October 2015 – Core Knowledge Foundation

Every time I see a toddler with an iPad, I cringe just a little. I try to hide it. I know I’m supposed to be amazed at the little genius.

I also know that the device could be useful, especially as the toddler becomes a preschooler and starts learning letters and numbers. Still, beyond a few apps for those (very important) basics, I typically see the iPad as more opiate than education. But we can’t just say no. iPads and similar devices are ubiquitous and revered. We must co-opt them. But how?

Lisa Guernsey of New America and Michael Levine of Sesame Workshop provide the first really compelling answer I’ve seen. Their new book, Tap, Click, Read: Growing Readers in a World of Screens, is a rare gem. It’s written in a way that parents will find accessible and it offers a combination of research, initiatives (with videos), and insights that even the most expert decision makers will find useful.

Rather than a summary, I’ll offer a few samples of Lisa and Michael’s findings and trust that you’ll be motivated to dive into the whole book.

On literacy:

Literacy in the younger years is not, and never has been, solely about reading print. Walk into a children’s library and what do you see everywhere? Picture books, some with no print at all. Nor is early literacy only about reading books. Literacy has always involved speaking, listening, and writing.

On literacy apps:

Our analysis can be summed up as follows: kids’ literacy apps are abundant within the marketplace, but they have not been designed or distributed in any coherent fashion, and the vast majority are not oriented to help bridge the gulf of literacy problems faced by some families…. Meanwhile, however, we see hope in the growing number of curators popping up, a few of whom are trying to bring in a lens on learning in the early years.

On the future of literacy apps:

To give you a sense of the type of research likely to come, consider the case of the app-based learning system called Learn with Homer…. It brings a mix of proven early learning techniques—story time, rich vocabulary and background knowledge, and skills practice—together in one app…. Kids are not only learning what the letter A sounds like and that “alligator” starts with A, but also taking virtual “field trips” to the zoo, where they learn about alligators.

On wise use:

We cannot afford to ignore the affordances of technology, especially for disadvantaged children and families of many different backgrounds and circumstances who may not otherwise have access to information and learning opportunities. And yet to leave the fate of these children to technology alone would be a big mistake…. Children who interact with technology while working with adults who can set good examples and guide them to new heights are receiving tremendous advantages. If only the privileged few have the opportunity for that kind of tech-assisted but human-powered learning, divides will only grow wider.

To be educational, iPad time needs to be quality time (image courtesy of Shutterstock).

On knowledge and comprehension:

One recent day in California, a six-year-old boy named Brandon was … watching one of Disney’s Ice Age movies, when he saw a scene that captivated him. On the screen were the lovable animations of Ice Age’s prehistoric beasts, loping along the barren, icy terrain. Brandon turned to his father: “Papi, at that time, what was it like? There weren’t any buses?” Smiling, his father, José Rubén, saw this as a teachable moment. He went to his computer, pulled up YouTube, and searched for videos that would show his son more about what life was like during that time…. Brandon was engaged in building his knowledge base, getting an introduction to concepts and ideas that not only gave him a little more understanding of the Ice Age, but also helped him put the Ice Age into context of other periods in history and start to gain a framework for thinking about how time passes and how change happens….

When most people talk about the troubling state of children’s reading in the United States, the untapped power of these kinds of learning moments are not likely on their minds. Instead they may think our country’s problems are simply a function of whether children ever learned how to decode words on a page or read sentences with fluency. But the root of the problem may be in children’s abilities to comprehend and make sense of the ideas that are built by those words and sentences. Recent vocabulary scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, for example, showed that American children are making few if any significant gains in understanding the meaning of complex words, with a wide gulf between white students and … Hispanic and African American students. So if there are ways to build that word learning and even more importantly build a deeper knowledge base that enables comprehension in today’s children, don’t we have a moral obligation to seize it?

Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve never seen a position description for a good job that didn’t have a long list of knowledge, skill, and character requirements. It makes me wonder why those focused on “21^st century” careers seem to place skills and character—or problem solving, team work, and perseverance—far above knowledge.

David Brooks provides the latest example as he laments widespread enthusiasm for the new documentary “Most Likely to Succeed.” In lauding High Tech High, it dismisses the need for broad knowledge. Students’ time is devoted to long-term projects, so they end up with narrow bands of knowledge:

Teachers cover about half as much content as in a regular school. Long stretches of history and other subject curriculums are effectively skipped. Students do not develop conventional study habits.

The big question is whether such a shift from content to life skills is the proper response to a high-tech economy. I’d say it’s at best a partial response.

Ultimately, what matters is not only how well you can collaborate in groups, but the quality of the mind you bring to the group. In rightly playing up soft skills the movie underemphasizes intellectual virtues. For example, it ignores the distinction between information processing, which computers are good at, and knowledge, which they are not….

The cathedrals of knowledge and wisdom are based on the foundations of factual acquisition and cultural literacy. You can’t overleap that, which is what High Tech High is in danger of doing.

Brooks is absolutely right. The question is how to convince others.

What’s the value in collaboration without enough knowledge to generate and implement excellent ideas? (Image courtesy of Shutterstock.)

While the overwhelming evidence from cognitive science will win over our education system eventually, today’s students can’t wait. Fortunately, a new report from the Center for American Progress could catalyze change. The Hidden Value of Curriculum Reform: Do States and Districts Receive the Most Bang for Their Curriculum Buck? shows that better curriculum could be a low- to no-cost, high-impact reform. Focusing on return on investment (ROI), it should turn the heads of policymakers, philanthropists, and reformers:

Switching to a higher quality curriculum has a huge ROI relative to other educational policies—in large part because curricula cost so little…. The average cost-effectiveness ratio of switching curriculum was almost 40 times that of class-size reduction in a well-known randomized experiment….

State adoption decisions are often based on limited assessments of quality and weak proxies for alignment to state standards…. There is also a clear gap between the reality of which curricula are effective or aligned to state standards and the curricula that publishers advertise as such.

Much of the problem with adoption seems to be a lack of information. Curriculum has long been ignored by academics, funders, and decision-makers, so there’s shockingly little evidence of which curricula are most effective. Lots of approaches and materials result in at least some learning; rigorous comparative studies are needed to find out what works best for various groups of students.

The report calls for investments in creating better curricula, comparative evaluations, and improvements to the state and district selection processes (including a wise recommendation to pilot materials prior to adoption). The one suggestion I’d add is that districts and states need not do this work alone. Consortia could be more effective and efficient, especially for finding materials aligned with the Common Core standards. One large consortium might even have the resources to fund comparative studies.

Not all that long ago, college followed a predictable pattern: two years of general education requirements followed by two years of courses in the chosen major. No longer. As this review of course requirements shows, even some of the liberal arts colleges have minimized requirements outside the major.

Of all the potential causes for the disappearance of general ed, two seem lost likely to me (though this is pure conjecture). One is the commodification of higher education, in which climbing walls, dorm-suites with pools, and emphasis on career-focused courses are necessary to compete for students. The is that many faculty members are unaware that a shared body of knowledge is necessary for active citizenship (or effective communication or even on-the-job critical thinking).

Regardless, creating general education requirements is so rare these days that it’s newsworthy. Students seem oblivious to the notion that education could have more than one purpose. As a freshman at Boston University said,

“I feel like, if you know you want to be an engineer, you shouldn’t have to spend your time doing things that aren’t really going to apply to you.”

Engineering may make for a good career, but there’s far more to a good life (image courtesy of Shutterstock).

Of course, this isn’t the students’ fault. The real problem is with the adults who have abdicated their duty to define and protect the very notion of an education. Marc Tucker tackled this recently, asking “What Does It Mean to Be an Educated Person Today?”:

One of the most influential—and, I think it is fair to say, thoughtful—statements on what it might mean to be an educated person … was the Harvard University report on General Education in a Free Society, released in 1945. It addressed both the schools and higher education, offering the view that social and moral development is no less important than academic learning. It argued that everyone is capable of serious intellectual accomplishment at some level and that the accumulation of expert knowledge in one arena is positively dangerous if it is not grounded in a broad, deep and humane understanding of the human condition and a well-grounded moral sensibility, that a democracy likes ours cannot survive if serious learning is monopolized only by our elites. For all these reasons, it said, the modern university had an obligation to require all students to take at least a third of their course selections from courses specially designed by teams of top faculty not to advance students in their march toward specialization but rather to involve them in the study of complex issues, systems, big ideas from the full realm of human experience … to help them lead the good life as the Greeks would have understood that phrase—to be decent, capable, concerned, involved contributors and thoughtful citizens. They proposed, in other words, what amounted to a common curriculum, with some choice, that would be designed to enable all students to achieve goals that the Harvard task force had thought long and hard about.

Just a few years ago, another Harvard president called a subsequent Harvard task force together to update General Education in a Free Society. It failed to come to a consensus on a common, coherent undergraduate curriculum. Little wonder. In the intervening years, the university had become a vast holding company of faculty entrepreneurs and specialists and the student body had come to build and hone the specialist skills and faculty and student connections that would give them an edge in a highly competitive job market.

With every passing year, our college and university programs are more vocational in nature…. We need to turn off the autopilot. We need to examine the technological, political, social and moral challenges we face and ask ourselves how and for what purpose we should be educating—not training—our young adults. If it were ever the case that the unexamined life is not worth living, it is the case now.

While there are still some institutions teaching the liberal arts, I don’t see most colleges escaping from a narrow concept of career preparation. But since most students don’t complete college, perhaps our focus should be on K–12. With Core Knowledge and other rigorous curricula, shouldn’t our goal be for high school graduates to be well educated, ready to lead good lives?

I have a very simple proposition: The more we teach, the more students learn—but some students get taught more than others.

There’s plenty of evidence to back me up, so I’ll just go with the most recent study I’ve seen that make this point. Bill Schmidt and his research team found that all around the world, schools are increasing the achievement gap by providing low-income students less opportunity to learn mathematics. Using PISA data, they “found not only that low-income students are more likely to be exposed to weaker math content in schools, but also that a substantial share of the difference in math performance between rich and poor students is related to this inequality.” Across the 62 countries in the study, unequal math content accounted for 32% of the achievement gap, on average. In the US, it accounted for 37%.

Student who deserves an equal opportunity to learn courtesy of Shutterstock.

This isn’t a simple story of good and bad schools. Most of the variation in opportunity to learn math was within schools, not between them. As Schmidt’s previous research has found, the inequity is often hidden because schools will offer a range of math courses with very similar names—but very different content.

Sadly, other research indicates that systematic inequities in opportunity to learn have a snowballing effect. As Dan Willingham explains, schooling increases IQ by increasing your store of knowledge:

[Research shows that] schooling makes you smarter, but is there evidence that the stuff you remember from school is what’s making you smarter? Maybe going to school exercises your brain, so to speak, so you get smarter, but the specifics of that exercise don’t matter. We have some tentative (but probably not conclusive) research suggesting that the specifics do matter…. Two factors contribute to IQ: the breadth and depth of what you have in memory, and the speed with which you can process what you know…. Researchers have shown that although years of education is associated with IQ, it’s not associated with processing speed. That finding suggests that education increases IQ by increasing the breadth and depth of what you know, which runs counter to the idea that school is like mental exercise, and that the content of the exercise doesn’t matter.

Given such evidence, and common sense, why do low-income students tend to get lesser academics?

Let’s dispense with notions of teachers who are lazy or don’t believe low-income students can learn. Other than a tiny fraction of the profession (recall that all professions have their bad apples), I see no evidence of either. Those who buy into such ideas are being intellectually lazy themselves.

Clearly, much of the achievement gap is caused by low-income students, on average, arriving at kindergarten with lower levels of knowledge and skill, and sliding backwards each summer. But that doesn’t account for why schools are making the problem worse.

My guess is that lesser academic content is, in part, an unintended consequence of the focus on student engagement.

It’s true that some aspect of the educational enterprise has to be engaging. When I found a class boring, I knew that I had a reward coming: I was very fortunate in knowing that I would be able to go to college—if I kept my grades up. That was enough for me to stay engaged. I suspect the same is true of many students in middle- and higher-income families.

But relatively few students so fortunate. When students don’t see a connection between challenging academics, high grades, and their futures, what can teachers do? Revising the curriculum to be more engaging (i.e., based on students’ current interests), which in my experience almost always results in easier texts and assignments, seems like the right choice—at least students will learn something. But is there another way to make education engaging? Is there a way to change the class environment without changing the curriculum? Research in Chicago schools indicates there is. It boils down to two essential ingredients: very rigorous content and high social support.

Summarizing this research, Charles Payne characterized it as “Authoritative-Supportive Teaching” that consisted of a:

High level of intellectual/academic demand
High level of social demand
Holistic concern for children and their future; sense of a larger mission
Strong sense of teacher efficacy and legitimacy

Rigorous content tells students we believe in them. Social support shows that we mean it.

Policymakers take note: This type of teaching—gap-closing teaching—is exhausting when the educational system is not set up to support it. Across the country, schools with the neediest students often have the fewest resources. To equalize opportunity to learn, policymakers will have to create the conditions for rigor, and teachers will have to embrace it.

The High-Tech Road to Literacy