Here we go again.? The newest buzz phrase in education:? deeper thought. Or deep thinking. Or deep learning. Deep is suddenly everywhere. The biggest question for schools experimenting with the common core, discussed in a recent New York Times story by Fernanda Santos, was A Trial Run for School Standards That Encourage Deeper Thought.? There is an upcoming? Alliance for Excellent Education briefing called, A Time for Deeper Learning: Preparing Students for a Changing World. A reader comment on Mike's essay about Alfie Kohn went like this:
?but a place where the structure is so stultifying, and the curriculum so narrowly conceived, that any sort of deeper learning like the kind you'll find at, say, Sidwell Friends, gets strangled at the root.
Another commenter on Mike's story wondered, rhetorically, whether,
? the purpose is the same across race and class ? to engage students in deep thinking and the construction of meaning or to prepare them for tests and their place in the economy?
What happened to 21st century skills? ?Remember critical thinking? I often tell the story of showing the Core Knowledge Foundation's K?8 Sequence (upgraded and available here) to our school district's Curriculum Director, who dismissed it with a huff, ?We're interested in teaching critical thinking.?? ?But what,? I asked, ?will they think critically about??
As my rhetorical question suggests, it's not so much that these concepts are faulty ? who would oppose deep thought or critical thinking, after all? It's what's behind them that educators need concern themselves. (See my March 26 Habits of Mindlessness.) Based on last week's Times report on the 100 NYC schools testing out the new Common Core standards, there are kinks to be worked out.? For one thing, as Joanne Jacobs points out, ?It's one of those stories in which the new, improved ideas seem very familiar.?
They are.? And that is because, as Santos notes, ?There are guidelines for what students are expected to do in each grade, but it is still up to districts, schools and teachers to fill in the finer points of the curriculum, like what books to read?? There is no national body responsible for seeing that the standards are carried out, because of fears of giving too much control of education to the federal government. So far, only a few other large cities, including Boston, Cleveland and Philadelphia, have begun to apply the standards in the classroom. And depending on how No Child Left Behind is refashioned, it may still be left to each state to measure its own success.?
As Checker points out, in that story, ?the standards create a historic opportunity in that we now have a destination worth aiming for.?? And the Times story provides, unwittingly perhaps, a road map of the detours along the way.? Here are four of them.
1. Standards are distracting.? Yes, the United States is notoriously ? proudly? ? lococentric.? Autonomy (see #3 below) is built into our national DNA. But stupidity isn't.? And to continuously study, and discuss, and write standards without writing a curriculum is simply ? not smart. As I wrote in my March Madness post, ?we keep talking about playing the game, how to score it, what size the ball should be, the dimensions of the court, the height of the basket, the uniform colors of the referees -- but we don't play the game.? ?Teachers don't teach standards; they teach ?the stuff of knowledge,? in Ted Sizer's words (see Habits above). Standards come from that stuff, not the other way around. We get our history standards from ? where else?--history; more specifically, from the events and facts of history. We need to teach them. We get ELA standards from great literature ? the analysis of the master texts give us some rules about writing.? We need to read it. This point was made recently by two reviews of the new book by Professor X, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, by a college English teacher ?whose job filled him with despair,? as reviewer Caleb Crain notes in the NY Times Book Review. As Crain notes, ?Competent writing, X insists, requires a solid grounding in grammar and a long history of reading.? ?As Liam remarked in his review, ?Professor X writes that it is precisely lack of `declarative sentences and bedrock grammar' that make his workshop sessions so `strained.'?? Professor X writes about writing, says Liam, ??in a way that lends the craft more mysticism than it deserves, but that isn't the pupils' trouble?their trouble is that they're enrolled in a college class and cannot spell.?? Unfortunately, though the Common Core has a wonderful reading list in an Appendix (sadly, they are only ?illustrative texts?meant only to show individual titles that are representative of a wide range of topics and genres?) try to find ?parts of speech? in the dense 66-page ELA Standards document (officially known as ?Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects). ?The math standards have their critics as well. ?The sooner we can get to good curriculum (or curricula), the better (see #4 below).
2. Content is misunderstood.? In his latest book, The Making of Americans, E.D. Hirsch notes early on that ?the widespread notion that the early grades are places where students should learn merely basic skill of reading, writing, and arithmetic rather than specific content is, we now know, a scientifically misguided concept that contradicts reality.?? We now know? Unfortunately, based on dozens of conversations with teachers and other educators ? and reading many blogs by others ? I would say the ?we? remains an unfortunately smallish part of the education world. And part of the reason that the standards movement is gaining momentum but remains a weak coalition is the failure to understand, much less appreciate, how fundamental ?specific content? is to the education enterprise. As Hirsch writes, ?We have paid a high price for a persistent adherence to this fallacious, how-to conception of early schooling in which `critical thinking' is supposed to transcend `mere facts.'? (An Appendix in Hirsch's book, ?Content is Skill, Skill Content,? is well worth the reading. In it Hirsch also directs readers to Daniel Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognititive Scientist Answers Questions about How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom, his brilliant 2009 book that should scare educators straight on the subject of ?mere facts.?)
3. Autonomy is overrated.? With all due respect for fellows like Senator Jim DeMint (from South Carolina), Neal McCluskey (Cato), and our 100 reform colleagues who just issued their anti-curricular manifesto (Rick Hess calls them the anti-Common Core-ites), local autonomy is just one strand of the American DNA; another part is union. After all, this isn't France ? or Spain or Indonesia. What is America?? Do we not want to school our children to be American?? The anti-Common Core-ites forget the meaning of the melting pot, that the word which comes after e pluribus is unum and that we fought a bloody civil war to keep it so.? They forget that our founders were not only highly educated themselves, but knew ?that an ?informed? public was necessary to sustain the American experiment. Jefferson, often cited for his apt comment that, ?I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves,? also said, ?and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.? The agreement to create a national government was an agreement to create a nation ? not a suicide pact. ?David Brooks addressed this problem nicely in his Politics of Solipsism column a few days ago. As Brooks says, ?America's founders were republicans,? meaning that they had ?large but limited faith in the character and judgment of the people? and believed in the need to ?erect institutions and barriers to improve that character and guide that judgment.?
4. The fear of a curriculum. ?One of my favorite education book titles (and there are many good ones) is Cheri Pierson Yecke's 2005 volume, The War against Excellence. Part of what Yecke argued was that schools had given up on their academic duties. And in many ways the reform movement of the last 30 years ? since Nation at Risk ? has been a battle to regain the high ground of academic excellence. ?The push for higher standards and choice, the effort by our NCLB authors to shine a light on the horrors of the miseducation of ?subgroups,? and the incentives to excellence of Race to the Top are all part of the effort to right the ship.? And it should have come as good news, as Sam Dillon reported a couple weeks ago, that the common core standards movement had prompted some foundations, including Gates and Pearson, to start writing curricula ? the real thing.? And even if they may not be the best choices for the job, their efforts were surely not ?The Outrage of the Week,? as Diane Ravitch called them. In fact, what Ravitch ? and her new anti-Common Core-ite allies on the right -- misses is that the country has no curriculum -- and our children, especially, our poor children, suffer for it. The only outrage here is that we haven't done this earlier.
In fact, as mentioned, the Core Knowledge Foundation, on whose board I believe Ravitch still sits, produced one of the best full-bodied curricula for K?8 education over ten years ago. As CK's Robert Pondiscio says, in an email, ?It was our hope that textbook companies and others ? Gates and Pearson, I'm looking at you ? would avail themselves of the Sequence, and use it as the ?source code? to produce instructional materials that are coherent and sequential.? If they merely (and dumbly) throw in an arbitrary amount of nonfiction in their existing basals and skills programs and slap a `CCSS Ready!' sticker on them the entire common standards effort will die in its crib.?? (See #2 above.)
It's unfortunate we're still in the curriculum crib. But if we're serious about winning the future or teaching children critical thinking skills or how to think deeply, we better get them a comprehensive, rigorous, and content specific curriculum as fast as we can, even if we have to skip the training wheel stage.
--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow
