Unwillingly to school

National Review, March 2, 1992 by Chester E. Finn, Jr.

BARBARA Lerner's provocative essay ["How Shakespeare Can Save Our Kids," Jan. 20] contains food for thought, but the meal is not so well cooked as we've come to expect from her, and some of its ingredients turn out to be ersatz.

We are accustomed to taking Miss Lerner seriously when she turns her formidable intellect and deft pen to the causes and remedies of education melt-down. Whether she is looking at the depredations of judicial activism, the efficacy of testing as a reform strategy, the baneful consequences of modern educators' obsession with student "self esteem," or a dozen other issues, she has generally shown herself to be well informed, clear eyed, and sensible.

This time, alas, she didn't maintain that standard. Though there are some worthwhile insights to be found in it, her analysis proceeds from a fundamental misreading of the Bush/Alexander "America 2000" strategy, through a major distortion of my own (and Diane Ravitch's) writings about education, to a policy recommendation that manages to be quaint, shrewd, and naive all at once.

Miss Lerner states that Education Secretary Lamar Alexander's reform plan centers on the notion of a "national curriculum" and that such a curriculum would consist exclusively of "information," i.e. factual knowledge. Both suggestions are erroneous. America 2000 does propose that (voluntary) national standards be set in the five core subjects enumerated in the goals previously established by the President and governors (English, math, science, history, and geography), and that a new (voluntary) national examination system be created at grades four, eight, and twelve to track the progress of children and schools in relation to those standards.

National standards and exams are not a national curriculum, however. Standards say what result should be produced, not how to go about it. Running a mile in four minutes is an example of a standard. So is getting your cholesterol below 200, or your new car's gas mileage above 25. None of those standards says what to do in order to achieve the desired outcome.

The same is true of education, as any accurate rendering of America 2000 makes clear. An English standard might say that twelfth graders should be able inter alia to write competent essays. A math standard might say they should be capable of handling quadratic equations. Perhaps the history standard will say they need to be able to contrast the causes and consequences of at least two wars in which the country has been involved. Such standards embody outcomes, not detailed prescriptions of what books are to be read, what lesson plans followed, what discussions held in class, what topics taken up in what sequence, etc.

This is no trivial distinction. Even in England, which has lately embraced an explicit "national curriculum," wide latitude remains for schools and teachers. The "law does not require specific textbooks or teaching methods," Susan Chira reported in a recent New York Times account. "Rather than listing books, the curriculum says students should read a range of fiction, poetry, literary nonfiction, and drama' . . ." Nor, the same article makes plain, have British teachers found such homogeneity of outcomes deeply objectionable: "[S]urveys have consistently found that teachers welcomed the continuity, higher standards and sense of priorities the national curriculum brought."

And that's under a compulsory system. Few observers of U.S. education expect any national standards we set to be mandatory. That's not to say some wouldn't prefer to go farther. E. D. Hirsch, for one, has been urging a full-fledged national core curriculum for elementary schools. I'm still torn myself, agreeing with Hirsch that there is much that all Americans should know in common with one another if the unum of our society is not to yield entirely to the forces of pluribus; but also agreeing with James Q. Wilson and others that any serious effort toward a national curriculum is apt to fall into the hands of extremists, interest groups, and the foolish-but-ardent denizens of the education establishment.

The Bush-Alexander plan is clearly and unambiguously opposed to a national curriculum, and Miss Lerner does it an injustice by claiming otherwise. It also needs to be noted that the standards (and exams) envisioned in America 2000 are not obsessed with factual information in the way that she seems to think. There is no basis for her assertion that Alexander's thinking has been heavily influenced by Hirsch's notion of "cultural literacy."

To the contrary. Whenever I've heard Secretary Alexander give a spontaneous example of the kind of "standards" he has in mind, he cites the work of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). What's noteworthy about the standards developed by this group (and dismaying to other math experts such as John Saxon) is their down-playing of "math facts," computational skills, drills, and practice. Instead they stress math concepts and the solution of complex problems--the very kinds of things Miss Lerner favors. It's a far cry from the preoccupation with "information per se" that she--to my bafflement--asserts is the driving spirit of America 2000.