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?