An overlooked root cause of many of the problems that plague American education is that in most ... [+]
There’s no shortage of journalism focusing on education. But little of it has examined a fundamental question: What gets taught in our schools and how?
Look through a newspaper or magazine—or one of the education-focused news websites that have sprung up in recent years—and you’ll see plenty of stories about schools: teacher strikes, racial and socioeconomic disparities and segregation, charter schools, the role of technology, and (alas) school shootings. But if you’re curious about what is actually going on in American classrooms—what texts and topics are being taught, what kinds of questions teachers are asking students—you’re unlikely to find much information. And yet that’s what the public needs if we’re going to understand many of the problems that plague our education system, not to mention our society as a whole.
There are encouraging signs that the situation is beginning to change—including a panel at a recent conference of education journalists on “Curricular Concerns: How to Cover What Gets Taught.” Attendance was high, and one prominent education journalist tweeted afterwards, “This is the session that will change my lens for the year.”
The panelists—two academics and a school district leader—minced no words, focusing largely on the plight of students of color and those from low-income backgrounds, whose test scores and graduation rates lag far behind their peers, and placing the blame on “curriculum.” But journalists could have been left confused about what the problem is. Are the textbooks deficient? Or is it that teachers have been told it’s best to create curriculum themselves—despite not having received training in that—with the result that the vast majority get materials from websites like Pinterest? Or is the problem that educators believe it’s more important to teach “skills” like critical thinking rather than focusing on content—despite abundant evidence that content knowledge is what enables you to think critically?
The answer, unfortunately, is all of the above—and more. But perhaps the place to begin is with the last point. The education establishment, including schools of education and textbook publishers, have largely “pooh-poohed” the idea of knowledge, observed panelist Sonja Santelises, chief executive officer of the Baltimore public schools.
“It doesn’t take the place of other things,” she said, “but to say it’s a side dish, to say content doesn’t matter, is professional malpractice.”
In Baltimore and a few other places, leaders like Santelises are trying to turn things around by adopting curricula that build knowledge in history, science, literature, and the arts. That’s the kind of knowledge that can ensure academic success, and children from more educated families generally acquire it outside of school. Children from less educated families—like the majority of those who attend Baltimore’s public schools—often won’t acquire it unless they get it in school. And most don’t.
Santelises, a member of a group of top state and local education officials called Chiefs for Change, began her efforts by evaluating Baltimore’s homegrown literacy curriculum. Using a “Knowledge Map”—a tool developed by Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for Education Policy—she discovered gaps in coverage and weaknesses in the approach teachers were supposed to take. Last year the school system adopted a content-focused literacy curriculum called Wit & Wisdom for kindergarten through eighth grade that includes challenging books along with related works of art for students to analyze. Santelises says she worried teachers would say their students couldn’t handle the work. Instead, “teachers are saying their kids are eating up the content” and parents are thrilled to see how much their children are learning, she reported.
Santelises and her fellow panelists encouraged the journalists who want to cover the curriculum story to just get out and visit classrooms. But it may not be that simple. For example:
· To understand the issue, journalists first need to see and understand what is going on in the vast majority of American classrooms, particularly at the elementary level: a focus on a reading comprehension “skill of the week,” which kids practice on texts easy enough for them to read on their own—often well below their grade level. The actual content is considered relatively unimportant. The theory is that if kids first master a “skill” like “making inferences,” they’ll be able to apply it later on to understand any text put in front of them. In fact, evidence shows that the most important factor in understanding a text is how much background knowledge and vocabulary the reader has about the topic.
· Once you’ve got a handle on what skills-focused instruction looks like, it’s best to compare it to content-focused instruction. But it can be hard to find elementary classrooms that are truly engaging in that. Santelises and some other members of Chiefs for Change are advocating for knowledge in their states or districts, but most education leaders aren’t focused on the issue (including some members of Chiefs for Change). Even where they are, the content-focused approach may or may not get translated into classroom practice. And the most commonly used reading textbooks still use the skills-focused approach.
· Teachers themselves may tell journalists there’s no problem with the skills-focused approach, because that’s what they’ve been trained to believe. And in the elementary grades, when texts are simple and don’t assume much background knowledge, it can look like kids are learning comprehension “skills.” But when students get to high school, many lack the knowledge and vocabulary to understand high school-level texts—and high school teachers may have no idea why.
· The panelists argued that content and instruction need to be “rigorous,” but words like “rigor” mean different things to different people. Publishers will claim a skills-focused curriculum is “rigorous,” because it purports to build supposed Common Core “skills” like “close reading.” Alternatively, a curriculum may be described as rigorous because it includes challenging texts. But unless teachers can figure out how to ensure students understand those texts—a task that gets increasingly difficult at higher grade levels, when assumptions about background knowledge increase—they don’t do much good.
· Journalists may be told that teachers need to focus on skills because that’s what students are tested on. The reading passages on standardized tests don’t match up with the content students are learning—assuming they’re learning content at all—-so it looks like what is being assessed are kids’ general abilities to “find the main idea” or “make inferences.” In fact, if students lack the knowledge and vocabulary to understand the passages in the first place—as many do—they won’t have a chance to demonstrate any “skills.” But it can be hard for teachers to absorb that message, especially when their job ratings and those of their schools are tied to test scores.
· Not all skills-focused reading instruction is bad! In fact, one part of reading really is skills-based: decoding words. It’s just comprehension that is primarily dependent on knowledge. But because of deficiencies in their training, many teachers mistakenly believe that decoding doesn’t need to be taught as a set of skills—that kids will pick it up naturally—and that comprehension does.
· Even when journalists do get into classrooms—or schools—they may shy away from reporting on what they see, particularly at the high school level. At another panel at the education writers’ conference, I asked a journalist who had written a book about high-poverty high schools if she had found that kids arrive with crippling gaps in their knowledge. I mentioned that I’d spoken with teachers at such schools who told me that many students are, for example, unable to locate the United States on a map of the world or unaware the United States had a War of Independence—because the curriculum at their elementary and middle schools had narrowed to reading and math. Oh yes, she said, she heard things like that all the time, and it was a big problem. Yet her book makes no mention of that issue, arguing instead that the reason so many poor kids drop out of school has little to do with a lack of academic preparation. I didn’t get a chance to ask her why she hadn’t talked about kids’ knowledge gaps in her book, but she may have wanted to avoid appearing to blame students for not knowing these things. It’s not the students’ fault, of course. Nor is it the teachers’ fault. It’s the fault of the system they’re all trapped in. But if we don’t talk about the problem, we can’t even hope to address it.
All of this is to say: it’s complicated—so complicated, in fact, that I spent the last several years researching and writing a book about it. And although I had visited many classrooms before I started working on my book, I later realized I had no idea what I’d been looking at. I only put the pieces together when, through serendipity, I met a veteran educator who began explaining it to me.
That’s not to discourage other education journalists from tackling the subject of what gets taught and how. It may be complicated, but if they can figure it out they’ll have a much clearer picture of the root causes of many of our education problems—and so will their readers.
