E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Why Knowledge Matters, Rescuing Our Children from Failed Educational Theories (2016). A year ago at age 88, E.D. Hirsch—author of the best-selling Cultural Literacy (1987) and founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation—published his fifth and possibly most compelling book on education. While mentoring new English teachers/Masters of Education students at CUNY’s Lehman College in the Bronx, I eagerly read his articles in the AFT’s American Educator on vocabulary development and reading comprehension, in which he argued that there was no substitute for a knowledge-rich curriculum for nurturing both. In reading his articles I became aware of the large body of research on the so-called Matthew Effect (“For unto everyone who hath, shall be given,” etc.): Those students who know, say, 90% of the vocabulary in a given passage will learn the new words through context clues; those students who are unfamiliar with many words will learn none. This well-researched phenomenon has especially devastating implications for disadvantaged students who come to school without the background knowledge and vocabulary gained from being read to by parents, listening to adult conversations, having access to books in the home, etc. While the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

In his 2016 Why Knowledge Matters, Hirsch has strengthened his previous arguments in favor of a knowledge-rich curriculum for all students (educational equity is a major concern of his) in two principal ways: He references recent research in cognitive science that pretty much demolishes the idea upon which most recent ELA standards are based—namely, that there exist teachable, abstract skills such as “a main-idea-finding-skill,” “an inference-finding-skill,” and a “critical thinking skill.” (Some reviewers of the book disputed or simply ignored his claim. I know from my own experience that this approach bores students to death.) Second, he discusses at length the educational debacle that ensued in France following the implementation of the 1989 Loi Jospin when a knowledge-rich, communal, cumulative curriculum was replaced by a skills-oriented, child-centered, individualistic curriculum in one fell swoop, a la francaise (or as Hirsch describes it, an unprecedented “natural experiment”).

This slim 260-page book is overflowing with important ideas based on decades of research. Here, I’ll merely report on what I found to be highlights:

Three bad ideas. Hirsch says lack of educational progress in K-12 is due to three hegemonic ideas: that early education should be part of a natural developmental process and therefore age-appropriate; that it should be individualized as far as possible; that the unifying aim should be to develop critical thinking and other general skills.

High-stakes testing has hurt student performance. Hirsch cites 2012 NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) results (post-No Child Left Behind) that show that while there may have been important gains in students’ decoding skills in the early grades, scores of 17-year-olds remained flat. Why, despite all the attention and money thrown at education? and despite the fact that these same students were making progress at ages 9 and 13? As Hirsch explains, by the time this cohort hit high school, NCLB standards had taken hold. Its high stakes testing hurt rather than helped student performance by emphasizing skills training and test preparation at the expense of art, literature, science, history, and other content-heavy subjects that would have promoted vocabulary building.

Common Core State Standards will not improve student outcomes. Hirsch is favorable to the “isolated paragraphs” in which the Common Core State Standards for ELA acknowledge the importance of a content-rich curriculum but notes the lack of specifics and predicts that the high-stakes reading tests that accompany the CCSS will have the same depressing effect as NCLB on the reading competence of 17-year-olds. The emphasis of the CCSS and related tests is still on skills; in fact, a new skill has been added: the “close reading skill,” which Hirsch points out may be important for literary analysis in the later grades but can actually be a detriment to comprehension because the reader focuses on individual words, not the overall meaning of a text. “With most texts, paying close attention to the text itself debases comprehension by usurping limited mental resources that would be better applied to pondering the substantive implications and the validity of what the text is saying. Thus people who do not pay conscious attention to the vehicle of meaning tend to understand and recall textual meaning better than those who read in a more literary way.” As someone who cut his teeth as a literary scholar and theorist, Hirsch should know something about this. (Hirsch wrote his dissertation on Romantic poetry, is author of Validity in Interpretation and other influential works of literary theory, and was chairman of the UVA English Department.)

More informational texts—not a bad idea. Hirsch, controversially, believes the most criticized element of Common Core’s ELA standards—that about half of the texts read should be “informational” texts—is one of the best. This reduces the number of vacuous stories about picnics at the beach with the Beaver family in favor of texts that convey knowledge and vocabulary in many domains. Good works of fiction are informational; informational texts can be literature. The received idea that language arts should focus on imaginative literature in the early grades is an unfortunate legacy of 19^th century European Romanticism and educators influenced by it. (There is an appendix on the founders and promoters of child-centered, natural education.)

Teacher scapegoating. Value-Added Teacher Evaluation, which rates teachers on their students’ year-to-year progress, leads to unfair scapegoating of teachers. Since tests do not test specific content that is imparted by teachers and since scores on reading tests reflect knowledge and vocabulary gained from all sources, it is impossible to say what was learned in the classroom and what was learned outside of it. This is less the case with disadvantaged students, who learn mostly at school.

The fadeout problem. It is well-documented that IQ and academic gains made by disadvantaged children in Head Start and similar preschool programs fadeout by second grade. The problem isn’t with the preschool programs, writes Hirsch, but with what comes after; without a content-rich, cumulative curriculum in early elementary school, the gains are not solidified and are lost. There is a second fadeout phenomenon after middle school, for similar reasons. Additionally, there is a late fadeout of a related sort: an equity fadeout. The achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students at 13 has widened at age 17.

Hirsch cites Diane Ravitch’s classic essay “Tot Sociology” on the dilution of K-3 social studies by progressive educators starting in the 1920s and 1930s. Substantive content—myths, biographies, great events, etc.—were replaced by a less academic, less “subject-centered” curriculum centered around students’ experiences (home, school, neighborhood, etc.).

“Differentiated Instruction.” This was one of the favorite buzzwords while I was mentoring new English teachers (middle school and high school) at Lehman College. Under “DI” teachers are required to monitor the diverse activities of individual students and small groups, all of whom are at different levels and have different interests and preferred learning “modalities” (see Howard Gardner’s theory of “multiple intelligences”). Whole class activities, such as having all students read the same book and discuss it, are out. Hirsch comments, “In retrospect, the attempt to individualize the content of the language arts curriculum has been a quixotic idea that has put teachers under enormous pressure to achieve the impossible.” Indeed. Try doing differentiated learning day-in and day-out with a class of 20-30 students.

Thinking skills are domain specific. Research on the domain specificity of thinking skills was kicked off in the 1940s by an experiment by Dutch chess master and psychologist Adriaan de Groot. When chess masters and novices were briefly shown an actual game with 20 pieces left on the board, the masters were able to reproduce the entire 20-piece position whereas the novices could only remember the positions of 4 pieces. However, when both masters and novices were shown a board with 20 randomly placed pieces, masters and novices performed the same, correctly reproducing the position of only 4 pieces. De Groot concluded that the chess masters had not developed an all-purpose skill but instead drew on their deep knowledge of the game—stored in long-term memory—in reproducing the 20-piece position. Since de Groot conducted his experiment, his finding that thinking skills depend on domain knowledge has been reproduced and generalized by “an overwhelming body of evidence.”

Updating the Coleman Report. A 2010 reexamination of the data of the famous 1964 study of U.S. educational equity concluded that fully 40% of the difference in achievement among students was due to schools. In other words, schools did and do matter, not just family socio-economic status. Coleman was so disturbed by the original social deterministic interpretation of the report that he pursued further studies showing that Catholic schools, with their order and coherent curriculum, were doing an excellent job of educating students from disadvantaged backgrounds. He believed the data showed that improvements in school quality would make the most difference for the most disadvantaged students. (If you think about it, this is simply common sense.)

France’s “natural experiment.” The most surprising and persuasive chapter in the book examines what happened in France when the traditional national curriculum for primary schools was abandoned in favor of a supposedly more egalitarian and child-centered curriculum. The change had been brewing since the 1960s, but the 1989 Loi Jospin, named after the Minister of Education, fully decentralized the highly centralized education system—which dated from the French Revolution—and instituted sweeping curricular changes. Henceforth, instead of acquiring the same national culture, each child would go to a primary and middle school that conformed to the individual characteristics of the locality and the child. The new emphasis was to be on skills, not facts; in the earliest grades students were no longer to be taught by phonics but by the methode mixte or “balanced literacy,” which mixes in a little phonics to whole language reading instruction—in other words, France’s version of progressive education. Just a decade or so later, French educators and the public at large were alarmed “at the crisis of the school.” France had lost its preeminence among European—and international—school systems. Between 1987 and 2007 student performance on literacy tests at the end of fifth grade had declined significantly, with the biggest drops for the children of laborers and the unemployed. (Sweden, under a center-right government, and the UK, under Labour, undertook similar experiments in the same period, also with poor results, leading Hirsch to say that no political persuasion has the monopoly on bad education policy. The data for those two countries are insufficient for assessing the full scope of the decline.)

Solutions. Hirsch seems amenable to using the Common Core State Standards as a framework and building on those “isolated paragraphs” that call for a “rich coherent curriculum.” Expectedly, the main criticism of the book when it appeared was, in Publishers Weekly’s words, that “Hirsch sidesteps the question of who gets to decide what is communal knowledge.” This, of course, has been the main criticism of Hirsch’s reform program all along. At 88 Hirsch acknowledges that the traditional Core Knowledge plan might have seemed elitist when it appeared in the 1990s: “The aim of giving everybody entrée to the knowledge of power [his conception of the function of The List of what every culturally literate person should know] ran smack up against the aim of deprivileging those who are currently privileged.” Realistically, he now proposes a traditional curriculum with “new elements” added in and devised and implemented at the local level: “At the present time, setting forth and teaching a well-articulated local core curriculum is the only politically viable way to foster coherent knowledge buildup and curriculum-based tests, the only kind that can be productive and fair.” This is a realistic aim because the sort of national curriculum that existed in France pre-1989 could never be implemented in the United States given the long-standing tradition (and constitutional mandate) of state and local control of education and ever increasing disagreement over what should be in the curriculum. Another criticism of Why Knowledge Matters was that knowledge doesn’t matter anymore now that everything can be “looked up” on the Internet. The reviewers making the criticism apparently didn’t read the pages where Hirsch demolishes this idea. In short, it’s a bit like the Matthew Effect—the more you know about a subject, the more you absorb and get out of “looked up” material. Hirsch even makes some interesting claims about looking up new words, in an online or print dictionary, arguing that because this is often a distraction when reading, it’s better to rely on context clues; moreover, learning words in context assures that the correct meaning of a given word is learned.

Addendum: Some things I observed while observing/mentoring new teachers in classrooms in the Bronx:

*Classroom walls “decorated” with rubrics (Find the main idea, locate supporting details, etc.). How boring for adolescents!

*During Independent Reading time, students sitting alone, as per “differentiated instruction,” possibly reading books at their level and of personal interest, filling out worksheets with pro forma questions.

*Students sitting in small groups, desks facing each other, chitter-chatting so that the teacher cannot not be heard (while the school principal forbids moving desks into rows or even a horseshoe arrangement because it would destroy the sense of community).

*One day the new Workshop Model suddenly replaces the decades old- Developmental Lesson Plan in New York City classrooms, but an effective teacher, who has spent weeks establishing a routine with her classes, reassures her students that everything will be the same, only the names have changed (The “Do Now” will be called . . . , the “Instructional Objective” is now . . . .)

*A graduate student/new teacher tells me that she plans to write her Masters thesis on bias in the New York State Comprehensive English Regents Exam; a passage on a recent exam was about manatees and minority students in the South Bronx are unfamiliar with manatees (so was I at the time). I later read numerous articles by aspiring educators on bias against minority students and English Language Learners (ELL students) in standardized tests. I learn that the seminal 1995 study by Betty Hart and Todd Risley that documented the word gap between disadvantaged and advantaged students has been used to argue against emphasizing content knowledge in the curriculum and on tests. Even words and phrases such as “shopping mall,” “baby boom generation,” and “caller ID” are cultural terms what wouldn’t have been taught in school and whose inclusion on standardized tests is unfair to ELL students and some minority students.

Second Addendum: Diane Ravitch, Education after the Culture Wars (Daedalus, Summer 2002). Sorry it took me 15 years to come across this excellent and very prescient essay. In 1997 President Clinton entertained the idea of adopting national tests in reading and mathematics (in fourth and eighth grades, respectively; the tests never materialized). Ravitch was recruited to serve on the small National Assessment Governing Board, and in that capacity she became aware of the strict self-censorship being practiced by publishers and test makers in the early days of political correctness. The test passages she reviewed were so scrupulously edited for any traces of sexism, racism, and ageism, with any references to potentially controversial or disturbing topics deleted, that all that remained was boring pablum. A fable that ended with the moral “God helps those who help themselves” was rewritten as “People should try to work things out for themselves whenever possible” to avoid offending the non-religious (never mind offending lovers of the English language!). When she asked a publisher why there were no passages drawn from classic children’s literature, he answered that everything written prior to 1970 was too sexist and racist to consider. Is it any wonder, Ravitch asks, that students arrive at college not having read anything by Melville, Emerson, Cather, Conrad, Dickens, and other writers from the benighted period before 1970?

Worse, publishers’ anti-bias guidelines encourage writers and illustrators to fight stereotypes, depicting senior citizens jogging, women fixing roofs, and men taking care of children; boys must cry, girls must be physically strong, and Asian-Americans must be chubby and uninterested in math.

When the NAGB submitted a selection of recommended passages, many were considered too biased to meet the publishers’ guidelines. My favorite: “The bias panel proposed to drop a passage about a heroic blind mountain climber because it implied that people who are blind are worse off than sighted people and have a more difficult time facing dangers like mountain climbing.”

Where is all this leading? To the loss of a common culture that is the necessary underpinning of our democracy, Ravitch warns presciently, and to a widening of the gap between haves and have nots. Students who attend private schools or public schools in affluent suburbs will continue to read Shakespeare and other literary classics, but everyone else will be deprived of this rich heritage. They will be bored at school and go home to watch television and play videogames.