DATE: Thursday, September 4, 1997           TAG: 9709030013

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B11  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: OPINION 

SOURCE: William Rasberry

DATELINE: WASHINGTON                        LENGTH:   81 lines

AN EASY SOLUTION U.VA. PROF URGES SCHOOLS TO ADOPT UNIFORM STUDIES

``There is always an easy solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.''

The quote is from H.L. Mencken. But since the Sage of Baltimore has, in recent years, been exposed as a racist, anti-Semitic bigot, maybe it's OK to question his famous aphorism. In other words, I'm about to offer an easy solution.

The problem is American public education and the solution - mine only by adoption from E.D. Hirsch Jr. - is this: Decide precisely what information should be taught in each grade, then make sure every child learns it.

It's surely neat and plausible. Is it wrong? I don't think so. You don't think so, either. Even the people who are roundly ignoring it think it's good advice. You can hear teachers in some of America's worst schools singsonging about ``what every child should know and be able to do.''

Hirsch thinks his notion not only makes sense pedagogically but that it would do so much to close the educational gap between black and white children that he calls it ``the new frontier in the struggle for civil rights.''

Listen to him:

``In France, disadvantaged children enter a school system that has explicit requirements for each grade. Each child's progress in meeting those requirements can be monitored in detail, so that extra help can be quickly provided when needed. Under these circumstances, disadvantaged children in France soon catch up.''

Disadvantaged American children, it goes without saying, tend not to catch up. Indeed the learning gap between rich and poor widens for every year of school. Everybody knows this, of course, but the tendency is to attribute it to ``home conditions.''

Hirsch attributes it to the fact that virtually every school within every school district - and often every classroom within a school - has different ideas about what ought to be taught, with what texts, and when. As a result, no teacher can assume what knowledge her pupils bring to her classroom. It's worse, of course, for children who transfer in from other schools, or other districts.

For teachers who think they are doing what Hirsch advocates, he offers excerpts from two sets of school district guidelines for teaching history to first-graders:

The child shall be able to identify and explain the significance of national symbols, major holidays, historical figures and events. Identify beliefs and value systems of specific groups. Recognize the effects of science and technology on yesterday's and today's societies.

That's the first. Here's the second:

Introduce ancient civilizations and the variety of religions in the world, using maps of the ancient world. Specifics: EGYPT: King Tutankhamen; Nile; Pyramids, Mummies; Animal Gods; Hieroglyphics. BABYLONIA: Tigris and Euphrates; Hammurabi. JUDAISM: Moses; Passover; Chanukah. CHRISTIANITY: Jesus. ARABIA: Mohammed; Allah; Islam. . . .

You see the difference, of course. The first is so vague (``Identify beliefs and value systems of specific groups'') as to make it nearly impossible to give a failing grade to any child who remembers a few names or a phrase or two from the class work. The second is content specific and eminently testable.

Hirsch, a University of Virginia professor who runs the Core Knowledge Foundation in Charlottesville, is devoted to content specificity. He has argued for years in behalf of fact-based teaching, contending that ``learning how to learn'' is nonsense.

What has any of this to do with the learning gaps between black and white, rich and poor? In his paper, ``Fairness and Core Knowledge,'' from which these quotes are taken, Hirsch says:

``Detailed guidelines (are of) great value . . . to disadvantaged students and those who try to remedy their educational deficiencies. Explicit guides enable tutors to focus on the specific knowledge that students need in order to attain grade level. Absent such specific guides, disadvantaged students and their tutors in this country play a game whose rules are never clearly defined. Soon the unlucky are consigned to slow tracks from which they can never enter the mainstream of learning or of society.''

Sorry, H.L., but from where I sit, that's neat, plausible - and dead on the money.

MEMO: Mr. Raspberry writes for The Washington Post, 1150 15th St., N.W.,

Washington, D.C. 20071.

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