Many years go, when I was a Fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, I got o know Sol Stern, who has been at that think tank for many years. Sol has an interesting history. Back in the radical 1960s, he was an editor at the leftwing Ramparts. At some point, he had a political-ideological conversion experience, and he became a zealous conservative. He is a journalist, not an educator. He writes about what interests him. Ten years ago, he wrote a book advocating school choice, called Breaking Free. In 2011, he wrote a book about Israeli-Palestinian relations, called “A Century of Palestinian Rejectionism and Jew-Hatred.” one thing about Sol Stern: He has strong opinions.
At the moment, his strong opinions are focused on fervent advocacy for the Common Core. Stern thinks that the Common Core implements the ideas of E.D. Hirsch, Jr. Hirsch believes that kids should learn lots of background knowledge, which will not only make them smarter but enable them to read and understand increasingly difficult text. I agree that background knowledge matters, so long as it is developmentally appropriate, that is, comprehensible to the child. And I don’t see Comon Core as the fulfillment of E.D. Hirsch’s vision. After all, David Coleman–widely acknowledged as the “architect” of he Common Core–advocates “close reading,” in which a student deciphers text without reference to any background knowledge. One example would be a student reading the “Gettysburg Address” without reference to or knowledge of the Civil War or Lincoln or the battle it commemorates. I think Hirsch would insist that context and background knowledge are crucial for comprehension. I am not sure that Stern understands the Commn Core standards but he has now made it his business to defend them and to attack those who doubt their excellence.
Stern got into a heated debate with Peter Wood, the president of the National Association of Scholars, who does not believe–as Stern and Arne Duncan insist–that development of CCSS was “state-led.” They have other differences, but it is amusing to see Stern, one of our most conservative education commentators, defend Duncan and CCSS.
Now comes Mercedes Schneider to dissect Sol Stern’s take on the Common Core. It’s fair to say that she knows a lot more about the Core than Sol Stern. Stern doesn’t really understand that the CCSS does not embody Hirsch’s Core Knowledge. And it must surely pain him to realize that one of he best-selling books about the Common Core was written by Lucy Calkins of Teachers College, one of Stern’s arch enemies (he hates Balanced Literacy, loves phonics).
Bottom line: CCSS has created strange alliances.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And it gets even strager — Turns out that Hirsch is in favor of Common Core:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/e-d-hirsch-jr/why-im-for-the-common-cor_b_3809618.html#
I’m beginning to think that the whole world has gone completely bonkers.
E.D. Hirsch, Jr., has spent half a lifetime arguing AGAINST state standards that were simply bullet lists of abstractly formulated skills and FOR a knowledge-based curriculum.
The Common [sic] Core [sic] is everything that Dr. Hirsch has argued AGAINST for decades. It is a list of some 1,600 abstractly formulated skills with a tiny smattering of content (read Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers) thrown in to please those who think that actually knowing something matters.
The Core Knowledge Sequence, not to be confused AT ALL with the Common Core, is a list of world knowledge (knowledge of what). It also contains some procedural knowledge (knowledge of how), that one might describe as “skills.” But skills as they appear in the Core Knowledge Sequence are very different from the abstract bullet list of the CC$$. They are concrete and operationally defined.
Again, in speech after speech, article after article, book after book, for decades, in works like Cultural Literacy, The Schools We Need, and The Knowledge Deficit, E. D. Hirsch, Jr. has argued quite specifically AGAINST bullet lists of skills LIKE THE COMMON CORE STATE STANDARDS and like the lowest-common-denominator groupthink of the state standards on which the amateurs who created the CC$$ based their work.
Before this thread gets off into a lot of ranting about how Hirsch is all about white hegemony and just teaching lists of facts, please know that
a. Hirsch’s interest has always been in reading comprehension, and his argument is that writers in a given culture assume certain background knowledge, and unless one knows that stuff, their writing will not be comprehensible. The question of what knowledge writers assume that their readers will have is a purely EMPIRICAL ONE. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the culture wars. It’s a descriptive, not a prescriptive matter. One looks at a representative corpus of work in a given culture and asks of each work, what knowledge is assumed here? That becomes the list.
b. The Core Knowledge Sequence contains a lot of material that is multicultural. And it is very broad in its scope, covering art, music, history, science, mathematics, philosophy, literature, economics–a lot of material of real substance.
c. The Sequence is not simply a list of facts. It is about world knowledge, which includes conceptual, higher-order knowledge and understanding of many, many kinds.
d. Hirsch has always said that the Sequence should make up about 50 percent of the curriculum, leaving a great deal of room for other material.
There are things that I would change in the Core Knowledge Sequence. Definitely. But there are lots of misconceptions about it because it hit at the height of the multiculturalism wars. Hirsch can speak for himself, but I am certain that he would approve of kids being exposed to world literatures, to the Ramayana and the Analects and the poetry of Rumi and of Pablo Neruda. And in fact a lot of such literature is in the Core Knowledge Sequence.
The Common Core is a bullet list of abstractly formulated skills, everything Dr. Hirsch has argued against for decades.
The Core Knowledge Sequence is an attempt at a comprehensive list of the world knowledge and procedural knowledge that a child would need to know in order to read–the stuff that writers assume that people already know when they sit down to write.
No two documents could be more dissimilar.
I hope that this thread doesn’t devolve into the usual dumb skills versus facts debate. We learn skills incidentally when we are engaged with rich content. The bullet lists of skills in the Common Core encourage precisely the sorts of curricula that treat content as irrelevant. The reading becomes just an interchangeable occasion for exercising one’s skill in “explaining how the use of figurative language affects the tone or mood.” I am seeing the junk curricula being produced as a result–incoherent crap that simply checks off the list of Common Core skills. Terrible. And everything that Hirsch has fought against for decades.
So how can Hirsch support Common Core?
You will have to pose that question to Dr. Hirsch. My own view is that the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] are backward, amateurish, hackneyed, unimaginative, pedestrian, often prescientific, that one could drive whole curricula through their lacunae, and that they were misconceived at their most fundamental level, at the level of the categorical conceptualization of “standard” in each of the domains covered.
You certainly know better than I, Bob, and you’ve certainly done more thinking about it than I, but what you write is completely consistent with how I’ve always understood what Hirsch has advocated. Content, not “skills.”
I’ve never taught K-12, but my uninformed view is that, for “ELA,” most the “skills” that we try to teach could be taught just by reading great books and arguing about them. A curriculum of Great Books and arguments about them.
Of course, then you get the debates about how you construct a canon of Great Books. Those debates were huge in the 80s and early 90s. They seem so quaint now.
Especially so, given the forced march toward “informational text.”
After all, literature is so pre-digital humanoid.
Pre-scientific? What science? I am sorry, but I trust Hirsch to understand his own ideas in relation to Common Core to any of those here commenting for him.
And, finally, the very fact that there exist such radically different conceptualizations of what schooling should be about as the Common Core and the Core Knowledge Sequence should be a clue that the last thing we need is some national Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth. We need an ecology, not a monoculture, one in which competing, voluntary models can be tried and tested and continuously refined by a free people empowered to make their own decisions, in local schools, about these matters. The last thing we need is the Thought Police.
Very well stated, Bob Shepherd. Especially with education research and data hinting at so many, often contradictory, conclusions, your words about an ecology should be enshrined at every Board of Education around the country; how’s that for standardization:)?
Hirsch’s argument is this simple and clear: When I mention the Thought Police, you won’t know what I actually intend there unless you are familiar with Orwell and 1984. I assume that familiarity when I write that line, that you have that knowledge: who were the Thought Police?
Bob Shepherd: ¡ya has dado en el clavo!/you have hit the nail on the head!
Much said in very few words.
Thank you.
😎
I have no data to back this up, but my gut says that a lot of the problems with K-12 public education can be traced to people who have strong opinions.
Strong opinions aren’t neceessarily the root of the problem. One can have strong opinions that are rightly/correctly based in rational logical thought. One can have strong opinions questionably based in false ideologies, belief systems and/or intuitions/suspicions (gut systems??).
Which would you prefer as a basis for public policy issues?
It’s not just CCSS that has created strange bed-fellows, it is far more generally, all this Ed ®eform bizness. One of my favorite pieces was written by the head of the Republican Party in Fla’s Orange County. I’m not sure I’ve ever been able to carry out a full conversation with a known republican, much less laud a well-known one’s writing. This is a very topsy-turvy set of affairs.
Meanwhile, I cannot get any of my “own”, my own friends, SES, compatriots, to pay any attention whatsoever. None of them has any actual real live kids in public schools, but they know all about what’s happening and literally refuse to read what I send them. They are mortified of finding things to criticize Obama regarding. In mortal terror — just as is suggested here more generally that “hispanics” are: opposing the common core might be basically seen as opposing Obama – See more at: http://parentsacrossamerica.org/national-hispanic-organizations-silent-common-core-testings-negative-effects-ells-hispanic-students/#sthash.axO23jVj.dpuf
I just opened a FB group examining CCSS and supporting those interested in opting out. My co-moderator is … republican. It’s OK with me, but it sure is soul-shuddering.
I was always riveted in geology class by the concept that the earth’s polarity actually literally reverses itself regularly, in geological time that is. It seems to me that politics in the US is re-aligning too. In all honesty, Ralph Nadar pointed this out to near-universal disdain when he declared the difference between our two parties to be secondary in size to the difference between the 1% and 99% — that wasn’t the way he phrased it, but it was his point.
And it is true. I have more in common with republicans these days who champion the 99% than with many fellow democrats who are fixated on the rights of the 1%. IT is dismaying, but when the world shifts gear, you gotta go with it, no?
Meant to leave the LA CCSS page link here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/LAQuestionsCommonCore/
It must be like a Congregationalist attending Catholic Mass for you. One would think you thought Republicans were monsters, followers of the Antichrist. But I suppose you’d draw the line at collaborating with—shudder—a tea party activist such as myself.
I’ve said it a few times already, that until one repudiates Obama, one can hardly be taken seriously because he’s screwing the whole country JUST the way he’s screwing the public schools. He is totally against the everyday regular American, in the workplace, in the small business community, and as we know in the public schools. He’s not keeping Arne from raping and pillaging, but Jeb Bush is almost worse. Real people have to work together when reality demands it and not get hung up on party affiliation. My hero Bo Schembechler had a number of pithy sayings for his players. One of them was: “Always do the right thing.” Not say the right thing, but DO the right thing.
Diane’s analysis of the situation is very good.
Hirsch supports the Common Core because it includes a few mentions of the need for the systematic teaching of background knowledge. He thought this would enshrine his ideas in our nation’s new education “constitution”. The problem is that no one is paying attention to that part of the Common Core document. They’re completely ignoring it. When i point it out to Common Core trainers, they’re surprised and uninterested. They “know” that the Common Core is REALLY about skills.
I like Stern for loving Hirsch, and I like his pugnacious writing style, but I found his attack on Diane Ravitch on City Journal quite loathsome.
The problem is that no one is paying attention to that part of the Common Core document.
Tragically, yes.
But New York State is implementing the CCSS by mandating Hirsch’s curriculum. There are plenty of reasons to drop the CCSS, mainly the testing, but IF the curriculum used to develop the CCSS skills is Hirsch’s, that’s not one of them.
Yes, NY has declared Hirsch’s curriculum compatible with Common Core in grades K-2. But this is just one small bright spot. From what I understand, this is only one choice for NY districts; I suspect only a minority are using it. And I doubt the Hirsch-approach is used much outside of NY. Most places, I suspect, it’s skills over content.
So much misunderstanding of that debate. Here’s the problem: Extremist hegemonists embraced Hirsch’s work because they thought that was what the work was about. They didn’t understand that the question of what writers assume that their readers will know is a descriptive one, a purely empirical one. As a result of the right-wing embrace of Hirsch’s work at the height of the wars over multiculturalism, folks on the left picked up that same misunderstanding of what Core Knowledge was about. And from there, the misunderstanding has deepened and deepened. I intend to continue fighting for a content-rich curriculum based in world knowledge (knowledge of what) and procedural knowledge (concrete, operationalized knowledge of how). Why? Because I know how powerfully engaging such curricula are, how much such curricula foster intrinsic motivation to learn. And because I believe, passionately, that education is to a great extent about cultural transmission, about the great handoff from one generation to the next, of what is known and valued, not by a tiny elite at the top, but by the culture as a whole, in all its richness and diversity.
Thank you again for saying so much so well. I revere E.D. Hirsch. And I revere Diane Ravitch because of her book, LEFT BACK. But in many ways I agree with Sol Stern about the Common Core. And I’m a leftist. From what I am reading in blog discussions, teachers in districts that haven’t gone on a testing binge and haven’t tortured their students with test preparation are finding a new opportunity to focus on content, and some are even teaching subject matter and then allowing their students to be tested without prep. Imagine. I am alarmed by what you describe in ELA. I have focused on the math standards and agree with the teachers who find them refreshingly deep. I’m heartened when they describe students getting it for the first time and enjoying it. I’m still hopeful. If nothing else, maybe the Common Core will allow teachers who have struggled for so many years with the vapid abstract skills regime to finally get back to teaching, as you say, about the world.
Linda – Every time I hear “…the Common Core will ALLOW teachers who have struggled for so many years…. To finally get back to teaching…about the world.” I cringe and wonder how many of these teachers really exist. If one knows how to properly teach yet waits to be ALLOWED, the question is why? And the answer seems to me has got to be the high stakes standardized test brought on with “consequential accountability” of NCLB. And that, to be sure, us the REAL danger of the Common Core a Initiative. The test and the test alone withholds permission to teach.