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?

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.

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