We recently asked E.D. Hirsch, founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation and author of over a half-dozen influential books on education reform to reflect, in blog form, on what it has been like to be a lifelong Democrat who gets accused of being a right-winger because of his strong beliefs that content matters more than process. In my household, Hirsch is known as the writer who reminds us how much ground we have to cover in the summer months with our kids to keep them up to speed.
Dear Joe,
Thanks for offering me a chance to blog some of my fellow Democrats on the subject of school reform. In 1986 I started the Core Knowledge Foundation to encourage reform in the early grades. But it’s been lonely out here for me as a left-leaning Democrat, ever since my 1987 book Cultural Literacy with its advocacy of a core curriculum in the early grades was attacked as part of a right-wing plot to perpetuate male, lily-white American culture, and as a generally illiberal effort to continue the suppression of minorities.
Gradually, since that time, certain things have happened to help revise that estimate, and to encourage the realization that maybe the opposite is true, that, all the time, the Core Knowledge project has been what it said it was – a progressive effort to improve schools and empower low-income and minority students. Recently, for example, I was invited to keynote the annual conference of the Education Trust, the principal advocacy group for disadvantaged students. What happened?
If a person on the street, whether Democrat or Republican, were asked if it were a good idea for the schools to build up knowledge cumulatively, with one year building systematically on the prior one, and avoiding a lot of wasted time, boring repetitions, and glaring gaps, would they say “yes”? Of course they would. Next question: Do you think that a definite core curriculum is probably the only way schools can accomplish that goal? Again the answer would be: “yes, don’t see any other way.” Would this be just as true for a charter schools as for a regular neighborhood school? Yes. And considering the many low-income students who move from school to school in the course of a year, would it also be a good idea for there to be some commonality in the core curricula from one school to the next? Yes. Then what’s the problem? Well there’s a problem on who decides on the substance of the curriculum.
Until very recently, I thought that the opposition to the Core Knowledge idea by my fellow liberal Democrats was a historical accident. I knew that ever since the 1920s schools of education had been preaching that a definite core curriculum was illiberal and authoritarian. I thought that this spurious claim had been accepted by Democrats as a group. But I now see that the issue lies deeper. We liberals do not want to impose substantive values and opinions on others. We think that’s the essence of democracy. In part for that reason we have been suspicious of any definite, grade-by-grade content imposed upon schools from on high. That’s why state “standards” have tended to be so devoid of specific content – except in the non-controversial areas of math, and, to some extent science. We have wanted to believe that “critical thinking” and “reading skills” were the important things to impart in the early grades, and that we did not have to specify definite content. But we now know that such a belief in formal skills is almost entirely wishful thinking. Cognitive science tells us it isn’t true, and our own eyes tell us it hasn’t been working. For, despite our emphasis on reading skills under NCLB, reading scores in grade 8 and 12, where they count, have stayed abysmally low, because our students lack the accumulated knowledge they need to read with comprehension, and to learn.
So here’s the dilemma: We liberal Democrats believe in not interposing substantive values on other people; we resist telling schools what substantive topics they must teach. On the other hand, we also believe in giving every child an equal chance to become an effective, productive citizen. But it turns out that our belief in keeping government out of substantive curriculum issues and our belief in equality are in conflict. We can’t honestly keep hold of both liberal beliefs when it comes to schooling. For, at this stage of our knowledge about the content-based nature of academic skill, it’s either an act of ignorance or of dishonesty to keep holding on to the view that we mainly need to teach formal skills, and can avoid deciding upon specific content. In fact, we either have to give up on equality, or we have to give up on keeping our noses out of the curriculum. For me the choice is easy. Surely it will be for most other Democrats, once they clearly understand this issue.
Yours,
E D Hirsch, Jr.