Interview
with Education Expert E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
E.
D. Hirsch, Jr. is the author of the best-selling
book, Cultural Literacy, and
founder of the Core
Knowledge Foundation.
He is also professor emeritus of Education
and Humanities at the University of Virginia.
In
his latest
book, The
Knowledge Deficit, Professor
Hirsch addresses the achievement gap in American
schools. The book provides a map for
creating a content-rich education that leads
to reading mastery and to success on standardized
and state tests.
In
The Knowledge Deficit you cite evidence that
there is a point of diminishing returns for
teaching comprehension skills; that we
should be teaching more content and less
skills. This is a fairly radical idea since
virtually all textbooks, as well as state
and nationally standardized testing focus
on “generic” comprehension
skills. What kind of reaction have
you been getting to your book and this challenge
in particular?
So far, the book has received praise from
researchers who have bothered to write, and
mostly silence from advocates of skill drills. It
seems that the tide of thought is shifting – especially
since the early gains from following the comprehension-skills
idea have not been followed by later gains,
in later grades when reading scores really
count for a person’s chances in life. The
ONLY long-range road to mature reading skill
is general knowledge.
How can schools make time for teaching
vocabulary and background knowledge to students
who are several years behind in basic reading
skills such as decoding?
How can one be “several years behind
in decoding” when mastery of decoding
should take just 1.5 years? Typically
2 hours are allotted to language arts. More
than an hour of decoding/encoding practice
for young children is unwise. That
would leave an hour for substantial reading
aloud to children with accompanying discussion
on topics that extend over several weeks. That
is what should be done.
What can be done when teachers themselves
do not speak Standard English and communicate
with mostly utterances?
This is clearly a situation that is unfair
to children and should not be permitted to
persist. One possibility as a stopgap
is to have the reading aloud done from professional
recordings.
If the type of speech used in school
is different from that used in the home,
can this have an impact on behavior management?
School speech is different from home speech
in most parts of the world. This
is not an unusual circumstance. A principal
aim of schooling is to teach school speech. I
discuss this issue in my new book.
Many
teachers have not had what would be considered
a liberal education and are, themselves,
unfamiliar with much of the content of
Core Knowledge. In The Knowledge
Deficit you state that college Departments
of Education teach skills and rely on other
departments to teach content, with little
coordination. What are the obstacles
to increasing coordination between departments
or having education departments teach more
content?
The chief obstacle
to teaching teachers what they need to know
is the failure of schools of education to
decide what content knowledge teachers need
to know. Once the schools
of Ed decided they could advise other departments
about what teachers need. It is not
teachers’ fault that they lack this
knowledge; it is a signal failure of the
Ed schools – perhaps their worst.
How does one address the knowledge
deficits of teachers after college graduation
and teacher certification?
The way it is done in Core Knowledge schools
is by teaching what you didn’t know before. Teachers
are hugely enthusiastic about getting a good
education by teaching Core Knowledge. And
now we have Core Knowledge teacher handbooks
that supply the needed information.
Do you think the USDOE is subtly pushing
for a national curriculum with Reading First
as a tentative step in that direction?
Reading First takes a skills orientation to
reading, and to that extent is very incomplete. It
is nothing like a national curriculum. To
see what that is like you can check with the
curriculum of say Finland to see what a good
one looks like. It’s very
content specific. Rather like the Core
Knowledge grade by grade curriculum.
How do you address the assertion that
teacher creativity would be limited by a
national curriculum?
It’s an empirical question, and the
answer is that teacher creativity is ENHANCED
by a set curriculum, because the students are
ready to learn, having gotten in prior grades
the content they need. This is
especially true when teaching methods are not
prescribed. There is a discussion
of this point in a great book on education – The
Learning Gap, by Stevenson and Stigler.
How would our nation deal with the
dangers of special interests influencing
the development of a national curriculum?
By making everything very open and public. Right
now hidden interests already rule, because
the curriculum is hidden. It is unknown. That
is an invitation to special-interest distortion.
How does one convince schools, school
systems and States to wait for the long-term
benefits of teaching word and world knowledge,
instead of switching to another curriculum
that promises immediate results?
A great question. Maybe by pointing
to the consistent failure of quick-fix programs
in achieving real gains in reading and learning.
It seems that many education practitioners
dismiss even the strongest research evidence. Why
do you think that is and how can it be addressed?
Don’t give up the ship. Keep
speaking truth to power and slogan and habit.
How do you respond to the criticism
that there is too much to material to cover
in a given year of the Core Knowledge Sequence?
Do students have sufficient time to master
to material?
This is a claim made mainly by those who have
not taught CK. There are several
hundred schools that are doing so. By
now it is one of the most highly field tested
curricula going, and it has been adjusted on
the basis of direct practical experience.
Vocabulary-Building
and The "Fourth-Grade Slump"
By
Bob Marino
Reading
is by far the single most important skill
learned in school. All academic learning
ultimately relies on how well students read. Once
phonics has been mastered, the key to understanding
what one reads is, quite simply, understanding
the words one reads and the concepts they
represent.
Until
recent years educators have employed a broad
spectrum of instructional approaches to reading—some
highly effective, some abysmally ineffective. After
forty years of experimenting with various
instructional methods, the research has in
some respects, brought us back to the 1970’s
DISTAR, the first Direct Instruction curriculum.
Five
Big Ideas
After
years of whole-language and other failed
experiments researchers have identified vocabulary
as one of five skill areas critical to effective
reading instruction. These same five
areas have been at the core of Direct Instruction
for decades.
The Congressionally
commissioned National Reading Panel, in its
landmark meta-analysis of more than 150,000
research projects published in 1999, identified
five critical aspects of effective reading
instruction: Phonemic Awareness,
Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension.To be
effective, any approach to the teaching of
reading must systematically address these
five areas.
The
study also identified direct instruction
as the most effective instructional method
particularly for children who are at risk
of failing. These “Five Big Ideas” as
they are sometimes called, taught directly
and explicitly, amount to a reading instruction protocol. That
is, careful, systematic instruction in all
five areas virtually guarantees that all
children, including the poor, the learning
disabled and English language learners will
master basic reading skills in the first
years of schooling.
Nearly
all recently published commercial reading
programs now include phonemic awareness and
systematic phonics instruction. The
Baltimore Curriculum Project’s Direct
Instruction curriculum has always included
these elements in addition to a strong reading
fluency component.
Although
the DI reading curriculum also focuses on
vocabulary and comprehension skills, and
although DI has been identified in the research
as one of the two most effective reading
programs, we are learning additional approaches
to vocabulary instruction that will boost
not only vocabulary acquisition, but comprehension
skills as well.
Researchers
have discovered a surprisingly high correlation
between vocabulary and reading comprehension. An
assessment of a student’s vocabulary
also measures, to a very high degree, his/her
reading comprehension. This clearly
demonstrates the vital importance of teaching
vocabulary, teaching it early and teaching
it well.
The
Fourth Grade Slump
The
current “gurus” of vocabulary
instruction including, Andrew Biemiller,
Isabel Beck, Margaret McKeown, Michael Graves,
Steven Stahl and William Nagy have described
effective approaches to the teaching of vocabulary
to address what is commonly referred to as
the “fourth grade slump.”
Teachers
are familiar with the “fourth grade
slump.” They find that many children
who were “A” or “B” students
in the early years, from pre-kindergarten
through third grade, begin to fail at about
the fourth grade level.
Here’s
why: Children who know a
word’s meaning, and can easily sound
it out, learn to read the word with little
or no difficulty. For example, young
children learn to read words such as lunch,
bike, or mailman easily—words
that are easily sounded out and whose meanings
are known.
At
about fourth grade, the reading vocabulary
in commercial reading programs takes a quantum
leap to much higher level vocabulary. Children
living in poverty, learning disabled, or
of limited English facility begin to encounter
many words whose meanings are unknown.
Encountering
these words requires students to interrupt
their reading as they simultaneously attempt
to identify the words and understand the
concepts that they represent. For example,
even though children can easily sound them
out, learning to read words such as inhibit, consistent, or belligerent, when
encountered in the intermediate grades, is
much more difficult if these words and the
concepts they represent are completely unknown.
This
double challenge dramatically impedes reading
progress causing, or at least contributing
heavily, to the “fourth grade slump.” Our
researchers also point out that the words
children learn to read in the primary school
years, words such as dog, happy, and play are
words that virtually all children already
know. In fact, a year of primary school
has been found to add no significant amount
of new vocabulary to a child’s store
of known words.
The
Importance of Context
We
have traditionally taught children to figure
out the meaning of an unknown word by using “context
clues,” that is, figuring out the meaning
of the word using the context in which it
appears. But what if the child has no knowledge
of the context itself?
E.
D. Hirsch, Jr., author of the Core Knowledge
Curriculum, points out that children
may be able to figure out the meaning of
a word using context clues unless the
context is also unknown. Professor Hirsch
argues that since vocabulary and reading
comprehension are almost perfectly related
we should concentrate more on instructional
content such as science, geography, and history,
and the vocabulary inherent in these studies,
and less on comprehension strategies of limited
effectiveness.
Hirsch
cites studies which demonstrate that beyond
a certain number of lessons, additional instruction
in selected general comprehension strategies
does not improve children’s reading
comprehension. These concepts can be easily
demonstrated to adults: Even well
educated adults who presumably have excellent
comprehension strategies may not understand
an article in a professional psychiatry journal
where neither the vocabulary nor the context
is known. Additional instruction and
practice in generic comprehension strategies
would obviously be of no use whatsoever.
Given
what we now know about the role and importance
of oral vocabulary, the Baltimore Curriculum
Project is taking steps to improve our children’s
vocabularies beginning in pre-kindergarten. If
we teach robust oral vocabulary in the early
years, students, when they encounter these
words at about the fourth grade level, will
easily understand what they are reading. Good-by
to the “fourth grade slump!” Continuing
to teach rich oral and print vocabulary in
the upper elementary through the middle school
years will provide our youngsters with the
tools they need to master all of their academic
subjects now, in high school and beyond.
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