Originally published in U.S. News and World Report, October 7, 1996.
They are two guys in tweed jackets. Ivy Leaguers. Professors. Grandfathers. They are also vocal critics of America’s schools, in a year when education looms as one of the largest issues in the presidential race. Both are convinced that public school performance is lagging because many schools are, to put it bluntly, miseducating kids. And both have spent more than a decade trying to help schools out of the wilderness.
But E. D. Hirsch Jr. and Theodore Sizer, each weighing in this fall with a new book on education, take strikingly different routes to reform. Hirsch is an educational traditionalist, Sizer a progressive. To Hirsch, knowledge is education’s brass ring. The sorts of classroom strategies best suited to knowledge building are often old-fashioned ones: a tough course of study, book learning, in-charge teachers and lots of testing. To Sizer, schools ought to be about teaching students mental skills, like independent and creative thinking. Students’ curiosity should drive the curriculum. In-depth projects should replace standardized testing. And single-subject teaching ought to be abandoned in favor of interdisciplinary study.
At schools Hirsch has nurtured, like Roland Park Elementary and Middle School on Baltimore’s West Side, his philosophy is on display. Students in Regina White’s fifth-grade classroom perform a scene, theater-in-the-round style, from Don Quixote. Elizabeth Aliberti’s sixth-grade pupils practice songs from the musical version of Oliver Twist. Each day is an expedition into core knowledge, from Bach to Michelangelo to the science of rainbows.
The atmosphere at Hope Essential High School in Providence, R.I., where Sizer’s ideas flourish, reflects his emphasis on developing students’ minds. Housed on the top floor of an inner-city building, the 370 mostly African-American and Latino students of this school-within-a-school move through their day in 90-minute sessions. There are few textbooks. Teachers rarely lecture. The curriculum is divided into four large blocks–math, science, English and social studies. In many courses, students study only a few topics intensively.
Two blueprints for reform. Two visions of what the basics of education should be. While Bob Dole and Bill Clinton tantalize voters with pledges of billions of dollars for new tuition plans, new schools and new technology, Hirsch and Sizer address the most fundamental questions facing the nation’s classrooms: What should teachers teach, and how should they teach it? Smart answers to these questions are a sure way to improve schools, with or without infusions of money or machines.
For decades, schooling battles have been fought along progressive and traditionalist lines, and today the two camps are locked in opposition on major issues ranging from national standards to the teaching of reading. Yet school reform doesn’t have to be an either-or proposition. In fact, it shouldn’t be. Both Hirsch, with his traditionalist allies, and Sizer, with his progressive followers, have valuable contributions to make.
Plato, not Play-Doh.“Vermouth. Half dry. Half sweet. Straight up. Chill it,” says Hirsch, Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English at the University of Virginia, red half glasses dangling on his chest. He’s sitting in a Washington, D.C., restaurant, talking about education and battling a nasty cold. “Medicinal,” he explains, as the waiter leaves.
Nearly a decade ago, the Yale University-trained expert on the English Romantic poets vaulted into the leadership of the traditionalist movement when he published a bestselling–and controversial–book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. In it, he argued that the nation’s democratic institutions were threatened by a citizenry lacking a shared cultural vocabulary. The schools’ “holiday curriculum”–cutting out paper turkeys at Thanksgiving and the like–wasn’t doing the job.
In his new book, The Schools We Need & Why We Don’t Have Them, Hirsch, 68, blasts the progressive teaching methods he says stand in the way of the wide-ranging cultural knowledge he advocates. Schools rely too much on progressive techniques like interdisciplinary instruction, ungraded work, “hands on” units and “cooperative” learning, he asserts, and such techniques are often used badly. Instead, Hirsch stresses the value of recitation, memorization, standardized tests and other traditional devices. Verbal instruction, he says, should be an “essential and even dominant focus of schooling.”
Hirsch supports national education standards because he believes that to give kids the knowledge they need, a school’s curriculum has to be prescribed. “What kids should know each year should be engraved in stone because the year is the unit of accountability.” Able to navigate through Latin (as well as German, French and Italian) and always ready to take a computer apart, Hirsch rejects the notion of the “child centered” curriculum, in which subjects like ancient history and science are withheld from kids in early grades in favor of material focused on the students’ world. “The presumption that the affairs of one’s neighborhood are more interesting than those of faraway times and places is contradicted in every classroom that studies dinosaurs and fairy tales,” he writes.
In 1986, Hirsch created the Core Knowledge Foundation to help schools implement his theories. The foundation, funded in part with the educator’s book royalties, is now working with 350 schools in 40 states, including Baltimore’s Roland Park. At such “Hirsch” schools, teaching cultural knowledge is indistinguishable from teaching basic skills like reading, writing and speaking. A culture-rich curriculum is crucial, Hirsch argues, because a shared cultural vocabulary is a cornerstone of literacy. “To grasp the words on a page we have to know a lot of information that isn’t set down on the page,” he writes. That knowledge then serves as a kind of intellectual Velcro, to which new learning can cling.
Cultural Literacy landed Hirsch in the middle of the then raging culture wars, with multiculturalists and others on the left denouncing the book as elitist and authoritarian. But it was in reality a product of Hirsch’s long interest in the theory of writing, a polemic less about the shape of the cultural canon than about how kids learn to read and write. In fact, Hirsch says, a traditionally taught core curriculum helps disadvantaged students the most: “Kids from affluent backgrounds get knowledge from outside school; those who rely on school to give it to them–disadvantaged students–don’t get it” because schools aren’t teaching it.
Habits of mind.Ted Sizer, 64, has been called an elitist nearly as often as has Hirsch. Like Hirsch, he believes all kids should get a demanding intellectual education. But Sizer, a Yalie who was dean of Harvard’s graduate school of education in the 1960s and headmaster of prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., in the ’70s, thinks the way to a good education lies in progressive reforms. In a blistering 1984 study of the nation’s public schools, Sizer deemed the typical high school “a place of friendly, orderly, uncontentious, wasteful triviality,” notable mostly for “the docility of students’ minds.” In classroom after classroom, he found a “conspiracy of the least”–an unspoken pledge by students and teachers to demand little of one another.
Like Hirsch, Sizer sought a way to help schools reform themselves. Backed by major foundations, he launched the Coalition of Essential Schools, an organization housed at Brown University, where Sizer served as education department chairman. Twelve years and $60 million later, Sizer’s coalition has grown to 238 schools, including Hope Essential.
In his new book, Horace’s Hope: What Works for the American High School, the educator reflects on his years in the school reform trenches.He again takes aim at educational traditionalism in public high schools, attacking the “lecture-drill-and-test systems” of many schools, “with their swift march over lists of topics and unconnected material.” The average school, he charges, is “stuck with the notion that a curriculum is primarily a list.” To Sizer, true education means students who exhibit the right “habits of mind,” ask inquiring questions and utilize knowledge in thoughtful ways.
Crucial to such thoughtfulness, he says, is interdisciplinary instruction. Grasping the complexities of a topic like immigration, for example, requires investigating a host of other seemingly unconnected subjects, such as history, economics, statistics, geography, even ecology. To encourage such probing, he urges schools to reorganize each day into longer blocks of time and to increase team teaching.
High on Sizer’s list of educational crimes is the reliance on standardized testing, a practice he dismisses as “giving at best snippets of knowledge about a student and at worst a profoundly distorted view of that child.” He calls instead for measuring students’ achievement by having them present “exhibitions” to their classmates. He strongly opposes national and state education standards, arguing that parents should control what their kids learn through local school boards. To impose nonlocal standards, he says, is a form of intellectual censorship, “a dangerous and potentially undemocratic road.”
Common ground. School reform is a difficult road, as Sizer and Hirsch readily acknowledge. Sizer’s book is far less sanguine than its title suggests. “We are sobered by how hard it is to accomplish change,” he writes. With Sizer’s reform measures come new classroom roles for students and teachers, and the task of battling union rules and school regulations. Faculty turf battles, tradition and simple cynicism have slowed the “Sizerization” of many coalition schools: Only a fraction have introduced his entire plan. Not by accident, a portrait of Don Quixote hangs in the coalition’s offices. Hirsch’s curriculum, for its part, demands a far greater grasp of subjects like ancient history than the typical elementary teacher possesses, and it often runs head-on into local curriculum edicts. Where the educators’ efforts have been successful, however, the results have been impressive, suggesting that reform is not an either-or proposition, not a matter of selecting one philosophy over the other. To be convinced by Hirsch’s argument for a core curriculum, one need look no further than schools like Roland Park, with its diverse student body. Classroom life in such schools is hardly the drudgery Hirsch’s critics claim, nor is the course material “Eurocentric” or otherwise elitist. There are units on African-American scientists, African and Norse myths, Maya culture and more. Diversity rules even in gym class, where students perform American Indian dances.
Roland Park’s curriculum is a far cry from the school’s pre-Hirsch version, which was essentially a fat list of skills the Baltimore school system wanted students to master, such as identifying the main idea in a storyor locating a body of water on a map–in other words, a curriculum built on the belief that skills mattered more than what kids studied. The new curriculum is far more demanding, but students rise to the challenge. “I never thought of teaching astronomy or the Roman Empire in the third grade,” says teacher Pat Wolff. “Originally, I said the kids are not going to read this,” adds fifth-grade teacher Regina White, whose students read abridged versions of classics such as Julius Caesar and the Iliad. “Now I know differently. Even in remedial classes, there’s a lot of enthusiasm.”
Test scores suggest as much. In the two years since the core-knowledge curriculum began, the proportion of fifth graders passing Maryland’s state social studies test has jumped from 27 percent to 44 percent; passing grades in science have risen from 34 percent to 47 percent and in language usage from 18 percent to 49 percent. Other core-knowledge schools wit= h large populations of disadvantaged students report similar gains.
Attendance up.But if Hirsch’s schools prove that traditionalism doesn’t equal mind-numbing learning, Sizer is right to make the culture of schools a priority. Too many schools are large, impersonal places; too many students are alienated and apathetic. In many classrooms, the instruction is as dry and lifeless as Sizer paints it; students are required merely to parrot surface facts and figures, and many never learn how to put their minds to good use. Sizer’s assessment of standardized testing also has merit: Tests drive down the level of instruction in many classrooms as teachers match their teaching to the low-level skills often being measured.
At Hope Essential, breaking the school day into large blocks makes relationships between students and teachers more personal. In turn, student attendance is up, discipline problems are down. Interdisciplinary instruction gives students a richer understanding of what they are learning, exemplified in the student exhibitions so important to Sizer as alternatives to standardized tests. Last year, with the O. J. Simpson trial in the news, a month’s study of Shakespeare’s Othelloin an 11th-grade English class at Hope Essential culminated not in a multiple-choice test but in a mock trial of the Moor for Desdemona’s murder. Students explored the tragedy’s insights into marriage, jealousy and responsibility. Their tasks included reciting portions of the play, writing papers in the form of opening and closing legal arguments and a host of other activities.
Such intensive study pays off: Nearly 90 percent of Hope Essential’s students are admitted to college, up from 18 percent at Hope High School before Sizer arrived. Hirsch himself is not opposed per se to exhibitions or other Sizeresque methods–if they deliver enough of the right content.
Even Hirsch’s conviction that knowledge building is schools’ primary task can be partly reconciled with Sizer’s view that knowledge is secondary to the teaching of mental skills, or “habits of mind.” Hirsch’s focus is elementary school; Sizer’s is high school. Indeed, when he talks about high school, Hirsch moves closer to Sizer’s stance, suggesting that older students, secure in a broad knowledge base, be encouraged to “focus more narrowly and probe more deeply.”
Nowhere is the value of merging the best of traditional and progressive strategies better illustrated than in the thorny question of how best to teach kids to read. Overwhelmingly, studies suggest that kids need to learn phonics, the building blocks of sound-letter relationships, as traditionalists argue. But equally compelling evidence exists that kids learn such skills faster and more thoroughly when teachers use progressive techniques to teach phonics, such as asking students to write stories using phonetic or “invented” spelling.
In the reading debate, as in other school reform issues, many progressives and traditionalists seem more eager to fight than to find common ground, routinely misrepresenting each other’s views and needlessly polarizing debates at students’ expense. It is left to the rest of us to break through the overheated rhetoric, finding in both sides important pieces of a national solution.