ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, January 17, 1997 TAG: 9701170087
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOEL TURNER STAFF WRITER
The Roanoke County School Board is sending the wrong message on Virginia's new academic standards and tests for students, Thomas Leggette says.
By protesting the testing schedule, the board is saying that students shouldn't be expected to retain a common body of cultural knowledge in core subjects, he said.
"We're opposing reform even before we see the tests," said Leggette, a board member who disagrees with his colleagues. "I think it's inappropriate for us to be taking a position at this point."
The board wants the state to adopt a plan that will allow students to be tested on each course or subject when it is finished, instead of two or three years later in some cases.
Board member Jerry Canada objects so strongly to the testing schedule that he said he might refuse to allow his daughter, a student at Northside High, to take the tests.
"I don't think it's fair to our children to test them on material they covered three years earlier," Canada said. "This is not a level playing field for our students."
Three other board members agreed and voted for a resolution that has been sent to the state Board of Education.
"I think testing is good, and I have no problem with accountability," said board member Marion Roark. "But we have to be realistic, and I don't think we should test students three years after they've taken a course."
Students will be tested in grades three, five, eight and 11 in English, mathematics, science and social studies. The tests will cover content in each of the core subjects in the grades between tests. The 11th grade tests, for instance, will cover material that the students studied in the ninth, 10th and 11th grades.
Leggette said his colleagues' position runs counter to E.D. Hirsch Jr.'s argument in his best-selling book, "Cultural Literacy," about the need for people to have a shared body of knowledge to communicate effectively and participate in a democratic society.
Hirsch, a nationally known English professor at the University of Virginia, contends that schools should emphasize tough, content-based courses that challenge students academically
"Hirsch's goal is to reform education and make sure that students have this core knowledge," Leggette said. "We're opposing change even before we know what the tests will be like - and how the students will do on them."
Virginia's new academic standards reflect Hirsch's educational philosophy: They outline the content and knowledge that students are expected to acquire in each grade.
Leggette said board members may be underestimating the students' ability to retain the information they learn. He said the tests may cover broad knowledge and not details from the courses.
Hirsch has become a leading critic of the national trend in education that focuses on theories such as teaching the "whole child" and meeting children's developmental needs instead of subject-based instruction.
He claims that the most effective school systems in the world, such as those in France, Germany and Japan, focus on teaching a coherent, specific and shared body of knowledge.
American schools are failing to do this because of an outmoded educational philosophy that emphasizes the learning process over content, he said.
Too many schools have a curriculum that speaks in general terms of vaguely defined skills, processes and attitudes, such as "analyzing patterns and data," rather than core knowledge, he said. For him, the memorization of facts, standardized curriculum and rigorous testing are not negatives, as some educators contend.
Leggette said the School Board should wait at least until it sees the tests and how students perform on them before it protests.
"I don't think the state has bad motives in this," he said.
Hirsch has written a new book - "The Schools We Need, And Why We Don't Have Them" - that argues that schools need to emphasize a traditional, content-based curriculum.
Some educators say Hirsch over-emphasizes facts and cultural literary rather than thinking skills. But he said that children and especially disadvantaged children are harmed and prevented from developing thinking skills when they are offered no core of knowledge to build on.
"Just as it takes money to make money, it takes knowledge to make knowledge," he said. Children who come to school lacking a shared cultural vocabulary with others "fall further and further behind," he said.
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