America Is Listening to E.D. Hirsch

E.D. Hirsch Jr. once was the boogeyman of public education. Although conservatives embraced him, liberals--meaning most of the mainstream education world--considered him a Neanderthal, a pedagogue, an elitist.

They bashed his 1987 book, “Cultural Literacy,” as a Eurocentric tract that would have students reading about dead white males and conjugating verbs in Latin. They sneered at his next bestseller, the “Dictionary of Cultural Literacy,” as a boon mainly for enthusiasts of Trivial Pursuit.

They feared that if he had his way, the “open” classroom would revert to its dreary former self, with bolted-down desks and chairs and students performing mind-numbing memory drills.

The Harvard Educational Review lambasted “Cultural Literacy” as “one of the most elaborate conservative educational manifestoes” in years.

A decade later?

Well, Hirsch was the star of a recent forum at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, swarmed by fans wanting him to sign his latest book. Then he was feted at the faculty club.

But that was nothing compared to the reception a few miles away at the Morse School, one of 350 schools around the country following his grade-by-grade prescription for what children should learn. Here, hand-painted banners trumpeted his name. Here, grateful teachers and parents offered juice and homemade bread. And here, gaggles of exuberant fourth-graders begged for his autograph as if he were Pluto in Disneyland.

“I regard him as a hero--an intellectual hero,” said John Kelleher, a Morse parent who bucked the liberal tendencies of the Cambridge community to bring Hirsch’s curriculum to this once-downtrodden public school.

What gives?

Ten years and several cultural wars later, Hirsch, a balding, 68-year-old English professor from Virginia, has emerged as an intellectual guru of education reform.

He has become a force by standing firm on two points he first made in 1987: that there is a core of knowledge every American must learn to succeed in school and function responsibly in our democracy; and that a wrongheaded educational theory called progressivism--teachers should be attuned to the social and emotional needs of children and should nurture their creativity--has kept schools from teaching that essential knowledge.

With talk of national academic standards permeating discussions of how to fix America’s schools, Hirsch’s message resounds today not as a right-wing rebuke but as common sense, educationally and politically correct.

“I think the world is coming closer to E.D. Hirsch,” said Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy in Washington and co-director of a national project to write standards for schools. “He is driving his point home at a time when the United States has standards on its agenda.”

Process vs. Content

Hirsch’s new book, “The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them,” contends that America’s students rank at the bottom internationally because “progressive” theory has led schools to exalt process over content.

The result, he says, has been watered-down courses and ineffective teaching practices, such as cooperative learning, “interdisciplinary” instruction that blurs math and science or English and art, the naturalistic “whole language” approach to reading, and math programs that shirk mastery of basic skills.

He lays all this out in plain language that cuts through the fog of education jargon and hits home with parents and teachers. “A systemic failure to teach all children the knowledge they need in order to understand what the next grade has to offer is the major source of avoidable injustice in our schools,” he writes, calling U.S. schools “among the least effective in the developed world.”

His book is showing up as required reading on the desks of school board members, superintendents, policy wonks and politicians across the country, particularly in California, where the so-called traditionalists in the math and reading wars look to Hirsch as a voice of reason.

Maureen DiMarco, Gov. Pete Wilson’s education secretary until last year, bought 50 copies and gave them to the governor, legislators and lobbyists. Democrat Delaine Eastin, the superintendent of public instruction, is urging every member of the state Board of Education to read it. Bill Honig, the former superintendent who last year admitted he led the state down the wrong path with whole language teaching, recommends it wherever he goes, calling it “a good corrective.” Every member of the new state commission on academic standards had a copy at its first meeting last month.

Hirsch still has his critics. Harvard education professor Howard Gardner admires his call for a beefier curriculum. But he views Hirsch’s attacks on schools of education as ill-informed and mean-spirited. He thought that Hirsch’s singling out of a long-forgotten New York professor as the root of American educational evils bordered on the absurd.

“Hirsch,” Gardner said, “has swallowed a neoconservative caricature of contemporary American education. If this kind of angry, stereotypical thinking is what results from a ‘core knowledge’ orientation, then I want no part of it.”

Hearing such broadsides, Hirsch sighs and quips, “It’s not very nice to be such a Simon Legree.” Yet the self-described political liberal and educational pragmatist notes that, in contrast to the vitriol aimed at “Cultural Literacy,” he is encountering little open resistance this time--and none as vehement as Gardner’s.

Indeed, he has even been invited to speak at Teachers College, Columbia University, the place he portrays as the evil empire of progressive thought. The New York school’s president, Arthur Levine, does fault Hirsch for failing to give progressivism credit for rising test scores during its heyday, the three or four decades leading up to World War II.

But Levine declares the rest of Hirsch’s book “fascinating. . . . He’s gone far beyond talking about the mere accumulation of facts.”

So, today, “I think he’ll be received very nicely,” Levine said. “I don’t think people are lying in wait for him.”

Hirsch agrees: “The mood has changed--something has changed.”

That “something,” some would assert, is the new mood about academic standards. When President George Bush called the nation’s governors to an education summit in 1989, he set in motion events that led to a set of education goals. Adopted by the Clinton administration and Congress, they include raising the achievement of U.S. students to “world-class” levels by 2000 and standardizing what every child should learn.

The movement riled some conservatives, who saw it as federal encroachment on a local prerogative, and it has produced some notable failures. (Remember the history standards that critics said slighted George Washington and the English standards that failed to mention one great book?)

But 48 states have or are devising standards for teaching every major academic subject.

“The whole country has moved into a more educationally conservative stance. Who would have imagined that we would have national education goals? That would have been anathema 10 or 15 years ago,” said David Breneman, dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education.

“The whole battle over standards seems settled, and now we are just debating the details. I have to believe that E.D. Hirsch has been a fairly significant force, among others, in altering that debate.”

Classroom Strategies

In “The Schools We Need,” Hirsch says progressive educational ideas emanated from Teachers College in the early part of this century. Although the movement is often associated with John Dewey, Hirsch sees the most influential proponent as William Heard Kilpatrick, who taught at the college in the 1920s and ‘30s.

Kilpatrick believed that learning should occur at each child’s natural pace. It’s this philosophy, Hirsch says, that led to such current practices as the “developmental” report card, which replaces letter grades with an elaborate rubric of skills and goals; “constructivism” or “discovery learning,” in which students arrive at their own understanding of key concepts through hands-on activities, projects or problem-solving; and “multi-age” classrooms, in which children are grouped not by age but by their “readiness” for learning.

Hirsch pans such teaching strategies as largely unsupported by research. That is a key point that reformed reformers, such as Honig, have taken to heart. But what is more troubling to Hirsch--and reveals what he says are his true political leanings--is the belief that approaches such as multi-age classes are inherently unfair and exacerbate the social inequities rife in the nation’s classrooms.

Fundamental to his analysis is the idea that knowledge builds on prior knowledge, that facts learned in one grade, for instance, form the “mental Velcro” on which the next grade’s lessons attach and grow.

A child from a disadvantaged home, deprived of cultural opportunities available to the more prosperous, enters school with less “Velcro.” It is far better, Hirsch argues, to have every student on the same page, tackling demanding subject matter, than to have Jimmy on Page 20 because he’s a slow learner and Susie on Page 40 because she’s quicker.

The egalitarianism of his message heartens parents like Martha Schwartz of San Pedro, a former high school teacher who has fought the dumbing-down of math instruction in California.

Schwartz, who describes herself as a liberal-to-moderate Democrat, says she and her cohorts began to doubt whether they were still liberals when proponents of reform math attacked their advocacy of basic skills as reactionary. “Hirsch’s book documents for us that we are still liberal people concerned with the poor and that taking a conservative educational stance was a natural and productive thing to do,” she said.

This was Hirsch’s message back in 1987, too. But it was buried under the mud slung in the raging culture wars, with multiculturalists fixating on the Western Civ orientation of “Cultural Literacy,” which had a 4,500-item appendix of facts every American should know, such as that “Gunga Din” was a poem by Rudyard Kipling.

Now, some observers say, Hirsch’s new book makes clear what motivates him.

“I don’t see him as conservative or traditional at all,” said Stanford educational expert Michael Kirst, a former California Board of Education president who became friends with Hirsch when both were fellows at a Palo Alto research institute. “He thought you needed a certain number of facts to place reading in context. . . . There is a very compelling rationale to what he has to say.”

Another reason Hirsch is getting a second look may be that, when it comes to what works in schools, he no longer is just a theorist.

More than 300 elementary schools in 40 states--including a Catholic academy in San Diego--have bought Hirsch’s argument, along with the $17 curriculum guide he sells through his Core Knowledge Foundation, which he runs out of a small, Tudor-style building next to a bagel shop in Charlottesville, Va.

At the Morse School, principal James Coady and his teachers swear by the results. Four years ago, the school had so few students that closure seemed likely. Today, after three years of using Hirsch’s curriculum, its test scores rank among the highest in the Cambridge system. There’s a waiting list for admission.

These promising signs are occurring in a predominantly minority school, where half of the 300 students qualify for subsidized lunches and a quarter speak limited English. Morse students, Coady says, are a living rebuttal of the charge that Hirsch’s knowledge-based approach is elitist.

Teacher Andrea Downie agrees.

On a recent morning, her students were happily filling in green poster-board maps of Italy with the locations of ancient Roman cities. They had been studying the Punic Wars, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, the destruction of Pompeii and the decline and fall of Rome. All this in third grade.

Uniform Curriculum

Downie and other teachers say they now know exactly what they must cover, grade by grade. That may seem a surprising admission. But one of the great myths in education, according to Hirsch, is that all schools follow a curriculum. What most have is a poor imitation, so vague that first-graders might spend weeks studying dinosaurs in one classroom while others next door might not study the subject at all. It’s potluck rather than a set menu of learning, Hirsch says.

At Morse, Downie has noticed students retaining more of what they learn from year to year, lessening the need for review. They also seem excited about studying, proud to be tackling subjects their siblings didn’t encounter until later years. Ashlei Levesque, an energetic 8-year-old, knew why Julius Caesar uttered “Et tu, Brute!” “It was his friend who betrayed him, and those were his last words,” she said.

Course outlines for other grades, K-6, are as ambitious, covering world and American civilization, geography, language, literature, art, music, math and science. They also have a multicultural flavor absent from Hirsch’s earlier lists of essential knowledge.

His guidelines recommend that kindergartners learn about Thomas Jefferson and Diego Rivera, that third-graders read Lewis Carroll and Nikki Giovanni, and that fourth-graders study Marco Polo and Ibn Batuta, an African geographer and explorer.

What may also surprise some is that Core Knowledge schools employ the “touchy-feely” techniques that Hirsch questions.

At Morse, teachers use projects to stimulate excitement about learning, such as building a guillotine for a lesson about the French Revolution. Desks are clustered in groups of three or four to promote cooperative learning. Hands-on activities, such as counting money to learn a math lesson, are carried out in every classroom.

“It’s not drill and kill, it’s not rote,” said Shivanthy Srikanthan, a second-grade teacher. “The teacher gets to choose and decide how to teach it.”

Seeing this activity doesn’t necessarily please Hirsch, but neither does he condemn it. In fact, before the crowded forum at Harvard last month, he declared that he had no strong feelings about how his curriculum ought to be taught.

Some critics suggest that Hirsch is guilty of having his cake and eating it too.

“Is Hirsch saying that he will go along with any teaching approach, and any set of curricular materials, so long as they have substance? If so,” says Gardner, “then there is no responsible educator anywhere who would disagree with him.”

Hirsch sees no contradiction. “I say, do whatever you want, as clearly as possible. If you define in a very specific way what your goals are for your hands-on projects and monitor to make sure all children achieve the learning goals, I have nothing against the hands-on and the projects.”

The rigorous curriculum he favors has been a magnet, in some cases drawing white middle-class parents back to schools that had been failing. “We watched our kids really fall in love with learning in a content-rich curriculum,” said Mark Sullivan, a Boston business executive who enrolled his two daughters at Morse. “Just seeing the Aztecs and Mayans on the scope and sequence for kindergarten was tremendously exciting.”

Positive Results

Although the record is far from complete on Core Knowledge schools, Morse is not the only one with positive initial results. A handful of independent studies show that the achievement of students at all levels--but especially the disadvantaged--rises under the Hirsch curriculum.

At the Mohegan School, which serves poor Latino and black youngsters in New York’s South Bronx, the average improvement in language ability was more than twice as great as the district average in 1993. The lowest quartile made gains 30% greater than their counterparts.

Teachers and principals are reporting that discipline, along with academics, is improving. Coady said he typically suspended about 10 students a year before Core Knowledge. That number has dropped to zero.

Coady speculates that’s partly because students are reading Greek mythology and other cultures’ folk tales that focus on traditional virtues, such as honesty and diligence. David Gibson, who taught at a Core Knowledge school in Franklin, Mass., believes that kids absorb a message of respect inherent in the demanding program: “It sends a clear message that they are important, that they are to be taken seriously, that they can learn.”

Armed with such signs of success in the crucial elementary grades, Hirsch isn’t slowing down. But he’s lowering his sights--literally.

Get ready for . . . Shakespeare for the see-saw set?

“We’re doing preschool next,” he said the other day, disclosing plans to develop a curriculum guide for children under 5.

Hirsch is aware of the uproar he could cause by insisting that such tender minds need to be loaded up with facts and figures. But he points to France, where 90% of 3- and 4-year-olds attend school all day, 12 months a year. He cites studies showing that such early schooling permanently boosted the achievement of children of low-wage workers and immigrants from North Africa.

That is what Head Start in this country set out to do--provide disadvantaged youngsters with a stimulating environment to prepare them for school. But studies show that the benefits are temporary, a problem Hirsch believes could be solved with a core curriculum.

“One has to go by reality, rather than ideology,” he said. “That is my hope.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The World According to E.D. Hirsch

E.D. Hirsch, author of “Cultural Literacy” and, most recently, “The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them,” says the problem with America’s public schools is not so much the people in them as it is the ideas that drive them. Here is a Hirsch sampler.

* On standardized testing: “In the American context, such tests are necessary to achieve excellence and fairness. They function as achievement incentives for students and teachers, as ways of monitoring students’ progress in order to remedy their deficiencies, and as essential helps in the administrative monitoring of classrooms, schools and districts. Without effective monitoring, neither good teaching nor good educational administration is possible.”

* On the need for a uniform curriculum: “A diverse, nomadic nation like ours has a greater need for a grade-by-grade core curriculum than do countries that are less migratory and diverse. . . . Extreme localism, coupled with vagueness, seems increasingly outmoded at a time when children must change schools a lot and when the educational needs of young children have become very much the same throughout the world.”

* On ‘whole-language’ reading: “The most striking evidence against the naturalness of reading is the brute fact that alphabetic literacy is extremely rare among the historical cultures of the world, whereas oral language is universal. . . . A nonnaturalistic approach, including direct instruction in letter-sound correspondences, is by far the most effective approach to the teaching of reading. “

* On letting parents choose schools: “The basic problem with parental choice [is] it introduces competition under monopolistic conditions that may cancel out its utility. [It is nearly impossible to choose] between schools, even those that adopt special themes, when all of them espouse the same general ‘philosophy’ of education--the same concern for ‘the individual child and his or her needs,’ for ‘critical thinking,’ ‘self-esteem,’ ‘joy in learning.’ . . . With such similarity of rhetoric, is is a discerning parent indeed who can make a wise choice.”

* On multiculturalism: “When done well, introducing multicultural elements into the early curriculum has been useful to American children because it has recognized real achievements and contributions by minorities. . . . The mistake is to endow this beneficial change with quasi-magical effects on achievement and self-esteem that it cannot possibly have.”

SOURCE: “The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them,” Doubleday, 1996