Hiding in Plain Sight

Abstract

We could, if we wished, usher in an exceptional era of public education simply by employing the most powerful and obvious tactics and strategies that we already know will work. We have ignored, subverted, or postponed these priorities for the past 30 years of so-called reform. This failure, more than anything, explains why student learning as measured by the most legitimate assessments--NAEP, PISA, and TIMSS--has barely budged. The purpose of this column, my for Kappan, is to champion this things first approach. They are those few, straightforward elements and their corollaries that promise to reverse the trend of tepid improvement. Without a doubt, they will have an immediate and decisive impact on the proportion of students who would be ready for college, careers, and citizenship, in virtually in any school. First, we need to massively increase the amount of purposeful reading, writing, and discussion students engage in every day, across the disciplines. Next, we must create and ensure the implementation of decent, coherent, content-rich curriculum in every course. And third, we must ensure that teachers consistently observe the most fundamental elements of a good lesson, which we have known for decades. These will have a profound impact because, despite their unparalleled leverage for improving levels of learning, they are grossly and manifestly under implemented. We maintain current levels of education attainment, such as they are, in the relative absence of these most powerful practices. Few professions are in so propitious a situation. Even reasonable efforts to honestly address these priorities would have immediate and positive effects. There are precedents for swift, even startling improvements in other spheres. Last year, a doctor realized that the lives of thousands of patients hinged on something stunningly simple: the faithful implementation of the most obvious but critical medical procedures. Gathering representatives from a large network of hospitals, he implored them to set a goal to save 100,000 lives in 18 months by unswervingly focusing on the consistent implementation of simple practices known by the entire hospital staff, but consistently practiced by only a few. The result: 122,000 lives were saved, 20% higher than their original goal (Heath & Heath, 2011). Is similarly dramatic, near-term progress possible for schools? Most of us know individual teachers and schools who have made large, fast gains without cutting-edge gadgets, methods, or any of the perennial parade of new programs. A teacher who taught right down the road from my home was singlehandedly responsible for enabling his entire high school--in one year--to make the largest gains in the state on the English language arts exit exam. I watched him teach: He did nothing magical or extraordinary; his preferred technologies were a whiteboard and an overhead projector. He succeeded simply by always (if imperfectly) ensuring a decent curriculum, sound lessons, and plenty of reading and writing--every day. To better grasp the opportunity offered by the back-to-fundamentals approach, let's examine each of these priorities individually, while being fully aware that they're mutually reinforcing. (In future columns, I'll write about each of these facets and their corollaries.) Curricula Robert Marzano's metanalytic studies indicate that a decent, guaranteed curriculum--one that's actually taught by all teachers of the same course--may be the single largest in-school factor that affects learning. No innovation, however sexy or research-based, can overcome the havoc wrought by its opposite: the inevitable hodgepodge of self-selected topics that result in the absence of clear, content-rich curriculum. Moreover, as David Conley has discovered, such common curriculum means very little without clearly specified parameters for how much reading and writing will be required in each course. …