(From The Boston Globe, February 14, 2009)
By KATHLEEN A. MADIGAN
A DEBATE is raging about the future of academic standards in American public education. On one side, University of Virginia Professor E.D. Hirsch and organizations like Democrats for Education Reform are working to extend standards-based reforms. On the other side is Stanford University education professor Linda Darling-Hammond, once considered a top candidate to be President Obama’s education secretary. She blames detailed standards testing and their focus on discrete facts for wide achievement gaps and the nation’s failure to perform better on international assessments. Instead, she proposes allowing teachers to interpret broad curriculum guidelines and develop their own student assessments.
Darling-Hammond’s approach largely reflects where Massachusetts was prior to the enactment of education reform in 1993. The only statewide high school graduation requirements were a year of American history and four years of physical education. State SAT scores were barely at the national average.
Today, the picture is much brighter. Bay State students were the country’s best on “the nation’s report card” – the National Assessment of Educational Progress – the last two times the tests were given. They shook up the education world when results released in December showed the Commonwealth outperforming most of the international competition on the Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) tests.
Massachusetts achieved success by following the rich academic content and objective testing espoused by E.D. Hirsch and Democrats for Education Reform.
Research on reading comprehension test results shows that knowledge of the subject referenced in a passage is the key to students’ understanding. Similarly, the most effective way to get students to master important “real-world” skills is to teach them the knowledge that is prerequisite to those skills.
Just a decade ago, Massachusetts had lower reading scores than Connecticut. But while the Commonwealth’s reading scores improved more than any state’s between 1998 and 2005, Connecticut experienced some of the nation’s most significant declines.
Leaders in Hartford chose to focus on “how to” skills like critical thinking and problem-solving over academic content; Massachusetts chose rich content and objective assessments. Connecticut has recently seen the error of its ways. It has discarded the focus on how-to skills and joined the growing number of cities and states adopting Massachusetts’ academic standards as their model.
Importantly, research also shows a strong correlation between raising verbal scores and narrowing achievement gaps. The states that saw the most significant gains in reading scores during the 1998-2005 period – Massachusetts, Delaware, and Wyoming – also made the most progress at narrowing achievement gaps. Conversely, achievement gaps widened in states like Connecticut and West Virginia that saw the largest reading score declines.
According to Hirsch, that’s because the achievement gap is really a knowledge gap. Advantaged students have access to far more of it outside school than do less-fortunate ones. Massachusetts’ focus on exposing all students to the same rich liberal-arts content is the surest way to narrow the knowledge gap.
We still need to do better. That means introducing more specificity to the grade-by-grade academic content students learn in core subjects, particularly in the early grades.
Further narrowing achievement gaps will also require urban districts to align their curricula with state frameworks. A sobering 2006 study from the Pioneer Institute found that more than a decade after education reform, curriculum in a majority of the Commonwealth’s urban districts still wasn’t aligned with the frameworks, which means urban students are being tested on content they haven’t been taught.
At a recent event that featured Professor Hirsch, former Senate president and co-author of education reform Thomas Birmingham sounded the alarm, saying he is worried that Patrick administration proposals to shift the focus from clear standards and objective assessments to how-to skills threaten to “drive us back in the direction of vague expectations and fuzzy standards.” He added that he fears “a watering down of clear expectations with vague aspirations.”
Darling-Hammond’s proposals repackage the skills-over-content approach Massachusetts employed for decades prior to 1993. Fifteen years of moving in a different direction have yielded historic academic gains. By passing over Darling-Hammond as education secretary, Obama has correctly decided not to turn his back on standards-based reform. In Massachusetts, Governor Patrick would be wise to follow that lead.
Kathleen A. Madigan, founder and former president of the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, is a member of the Pioneer Institute’s Center for School Reform Advisory Board.