The Knowledge Gap
This is kind of a follow up to the New Education which I previous read. This time another author, Natalie Wexler talks about whats primarily wrong with the American education system and how we can possibly fix it.
Her central thesis is that, testing from No Child Left Behind and other such initiatives have made American Education beholden to nothing but testing from a very young level, as young as 1st grade in some districts. This is probably not a real problem as testing is pretty much ingrained in all of asia and no one really complains there that kids are over-tested, but unlike Asian school systems, there is no cohesive education system that encompasses all 50 states. Its important to realize that the America school system is on a much vaster scale than say, the biggest modernized Asian country, say, Japan, or Taiwan, or Singapore.
So what happens is that American schools are also funded vastly differently from schools in Asia, and thus each school has their own limited funds to make national goals that might or might not be all that useful to any specific school district. Compound to that that there is no national curriculum in the US, and teachers are saddled with the triple headed dragon of not enough money, not enough respect, and too much workload.
It is in fact the national curriculum that Ms. Wexler keeps emphasis on during the entire book. She talks about the cultural walls over reading, phonics vs whole language, the whole skills vs ideas/stories approach, and how writing is important to each student’s approach to learning.
There’s quite a bit of science in what Ms. Wexler talks about, especially the portion about phonics. Having had a kid go through phonics (and never having learned phonics myself), I was also a bit amused at so much consternation about whether you should learn words via pictograph vs pronouncing it. I’m guessing in singapore, you’d have a hard time pronouncing it the american way via american phonics or british phonics. I guess my own personal beef against phonics is mostly that pronounciation is always highly regional. But I’ll trust the science on this and say that phonics is a step up from whole language. I mostly learned my language through a LOT of reading, but I’m guessing kids these days just don’t read enough.
The second portion, of the curriculum, is one that I do agree a lot with. Curriculum buildling is its own skill, and teaching its a separate skill. Asking teachers to do both, and do both well, and do it on their pittance of a salary is just ludicrous. This is where I go, yes, there should be a national institute where they design curriculum from K - 12 for all public high schools whereby you can say no matter where your’e from, you have these basics covered if you have a high school diploma.
Alas the US isn’t such a country where this could happens, so the next best thing happens. Core Knowledge. https://www.coreknowledge.org/about-u… for those not familiar with core knowledge and its mission, i’m quite familiar with the curriculum that core knowledge provides becuase my daughter has been using it since Grade 1 in her school. In general, i find that the core knowledge curriclum is quite good and does a good job of instilling knowledge at a reasonable pace for Language arts, History/Geography and science. My daughter’s school used a different curriculum for math (saxon math) that I’m mostly meh about, but that’s American Math education for you. Ms. Wexler’s book talks a great deal about Core Knowledge and I must say that as a curriculum, it is quite good, so her section about how to instill more knowledge and not just teach skills is a good section to read through. I thoroughly agree that teaching skills (such as how to read or how to math) is just an adjunct to the real work of obtaining and retaining knowledge.
In summary, I’d say the book does a great job of summarizing the issues that american schools face. What you can do about it as a parent is a separate issue, but by and large, to educate a nation, you must have a good curriculum and clear goals that test scores by themselves will never provide.
Highly recommended read if you are a parent of school aged children. You can see what your own school is missing and supplement it yourself if you are so inclined.