Recommendations for PHS with summary of Hirsch's "The Schools We Need"

1. February 20, 2012
LITERACY TEAM REPORT

2. ASSIGNMENT MANDATED BY OPI
Make recommendations for improving literacy
at PHS
Based on research (rather than folklore)

3. QUESTIONS THE LITERACY TEAM ASKED
1. What should be done across the
curriculum in all academic classes?
2. What should be done in English classes?
3. What should be done for students
struggling with literacy?

4. TWO DOMAINS: ACADEMICS AND ATTITUDES
1. Academic Achievement: Poor readers
(little background knowledge, minimal
vocabulary)
Questions: Why are some students
getting to high school without the
knowledge and skills to succeed?
(diagnosis) What does research indicate
works? (prescription)

5. TWO DOMAINS: ACADEMICS AND ATTITUDES
2. Attitudes and Dispositions: Unmotivated
(poor work ethic, poor ability to focus, lack
of engagement, lack of diligence, unable to
work through boredom, impatient,
egocentric, lack of purpose)
Questions: What habits and dispositions
should be taught all year long in freshman
classes?
How can these habits and dispositions be
supported throughout the school? MBI?

6. Hirsch argues that in abandoning content-
based curricula for disproved theories of
cognitive development, the educational
establishment has done harm to America's
students, and instead of preparing them for an
information-based economy, the
establishment practices have curtailed their
ability and desire to learn.
Hirsch proves that if children are taught
substantial knowledge and skills, and learn to
work hard to acquire them, their test scores will
rise, their love of learning will grow, and they
will become enthusiastic participants in the
information-age civilization.

7. HIRSCH’S KEY ASSERTIONS
1. To stress critical thinking while de-
emphasizing knowledge reduces a
student’s capacity to think critically.
Focus on knowledge rather than formal “skills”

8. HIRSCH’S KEY ASSERTIONS
2. Giving a child constant praise to bolster self-
esteem (or cultural pride) regardless of
academic achievement breeds
complacency, or skepticism, or both, and,
ultimately, a decline in self-esteem.
Focus on knowledge rather than vague motivations

9. HIRSCH’S KEY ASSERTIONS
3. For a teacher to pay significant attention to
each individual child in a class of twenty or
more students means individual neglect for
most children most of the time.
Emphasize whole class instruction more than
individual attention

10. HIRSCH’S KEY ASSERTIONS
4. Schoolwork that has been called
“developmentally inappropriate” has proved
to be highly appropriate to millions of
students the world over, while the infantile
pablum now fed to American children is
developmentally inappropriate (in a
downward direction) and often bores them.
Increase the rigor of academic coursework

12. The reader needs the common knowledge
that the author of the text
assumes the reader has.

13. VIDEO
 What is “cultural literacy”?
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROIujiY1uZU

14. WHAT DOES NOT WORK
1. Remedial reading classes that conceptualize
“reading skills” as a formal set of processes
that are domain independent.
2. Building self-esteem or cultural pride
3. “Engagement” defined as “hands on” or “active
learning”
4. A school culture that is anti-knowledge (“rote
learning” “mere facts” “factory model” “higher order thinking
skills” “multiple intelligences” “technology” “student-
centered” “careerism”)

15. WHAT DOES WORK
Extensive Practice: "The research evidence is
overwhelming. The only thing we have seen that rapidly
accelerates student performance toward reading more
complex texts is extensive practice, repeatedly, even with
reading the same text." David Coleman, CCSS author
The practice will enable students do well on tests of what
they have studied. Because the impact of a single course
on their general knowledge may be small, there may
not be measurable improvement on general reading
test scores.

16. SELECTED FINDINGS
FREDDIE D. SMITH, “THE IMPACT OF THE CORE KNOWLEDGE CURRICULUM, A COMPREHENSIVE
SCHOOL REFORM MODEL, ON ACHIEVEMENT” (PHD DISS., UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA, 2003).
Students who remained in the Core Knowledge school
from kindergarten through sixth grade outperformed
peers at the control school as measured by mean
scaled scores on the Stanford 9TA tests, which
are standard grade-by-grade reading
assessments used across the nation. Core
Knowledge students outperformed control students in
all subjects tested and for both of the two cohorts of
students examined. The Core Knowledge advantage
was statistically significant for reading (p ≤ .029, p ≤
.002) and math (p ≤ .002, p ≤ .014).

17. Both advantaged and disadvantaged (free
lunch) students in the Core Knowledge
school outperformed students in the
control school on the Stanford 9TA tests.
Again, this was true for all three subjects and
for both cohorts examined. The
disadvantaged students in the Core
Knowledge school showed statistically
significant advantages in reading (p ≤ .017 for
one cohort and p ≤ .030 for the other). Core
Knowledge thus promoted fairness in
schooling by providing educational
opportunity to disadvantaged as well as
advantaged students.

18. Core Knowledge helped narrow the
achievement gap on the Stanford 9TA test
between advantaged and disadvantaged
students. The achievement gap, as
measured by the Stanford 9TA
tests, was narrowed for one Core
Knowledge cohort and eliminated for
the other. The achievement gap between
advantaged and disadvantaged students
remained large for both cohorts at the
control school.

19. Core Knowledge helped students achieve
much larger gains on the Stanford 9TA tests
over two-year periods, from fourth to sixth
grades. Both advantaged and disadvantaged
students made larger gains than their peers
in the control school in all of the twelve cases
evaluated. Among disadvantaged
students, the edge to Core Knowledge
was deemed highly significant in all three
subjects (p ≤ .001, p ≤ .001 for reading; p ≤
.001, p ≤ .001 for math; p ≤ .001, p ≤ .002 for
language).

20. COMPARISON OF FIFTH GRADERS
New York City
Schools, 2007 Report on
Charter Schools:
Chart shows average
percent of students who
read at proficient or
advanced levels. “Proficient”
is at grade level.
All schools have similar
demographics: nearly 100%
disadvantaged students.
The KIPP (Knowledge is Power) schools emphasize discipline and hard
work.
The Core Knowledge schools emphasize a coherent content-based
curriculum.

21. VIDEO
 Nathan Glazer interviewed by Education
Next
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GdjTIVIgh4

22. THE “MATTHEW EFFECT”
 “For whosoever hath, to him shall he given,
and he shall have more abundance: but
whosoever hath not, from him shall he taken
away even that he hath.”

23. MATTHEW EFFECT: VOCABULARY
1. Need to know 90% of words in text to make
sense of it
2. Kids who know the 90% are able to figure
out the other 10%
3. Kids who don’t, don’t. They fall even further
behind
4. The verbal gap gets wider as they move
through school

24. THIRD GRADE READING PASSAGE
Farmers in ancient Egypt thought of the year as
having three seasons: flood time, seeding, and
harvest. Each year the Nile River would flood. This
was good news for farmers because Egypt is mostly
desert, and not enough rain falls to grow crops. The
annual flood would last for a few weeks, and then the
water level would drop, leaving a layer of fertile, black
mud. This mud fertilized tle soil, and the flood water
was stored in a series of canals. A special
government department was in charge of making
sure the canals were kept in good repair.

25. NEEDED BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE
1. Egypt was a country in ancient times
2. The year has seasons
3. Farming depends on planting seeds in moist
soil
4. Plants need nutrients and water to grow
5. “desert” “Nile” “basic farming”

26. THE PROBLEM IS NOT ETHNICITY OR POVERTY
 The problem is diversity of preparation.
 The problem is background knowledge.

27. VERBAL SKILL INVOLVES KNOWLEDGE OF THINGS
Improving reading proficiency often fails
because of the mistaken assumption
that reading is a skill like typing
and that when you learn the technique
you can read any text

28. MANY LANGUAGE PROGRAMS
 Practice abstract strategies on an incoherent
array of uninformative fictions.
 The opportunity costs have been
enormous.
 Schools waste hours practicing drills,
depriving students of knowledge that
could enhance reading comprehension.

29. NEW YORK STATE: FOURTH GRADE READING TEST
There is a path that starts in Maine and ends in
Georgia, 2,167 miles later. This path is called
the Appalachian Trail. If you want, you can walk
the whole way, although only some people who
try to do this actually make it, because it is so
far, and they get tired. The idea for the trail
came from a man named Benton Mac-Kaye. In
1921 he wrote an article about how people
needed a nearby place where they could enjoy
nature and take a break from work. He thought
the Appalachian Mountains would be perfect
for this.

30. FIRST QUESTION, DEALS WITH MAIN IDEA:
This article is mostly about
1. how the Appalachian Trail came to exist.
2. when people can visit the Appalachian Trail.
3. who hikes the most on the Appalachian
Trail.
4. why people work together on the
Appalachian Trail.

31. WHAT IF YOU ARE A FOURTH GRADER
 Who knows nothing about hiking?
 Doesn’t know the Appalachians from the
Himalayans?
 Doesn’t know where Maine and Georgia are?
 Can’t grasp what “to enjoy nature” means?

32. RESEARCH FOUNDATIONS ARE WEAK
• For claims that scores on such tasks are
improved by practicing strategies such as
questioning the author or finding the main
idea
• Subject matter knowledge decisively trumps
formal skill in reading
• Proficiency at one reading comprehension
task does not predict success in another

33. READING COMPREHENSION IS DOMAIN SPECIFIC
Teaching students to read Shakespeare
will be unlikely to make them better at
reading geography texts or science texts
CCSS assigns responsibility for teaching literacy
to all academic teachers. Students are to
improve reading and writing science in science
class and reading and writing history in history
class.

34. FLORIDA TENTH-GRADE TEST
The origin of cotton is something of a mystery. There
is evidence that people in India and Central and
South America domesticated separate species of the
plant thousands of years ago. Archaeologists have
discovered fragments of cotton cloth more than 4,000 years
old in coastal Peru and at Mohenjo Daro in the Indus Valley.
By A.D. 1500, cotton had spread across the warmer regions
of the Americas, Eurasia, and Africa. Today cotton is
the world’s major nonfood crop, providing half of all
textiles. In 1992, 80 countries produced a total of 83 million
bales, or almost 40 billion pounds. The business
revenue generated--some 50 billion dollars in the United
States alone -is greater than that of any otler field crop.
Most of the five billion pounds that U.S. mills spin and
weave into fabric each year ends up as clothing.

35. A READING TEST IS A KNOWLEDGE TEST
1. Apart from “what is cotton?” or “what is a
bale?” it helps to understand the
domestication of plant species.
2. Success requires familiarity with the subject
the test covers.
3. The fundamental “gap” between kids is a
knowledge gap

36. A manifold, contained in an intuition which I call
mine, is represented, by means of the
synthesis of understanding, as belonging to
the necessary unity of self-
consciousness, and this is effected by means
of the category. This requirement of a
category therefore shows that the empirical
consciousness of a given manifold in a single
intuition is subject to a pure self-
consciousness a priori, just as is empirical
intuition to a pure sensible intuition, which
likewise takes place a priori.
From Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason)

37. The main idea of this passage is
1. Without a manifold, one cannot call an intuition
“mine.”
2. Intuition must precede understanding
3. Intuition must occur through a category
4. Self-consciousness is necessary to
understanding
Typical “reading strategies” struggling readers are
compelled to practice:
1. Try to find the main idea
2. Try to summarize the main idea
3. Try to clarify the main idea
4. Try to “question the author”—What is Kant trying
to get at here?

38. LITERACY TEAM RECOMMENDATIONS (DRAFT)
1. Establish district-wide conversation regarding
curriculum
2. Recognize that student time and professional staff
time are the limiting resources
3. Do not assume literacy teaching can be done
effectively without adequate prep time
4. Eliminate remedial reading classes
5. Use professional staff to teach core content
classes
6. Provide literacy labs (with their English teacher) at
school for students who do not succeed with
homework

39. CCSS (ADOPTED BY MONTANA)
(COMMON CORE STATE STANDARDS)
1. Literacy Standards included in Social
Studies and in Science
2. 70% of student reading is to be done in
informational texts
3. English teachers will still teach
fiction, drama, poetry, and other literature.
Most of the informational reading is to be
done in other classes. More frequent
tests (online) in more subject areas

40. VIDEO 24 MINUTES
 Davd Coleman Literacy Discussion
 http://neric.welearntube.org/?q=node/147