Education Week - May 22, 2013 - 32

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EDUCATION WEEK

MAY 22, 2013

www.edweek.org

COMMENTARY
www.edweek.org/go/commentary

THE ‘HOW’ OF EQUITABLE SCHOOL FUNDING 24
DESIGNING LEARNING SPACES FOR A NEW AGE OF DISCOVERY 24
TEACHING THE METRIC SYSTEM: A CAUTIONARY TALE FOR THE COMMON CORE 25
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 26

The Common
Core Needs
A Common
Curriculum

By Lisa Hansel

he Common Core
State Standards
contain laudable
goals for what
students ought
to be able to do.
Attaining those
goals, especially
in English/language arts and literacy, depends on how schools
interpret the standards’ call for a
content-rich curriculum: “[W]hile
the standards make references to
some particular forms of content,
... they do not ... enumerate all or
even most of the content that students should learn. The standards
must therefore be complemented
by a well-developed, content-rich
curriculum.”
What is a content-rich curriculum? And who should pick the
content? I argue that we should all
come to agreement on the content.
But first, we must understand the
cognitive science that explains
why content is important.
Instead of writing a contentrich curriculum, some schools
have selected a scripted program.
Some new teachers have said their
schools’ scripted reading programs
saved them because they were not
prepared to teach children with
widely varying backgrounds. But
once teachers build expertise, they
meet individual students’ needs
better than any script. Perhaps
scripted programs should be optional, not mandated.
At the other extreme, some
schools have a sink-or-swim approach in which each teacher
writes his or her own curriculum.
This drives too many new teachers
out of the profession, creating a
level of turnover that is harmful to
students. Some teachers swim, but
their ability to learn from their
peers is minimal when everyone
is teaching very different things.
Many educators seem to agree
that the middle ground between
a script and a free-for-all makes
sense, so the sticking point is defining that middle ground. This is
where my perspective differs from
mainstream educational thought.
Many school districts mandate

specific pedagogies, but not specific content. I think this is backwards. Effective instruction depends on the content to be learned
and the students in the room, so
pedagogical mandates are often
counterproductive. What to teach
ought to be a communal, researchbased, and experience-based decision; how to teach should be up to
the individual teacher.
The content of instruction is so
important that any responsible
community should be willing to do
the hard work of specifying and
agreeing to what students need to
know and be able to do by the end
of each grade.
Research demonstrates that
knowledge and skills develop together. The most crucial skills—
comprehension, critical thinking,
and writing—all depend on having
relevant knowledge not at one’s
fingertips, but already stored in
one’s long-term memory. The cog-

“

What to teach
ought to be a
communal, researchbased, and experiencebased decision.”
nitive science is clear: Any topic
students need to read or think
about is a topic they must know
about.
Exactly what are those topics?
Research can partially answer
that question. Skim a few newspaper articles. For brevity’s sake, the
articles explain what’s new, but
offer little background knowledge.
The sports section gives game
highlights and scores; it does not
explain the rules. The economy
section tells you where the Dow
closed and offers the latest jobs
and housing data; it reveals little
about what those are or why they
matter. The news tells you what’s
new—it expects you to know
enough to digest it.
As a foundation for lifelong
learning, the knowledge all stu-

Chris Whetzel

dents need is the knowledge that
adults are assumed to have. One
way research can help determine
what to teach is by showing what
knowledge is taken for granted in
publications intended for broad
audiences.
Here’s a recent example from
The New York Times: “Samuel
Ting, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a
Nobel laureate particle physicist,
said Wednesday that his $1.6 billion cosmic ray experiment on the
International Space Station had
found evidence of ‘new physical
phenomena’ that could represent
dark matter, the mysterious stuff
that serves as the gravitational
foundation for galaxies and whose
identification would rewrite some
of the laws of physics.”

What knowledge is assumed and
what is not? We are not expected
to know who Ting is or what dark
matter is. But we are expected to
know mit, the Nobel Prize, particle
physics, cosmic rays, the International Space Station, gravity, and
galaxies. That’s a lot to know.
Researching what knowledge
is commonly taken for granted is
the approach E.D. Hirsch Jr., the
founder of Core Knowledge, and
his colleagues took when they initially developed a list of what all
Americans should know. Many
critics pointed out—rightly—that
the list was too narrow. By focusing on knowledge assumed by
mainstream outlets, it did not adequately reinforce fundamental
American values: finding strength
in diversity and appreciating all

Americans (not just those who become famous).
Many of those critics do not
realize that Hirsch agreed with
them. That initial list has been
revised with input from hundreds
of teachers and scholars; today’s
Core Knowledge Sequence contains a great diversity of people,
events, and ideas.
When schools adopt the sequence, they go through their own
communal process: The sequence
PAGE 27 >

LISA HANSEL is the communications
director for the Core Knowledge
Foundation, which is located in
Charlottesville, Va. Previously, she was
the editor of American Educator, the
magazine published by the American
Federation of Teachers.

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Education Week - May 22, 2013

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