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Schools debate the popular Core Knowledge concept |
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Published Tuesday, April 10, 2001, in the San Jose Mercury News
And no effort has provoked more debate about what students really need to learn. The author of the 1987 bestseller ``Cultural Literacy'' argues that in their devotion to teaching critical thinking, educators have bled the primary school curriculum dry of substance. His cure: Pump it back up with great literature and world history, beginning in kindergarten and first grade, so children get the background they need to understand what they read. In an era of tightly scripted, ``teacher-proof'' school reforms that critics say dumb down the curriculum, Hirsch's program, Core Knowledge, has won an ardent grass-roots following among teachers. More than 1,100 schools nationwide -- including Northern California Lutheran Schools and East Palo Alto Charter School -- have tried it since 1990. And it's been embraced by Wal-Mart magnate John Walton's foundation, which supports eight charter schools in California. By listing explicitly what children should learn at each grade, Hirsch's program dovetails with the national movement toward tough, detailed academic standards. It's one of a handful of popular schoolwide reform packages that the American Institutes for Research labeled ``promising.'' But to critics, the program looks more like a trivia contest than a coherent method of teaching children how to analyze and solve problems. They see its popularity as symptomatic of the wider ills that grip the public school reform movement: the obsession with factual knowledge and the proliferation of standardized exams to test it. ``On my educational landscape, questions are more important than answers,'' Harvard Professor Howard Gardner argued in a 1999 book rebutting Hirsch's ideas. Core Knowledge has been adopted both by successful private schools and by struggling public schools. In the Bay Area, converts include Redeemer Lutheran Elementary, a largely white private school in Redwood City, and the East Palo Alto Charter School, where 75 percent of students qualify for subsidized lunches and 72 percent are still learning English. The two schools have had very different experiences. At Redeemer, the rich curriculum has been a nice addition to a flourishing school. On a recent day, first-graders sat stock still, waiting to be read ``The Pied Piper'' -- the latest in a series of fairy tales. Their teacher, Kathy Schneider, began by telling them the moral of the story -- ``a promise is a promise'' -- and asked if they remembered it from any other stories. They did. `` `The Frog Prince'!'' they shouted.
Faculty's revolving door
``Just as they start getting good at implementing the Core Knowledge curriculum, they leave,'' said Principal Kristyn Klei, who has been in her job for just one year. Hoping to raise test scores, teachers spend more time teaching with Open Court, a highly prescribed reading program that lays out each lesson in minute detail. To keep order in his fourth-grade class, Brian Auld recently paced the room in a camouflage vest, addressing his students as ``soldier.'' It was a rare day when he taught a Core Knowledge unit, this time on the Constitution. Students, some of them struggling, read aloud from Hirsch's book, ``What Your 4th Grader Needs to Know.'' Later, Auld said it's easier for teachers to rely on a more scripted teaching program. ``We have so many new immigrant families, they don't understand a lot,'' he said. ``If your focus is basic reading comprehension, basic vocabulary, some other programs do that better.'' From the beginning, Hirsch has been dogged by complaints that his program is elitist and old-fashioned. Liberals have viewed his efforts with suspicion ever since ``Cultural Literacy,'' which included a 60-page appendix of names, dates and places educated people should know. The list enraged many academics, who said it was shallow and overlooked the contributions of women and minorities. Hirsch conveys the idea that ``There's only one body of legitimate knowledge, and we're going to talk at you for four years until you know it,'' said Bruce Fuller, of PACE, a Stanford and Berkeley education think tank. Hirsch responded by forming an advisory board to diversify his curriculum. The 200-page Core Knowledge sequence now includes units on world religions, Africa, Asia and Latin America, and literature by authors such as Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou. But the conservative label has stuck. ``His critics haven't gone back and done the hard work to see where he's gone to,'' said Sam Stringfield, of the Center for the Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University. In a national study of Core Knowledge, he found that teachers reported it was far more diverse than the curricula they had been teaching. Schools can spend up to $20,000 for teacher training and basic books. But Core Knowledge doesn't tell teachers how to teach -- just what to teach. Yet, researchers found the program was so flexible that teachers could shape it to their own ends. After studying Thomas Jefferson, fifth-graders at a majority black school recalled he had fathered children with one of his slaves. At a majority white school, the children told researchers Jefferson was a hero. Hirsch said he always envisioned his approach as a way to help poor children do better in school by teaching them the references their more privileged peers learned at home. He argued children should be exposed to a broad range of knowledge as early as possible, to create the base they need to absorb more information later. Where schools have failed, Hirsch said, is in trying to teach critical thinking skills and abstract concepts, instead of teaching children about real people and places. ``The one thing we know about learning is to learn something, you need a lot of examples,'' he said. But a decade after Hirsch's reform took shape, the evidence that it can raise achievement is modest. ``There is positive evidence -- but not an overwhelming amount -- to indicate every school can be successful on this,'' said Steve Ross, an education professor at the University of Memphis. One study of schools in Florida, Texas and Maryland found that in the schools where Core Knowledge was done well, students did about the same as or slightly better than a control group on a test of basic skills. But in the inner-city school where Core Knowledge wasn't done well, students did much worse than the control group. A study of Oklahoma City Public Schools, where 86 percent of children qualify for subsidized lunches, found students improved only in reading comprehension, vocabulary and social studies. Hirsch cites the Oklahoma study as one of the best tests of his reform, because teachers there chose Core Knowledge themselves. About half the schools in the 40,000-student district use the program, more than any other district in the country.
Influence beyond test scores
``The teachers like it because the kids like it,'' said Denise Lenahan, a teacher at Redeemer. ``And when the kids are interested in what they're doing, it's a whole lot easier to teach them.'' Hirsch's sequence, which is supposed to take up half of a school's curriculum, intentionally introduces even the youngest children to sophisticated material. First-graders at Redeemer this year learned about Impressionism and painted their own versions of Monet's ``Water Lilies.'' But teachers say it's not always easy to do. ``You teach a lot of the surface,'' said Marla Kuefner, who introduced ``Gulliver's Travels'' to her fourth-graders. ``We didn't actually read it. It's too hard for them.'' Critics like Gardner, the Harvard educator, say that rather than cramming children's heads with literary allusions and facts -- however important they may be -- schools would do better to teach them fewer subjects in depth. That way, they can learn to make sophisticated distinctions between concepts like correlation -- events that are related -- and causation -- one event that causes another. ``This insight can never come just from accumulating facts in a `Wheel of Fortune' way,'' Gardner said. ``It can only come from digging deeply enough in a rich content area that you can actually see the difference between correlation and causation, over and over and over again.'' Yet, in practice, such theoretical distinctions on how best to teach sometimes evaporate. Researchers found teachers often resorted to some of the hands-on teaching methods that Hirsch criticizes. Teachers at Redeemer certainly do. During a lesson on ancient Egypt, for example, Schneider had her first-graders mummify one another with toilet paper and make pyramids out of sugar cubes. Then the whole class paid a visit to the Rosicrucian Museum in San Jose.
It was useless, and boring, to try to teach the lesson with books, she said, because ``all the materials on ancient Egypt were at the sixth-grade level.'' Contact Laura Kurtzman at lkurtzman@sjmercury.com or (408) 920-5608. |