ll Core you when you try to be so good
They’ll Core you just like they said they would
They’ll Core you when you try to go home
And they’ll Core you when you live all alone
But I would not feel so tired and bored
Everybody must get Cored!!
—————————
Common Core standards forget that even within a state, there is a variety of valuable content to be learned about the immediate world around school children. In the mountains, there is slope and run off. At the coast, there are boat slips and sea walls. With Common Core, can teachers still make learning relevant to surroundings? Is there a passion or connection to one’s community as a result?
Again: consider the desired outcome of Public school. Will Common Core still allow for the wonderful coastal biology class I took in high school (growing up at the southern outer banks)? I find being globally competitive to be far from anything having to do with identifying the trees of one’s region or understanding Bryne shrimp populations, the problems the Chesapeake Bay can teach us about the migration of Blue Crabs, or the anatomy of the shark. Does that mean those subjects of study are no longer relevant? Down east, I would rather understand the tides, how to cast a net, and the history of the intercostal waterway. The more a Common Core is pursued, the less these relevant subjects can be explored, I think.
Falling off my chair laughing at the take on Dylan’s classic, Joanna! Thanks for the great laugh.
Local and regional geography and biology in the classroom? What a concept. Why on earth would we want one uniform, homogenized educational program for such a diverse nation? Instead of having “E Pluribus Unum” on the Seal of the US, maybe we should just have “Unum.”
Seriously, your comment gave me goosebumps. What about local and regional culture? If we follow the Common Core, where will the Firefoxes of the future come from? http://www.foxfire.org/
I agree emphatically, Randal. One uniform, homogenized educational program for ALL is an insane idea. Kids differ. They will have vastly different lives from one another. A diverse, pluralistic society needs those differences to be developed in manifold beautiful and unique ways.
Well said, Randal!
I suspect, Joanna, that Hirsch would very much approve of that coastal biology class, and of the one’s that I took in my lab high school, years ago, in paleontology and wave motion and modern Russian history–anything with substance–but not this mind-numbing continual harping on metacognitive strategies and abstract skills that we’ve been doing in our classrooms for so long. I couldn’t agree with you more about those brine shrimp. They are really fascinating. We have three kinds of cones and one kind of rod in our retinas. As a result, we can distinguish some million or so colors. Some species of shrimp have sixteen different kinds of photo-receptive cells in their retinas receptive to a much larger part of the electromagnetic spectrum and so they can distinguish VASTLY more than we do. And the fact that they can raises a really important philosophical issue–our access to “reality” is limited by our cognitive and perceptual apparatus, to the Umwelt created by our particular processing, and we are on the verge of modifying that enormously via prostheses. Those shrimp are very, very interesting indeed and very much worth learning about.
cx: ones, of course, not one’s
Those shrimp live in a different world than we do. That’s just about as interesting as it gets.
Spelled the shrimpers wrong. Woops. Brine. 🙂
I think that the whole country should adopt Joanna’s wonderful phrasing and say,
No thank you. We don’t want to be Cored.
Yep, the “professional development” folks in my district attempted to common core me for almost four hours last Friday. I successfully defended myself by reading a book on Ozark mountain folk tales of ghosts, haunted houses and strange lights. The presenter even attempted to break my defenses by coming over and literally leaning on me (you know the proximity trick) while I was reading during one of those cutesy “discuss what I presented among yourselves at your table” moments. I ignored her. I really didn’t want to engage at all with her as in the first five minutes she had spouted so many lies, distortions and half truths about CCSS that I almost got up and walked out.
You may command my presence but you can’t command my mind. (I have to be paraphrasing someone with that but have no clue as to whom it may be, any help?)
Diane, thanks for re-posting my comment. I retired from my teaching job in 2005, but as one of your readers said, “Once a teacher, always a teacher.” My objections to NCLB fell on deaf ears when the law was passed. I first got a whiff of the Gates education agenda in December of 2009 and have been following the “ed reform” movement ever since.
Here’s part of another pro-Krashen comment I made today on your original Hirsch post. I know Professor Hirsch isn’t in favor of making little children suffer, but I hope he and the other reformers will reconsider foisting “academic rigor” on first graders…
“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.”
And Mr. Hirsch is such a class act that when I posted a link to this piece earlier today, with no comments – just a link, he rejected the comment.
Have now tried twice to post a link to this piece on Hirsch’s HuffPo blog entry. It’s not possible to be 100% sure that he personally has rejected it, but there’s no indication of pending comments, and neither time did my comment appear. Seems rather cowardly if indeed he’s rejecting nothing more than a link to this blog.
Skills and content are BOTH important, but much of what passes for skills instruction in the U.S. today in our GAWDAWFUL textbooks and even worse online curricula has kids being instructed in and practicing “skills” in almost total obliviousness of a) the fact that a lot of skills are hardwired and simply need to be exercised, b) the fact that skills those skills that can benefit from explicit instruction require instruction and practice that is operationalized–in procedures, because skills of those kinds are procedural knowledge. These are elementary concepts that the authors of the CCSS in ELA seemed to be totally oblivious about.
yikes. I wish one could edit these posts. Sorry about the awkwardness of that last one.
Let me tell you about my daughter’s experience in kindergarten. We walked into the classroom the first time and saw a large refrigerator carton. What was it for? The students were going to make the Trojan horse. In that year of kindergarten, they listened to and learned the Greek myths in Homer and other myths, ending with Beowulf. These were exciting “readings” for kindergartners–not Jim and Jane–which gave to them a rich cultural experience. So if in kindergarten children can enjoy and learn about ancient Greece, what is wrong for first-graders to learn about ancient Egypt or Babylon? That too can be exciting and yield a rich cultural experience that can last a lifetime.
As to silent reading, individual choice, or being read to: in second grade my daughter announced that the students who were the best readers were those whose first-grade teacher read aloud to them from interesting books. That gave to the students, she said, a love of reading. So let us not dismiss teachers reading to students, so long as they choose readings interesting to students, and not boring drill books. Again, young students need a base from which they can then become autonomous readers.
I’m a huge proponent of reading to kids. (See my comment above.) When I was a high school teacher I read to my students often.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong, per se, with first graders learning about Egypt or Babylon. What I object to is the endless, dreary, discontinuous lists of outcomes that require young children to do academic tasks they’re not prepared for… Define and explain the significance of this or that famous ruler or abstract concept, and so on. I’m also concerned that a detailed curriculum covering so much material will crowd out opportunities for kids to explore the subjects they’re naturally drawn to.
For me, the key to your kindergarten anecdote is the refrigerator box–supplied by a creative teacher who knows how to spark the imaginations of kids. The kids, in helping create the Trojan horse, begin to live the story of Troy and enter into a world they’ve never encountered. It’s all about stories, play, imagination, and new experiences, which is completely appropriate for kindergarten. (I just hope Beowulf didn’t give anybody nightmares.)
In fact, that sort of activity is appropriate for any age. My attitude: if the kids aren’t coloring in AP English, there’s something wrong. Sure, they have to learn how to write critical essays, but maybe once in a while give them the option of doing an interpretive dance or music video. What’s happening now is that the AP agenda is getting pushed down to preschool, instead of the other way around. I don’t think any good can come of it.
Randall,
I agree that teaching the CC standards sounds dreary (I just read through an EngageNY three-week unit on “evidence based claims”. Yuck.). The reason they’re dreary is that they’re SKILLS-centric. Metacognition takes center stage. Blech.
The Core Knowledge curriculum, by contrast, is a list of CONTENT, not skills. Content is rarely dreary, in my experience. Content is where the juicy bits are. After four weeks of immersing themselves in the Maya, my students are now producing skits, comics, illustrated journals and songs about them. The rich content is the fuel for all this creativity. Content knowledge is the mother of joy and creativity, not its enemy. Skills-centric curriculum is the enemy.
The many of the coming CC curricula scare me. A CK curriculum would fill me with excitement; the fact that NY view this kind of curriculum as compatible with the CC standards is one of the few bright spots in recent education news, in my opinion.
“My attitude: if the kids aren’t coloring in AP English, there’s something wrong.”
You try coloring! Had any teacher tried to make me and my classmates color in high school, middle school, or even elementary school (past perhaps first grade) he or she would have lost our respect, and rightly so. There are far, far too many mindless cutting, pasting and coloring activities going on as it is (e.g. high school students having to make paper dolls of characters in a novel; they weren’t even reading the novel, because their literacy skills were so low and let’s not challenge them; instead, they got a broken up synopsis of episodes out of order.)
As the former kindergartener who was so lucky as to learn the Greek and Norse myths (my mother pointed me to this blog), I assure you that the magic lay not so much in the refrigerator box (though it was fun to hide in the one we painted as a castle), but in the stories themselves, which our teacher read to us for perhaps an hour every morning.
As for doing an interpretive dance or music video: these are fine activities for a dance class or a film and video class, not an English class. As an English teacher with no experience in dance or videography, how could I possibly advise my students on such projects? I feel your suggestion is rooted in a common misconception of art as pure expression, as just letting it all hang, whereas in fact every art is a discipline with its own language and inner logic.
The larger debate on content and procedural skills is intriguing. Right now I’m teaching a college composition course which should probably be taught in high school, and, in some form, in middle school. We do a lot of grammar, because the students don’t know any, and if I were to point out mistakes in their sentences without first teaching them grammar they would feel understandably aggrieved and bewildered. We’re also reading some of my favorite essays by George Orwell, Errol Morris, and others; that would be the “content,” and I hope reading these essays will foster both curiosity and skepticism. But we’ll also do a few exercises on paragraph structure and development (distinguishing bad from good paragraphs, how paragraphs develop). And I’ll also meet with students individually to discuss their essays. It’s a mix of content and procedural skills.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but haven’t curriculum guidelines focused on skills, to the neglect of content, for some time? Some subjects seem to be weighted toward “content”: history and science, at least until we start doing research, or experiments, or balancing equations. Other subjects, like math, English, and foreign languages, seem to feature a mixture of both right from the beginning. Then again, the distinction starts to seem artificial: surely grammar, and anything in math, is applied knowledge, both content and skill.
A lesson or unit on coastal biology sounds great, but glaciers, deserts, and volcanoes are also fascinating, even though we might not live near them. Let’s not define “relevance” too narrowly!
Ponderosa:
Sounds like your students are having fun, which is a tribute to you, but not necessarily to the content. I thought the material Diane linked to (which was said to be based on the Core Knowledge curriculum) contained too much content for the time available–too many loosely related topics. I found it disorganized and over the heads of first graders. It wasn’t focused on actual skills, either. The verbs used in framing the expected outcomes (identify, define, describe, explain, and so on) were used pretty much interchangeably. I’m not a curriculum expert, but it looked like a shoddy job to me. The idea that every child is expected to attain all of these outcomes in order to be ready for the next stage of a cumulative sequence seems foolish.
In my own teaching I tried to be both integrative and eclectic. Teaching high school kids how to write an essay about a literary work is a nice exercise in integrating content learning and skills instruction. We didn’t have them study a novel just so we could teach analytical writing, but the two did complement one another. There was no big gap between content and skills.
In the eclectic vein, if I’d been teaching younger kids how to read, I’m sure I would’ve used phonics, sight vocabulary, comprehension strategies, and whole language techniques, but the big emphasis would’ve been on reading to them and having them read books of their own choosing. Over-emphasis on skills and strategies would be bad, but if, for example, a child didn’t notice textual features such as subheadings and boldface type, then I think it would’ve been my job to point them out. Stephen Krashen makes a strong case against focusing on skill building as the basis for teaching reading, but I don’t think he’s all that excited about “core knowledge” either: http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2010/05/stephen_krashen_fix_poverty_an.html
Again, I don’t think any good teacher would try to run a content-free classroom. If the textbooks and professional development sessions overemphasize one thing or another, a good teacher will take it all with a grain of salt and modify her practice accordingly. The problem today is that she might get fired for it.
Gabriella:
“You try coloring!”
I did, and it worked well. In fact, I’ll be doing it later today to help design a project I’m working on. The kind of coloring I’m talking about is a form of mindmapping. It’s a great way of getting ideas out of your head and showing what you know about a topic in an organized way. The coloring dimension is an important part of it. Check out Tony Buzan’s website http://www.tonybuzan.com/about/mind-mapping/ and several books on Amazon… http://www.amazon.com/The-Mind-Map-Book-Potential/dp/0452273226 http://www.amazon.com
I’m not talking about free expression, or mindless cutting and pasting. I’m talking about purposeful learning activities that relate directly to the material being studied. If I were teaching a one-semester high school literature course, my students would to be doing a lot of informal writing about the works we studied, and at least one major formal essay. I would also assign one or more creative responses. The teacher doesn’t have to offer detailed guidance on these, because the students will decide on a form that suits them best. Or doesn’t suit them. I once watched a group of six boys perform an interpretative dance that brilliantly evoked the plot and major themes of a classic film we were studying. My only regret is that I didn’t get it on videotape. Most kids enjoy this sort of thing. The ones who don’t are free to write an essay or keep a journal. Either way, they generally get out of it what they put into it.
I’m not sure about what curriculum guides have been saying, but in teaching high school English there seemed to be a balance between content learning and skills instruction. The problem with high school is that it can be boring, and for the students who take it seriously, way too stressful. I’m all for making it less boring, less stressful, and more meaningful. I’m less interested in curriculum guides and “standards” than I am in meeting the students where they are and getting them involved in their own learning.
It sounds like you have a good handle on the course you’re teaching. The grammar and usage problem is a very tough nut to crack!
Just to clarify one thing, I didn’t personally teach AP English. I did teach “honors” classes, and I used mindmapping quite a bit. At some point I caught a glimpse of an AP teacher doing the same thing–students were on the floor working on character mindmaps for The Brothers Karamazov. The idea seemed to be catching on.
There’s great value in the process, and the finished maps can be a springboard for class discussion and writing. Color is a big deal, though. A black and white mindmap would partly defeat the purpose.
Michael: can’t you even IMAGINE a common curriculum that is not a nefarious plot to enslave minds? Would you rather American kids know NOTHING about the story of Western Civilization than an imperfect-but-essentially-accurate version? California has standards for teaching about Western Civ that have passed muster with both Right and Left. Aren’t they proof that you can impart the basic facts without egregious bias? Isn’t it important to know the basic facts (e.g. Galileo’s story; Martin Luther’s revolt). Or would you rather kids just got the Berkeley catechism –Columbus is a genocidaire and that’s all you need to know about him, etc.? Or pure “critical thinking skills” sans particular content?
I agree with most of what you say here, Ponderosa, with a couple of exceptions. First, a curriculum should NOT have to pass muster before the Right and the Left. It should enrage the hell out of both. We’ve had quite enough of the pablumizing of our curricula that comes from having it all created by megacorporations adept at producing the vanilla product that no one will be offended by. We need real teacher tenure so that we can have teachers who aren’t afraid to take positions and defend them. And kids need to be exposed to conviction across the political spectrum, not protected from controversy. Second, it’s shameful that we honor Columbus with a national holiday. This was a man who, when he didn’t find the promised gold, turned to enslaving people to produced crops to make up for it, one who gave a written order that every once in a while, his overseers should pull an Indian out of the field and slaughter him or her in front of the others in order to maintain discipline. And no, it is not anachronism to call him a genocidal maniac. He was a contemporary of Bartolome de las Casas, who called Columbus’s ilk precisely that.
“First, a curriculum should NOT have to pass muster before the Right and the Left. It should enrage the hell out of both.”
Exactly, Robert!
Except that then they both come back at us with the “you’re politicizing the curriculum” argument. To which I reply, “You’re right because all education is political!” (and that’s coming from one who has letters of reprimand in his file for being “too political”)
“Second, it’s shameful that we honor Columbus with a national holiday.”
I use Ruben Blades’ song “Conmemorando” (Commemorating) to drive home that point. See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKl9IqlWrxM
I’m not saying don’t call Columbus a genocidaire; I’m saying, teach the whole story –good, bad and indifferent. I do think teachers should try to be as objective as possible. I’ve visited the class of a right-wing teacher who plied his kids with National Review articles and parroted Fox News in his government and economics class. To me that’s a travesty of education. For a conservative parent, having their kid relentless exposed to leftist talking points would seem the same. A teacher should give a kid the ability to make up his own mind; he should not try to make it up for him. That’s called indoctrination –it’s what they tried to do to me in education school and I didn’t appreciate it.
I’m sorry, but there are so many straw man arguments being put in my mouth here that I don’t think it’s worth my while to try to sort them out for individual refutation.
Instead let me suggest the following: 1) If Hirsch is so marvelous, why is he supporting CCSSI? Something seriously fails to make sense there, and I believe the burden falls to his supporters, not his critics (who are already less than impressed with him) to explain and sort that out;
2) the choice is not between CCSS and Hirsch’s Core Knowledge, thank goodness. There are lots of other choices and I want neither of those;
3) those who find serious problems with Core Knowledge are not automatically supporters of CCSS and a one-size-fits-none approach. I really resent having people suggest that I’m looking for ignorance, fact-free education, or any of the other things that have been implied here because I’m not enamored with Mr. Hirsch and his work. It does not follow logically from the latter that what I favor is the idiocy of the Common Core;
4) I don’t oppose the Common Core because it’s a plot to enslave minds: that would be the typical Tea Party opponent to CCSSI, and I’ve repeatedly pointed out how weak and crazy their criticisms tend to be. I oppose it for a host of other reasons I’ve written about here and elsewhere a great deal this past year. If you’ve read any of that, you know that I view the Common Core as a greed-inspired piece of the privatization, for-profit folks (the education deform movement) and while some individuals and groups in the set have agendas besides wealth – e.g., Betsy DeVos and her attempts to get Christian religion into public education – the main thrust is profit and power. If you haven’t previously read any of my points in opposition to the Common Core, they’re not hard to find and I hope you’ll take a look before bizarrely tying me to support of this ridiculous abomination.
There are probably more ridiculous things stated or implied in the comments on this thread about what I must think or believe or support, none of which appears to be grounded in anything I actually have written. But hey, I’m used to the popularity of the straw man argument in educational politics, so it’s not surprising. Just a bit sad when it’s being done so transparently.
So as the saying goes, “Please don’t misunderstand me too quickly.”
I do hope that I didn’t put any straw man arguments into your mouth, Michael. If I did, I apologize for my inattention.
I posted a comment earlier asking Diane if she now opposes Hirsch’s CK philosophy and it was never posted. Instead she chooses to align herself with Mike Goldenberg, who’s ad hominems have echoed from one blog to the next across the education reform debate with anyone who opposes his unfounded views. I guess the free exchange of ideas in a democracy has no place here.
This discussion started when Diane cited Mr. Hendee’s criticism of my Huffington Blog, and this comment is addressed mainly to Mr. Hendee.
Your account of what I said in the blog was selective to the point of distortion. My blog had a double theme, stated in its title: “Teacher Bashing and Common Core Bashing are both Uncalled For.” (I’ve always admired Diane’s courageous defense of teachers and of the public schools – as I stated in my NYRB review of her prior book.)
In defense of the Common Core, I pointed out that its call for a coherent and cumulative plan of content across grade levels was far from an untried scheme, but is characteristic of all best and fairest school systems.
But I spent much more space on the benefits to teachers of content coherence: I said, “This fall, my granddaughter Cleo, will be teaching in a school in the Bronx, assigned to teach the American Revolution to seventh grade public school students. Though hugely competent, she panicked and called me: “Oh my gosh. Granddad, are there any teaching guides for this?” Her school could offer no real support. I sent her one of the thick, grade-by-grade teacher handbooks produced by the Core Knowledge Foundation. In them each topic is explained and instructional suggestions are provided. … Cleo was greatly relieved. But what about all the other Cleo’s out there who are being thrown into these sink-or-swim situations in our public schools, sent into classrooms where it’s impossible to know what their students already know, and where teachers are given scant guidance about what they should be teaching — or worse — are asked to teach literacy classes based on the trivial and fragmented fictions found in the standard literacy textbooks? That’s why I have become so impatient with the teacher bashing that has overtaken the education reform movement. The favored structural reforms haven’t worked very well. The new emphasis on “teacher quality” implies that the reforms haven’t worked because the teachers (rather than the reform principles themselves) are ineffective. A more reasonable interpretation is that reforms haven’t worked because on average they have done little to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades.”
On the other points in the discussion: No, I’ve never drawn a salary from Core Knowledge, and won’t make a cent from the literacy program,which in any case can be downloaded in full for free from the Core Knowledge web site. Finally I have no idea who controls the comments on Huffington.
Thanks for responding. I read your entire original post, and I don’t think I quoted you unfairly. The anecdote you reprint here doesn’t say anything about the efficacy of a detailed, sequential curriculum or about how background knowledge and learning capacity are built within individual learners. It just proves that a detailed sequential curriculum has been published. It might also indicate that a particular school didn’t have its act together, I don’t know. Also, it may not be obvious that the success of your son’s school can be credited solely to the curriculum. It could be that he’s a terrific principal with a talented, dedicated, empathetic staff (and when I say “staff,” I include the custodians, secretaries, and all the other support people).
As I said, I don’t believe it’s possible or advisable to create a detailed, sequential (i.e., “canned”) program that fits all students, especially if mastery of one year’s work is assumed as a prerequisite for the next year’s. I think it’s wishful thinking to imagine that exposing every child to the same materials at the same time will somehow reduce the deficits they may enter school with. It does, however, invite the problem of developmentally inappropriate materials in the earliest grades, especially when you consider the difference between boys and girls at that age.
Some of my objections rest on philosophical differences. I’m looking at learning from a constructivist perspective rather than a knowledge-transfer perspective. Mastering a body of knowledge may be necessary when you’re training someone to be competent at a particular set of tasks. But it’s not clear that a detailed, programmatic curriculum is the best route to building a robust knowledge base and learning facility within every child. My bias is toward helping children develop their own individual knowledge base in an organic fashion, rather than trying to impose a predetermined knowledge base onto him. Free reading, inquiry-based methods such as Problem Based and Project Based learning, the Learning Power paradigm espoused by Ruth Deakin Crick in the UK, the Maker Movement… none of these approaches rules out a content-rich learning environment. What they might be able to do that a lock-step curriculum is less likely to do, is engage the learner on a deeper level with the content that means the most to him, within a community of learners who are encouraged to share that knowledge with one another. That’s where the work of Stephen Krashen comes in. He offers evidence that extensive reading of self-selected materials, for example, is practically guaranteed to make a child a good reader.
In any case, I don’t agree that “effective classroom teaching depends on key prior knowledge being shared by all the members of the class.” Kids don’t have to know the same things on the way into a grade level in order for them to learn new concepts, or for the teacher to run an effective classroom. If this were true, the one-room schoolhouse would’ve been an utter failure. But in fact, it worked brilliantly. Furthermore, I don’t think it’s necessary for every child to learn the same thing. No matter what we do, students will come out of elementary school with wildly varied knowledge sets. It doesn’t matter, though, as long as each child has continued to grow substantially in learning capacity. Ruth Deakin Crick’s research has shown that the longer students endure traditional schooling, the LESS resilient is their learning capacity. That is, they are less likely to persevere and remain absorbed in a learning task then they were at an earlier age. Not a good sign for prescribed curricula.
As I indicated in my comment, I attribute my own intellectual development to extensive independent reading and study in the areas that interested me. I also had a lot of great teachers over the decades. None of them ran a classroom that wasn’t “content-rich,” yet the best of them weren’t hung up on a rigid body of knowledge, and some of them turned me loose to learn on my own. That made a big difference. Maybe that’s why anything with the word “common” in it goes against my learning instincts. And the Common Core Standards go against both my graduate school education AND my teaching experience, and that’s why I oppose them. (And yes, it seems like a boondoggle hatched by a small group of self-interested people, forced from the top onto the people below who had the least input but will be the most affected, and so on.)
Thanks again for taking the time to comment. I, for one, never questioned your integrity. Also, thanks for sticking up for teachers. They really are more important than the curriculum, though!
Those who have attacked Hirsch on this blog would do well to consider the fact that he took a courageous stand against VAM in this piece in the Huffington Post. A lot of people in the “reform” movement are very wedded to VAM. They see it as the primary tool in their arsenal. If Hirsch were the Machiavellian figure that some here seem to think that he is, he would not have seen it as in his interest to explain why VAM is a terrible idea. Clearly, he wrote what he did because he understands why VAM doesn’t work and recognizes it for the terrible idea that it is.
He’s going to catch hell for this from from the would-be reformers. I am grateful that he has taken this stand, and, again, I hope that those whose ear he has will listen to him on this extraordinarily important topic.
He actually gave some credit to VAM as it applies to math scores. He objected to using it with reading scores because he believes the reading tests approximate a test of general knowledge, and as such the results can’t be attributed to teacher effectiveness. I wish he’d concluded that VAM is wrong on the face of it, especially when you consider that, in practice, many teachers will be evaluated by the scores of students they’ve never even met. I doubt if Professor Hirsch is up to no good, like some of the “reformers” appear to be. I just disagree with most of his main points.
I really do admire Hirsch for insisting on the importance of a broad culture, taught cumulatively, with a stress on content. I think everyone would agree with that. And I don’t think this is incompatible with also learning about local culture, heritage, and environment.
But there was always a danger inherent in leaving the impression that culture could be reduced to a list of items, cookbook fashion, to be mechanically regurgitated.
Moreover, Hirsch’s refusal to acknowledge his errors about childhood development and his obstinate attacks on (smears even of) Dewey — lately by associating him with Giovanni Gentile — are very troubling to me. Dewey is one of the good guys. As for Gentile’s educational theories, at the time they were liberal and they were not adopted by Mussolini, as Hirsch misleadingly implies. The Italian view of education has always been, be it on the right as also on the left, that the right to a classical education has to be earned. The methods and practices of Hirsch’s own allies today have even more in common with those of authoritarian regimes.
No, not everyone agrees on the importance of a broad culture, taught cumulatively, with a stress on content. Most commenters on this blog don’t, and neither do most education professors.
As anyone who actually knows about Core Knowledge realizes, that curriculum does NOT reduce culture to a list of items to be mechanically regurgitated. My kids were in Core Knowledge schools for grades K-8, and were NEVER taught in that fashion. Moreover, the CK curriculum requires at most 50% of school time, leaving plenty of opportunity to study local cultures, habitats, foreign languages, and other things. The factual knowledge in CK is scaffolding for much deeper study in later years.
Core Knowledge is the type of liberal arts education that most liberals used to favor, but no longer do. Diane Ravitch is, so far, hiding under cover, not willing to say if she has abandoned her 20+ year support for Core Knowledge. Does she so want to be loved by Edworld that she’ll abandon even that position and make a mockery of all her earlier work?
That’s an ad hominem attack. It’s inappropriate. No one in this country is doing as much for teachers and students right now as Diane Ravitch is. And yes, Diane Ravitch has long been a proponent of a rich, substantive curriculum in history, literature, the arts, music, and I’m sure that she still is.
I agree that the Core Knowledge curriculum does not reduce culture to a list of items to be mechanically regurgitated and that it allows plenty of room for (and in fact encourages) study of local culture. There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding of just what Core Knowledge is about. If it were as rigid and authoritarian and elitist as some are claiming it is, there is NO WAY that I would support it. But we really need to get away from the notion that content is irrelevant, that any content will do as long as we are addressing some list of skills.
I’m asking a question, not making an attack, and hoping Ms.Ravitch will make her views clear. She has effectively endorsed someone who continually personally attacks Mr. Hirsch, far beyond anything warranted by honest differences of opinion. Less than five minutes of blogging by her could clear this matter up.
Disagree, Robert. It is not an ad hominem. It’s an honest question that many of the CK supporters, and former supporters of Diane’s, would like answered.
She’s stated her opposition to the CCSS but how about her posture of CK, an organization where she was once on the Board of Trustees?
At the beginning of this post a reference was made to specific comments made by E. D. Hirsch in a HuffPostEd piece. I refer to the paragraph cited above that begins:
“Not even most prescient among us can know whether the Common Core standards will end in triumph or tragedy.”
Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/e-d-hirsch-jr/why-im-for-the-common-cor_b_3809618.html
So clearing our heads of certain mind-altering Edufoolish fumes by departing Rhee World and returning to Planet Reality for a moment, I pose this simple question:
Has it ever happened in the entire history of the ed debates that anyone, anywhere, at any time, has accurately predicted [using reliable data at hand, experience, logic and reasonable assumptions] what would be the results of BIG ideas with BIG implementation carried out by BIG people with BIG brains and HUMUNGOUS wallets?
Most strangely, I have in my possession a slim volume called MANY CHILDREN LEFT BEHIND with the subtitle How the No Child Left Behind Act Is Damaging Our Children and Our Schools (2004, Beacon Press, Deborah Meier and George Wood, eds.).
Contributors: Theodore R. Sizer, Linda Darling-Hammond, George Wood, Stan Karp, Deobrah Meier, Alfie Kohn, and Monty Neill.
This will come as a shock to the leaders of the ‘new civil rights movement’—please call the paramedics—but it turns out that this inexpensive tidbit of a book is a primer on the train wreck called NCLB [aka No Child’s Behind Left] and Race to the Top [aka Dash for the Cash] and it’s related offspring. A primer, I should add, on what has happened since the book’s publication, not just before.
How can this be possible?
Or is the answer not on the bubble-in test OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN will have to take?
Given the current mindset of self-styled education reformers, I know I am being impertinent. But I’m with Oscar Wilde on this one:
“Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are.”
🙂
Krazy , or crazy?
Deborah Meier, George Wood, Stan Karp, Linda Darling-Hammond, Alfie Kohn, Monty Neill? Wow! Are there a half dozen other people on the planet more progressive than this cohort? I can’t help wonder what they’ve concluded.
You might do well to revisit Diane’s book from 2000, called “Left Back” and jump to page 361. She accurately chronicles the death of progressive education in this country. Clearly, one of her more memorable works.
As for NCLB being a failure; that’s been recognized since 2007 and Congress has attempted every year since to reauthorize it – unsuccessfully. The gridlock in Washington, of course, being the main stumbling block.
Darn it all, Paul: the present-day progressive refuses to die!
And Diane Ravitch in 2000 is not Diane Ravitch in 2013, much to your dismay. Like, say, Wittgenstein, who underwent an enormous shift in thinking between his writing the TRACTATUS and his writing PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS. Were I a betting man, I’d give odds that you’d be a TRACTATUS man, not a PI man, assuming you’ve read both.
You’ve made it clear here and in various other places that you have no love for progressive education. The fact that at one point in her journey, Diane Ravitch apparently agreed with you doesn’t obviate the fact that over the next decade she changed her mind. I would say she came to her senses, but that’s just because the transition she went through appears to have been grounded a great deal in experience, not Ivory Tower theorizing. She looked at what she’d help build and found it badly wanting. Few people have done more in the last four or five years to try to enlighten the public about how flawed and destructive the entire education deform movement (including NCLB, RttT, and CCSSI) has been and continues to be. It’s genuinely exhilarating to view the change in her analysis.
Unfortunately, not everyone is so sanguine about her shift in viewpoint. But frankly, I don’t think you are going to find a lot of folks reading her blog who are rooting for her to return to her earlier, inadequate analysis. So perhaps you would make a better contribution by focusing on your own practice and thinking, rather than mourning the loss of a one-time ally.
Finally, I see that you and now Rodgers have come over here with the apparent intent of leveling personal attacks towards and making complaints about me. I think that’s unsurprising. Clearly, you knew you were in over your head, so you brought in a tag-team partner. Good luck to both of you. I think you’ll need it.
Michael Paul Goldenberg: when someone’s main point is that people s/he openly despises decisively beat her/him and her/his ideological compatriots to a good conclusion [by years and years!], and the strangely contradictory clincher is to rail against ad hominem [Latin for “against the man/person”] attacks as a poor substitute for substantive arguments—
I am not a religious person but Luke 6:42, King James Bible, seems to cover this: “Either how canst thou say to thy brother, Brother, let me pull out the mote that is in thine eye, when thou thyself beholdest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye.”
Feel honored: “Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.” [Francois de la Rouchefoucauld]
🙂
As for you having to deal with a tag team: the only way to make it a fair fight is to bind your ankles together, put a patch over one eye, and tie one hand behind your back. Even unfettered, the tag team will have hard time even scoring points against you. Victory? Only in their dreams.
They seem to have forgotten some good old-fashioned American advice: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” [Mark Twain]
Keep posting. I’ll keep reading.
🙂
Diversity of approach is a strength, not a weakness. From diversity in standards and curricula and healthy debate about these, real innovation comes. There are people on this very page whose ideas differ considerably from mine but who are doubtless superb teachers. What we don’t need is top-down mandates–“One ring to rule them all.” That’s how to squelch true progress. We shouldn’t be waiting for the politburo to meet again in a few years to see if there will be any innovation in our standards, tests, evaluation procedures, curricula, pedagogical approaches, etc. It’s time that the reformy crowd and the educrats who support them learned a little respect for teachers and the expertise that they bring to their extraordinarily varied (thank God!) approaches to their classrooms.
In other words, curricula and standards and lesson designs should be voluntary guidelines that site-managed schools can adopt and adapt. They shouldn’t be mandates. It’s interesting to me that a lot of business interests in the United States are supporting intensely centralized regulation. They of all people should know better. Of course, those who don’t like decentralization are the ones who benefit from monopoly control (and those who are simply confused and heedless).
cx: What we don’t need ARE top-down mandates. Of course. Ah for a post-editing feature on this blog!
Local school districts have information that is useful for standards and curriculum without all of the expense for the Common Core tests; the tests are merely a way of pushing the schools to say “hurry up; work faster; offer prenatal algebra” or some other message. Useful information for one school district looks like this:
Students who score low on report cards in reading comprehension (18%);
Students who show only modest development in their curriculum/textbook
(or lexile levels or grade level appropriate curriculum ) 22%
Students who show average development in the curriculum unit tests 28%.
Comparing these students with their scores on the CTBS tests the standard would be between 40 NCE and 50 NCE. Title I has typically used the 50 NCE as a target for a school year , given supplemental services (with Title I funds). I find this to be an acceptable standard. Not the state test is saying that the percentage of students who are “FAILING” IS 30 % OR MORE and that 50 NCE is not a legitimate standard?
This is changing the paradigm and the pscyhometrics. Asking first grade students to excel on a 4th grade reading comprehension tests is absurd. Can anyone explain to me why it has gotten so badly out of control and in such a “mess”?
prenatal Algebra. LOL!!!
From the same rural school district:
Percent of Students in each Percentile (Reading Achievement)
READING Highest 40% of the students
Third 18% of the students
Second 29% of the students
Lowest 13%
This is using a national standardized achievement test. I don’t think it helps to give an experimental tests, one that has not been field tested or validated and say that these percentages are out of whack…. that 30% or more are in your lowest ranking group. We have had access to these kinds of data for 50 years on quartiles and quintiles etc. It is what the schools and the leadership in the district do with these scores and how implementing and improvement are carried out. I don’t know of a school district that has enough individual students who took the NAEP who can also be compared (the same students) with the CTBS or some other standardized measure so that comparisons of actual students can be made . The student’s recorded progress in several grades on the CTBS and the NAEP and their trajectory through elementary to high school would be interesting but I don’t know of any school district that has that kind of data. The NAEP is based on samples throughout the state and doesn’t help with a particular school level understanding of data or improvement plants where the actual changes can be made.
CCSS/RTTT have become such a mega-mess because the founders purposefully excluded and ignored experienced teachers in the trenches. This is the result of arrogant bureaucrats imposing an agenda that has nothing to do with teaching children. We have fallen down the rabbit hole and the Cheshire Cat bears a strange resemblance to David Coleman.
NY teacher, If you attempted to explain the entire debacle in New York over the past several years, the mega-mess you refer to might be a bit more believable.
Their state standards, assessments and cut off scores were all fraudulent. They finally decided to go with the CCSS in an attempt to clear the air, as it were, and put their schools on a track to some degree of reasonableness.
State officials then decided to test students using the new CC assessments and that too was a major blunder, causing exponential confusion for those not up to snuff with the state’s plan.
CCSS was not selected to “clear the air” in New York. I’m not sure what you mean by “fraudulent cut-off scores” either.
Mr. Krashen’s essay on “The Case for Narrow Reading,” cited by Mr. Hardee, describes very well the importance of having kids do sustained reading in a particular content area. On this, Krashen and Hirsch can agree. Content and context are really important, for many reasons. Kids learn new vocabulary most readily in semantic context. At any point in their reading within a knowledge domain, previous knowledge that they have gained in that domain can help them to overcome difficulties with particular syntax or vocabulary or discourse structures that they encounter. Give the kids something substantive to chew on. On this Krashen and Hirsch can agree. I think we all can. Unfortunately, a LOT of the crap produced by the big textbook houses treats content as though it didn’t matter. Lessons skip from one topic to the next like a gerbil on methamphetamine. Content of minimal value is put forward because it exemplifies this or that skill. There’s far too much of that sort of thing. I had a new college freshman, last year, tell me how grateful she was finally to be learning ABOUT SOMETHING. I asked her what she meant. She said, “In high school, all we ever did was skills, skills, skills.” Of course, she was exaggerating. But I see what these ELA textbooks look like these days. One page of literary selection surrounded by 40 pages of skills exercises. And then off to the next topic. That’s a crime.
I think it’s important to recall that Hirsch got into the whole cultural literacy thing because he was concerned that underprivileged children were falling behind in and after their school years for lack of the knowledge that marks individuals as reasonably educated in our society.
When he writes in Huff Post that “The single most effective way to enhance teacher effectiveness is to create a more coherent multi-year curriculum, so that teachers at each level will know what students have already been taught,” as a former language teacher I have to agree. If you are coordinating the first 4 semesters of college-level French, as I have done, the teachers have to know where to begin and end each curse, and what content is expected, or else chaos ensues.
It is said that Napoleon looked at his watch one day at 11:00 a.m. and said: “Oh, good, all French school children are now studying geography.” Because of states’ prerogatives and our fear of any national education content, we don’t need to worry about having such a degree of uniformity. Still, Mesopotamia could be pretty interesting in elementary school.
At one point long ago, we were using the audio-visual method of teaching foreign languages: we exposed students to realistic dialogues and writings, from which they were expected to pick up structures and vocabulary the way a native child does. That was, I guess, a “Romantic” method. It isn’t much used any more.
I don’t think cultural knowledge and critical thinking have much connection to each other. But they don’t need to get in each other’s way either. Paolo Freire believed everyday literacy nurtures political literacy. I think there is something to that. We are, after all, still looking for a pedagogy for the oppressed.
In my view, any required knowledge should be exemplary, diverse, prudently sequenced, embodied in creatively inspired writings, and separated from any attempt to judge teachers on the basis of students’ progress.
For the record, even though this is a dead thread, I didn’t accuse core knowledge of reducing culture to a “list of items to be mechanically regurgitated”. What I said is that there was a danger that it could give that impression — because Hirsch really did use that kind of list in the books of his that I read. I am glad to hear that “it allows plenty of room for (and in fact encourages) study of local culture.” AsI said, that I didn’t think it was incompatible with that.
I do think that the core knowledge curriculum as it now stands would be improved by moving the first grade curriculum up a year or so, to make it more developmentally appropriate. I also think the attacks on Dewey are highly misguided and uncalled for. Agree with him or not, Dewey is an important American philosopher and it doesn’t do for educators to engage in anti-intellectual name-calling.
We need to educate adults, not only about the importance of culture, including our own great thinkers and philosophers, but also about what are appropriate activities and expectations for young children. The so-called reformers seemed to have missed the class on that one.
The author of this article clearly doesn’t understand Hirsch…lack of reading comprehension = case in point. Hirsch is right.
Three years after the fray, you jump in to enlighten us, but don’t actually do so. 😦