Common Core

Sandy Stotsky decries the 21^st century skills movement’s “[e]vidence-free rhetoric in support of reducing academic content in the schools” in The Weekly Standard (full article not available online).

Stotsky’s reviewing Tony Wagner’s new book, The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need — And What We Can Do About It.  Wagner’s the co-director of the Change Leadership Group at Harvard. His latest book contends that American students would score just as high as their peers abroad on international tests if they received a skills-centric education.

Wagner’s claim stands in stark contrast to the evidence.  Common Core’s own Why We’re Behind report – which reprints dozens of pages from other nations’ curricula, standards, and assessments – showed that these countries emphasize a full curriculum, including history, foreign languages, civics, and the arts.  Not very much in the way of skills.

Wagner is in distinguished company, though, as Stotsky points out that the skills Wagner believes are critical to student success are also being promoted by groups like P21 which have “no recent record of interest in strengthening the academic content of the school curriculum.” Wagner’s book is essentially a companion to P21′s skills framework.  He’s just about as serious about content knowledge as is P21: he devotes one page to it out of 288.

Stotsky calls The Achievement Gap “just the current manifestation of the goal driving most of our education schools and professional development providers–how to reduce the academic content of the curriculum while claiming to enhance it–this time in the name of closing the ‘gap,’ or providing worker bees for this century’s employers.”

Yeah – we noticed.

The September 15^th Boston Globe features an op/ed by Common Core co-chair Diane Ravitch. Diane outlines the similarities between the 21^st century skills movement and earlier (and harmful) educational fads. She finds quite a lot that should worry anyone that cares about American education.

Usefully, Diane points out that:

[W]e have ignored what matters most. We have neglected to teach [students] that one cannot think critically without quite a lot of knowledge to think about. Thinking critically involves comparing and contrasting and synthesizing what one has learned. And a great deal of knowledge is necessary before one can begin to reflect on its meaning and look for alternative explanations.

Proponents of 21st-Century Skills might wish it was otherwise, but we do not restart the world anew with each generation. We stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us. What matters most in the use of our brains is our capacity to make generalizations, to see beyond our own immediate experience. The intelligent person, the one who truly is a practitioner of critical thinking, has the capacity to understand the lessons of history, to grasp the inner logic of science and mathematics, and to realize the meaning of philosophical debates by studying them.

UFT board member Jackie Bennett takes P21 to task for ignoring content knowledge over at the National Journal’s education experts blog.

Bennett points out that “having skills may be part of what it means to be educated, but only a part, and not even the most interesting or exciting part.” According to Bennett, the interesting and exciting part is actually learning about stuff.

“Think of it this way: can’t most children create a powerpoint comparing bicycles to skateboards? Can’t they think critically about their dolls, their teachers, their parents and their friends? But when a high school student reads about France and cannot even conjure up a picture of the Eiffel tower in his head; when he does not associate slavery with the Civil War, or asks why there are no Roman ruins in New York; when he cannot distinguish between a vertebrate and non-vertebrate; and when schools don’t teach these things because, after all, students can always  ”access knowledge” on the web (a phrase I often hear)  – when these things happen, then what good is it to know how to “think innovatively” if all we can think about is our dolls, our skateboards, and our friends?”

Disturbingly, Bennett says that “these examples come from various Advanced Placement English 11th grade classes that I have taught over the years.”