At 4 pm today Common Core is hosting a release event for Why We’re Behind: What Top Nations Teach Their Students But We Don’t, an in-depth look into the content of education in nine high-performing nations that consistently outperform the U.S. on international assessments, specifically on PISA: Finland, Hong Kong, South Korea, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Netherlands, and Switzerland.Our research found that one common ingredient among these nations is that they are dedicated to educating their children deeply in a wide range of subjects. Why We’re Behind publishes extended excerpts from national curricula, standards, and assessment practices – documents that can offer lessons to individual states that might want to follow these exceptional models. Here are some examples:
- Fourth graders in Hong Kong visit an artist’s studio, study Picasso’s Guernica, and analyze the works of modernist sculptor Henry Moore.
- Finnish 5th and 6th graders study how the invention of writing changed human life and the impacts of the French Revolution; they trace a topic such as the evolution of trade from prehistory until the 19th century.
- Seventh graders in Korea are expected to know not just about supply and demand, but about equilibrium price theories, property rights, and ways to improve market function.
- Japanese 7th to 9th graders “conduct experiment regarding pressure to discover that pressure is related to the magnitude of a force and the area.”
- Eighth graders from the Canadian province of Ontario are expected to conduct musicians, create compositions, and know music terms in Italian.
- Dutch 12th graders must know enough about seven events connected to the Crimean War to be able to put them in chronological order.
- Canadian 12th graders in British Columbia are expected to identify the author of the words: “Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men” and to what Admiral Nimitz was referring when he said: “Pearl Harbor has now been partially avenged.”
- On a Swiss exam 12th graders write an essay analyzing JFK’s October 1962 proclamation that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The excerpts are also full of useful guidance for the common standards movement. Just yesterday the NGA and CSSO announced that 46 states and three territories are participating in their effort to create a “common core” of voluntary state standards. In part, the effort is about “measuring our students against international benchmarks,” according to Virginia Gov. Timothy Kaine. But we wonder how well participants in the “common core” standards effort have actually studied what students abroad are taught.
As our nation considers common standards, let us keep in mind that the notion of standards being “common” is less important than what the standards contain. Rich content must be the top priority.
Lynne Munson