What Skills for a Brave New World?

You've heard of the digital natives argument for technology in education, but Rick Hess gives a straight-up debunking to the recent trend of purchasing an iPad for every student.

This was all brought home to me again, just the other week, when I had a chance to spend a couple days visiting acclaimed "technology-infused" high schools. Yet, most of what I saw the technology being used for was either content-lite or amounted to students using Google-cum-Wikipedia as a latter day World Book Encyclopedia. Making powerpoints and video shorts is nice, but it's only us "digital tourists" who think it reflects impressive learning.

This had been my impression of technology use in public schools--students are seemingly addicted to it, yet can only use it in rudimentary ways. For example, they will copy and paste content from the internet into their Word document, and use the thesaurus feature to substitute individual words in the copied text. Voila! No plagiarizing here! (Or so they think.)

Diana Senechal's gem of a comment is a must-read:

In my first year of teaching, students kept asking me, "Why don't we do more projects?" I wasn't sure what they meant by "projects," until they started bringing in their projects for other classes. Typically, these were poster boards with a presentation on a topic. It would include pictures (taken from the Internet), a news article or essay (taken from the Internet), a few headings in fancy fonts and colors, and maybe a bit of writing (also copied from the Internet in many cases).

Teachers were under pressure to assign this sort of thing; it was considered "evidence of technology use in the classroom" and "hands-on learning." Also, it served as good classroom or bulletin board decoration.

For students to learn to use the Internet well, they have to learn to go without it. If they can puzzle their way through a text, taking time to make sense of it and think about it, then they will be in a better position to do the same online. If they need the graphics and quick answers, then something's wrong.

Exactly!

I subscribe to a number of listserves for science teachers, and there is often hand-wringing over the need to teach students how to navigate our New! Digital! world. The truth is, what they really need are the old skills: content knowledge; the ability to paraphrase, summarize, and cite text sources; an understanding of grammar and a solid vocabulary.

Adults over 30 are better able to use the technology available today because we developed those skills, sans fancy gadgets. Today's high school students? I worry about them.

Experts Agree: It's the Curriculum, Stupid!

This past week has seen an unusual (and welcome) focus on curriculum--specifically, the issue that we often don't have one.


Kitchen Table Math links to this essay by Barry Garelick arguing that It Isn't the Culture, Stupid.

Asian countries routinely trounce the US in international comparisons of mathematical ability. Cultural explanations are often given--the U.S. can't do any better than we are doing because we lack a culture that values education, or that is willing to send kids to afterschool cram sessions. Garelick debunks this argument.

This Robert Pondiscio's essay, featured on the Fordham Institute's Gadfly, points out the obvious:

What I cannot accept, however, is that to focus on instruction—on curriculum and teaching—is to play the “wrong game.”  To accept this argument is to believe that the educational outcome of Jose or Malik in the South Bronx or Detroit is more deeply affected by who wins a primary for a House race somewhere in California than what they learn in school all day.  It is to believe that electing the “right people” matters more than what teachers teach and what children learn.

John Whorter writes at NPR's The Root about the effectiveness of direct instruction in teaching reading in closing achievement gaps.

The tragedy is that the discussion about black kids in school — boys as well as girls — takes place as if there were some great mystery about how to teach children from disadvantaged homes how to read. An entire plangent and circular conversation drifts eternally over a problem that, at least in the case of reading, was solved way back during the Nixon administration.

Back then, in the early '70s, Siegfried Engelmann led a government-sponsored investigation called Project Follow Through. It compared nine teaching methods and tracked their results among 75,000 children from kindergarten through third grade. It found that the Direct Instruction (DI) method of teaching reading — based on sounding out words rather than learning them whole (phonics), and on a tightly scripted format emphasizing repetition and student participation — was vastly more effective than any of the others. And for poor kids. Including black ones.

And AFT's American Education devotes its entire winter issue to questions of curriculum. The blog Common Core covers AFT's article pointing out the dearth of solid research in support of "reform" math approached. They ask:

So why are so many American schools wasting resources and precious class time using reform curricula like Everyday Math that is based on an instruction-lite, discovery-driven approach to learning math?

So there you have it. Everybody and their sister, including the largest teacher's union, is coming out on the side of solid teaching and the importance of what is taught. Could this mean that an actual core curriculum lies on the horizon?

Want to Improve Content Retention? Make Your Fonts Harder to Read

The Research Digest Blog reports that Harder-to-Read Fonts Boost Student Learning. Researchers at Princeton first tested the effect in the lab and then replicated it in actual classrooms in a Ohio high school. Students who read worksheets, handouts, or PowerPoint slides with slightly harder-to-read fonts did better on tests of the material. Teacher's usual classroom materials were converted to the harder-to-read fonts "Comic Sans Italicised, Haettenschweiler or Monotype Corsiva, or, if the materials were hand-written, simply by shaking them about in a photo-copier to make them blurry."

Why does making something harder to read promote learning?

When people find something easy to read, they take that as a sign that they've mastered it. Conversely, the researchers believe harder-to-read fonts provoke a feeling of lack of mastery and encourage deeper processing. However, there's obviously a balance to be struck. If material becomes too difficult to read, some students may simply give up. 

The researchers think their finding could be the tip of the ice-berg as regards using cognitive findings to boost educational practice. 'If a simple change of font can significantly increase student performance, one can only imagine the number of beneficial cognitive interventions waiting to be discovered,' they said. 'Fluency demonstrates how small interventions have the potential to make big improvements in the performance of our students and education system as a whole.'

Students Can Spot Competent Teaching

Standardized test scores and value added teacher scores are much maligned.

But a recent New York Times article reports that teacher with high value-added scores were also recognized by their students as competent, caring teachers.

Thousands of students have filled out confidential questionnaires about the learning environment that their teachers create. After comparing the students’ ratings with teachers’ value-added scores, researchers have concluded that there is quite a bit of agreement.

Classrooms where a majority of students said they agreed with the statement, “Our class stays busy and doesn’t waste time,” tended to be led by teachers with high value-added scores, the report said.

The same was true for teachers whose students agreed with the statements, “In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes,” and, “My teacher has several good ways to explain each topic that we cover in this class.”

The Harvard professor who designed the surveys say that “Kids know effective teaching when they experience it.” Agreed!

Is there a herring in my school lunch?

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon writes about the red herring of bad parenting in the move to restrict food advertising to kids, while Joanne Jacobs complains about the "nanny state" setting guidelines on what foods schools may serve.

Since it's actually federal guidelines that drive school lunch menus (and often drive them to unhealthy extremes), it's hard to criticize the government for setting limits on what schools can sell to children. (Well, unless you really really dislike the federal government...then, it's easy.)

Weekend Roundup, 04Dec2010

What we've been reading this week...

Ri-Shawn Biddle at Dropout Nation argues in favor of school choice

When defenders of the status quo say that families should not have a wide array of educational options available [...] they are essentially arguing that there should be no civil right to a high quality education. That argument is absolutely wrong on every moral and intellectual level. Poor and minority families should not have to wait for these dropout factories to either shut down or be overhauled. Neither should middle-class families or anyone else. What these families deserve is the option to escape. They deserve school choice.

Ed pundit Chester Finn argues against local control

The weak and generally stagnant academic performance of most American school kids, our scandalous achievement gaps, the country’s sagging performance vis-à-vis other countries, the skimpy preparation of many teachers and principals, the shoddy curricula, the fat and junky textbooks, the innovation-shackling union contracts, the large expenditures with meager returns—these are not the result of an overweening federal government. They are, in fact, almost entirely the product of state and local control of public education

North Caroline caves into pressure to delay teaching U.S. history

When the state department of education put forward its earlier plan for new social studies standards, officials said they had no intention of diminishing history instruction. State Superintendent June Atkinson said at the time that the revised standards would actually have increased the amount of time students spent studying U.S. history during their elementary and secondary schooling, and that they would learn plenty about the major developments throughout American history. But with all the negative feedback, state officials agreed to revisit the plan.

Teach For America Recruits get better results

Teach for America [...] racked up the highest student scores among new teachers in reading, science and social studies. Even compared to students of veteran teachers, students of TFA teachers had the highest test scores in reading.

Indystar article on teacher-blaming and reform

[M]any good teachers think those of us pushing for education reform blame them for their schools' failures. We're not. We're actually making the opposite case: Good and great teachers are responsible for their schools' successes.

Baltimore schools get a turn-around

In 2007, the school board hired Andres Alonso, a Cuban immigrant with a Harvard degree and strong views on how to change things. In three years, he pushed through a sweeping reorganization of the school system, closing failing schools, slashing the central office staff by a third and replacing three-quarters of all school principals.

Glen Miller at The Quick & the Ed looks at bachelors degree completion rates

Despite being our best indicator of institutional-level completion, the federal graduation rate has a number of limitations; problems that critics of the measure (or schools with low results) consistently bring up when asked to explain outcomes.[...] When these issues are combined, critics assert that federal graduation rates are much lower than reality.

When Asians Enroll! (and other tales from meritocracy's margins)

By the logic of meritocracy, the cream would rise naturally to the top, regardless of status or association, and yet generations passed wherein the "cream" remained almost consistently white and male... that is, until just recently, when the world woke up to the news that minorities were not just gratefully accepting the token slots assigned them, but slowly and surely invading campuses in force, dramatically shifting the demographic away from the white, male, middle-class face of higher education. Meritocracy was somehow, if unevenly, coming through on its promise of diversity. Calamity ensued.

When It Comes to Privilege, Gen Y Plays Dumb

Of all of the downsides associated with the can-do attitude Gen Y was ostensibly raised with (the inability to handle failure or criticism, a purported bafflement at not having the world handed to us on a silver platter, etc.), the most subtle and rarely acknowledged would have to be the fact that we weren’t educated to the fact that not all of our peers were being indoctrinated with the same overweening sense of self-esteem that we were. 

Bills Gates funds the development of a better system to evaluate teachers

[Gates] is investing $335 million through his foundation to overhaul the personnel departments of several big school systems. A big chunk of that money is financing research by dozens of social scientists and thousands of teachers to develop a better system for evaluating classroom instruction.[...] For teachers, the findings could mean more scrutiny. But they may also provide more specific guidance about what is expected of the teachers in the classroom if new experiments with other measures are adopted — including tests that gauge teachers’ mastery of their subjects, surveys that ask students about the learning environments in their classes and digital videos of teachers’ lessons, scored by experts.

If you've been reading this blog and haven't commented yet, please do! We'd love to hear from you!

A Case in Which Teaching Trumps Poverty

The blog Inside Schools Research reports on a study that finds that introducing advanced vocabulary to children in kindergarten results in an increased vocabulary in first grade. (I'm going to hold off on the snark for this one.)

It's been known for a while now that children from low-SES* households enter school with only a portion of the vocabulary of a high-SES child. This has been pointed to as one of the roots of the achievement gap. What's more, a certain faction of the education establishment likes to point to outside-of-school factors and conclude that schools cannot possibly do better than they are doing with the students they have.

So, a study showing that those outside-of-school factors can be mitigated is kind of a big deal.

The intervention used in the study was simple: Teachers were taught how to introduce vocabulary to small children.

Each teacher gets a list of thematically related and complex words; for example, "temperature," "exhaust," "steam," and "boil," or "pineapple," "banana," and "kiwi." The teacher reads stories that incorporate the words with the students and opens conversations with the students.

"One of the strategies is building bridges, having conversations with students whatever they want to talk about," [....] "The teacher learns how to have these conversations. Take 'apple,' 'banana' and 'Kiwi.' Students in the Delta may never have heard of a kiwi or seen the fruit. So the teacher shows them and they talk about it."

The study was robust, with classrooms randomly assigned to either the intervention condition or to the no-intervention (control) condition. Over 1300 students were tested, so we can be certain that the results seen are the effect of the intervention and not of other variables.

The effect was modest, with the students exposed to the richer vocabulary only one month ahead of students in the control group. Still, it's nothing to sniff at when you consider that vocabulary impacts so much of a student's academic achievement, and may be the driver behind the marshmallow-test effect (kids who can wait longer before eating a marshmallow are found to do better in school even into adolescence...read more about it here).

So maybe, bigger vocabulary -> better self-control -> higher achievement. If so, the effect may be pretty big after all.

*Socio-economic status

Knowledge-Based Grades (Who'da Thunk?!?)

Although Out in Left Field blogged first, I couldn't keep from mentioning it here, too. This recent New York Times article describes a new trend in grading--basing grades on what students have learned. New? Yes. Grades are almost always based on a mix of what students know and how they act--whether they complete homework, hand in assignments on time, raise their hand in class. In other words, grades reflect how well students please the teacher as well as how well they have mastered the material. This dual function of grading shows up when students take standardized exams, in which no amount of people-pleasing will help:

About 10 percent of the students who earned A’s and B’s in school stumbled during end-of-the-year exams. By contrast, about 10 percent of students who scraped along with C’s, D’s and even F’s — students who turned in homework late, never raised their hands and generally seemed turned off by school — did better than their eager-to-please B+ classmates.

One district in New York State changed to knowledge-based grading, which didn't sit so well with some parents:

“Does the old system reward compliance? Yes,” she said. “Do those who fit in the box of school do better? Yes. But to revamp the policy in a way that could be of detriment to the kids who do well is not the answer.” In the real world, she points out, attitude counts. 

Of course, when the system was set up to work to detriment of bright nonconformists, no one complained quite as loudly.

Katharine Beals terms this favoritism toward the eager-sociable, grade reversal, and cites the larger culture's embrace of right-brain thinking as a (the?) cause. I'm not so sure; I see different mechanisms to point a finger at.

One is the selection process for public school educators and administrators. As a whole, education majors are not as academically inclined as graduates of other programs. They also seem (and I am speculating here) to have been more challenged by analytical, academic tasks than by things like motivation, organization, and "fitting in." It is natural that they would value what they excel at and redefine achievement to be more in line with their own strengths.

The second mechanism is what I call parentism, and it deserves a post all to itself.

Middle Schools Matter, Too (And Not in a Good Way)

OK, so I guess curriculum isn't the only thing that matters.

In this Education Next article, Jonah Rockoff and Benjamin Lockwood show that structure matters too. They looked at students who transitioned to a 6-8 middle school in either grade 6, grade 7, or not at all (i.e., went to a k-8 school). Students experience a marked drop in achievement beginning the year they move to the middle school, and continuing through the middle school years. This drop happens whether they transition in grade 6 or 7. It does not happen at all with the k-8 educated students.

Read the whole thing. It's scary.

The authors do not pinpoint a reason for the decline, but the results are consistent with my (and many parents' and students') observations about middle schools. The teaching is often horrendous, and the large number of kids in that age range leads to a chaotic atmosphere.

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Jay Matthews also blogs about middle school math, and one of the comments really stood out for me. Slackermom writes:

Middle school isn't much different from elementary school. Teachers are still somewhat intimidated by mathematics; thus, the same topics are taught over and over again without much depth. There are still what I used to call 'holding' years (I remember 8th grade being such a year). These are the years where you learn absolutely nothing new in math classes. Nothing. [emphasis added]

I remember that same 8th grade year when I learned absolutely nothing in math. I remember being so bored I almost walked out (I only regret that I didn't).

So not only do U.S. schools retard students in math, but they do it actively and on purpose.

Whaddayaknow? In Math, Curriculum Matters!

Since this blog is ostensibly about science curriculum, it may seem odd that I am blogging about math. After all, other blogs out there already cover math well enough.

But be patient. We're getting there.

First, let me present another piece of the (math) curriculum puzzle.

A recent Mathematica Policy Institute study looked at four different math curricula used in the early elementary grades and found that (you guessed it!) curriculum matters. Some, like Saxon Math, led to higher student achievement than others, such as TERC investigations. Schools were randomly assigned to different math curricula. The full report comes out next summer.

This was a federally funded study, and it is heartening to see some attention being paid to curriculum effects. It makes this blogger glad.

National Math Curriculum: A Lesson from TIMSS

2002 was, by all appearances, a banner year for discussion of curriculum issues by the AFT. In A Coherent Curriculum: The Case of Mathematics, researchers compare the breadth and depth of math curricula in the "A+" countries that achieved top rankings in the TIMSS with those of 21 U.S. states. They found that the A+ countries covered fewer topics per year, focused in-depth on more topics per year, and taught each topic over fewer years than states in the U.S.

(For a quick overview, download the pdf United States vs. International Standards from this Education Week article.)

It is tempting to think that the effects of what is actually taught pale in comparison with other factors, such as teacher quality, school funding, or the socioeconomic status of the student body. But the fact is that what you teach is what you get.

One of the most important findings from TIMSS is that the differences in achievement from country to country are related to what is taught in different countries. In other words, this is not primarily a matter of demographic variables or other variables that are not greatly affected by schooling. What we can see in TIMSS is that schooling makes a difference. Specifically, we can see that the curriculum itself—what is taught—makes a huge difference.

So what lessons can we draw from this study?

First, the A+ countries had something of a consensus about when topics should be introduced. For example, none of the A+ curricula covered polygons and circles before grade 4. In contrast, 100% of the 21 state curricula specified that this topic be taught starting in grade 1. And so on.... For a total of 32 mathematics topics examined, all but five were introduced later in the top-achieving countries than in the U.S. states.

Second, the A+ countries had a sense that some topics should be mastered before children move on to more advanced topics. As such, a clear sequence emerges of early-elementary, late-elementary, early-middle, and late-middle grade content. In contrast, in the U.S. states,

Prerequisite knowledge doesn’t come first. For example, properties of whole number operations (such as the distributive property) are intended to be covered in first grade, the same time that children are beginning to study basic whole-number operations. This topic is first typically introduced at grade four (and not earlier than grade three) in the top-achieving countries.

In contrast, 100% of the 21 state curricula examined featured this topic in all of the grades from 1-7, and >83% also covered it in grade 8. That's a lot of polygons and a lot of circles! While the A+ countries introduced and taught each topic to mastery in a relatively short time, the U.S. covered...and covered...and covered...and covered the same topics, ad infinitum. The authors state:

The longer topic coverage combined with the absence of the three-tier structure suggest that state standards are developed from a laundry-list approach to mathematics that lacks any sense of the logic of mathematics as a discipline. For many of the individual states it seems that almost all topics are intended to be taught to all students at all grades. [emphasis added]

The report gives us a glimpse of what a coherent curriculum would look like, and I encourage you to read the whole thing (pdf), including the related articles (there is one by E.D. Hirsch).

Lack of a Set Curriculum Hurts Teachers

Lack of curriculum is not a new problem, as evidenced by this AFT article from 2002. In Lost at Sea: Without a Curriculum, Navigating instruction Can Be Tough--Especially for New Teachers, the authors describe the challenges of make-it-up-as-you-go teaching.

Despite what some would have you believe, teachers want a set curriculum...as long as they are not constrained to it. So, being required to follow a script would be a no-go, but having a script to fall back on, use, improve, and modify is something that teachers desire:

We expected that new teachers in this context might feel constrained and frustrated by the rigidity of the curricula they encountered. Instead, we found that despite Massachusetts' detailed system of standards and accountability measures, most new teachers we interviewed received little or no guidance about what to teach or how to teach it. [...] Left to their own devices, they struggled day-to-day to prepare content and materials instead of developing a coherent plan to address long-term objectives. Rather than lamenting a lack of freedom or expressing a need to assert their autonomy, they longed for greater specification of their curriculum—both what to teach and how to teach it. [Emphasis added]

Has anything changed in the past 8 years?

I know that since 2002, some for-profit companies have developed bespoke curricula (daily lesson plans, scripts, the whole nine yards) at the behest of specific districts. Of course, these are not made public and they are not scrutinized by teachers at large, so their impact is limited.

What would an effective solution to the curriculum problem look like?

First off, lesson planning materials would have to be open-source. Any teacher should be allowed to access them and to modify them as they see fit. They must be able to give feedback on the lessons and post their modifications back into the curriculum bank. The curriculum should benefit from teacher expertise as well as guide it.

Second, one or more scope-and-sequence specs would have to be developed, and they would have to be aligned to existing science standards. With talk of national science standards, this may soon become a lot easier. While there might not be a single right sequence to teach the topics, there are surely one or more ways that work better than others.


If you are a teacher, what would you like to see in a curriculum?

Want to Fix the Achievement Gap? Fix the Expectations Gap

Via Joanna Jacobs and HechingerEd, a new study from AIR finds that states set widely differing academic expectations for their students. What is expected of an 8th grader in one state, for example, may be the expectation for a 4th grader in a different state. Of course, states can meet the reporting requirements of NCLB by setting the bar however high (or low) they please, with unsurprising results:

“By setting low performance standards, states commit the educational equivalent of short selling. Rather than betting on student success, the educators sell the student short by lowering standards,” said Phillips. “What the education system gets out of this practice is the illusion of high rates of proficiency, which have a palliative effect on public opinion and meet the requirements of federal reporting. What the student gets out of it is a dumbed-down education, with little opportunity to learn college-ready and career-ready skills.”

 There is a lot of talk, esp. from the right, about local control. But what research--and common sense--shows is that we need to hold every student to the same high standard. This is why national science standards are necessary. No common standards, no common assessment.

Once we agree on what students should know and be able to do, we can begin to design quality curricula to get them there.

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Also covered on the Inside School Research blog, which I highly recommend.

How Much Math is Too Much Math?

U. Chicago math professor V.G. Ramanathan asks, How much math do people really need?

We need to ask two questions. First, how effective are these educational creams and gels? With generous government grants over the past 25 years, countless courses and conferences have been invented and books written on how to teach teachers to teach. But where is the evidence that these efforts have helped students? A 2008 review by the Education Department found that the nation is at "greater risk now" than it was in 1983, and the National Assessment of Educational Progress math scores for 17-year-olds have remained stagnant since the 1980s.

The second question is more fundamental: How much math do you really need in everyday life? Ask yourself that -- and also the next 10 people you meet, say, your plumber, your lawyer, your grocer, your mechanic, your physician or even a math teacher. 

The answer to the first question is that the edu-fads have not been effective at all. But that is not the fault of math, it is the fault of educators who may themselves need to know more math.

The second question is competently addressed over at Joanne Jacobs.

Why is This a Novel Idea?

Ed blogs have pointed me recently to Lesson Study, which is pretty much what it sounds like: the detailed examination, by a small group of teachers, of a particular lesson with specific learning goals.

If you are unfamiliar with the field of education, the fact that this is a cutting edge  Japanese import, and not standard practice, will surprise you. If you are a teacher, you know how little attention is paid to developing the basic tools of teaching in ed schools and in professional development.

Examining a lesson and improving upon it is not revolutionary. In fact, it is pretty much necessary to educate well. South Korea, I once read, has a national database of lesson plans that are evaluated and updated by every teacher who uses them. If we in the U.S. are to improve the art of teaching, this is the way we need to go.

Why Technology Won't Save Us

Despite all the hype about digital nativism and 21st-century skills, it seems that you don't actually need a lot of high tech to teach effectively, reports Amanda Ripley at slate.

"In most of the highest-performing systems, technology is remarkably absent from classrooms," says Andreas Schleicher, a veteran education analyst for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development who spends much of his time visiting schools around the world to find out what they are doing right (or wrong). "I have no explanation why that is the case, but it does seem that those systems place their efforts primarily on pedagogical practice rather than digital gadgets."

Read more.

And it seems that handwriting may not be so irrelevant, either, according to this article at the Wall Street Journal.

"During one study at Indiana University published this year, researchers invited children to man a "spaceship," actually an MRI machine using a specialized scan called "functional" MRI that spots neural activity in the brain. The kids were shown letters before and after receiving different letter-learning instruction. In children who had practiced printing by hand, the neural activity was far more enhanced and "adult-like" than in those who had simply looked at letters.

"It seems there is something really important about manually manipulating and drawing out two-dimensional things we see all the time," says Karin Harman James, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Indiana University who led the study."

Why I Started a Blog, or, It's the Curriculum, Stupid

As a new science teacher, I was dismayed by the lack of high-quality, field-tested, complete curricula available and by the lack of attention paid to the actual teaching of science content. To put it in terms that the non-education-educated will understand, newly trained science teachers have not been taught how to actually teach. They have not been handed down lessons that have proven successful in the past, they have not been asked to consider the importance of the order in which ideas are developed over the course of a year, they have not been given a set of tools with which to do their jobs. In short, every new teacher is asked to reinvent the wheel.

I'm starting this blog in an effort to fix that. I want to draw attention to the issue of curriculum in science, biology in particular, and to find like-minded individuals interested in working with me to develop a solution.

In part, this is an attempt to highlight the muddled thinking that has become so pervasive around issues of science teaching. The muddle includes the current popularity of inquiry-based approaches, the emphasis on process skills over actual science content, and the idea that successful teaching cannot be tested and measured. Less obviously, but more insidiously, it includes the sentiment that a good curriculum will hurt teachers by diminishing their autonomy.

I would like to accomplish for science what E.D. Hirsch and the Core Knowledge Foundation have for elementary education. I would like to create an open-source, comprehensive biology curriculum that can be tested and improved by teachers all over. This is a first step.