Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 18, 1993 TAG: 9304200387
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: B-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: E.D. HIRSCH JR.
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
THE CRISIS IN K-12
RECENT debate prompted by a report from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia has focused on "change and improvement" in higher education. The report's call for renewed emphasis on teaching must be applauded.But this report is dangerously narrow in ways I have not heard mentioned in the high-decibel reactions to date. I am alarmed by its lack of vision and its unsound assumptions about Virginia's system of education as a whole.
The top educational priority for Virginia and for the nation is to lift all of our high-school graduates to a competitive international standard. We are far from that now. When we do reach that goal for high-school graduates, then those who go on to college will require higher, not lower, standards in higher education. The SCHEV report seems so concerned with attacking elitism and supposedly pampered university professors that, despite including the word "improvement" in its title, it spends little time on the need to improve the whole system of education in Virginia. Higher education is an indissoluble part of that system.
The state council's report quotes with approval the following aims for higher education in Virginia: to develop students' "mathematical, scientific and technological competence" and their "competence in public speaking, writing, listening and seeing the world around them." I am distressed at the blithe acceptance of such minimal, sub-collegiate aims as appropriate for the college level. The list identifies competences that students in other developed nations have achieved by 10th, certainly by 12th, grade.
Not all of Virginia's high-school graduates will go to college. Yet all Virginians can and must achieve the above-listed competence by the end of the 12th grade if they are to secure good jobs for themselves and create a high-performing economy for the state and the nation. To accept such minimal aspirations for college education makes the higher-education council's rhetoric about meeting the challenges of the new age ring hollow.
Even more distressing, in light of our need to meet a world standard, are the report's comments about college teaching. The report says:
"Students who come to higher education have become an increasingly diverse group. They lack a common culture, and often a common set of skills on which a teacher can draw in presenting new material. The same diversities that are so stimulating - those of gender, race, age and ethnicity - also make teaching in traditional formats very difficult."
To solve this problem, the report recommends "[r]econceiving the entire enterprise: by teaching differently, by using faculty time differently, and by taking advantage of modern technology."
Alas, these recommendations are based on gravely mistaken assumptions about both learning and teaching. Even with the most imaginative use of faculty time and technology, it is impossible to teach chemistry well to a group of students who have widely varied preparation for that subject, ranging from superb to totally inadequate. To accept quietly the idea that remediation in basic skills should remain a college-level task is to accept permanently a situation that we Virginians must insist upon getting fixed - fast.
Harold Stevenson and James Stigler have written the most important and deeply researched book on American education to appear in recent years, "The Learning Gap" (1992). Its data show that when you try to teach groups of students who have very uneven academic preparation, the result will be either neglect of the ill-prepared or, perhaps worse, neglect of the prepared. Despite the council's stated hopes to solve this problem through technology and innovative methods, no successful teaching techniques can be devised that contravene the basic law of learning behind the findings of Stevenson and Stigler: At each stage of learning, effective education depends upon adequate preparation; knowledge builds upon knowledge.
Stevenson and Stigler warn particularly against confusing diversity of academic preparation with cultural diversity - a mistake that the council's report glaringly makes. "The Learning Gap" makes the opposite point: It is diversity of academic preparation, not diversity of culture, that is the chief cause of our poor educational performance compared with other nations.
Americans who support Head Start already understand that children should come to kindergarten "ready to learn." We need to take the logical next step and apply the principle of readiness-to-learn for first grade, second grade, third grade, and so on right up the academic ladder to the Ph.D.
The best education systems throughout the world have defined with great explicitness high basic standards of achievement for each level of education. Our system cannot achieve secure, cumulative progress for all students until we also define very explicit grade-by-grade standards for all students.
It is ultimately condescending to students who come from diverse cultural backgrounds to assume that they must inevitably lack the "common set of skills" required for readiness to learn academic subjects. In my own school-reform efforts, I have seen elementary schools in the innermost inner city, schools with highly diverse and disadvantaged student populations, attain academic levels beyond their more advantaged suburban counterparts.
We Virginians must not accept, as the state council's report implicitly does, the status quo with regard to the pre-collegiate preparation of students. Rather, in cooperation with elementary schools, middle schools and high schools, our colleges and universities must demand that students be given the pre-collegiate preparation they need in order to do college-level work. The better our K-12 education becomes, the greater need we will have for enhancing, not compromising, the quality of higher education.
For complex historical reasons, our universities are currently our only educational institutions that meet world-class standards. The state council is right to ask colleges and universities to devote themselves more vigorously to teaching. But rather than compromise the quality of higher education - the one element of our system currently competitive - it seems wiser to shore it up while, as quickly as we can, we raise the quality of K-12 education.
The danger in the approach taken by the council's report is that it ignores the hard realities of international education-standards, pointing Virginia in the direction neither of fairness nor improvement, but of mediocrity.
E.D. Hirsch Jr. is Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English at the University of Virginia and author of the best-selling book, "Cultural Literacy."