This interview focuses on a chapter from A Nation at Risk +40, a report by the Hoover Education Success Initiative (HESI) that looks back at the birth, struggles, and future of the modern school reform movement. (Download the publication here.)
Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who focuses on K–12 education, specifically curriculum development. His chapter in A Nation at Risk +40 makes the case for a focus on higher-quality curriculum as a lower-cost, high-impact means of boosting student achievement. He spoke with Chris Herhalt about curriculum development and why it is not discussed by leading education reformers.
Chris Herhalt: In your chapter, you recall a time when former DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee said to you, “The last thing we’re going to do is get wrapped up in curriculum battles.” Why would she shy away from changing curriculum?
Robert Pondiscio: I use that story not to criticize Michelle Rhee, whom I admire, but to paint a picture of the low standing of curriculum as a reform lever. I was a South Bronx public school teacher for several years. When I left the classroom, I had this idea—because I’d been in the media world—that I’m going to take my communication skills and apply them to what I’ve learned in the classroom to make a difference for kids. And the primary lever that I thought needed pulling was curriculum. So it surprised me then, and, frankly, even to this day, that we don’t take curriculum more seriously.
Michelle Rhee was very mainstream in her thoughts at the time. She was arguably the highest-profile ed reformer in the country and had a reputation for being outspoken and combative. So that, to me, was emblematic of the way reformers thought of curriculum, which is to say they didn’t think about it at all. Or they did, it was too hot to handle, even for the toughest-minded, most thick-skinned of them.
Herhalt: You argue that we’re never going to get a sufficiently large pool of really high-quality educators. So, you say that curriculum reforms will get better results out of the pool of educators we have. Is that in itself controversial?
Pondiscio: It’s less controversial than I imagined. I’ve said this sotto voce over the years, and the older I get, the more willing I am to just lean into it, up to and including when I gave testimony in front of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee a few weeks ago. As I like to say, you go to school with the teachers you have, not the teachers you wish you had. It’s just math, right? If you need four million of anybody doing anything, a number that large means a normal distribution of human talent.
I think you still have to take great care in how you say that. I was a teacher. I don’t want to suggest for a second that I think teachers are less than capable or cannot be trusted to make curricular decisions. If I said that, no one would listen, and rightfully so. The point is, we’ve made this job too damn hard for the teachers we have. And when you put these outsize cognitive demands on virtually anybody—to be both lesson designer and lesson deliverer, to be diagnostician and interventionist—you push the job beyond the capacity of even the cognitive elite. So, to assume that you’re going to get that from four million ordinary men and women is quite literally, a plan to fail.
Any reasonable chance at improving outcomes for kids requires taking a good hard look at the demands that we make of the four million men and women that we have in our classrooms.
Having said that, there’s another factor. I’m an unrepentant disciple of E. D. Hirsch Jr. I’m quite persuaded by his work that says there is a body of knowledge that writers and speakers in a language community assume their readers and listeners know. That makes language a kind of shorthand. When we all are working with the same basic set of vocabulary and background knowledge, language proficiency is fluid. But when you assume that curriculum is taken care of, when you assume we all share the same array of mental furniture, as I like to say, then you’re mistaken. We cannot assume in a diverse country with many cultures, all kinds of education levels, et cetera, that we all are working with the same set of background knowledge and the same volume of vocabulary. It has to be taught in schools.
So, when you leave that up to individual teachers, they make bad decisions—not because they are untalented or ill-equipped, but because we’re valorizing the wrong thing. In other words, if we’re saying, “It doesn’t matter what kids are reading as long as they’re reading,” that has a surface plausibility. But this is how you end up with, as I like to say, getting the rainforest four times and the Bill of Rights never, and then wondering how come kids never learned this in school. Well, it’s because it was never made explicit that teachers should teach it.
Herhalt: Do you think we need to make a pathway in teachers’ colleges for a curriculum design or instructional development design major, something focused completely on developing and assessing curricula?
Pondiscio: Well, call this what you will—arrogance, professional pride—but it is about the most common thing in the world for every teacher to look at a boxed curriculum—and let the record show that I’m making air quotes when I say “boxed curriculum,” because that’s a term of derision—and say, “Oh, there’s no boxed curriculum that works for my students.” It’s amazing how every teacher in America thinks every published curriculum is terrible, but there’s this multibillion-dollar industry dedicated to creating products that are terrible. So maybe we’ve got the wrong people doing these jobs?
I’m making fun, but I think you take my point, which is that there’s an assumption that every published curriculum is either bad, inappropriate, doesn’t work, or needs to be modified. Some are, but I think we overstate it. What is the saying about the fox and the hedgehog? The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing. Well, like my hero and mentor E. D. Hirsch Jr., the one big thing I know is this idea that language proficiency rests on a presumed body of knowledge. So, the “one big thing” that we should know in education is not to take that for granted, and to make it our business to ensure that all children have access to it, and not to assume they already have it or hope that they will pick it up somewhere.
Once you see that one big thing, that changes the relationship of K–12 education to curriculum. Then it becomes an essential task to ensure that there is a coherent, cumulative curriculum.
When I worked for the Core Knowledge Foundation, which Hirsch founded, and I would talk to parents and policy makers about this—“There’s this thing called the Core Knowledge sequence. Here’s what you learn in kindergarten. Here’s what you learn in first grade, second grade,” and so on—the most common response was, “Well, don’t all schools do that?” And the answer is no, they don’t. There’s an assumption that the content of elementary education in this country has been more or less decided, and now all we need to talk about is who’s teaching it and how. Education reform has missed this by valorizing teacher quality, and charters, and testing and accountability, all of which I’m fine with, by the way. But we are assuming that we have a process problem, while we remain incurious about the product.
This is all a long way of answering your question of whether we should have specialties in educational training: You’re going to be a teacher, you’re going to be a curriculum developer, and never the twain shall meet? That’s a level of sophistication that we’re not at yet.
Herhalt: Are there things that states and the federal government can do to encourage the improvement of curriculum development and implementation?
Pondiscio: I would say states more than the feds. One of the big differences between the United States and most other advanced nations is they all have a national curriculum and we don’t. National curricula are very common in the rest of the world, but there’s this pesky little thing called the US Constitution that forbids us from having one. Would it help if we had a national curriculum the way England or the Netherlands has? Sure, but it’s not going to happen, so it doesn’t make sense to waste anyone’s time arguing for that.
Common Core was misperceived as being a national curriculum. It wasn’t. It was just standards, and standards aren’t curriculum. I don’t want to bore you with the details. But if you look at the sturm und drang that greeted Common Core, it should sober up anybody who thinks that the day will ever come. The sun will go out before we have a national curriculum in this country, so let’s just put that aside.
So could states have a state curriculum? They can and often do, but it’s also a custom more honored in the breach because of the culture of teaching. Take English language arts (ELA) standards, which are famously not content standards; they are process standards. They’re agnostic or silent on what kids should know. They describe the skills that should be developed, but there’s a big gap between “here’s what kids should be able to do” and “here’s the content that enables them to be able to do it.”
States and standards writers are reluctant to say, as Hirsch and others have said for decades: “Hey, kids need to know shapes and colors. They need to know land forms. They need to know these things about science, and these things about art, and music.” Because we are reluctant to be prescriptive about content. Think back to that Michelle Rhee anecdote—“the last thing I’m going to do is dictate content”—and we are assuming that districts, grade-level teams, or individual teachers will somehow magically work together to ensure there are no gaps and repetitions, to ensure that a child’s education is coherent and cumulative, and that they gather over time this body of knowledge. That simply doesn’t happen.
States could take up this work, and they should also put in place policies and procedures to ensure that it gets taught. All roads lead back to curriculum. It’s not enough to hand teachers a scope and sequence or a set of standards and say, “OK, make it your own,” because sometimes we prioritize the wrong things.
Herhalt: Earlier, you said teachers look at box curricula with derision. Yet, in your chapter, you mention they’re on Google and Pinterest, grabbing whatever they can find.
Pondiscio: Teachers have been acculturated to worship at the altar of student engagement. “If I want my students to be strong readers, I have to choose topics that are of interest to them, that reflect their backgrounds, their home lives, their culture, their experiences that are engaging to them. And by cultivating that enjoyment and that relevance, that’s how I’m going to turn them into a good reader.” And that idea is intuitive, obvious, seductive, and incorrect—because it assumes that reading is this transferable skill like riding a bike or throwing a ball: that once I learn how to ride a bike, I can ride any bike.
You and I as literate, educated Americans are swimming in background knowledge and vocabulary that we take for granted in this conversation, and we assume everybody else is swimming in it, too. It’s the most difficult thing in the world to imagine what it’s like to not have that, which is the context for a lot of our disadvantaged learners.
I’ve talked elsewhere about how if you went to your pediatrician because your child had a headache, and you saw him or her Googling “headache remedies” and then homebrewing pharmaceuticals over the sink, you’d run out of there. But that’s almost what we’re doing with teaching. We encourage teachers to believe no curriculum is ever good enough. The teacher has to do it himself or herself. No other professional works that way, expecting its practitioners not just to use their tools effectively, but literally create their own tools.
So, in my mind, you would be more effective—and frankly I think find the job more satisfying—if there were fewer demands on your time, that you taught a curriculum, and then your real value-add would be diagnosis and intervention. And I’m not pretending this is an easy thing to do. I think it would be a profound shift in the culture of teaching, but I want to say to teachers: “There are certain things only you can do. Only you can study student work. Only you can intervene and give feedback. Only you can develop relationships with your students and their families. We’ve got to take something off your plate, and that’s going to be the curriculum, not because we necessarily think the lessons you are ginning up are bad, but because someone else can do that work. No one else can do those other things that I just described.”
