Thinking Citizen Blog — The Most Elementary Error in US Elementary School Teaching

Thinking Citizen Blog — Friday is Education and Education Policy Day

Today’s Topic: The Most Elementary Error in US Elementary School Teaching

What a kid reads does not matter. What matters is that they read. Right? Wrong. The axiom that it’s all about skills and that content is of secondary or tertiary importance is toxic. Knowledge matters. And all knowledge is not created equal. Reading is not the ultimate goal. The goal of reading is to learn. And the most important stuff first. The opportunity cost of not doing so is infinite. Because knowledge and understanding are cumulative. The divorce of skills and content instruction is particularly devastating for poor children. Today, excerpts from an article on this theme by Natalie Wexler in the August 2019 issue of the Atlantic. Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.

THE FOCUS ON READING SKILLS RATHER THAN CONTENT HAS NOT WORKED

1. “As far back as 1977, early elementary teachers spent more than twice as much time on reading as on science and social studies combined. But since 2001, when the federal No Child Left Behind legislation made standardized reading and math scores the yardstick for measuring progress, the time devoted to both subjects has grown. In turn the amount of time spent on social studies and science has plummeted — especially in schools where test scores are low.”

2. “And yet, despite the enormous expenditure of time and resources on reading, American children haven’t become better readers. For the past 20 years, only a third of students scored at or above the “proficient” level on national tests.”

3. “For low-income and minority kids, the picture is especially bleak: Their average test scores are far below those of their more affluent, largely white peers — a phenomenon usually referred to as the achievement gap. As this gap has grown wider, America’s standing in international literacy rankings, already mediocre, has fallen.”

NB: “All of which raises a disturbing question: What if the medicine we have been prescribing is only making matters worse, particularly for poor children? What is the best way to boost reading comprehension is not to drill kids on discrete skills but to teach them, as early as possible, the very thing we’ve marginalized — including history, science, and other content that could build the knowledge and vocabulary they need to understand both written texts and the world around them?”

PRIOR KNOWLEDGE, THE VELCRO ANALOGY, AND THE “MATTHEW EFFECT”

1. “For a number of reasons, children from better-educated families — which also tend to have higher incomes — arrive at school with more knowledge and vocabulary. In the early grades, teacher have told me, children from from less educated families many not know basic words like “behind.” I watched one first grader struggle with a simple math problem because he didn’t know the meaning of “before.”

2. “As years go by, children of educated parents continue to acquire more knowledge and vocabulary outside of school, making it easier for them to gain ever more knowledge — because, like Velcro, knowledge sticks best to other, related knowledge.”

3. “Meanwhile, their less fortunate peers fall further and further behind, especially if their schools aren’t providing them with knowledge. This snowballing has been dubbed “the Matthew effect,” after the passage in the Gospel according to Matthew about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Every year the Matthew effect is allowed to continue, it becomes harder to reverse. So the earlier we start building children’s knowledge, the better the chance of narrowing the gap.”

NO THEMATIC CONTINUITY, NO CONSISTENCY OF TEXTS USED, THE LESSONS OF FRANCE

1. “In perhaps half of all elementary schools, teachers are supposed to use a reading textbook that includes a variety of passages, discussion questions and a teacher guide. In other schools, teachers are left to their own devices to figure out how to teach reading, and rely on on commercially available children’s books. In either case, when it comes to reading comprehension the emphasis is on skills.”

2. “And the overwhelming majority of teachers turn to the internet to supplement these materials, despite not having been trained in curriculum design.”

3. “One Rand Corporation survey of teachers found that 95% of elementary-school teachers resort to Google for materials and lesson plans; 86% turn to Pinterest.”

NB: A nation-wide, natural experiment in France: “…until 1989, all French schools were required to adhere to a a detailed content-focused national curriculum. If a child from a low-income family started public preschool at age 2, by age 10 she would have almost caught up to a highly advantaged child who had started at age 4. Then a new law encouraged elementary schools to adopt the American approach, foregrounding skills such as “critical thinking” and “learning to learn.” The results were dramatic. Over the next 20 years, achievement levels decreased sharply for all students — and the drop was greatest for the neediest.”

FINAL WORD: Joe Biden, Miguel Cardano, are you awake? are you paying attention? where are the executive orders targeting the replacement of a broken system? how low a priority is the education of poor children? is your framing of the problem an outdated one? is it all about skills? does content matter? is it not your job? not your responsibility? well, how has local control worked out over the last 50 years? especially for disadvantaged children? how long before failure is recognized for what it is? when is fairness delayed, fairness denied? where does the buck stop, Joe?

Elementary Education Has Gone Terribly Wrong

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YOUR TURN

Please share the coolest thing you learned in the last week related to education or education policy. Or the coolest thought however half-baked you had. Or the coolest, most important thing you learned in your life related to education or education policy that the rest of us may have missed. Or just some random education-related fact that blew you away.

This is your chance to make some one’s day. Or to cement in your own mind something that you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than otherwise about something that is dear to your heart.