<html><body>American Enterprise Institute October 16, 2006 [Edited transcript from audio tapes] <TABLE cellSpacing=1 cellPadding=1 width="100%" border=0> <TBODY> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>3:15 p.m.</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Registration</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>3:30</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Presentation:</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>E. D. Hirsch, author of The Knowledge Deficit</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText>Discussants:</DIV></DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Lynne V. Cheney, AEI</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Abigail Thernstrom, Manhattan Institute</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Moderator:</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Frederick M. Hess, AEI</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>5:00</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Adjournment</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE> Proceedings: Frederick M. Hess [moderator]: Okay, we will go ahead and get started. I would like to welcome all of you here today at AEI for a conversation around Don Hirsch new book, The Knowledge Deficit. I am sure everybody here is quite familiar with Don s body of work and does not need a whole lot of gesticulating from me by way of introduction. Don is somebody who was not trained as an education thinker, kind of stumbled into this after well long in a highly successful scholarly career. It was late 70s or the 80s, really Don? Asked these kinds of dangerous questions one asks like, How come our kids do not seem to know as much as they should? And it is never a question that really helps to ask because it takes you all kinds of places that will get in the way of a comfortable scholarly career. It resulted in one best selling book which was his 86th book, or his 87th book, Cultural Literacy by Houghton Mifflin. Don is also the author, of course, of The Schools We Need and Why We Do Not Have Them. One of the things interesting about Don s work, both with the Core Knowledge Foundation and with the effort to insure that kids are learning content and to insure that kids are learning the skills they need, is that he is one of those folks who really does not fit comfortably in any of the traditional partisan or ideological divides that folks like to try to draw in the education debates. Folks across the spectrum agree or disagree with Don about various pieces of the curricula solutions. I think that is a testament to the fact that he really is a path breaker and a pioneer in so much of his work that he is pushing. Anyway, today, he is going to kick us off. He is going to speak about his new volume, which is available outside in the foyer for those of you who have not had the chance to read it yet. And Don is going to speak about 20 minutes. He will then be followed up by two discussants who are each themselves among the more influential contemporary thinkers on education and the challenges of education, curriculum and reform. To my immediate right is Lynne Cheney, Senior Fellow at AEI; she focuses on education policy and standards. Before joining AEI, Mrs. Cheney was chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities for seven years from 1986 to 1993. Her books include Telling the Truth and Kings of the Hill. Everybody knows she is actually probably for about the past five or seven years the best selling author at AEI. She has built something of an industry out of writing children s books that sell like hotcakes; such books as A is for Abigail, When Washington Crossed the Delaware, and America: A Patriotic Primer published with publishing houses that many of us wish we could actually find a way to publish with, Simon and Schuster and such. And Lynne will be speaking third. And speaking before her is Abby Thernstrom, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York. Abby is also a member of the Massachusetts Board of Education and the vice-chair of the US Commission on Civil Rights. She also serves on the Board of Advisors at the US Election Assistance Commission. Abby, along with her husband, Steve, who is a Harvard historian that many of you are familiar with, are the co-authors of No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, which was named by both the LA Times and the American School Board Journal as one of the best books of 2003. Again, the way it is going to work is Don is going to speak for about 20 to kick us off. And then Abby and Lynne will each speak for about 10 12 minutes just offering some thoughts and reactions or less or longer, if you prefer; we are flexible about these things here. At that point we will open it up for conversation among the panelists for a bit and then we will open it up to the crowd. We will have a couple of folks -- I think Lauren and Julie will be circulating with microphones. I would ask that you wait for the mic when you are going to ask a question. Please do us a favor of just identifying yourself by name and affiliation since not everyone here knows each other. And I will remind you again - please actually ask questions. We do have that DC habit on occasion of offering three-and-four-minute diatribes punctuated by a rise in voice at the end supposedly to signify a question. But let us actually try to ask questions. Anyway with that, Don why don t you go ahead and get it started? Eric Donald Hirsch: Thanks, Rick. When you talked about when I started on this road in education reform, it reminded me of one of the events that happened in either 87 or 88, and Lynne can tell me which. When I was on a radio show with Lynne Cheney, just the two of us in Rosenberg in Chicago, right& ? I also have some fond memories of going out with Abby Thernstrom and Steve to a political science conference which I did not belong in. But, anyway, kindly took me and it was a lot of fun. Now I have written out what I want to say because I want to stay right within the 20 minutes with this distinguished panel. I am going to deal with three contexts of this book; Rick asked me to set the context for this recent book, which is about reading - that is the focus. Of course, the implications are supposed to be broader than reading. Today s Washington Post, I noticed, had a comment, which is typical, a sympathetic comment on the opinion expressed, that there is so much time spend on reading and math, not enough on other subjects. Of course, the theme I guess you could summarize, the theme of The Knowledge Deficit as being, well, reading is not a subject except in the two& the period that you need, urgently need to decode words, to turn them into sounds, fluently and accurately, except for that, which is a subject of course, reading is not a subject. And it is perfectly useless to involve oneself in these formal, structural exercises which are so boring to the children and so futile in results; which as you know reading scores have not responded to that initiative. Now the main focus of the book is, of course, on the enhancing of students verbal abilities, which are highly correlated with other academic achievements, including achievement in science and even in math. And with respect to verbal abilities, there are two notable achievement gaps in American education; the first is a gap between our students reading levels and the reading levels of students in other countries. On that measure, we lag behind 16 countries. Those are the countries we are known to [indiscernible]. The second reading gap occurs within the United States, as you all well know, between demographic groups. It is a big fairness gap and on this measure, also, we lag behind many other countries, 20 of them according to the account of the OECD. One point of the book is that we can do a lot better in narrowing both of these gaps. Let me also say more generally that results from educational reforms have not been encouraging. I would grant everyone here, many of whom are interested in the charter school movement, that the recent analyses, which say that the charter schools are not doing any better than the public schools may, indeed, be flawed, but it is pretty clear that the results from charter schools are not as good as we hoped. We have also been disappointed in reforms meant to improve quality and equity of schooling - the State Standards Movement, the No Child Left Behind law. For example, if you take a look at reading again, the focus of book - the results of the No Child Left Behind law and others have been meager, schools now under the pressure of that law spend 90 to 120 minutes everyday on language arts using mainly the how-to approach, which I suggested is not going to work. And the result of all this intensive activity has been an improvement in decoding, that is, in fourth grade reading scores but, to everyone s disappointment, negligible progress in later grades. A few weeks ago New York State reported a significant drop-off in reading scores in grade six and thereafter, which is simply a pattern repeated in other states, the College Board reported another decline in 12th grade reading scores. And I would say, all told, that American education reform efforts from all quarters, ever since as a nation at risk in 1983, have had a much smaller impact than we would have expected, given the time, the money, the effort we have expended. Now in sketching the reasons for these disappointments, in the place of curriculum, I would say, in helping to overcome them, my book provides some historical context to explain the current situation and I am going to summarize that context slightly differently than in the book here because I think I can do it briefly. I have a chart, which I made with in the internet. Many of you know this chart; it is called tracking the SAT. This is 1963 up here and this is 2003 here, and it is by the way one of the most important charts in American education. I think it is a pattern that we should keep in mind. It would be good if we just had it up more consistently in discussions of education and education reform. Since 1980, the overall pattern of reading skill of 12th graders has remained within a very narrow range, a low very narrow range, and never coming close to the levels once achieved in the 60s and the 50s. Educators claim that the precipitous drop-off -- well, you all know what the explanation is, more low-income children started taking the SAT test. But this explanation has been shown to be inadequate because high-income children also fell off in that period; there was a succinct argument by Christopher Jencks on this point many years ago when he pointed out that the state of Iowa, 98 percent white and middle class in those days also had the same kind of decline in verbal skills. So it could not have been a drop-off just from low-income students; that was not an adequate explanation of why this precipitous drop occurred. Well, Jencks said it was because of changes in school instruction, in what was actually going on in the schools, and what did happen then to school instruction in the 1950s. I say 1950s because it does take a few years before an educational theory yields its full benefit or its full liability, and we need to know what those 12th graders were doing in elementary schools so we have to look at what happened in the 50s. Basically, what happened in the 50s was that after the war, a whole new cohort of teachers who shared strong ideas about curriculum and about what should be done in school, and a series of textbooks that reflected those ideas, came into the schools. We all know these textbooks you can examine; they have been watered down. You can see the pattern of watering down, as one of the points Jencks made in his commentary on the SATs. So in the 1950s, what was this new idea? The chief feature was its opposition to subject-centered education and its opposition to a grade-by-grade curriculum set up in advance& contents set up in advance. That was the chief battle cry. I think the most succinct evidence for what was going on is an essay written in 1939 by Isaac Kandel. He was a brilliant education professor at Teachers College who wrote this essay, which, to me, crystallized what was happening in those days to American education. Since the early years of the 20th century, an argument had been going on, and here is his succinct description of it: Rejecting emphasis on formal subject matter, [indiscernible] began to worship at the altar of the child. Children, they said, should be allowed to grow in accordance with their needs and interests. Knowledge is valuable only as it is acquired in a real situation. The teacher must be present to provide the proper environment for experiencing but must not intervene, except to guide and advice. There must be nothing fixed in advance and subjects must not be set out to be learned. No reference was ever made to the curriculum or its content. The full weight of the progressive attack is against subject matter, and the planned organization of curriculum in terms of subjects. I put that graph and that quote in conjunction with each other because that group, of course, won the argument; Kandel lost. Anyone who doubts his point about set curriculum being the key issue in these debates can make a fundamental test. When an objection against the particular content curriculum is made - gosh, I have heard them all - ask yourself, is that objection followed up by a counter proposal for a definite curriculum, an alternative that removes the supposed objection, like, It is not multi-cultural enough, so, okay, what about having a curriculum that is multi-cultural? In my experience this never happens. If you examine state or district language art standards you will find a specific content is left up for grabs; the point of this is that the strange fact is not owing to indifference. It is the historical result of the doctrine that there shall be no set curriculum, which explains, to my mind, why the State Standards Movement has been - in most states anyway, except in Massachusetts in some respects - so toothless and ineffectual in enhancing verbal abilities. Most of us take the word standards to include the idea of guides to content. But the word standards is often a way of avoiding detailed content. As I say, if you look at the language art standards you will see that that is certainly true. Mainly, the job of constructing these standards has been put on the hands of people who have the standpoint that there shall be no set curriculum. Not really. You do not want to harm people s creativity, or the individuality of the child or the teacher. And I would say, by the way, that this point of view, this dominant doctrine has also infected the charter school movement because charter schools -- many of them I am very grateful to, they do core knowledge. But they also have to use these textbooks that are empty of content in [indiscernible]. There is not really very much alternative for charter schools so we are always kind of trapped in this dominant thought world [sounds like]. I would say even the teacher quality movement, a point I mentioned in the book, has been infected by this; one of the things we do know about teacher quality, though there are many factors involved, is that one thing that makes for high-quality teaching is knowledge of the subject matter being taught. And how do you instruct teachers in the subject matter they all teach? Well, the best, the most effective way of doing that is to know what it is that they are going to teach. And if you have some knowledge of what they are going to teach, then you can train them in that subject matter. Well, so much for historical background. I want to make a couple of remarks about another underlying theme of the book, which is the cognitive science that explains why it is that this absence of the said curriculum has led to such poor results in reading comprehension. I take the example of vocabulary, which is a marker for a lot of verbal skills, and it can -- most word-learning - learning a vocabulary - comes very slowly. The way it mainly occurs is through inferences about connotations from a context that is understood. The direct learning of vocabulary through word list or explicit exercises of definitions is, on the whole, highly ineffectual. If you pursue it too intently you are going to waste a lot of school time. George A. Miller is a wonderful psychologist and writer on this subject has done studies how children take word definitions. I will just give you three quick ones to lighten the atmosphere. Mrs. Morrow stimulated the soup. These are from children s essays, meaning that she stirred it up. Our family erodes a lot. That is, they eat out a lot. I was meticulous about falling off the cliff. That is, I was careful. Anyway, the best way to learn new words is to understand the discourse in which they occur. First, we learn things and we learn words. If you want to learn the word carnivorous, say, from the sentence, Alligators are carnivorous, it is good to know something about alligators they have jaws, they would chomp, and so with prior knowledge of things you can begin making inferences about words. And as a matter of fact Tom Landel has some research showing that you learn words at least four times faster in an understood or familiar context than an unfamiliar one. That is a very important principle, by the way, in developing linguistic skills; it has significant implications in schooling. To summarize that whole point about the importance of knowledge to language comprehension, to word-learning, to reading comprehension, I use as an epigraph to my book a succinct statement of it from a classic in that field by Kinchon Van Dyke, and I will read it here before going on to my conclusion: One of the major contributions of psychology is the recognition that much of the information needed to understand a text is not provided by the information expressed in the text, but must be drawn from the language user s prior knowledge of the person, objects, states of affairs or events the discourse is about. Again the implications of that for schooling are enormous, particularly for developing language abilities; knowledge of things that are not set down on page is just as important as knowing the things set down on the page. The example I gave in the book was Joan sacrificed and knocked in the run, and what that would mean to an Englishman. So the how-to approach to language and to reading has not worked and it will not work. On the other hand the way to build up verbal skills is to build up the background knowledge that you need to comprehend language. And I would say the only way to do that is to have a coherent year-by-year curriculum, which is, as we know from vocabulary development, the work of many years; it is not a single-shot result. I also think that it yields many opportunities for narrowing the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students, to exploit what we do know about language and building a vocabulary. Finally, a couple of words about policy implications; I know this is a policy group and it seems to me that one of the things we can do, the things that I -- the many implications, I think, for policy, the one that I am most closely concerned with is I think we need to bring into these hours now devoted to language arts, essentially, a liberal arts education in that 90-to-120 minute period and do it coherently, stage by stage. And that is a project that actually my colleagues and I are engaged in at the Core Knowledge Foundation. As I say there are many other policy implications, but if we start we can, I think, climb that ladder back up. I think if we reverse some of the ideas that made the graph go down as it did -- and with that hopeful note, I will ask my distinguished colleagues to comment. Frederick M. Hess [moderator]: Thanks Don. Abby? Abigail Thernstrom:  Well, Don, that is an elegant talk to go with an elegant book. Of course, I am a Core Knowledge fan, and I am a Don Hirsch fan. And he has made a point that when you see it spelled out, it seems so utterly obvious that you shake your head in despair that he has had to make it at all. But it is a very nice illustration of the very definition of an important work. He lays out an argument that seems elementary once it is made but that the reader, and I include myself among those readers, either did not know or only dimly understood before. This is not to say, however, that I agree with every word in The Knowledge Deficit, because I do not. My disagreement basically boils down to this. I think Don Hirsch greatly underestimates the difficulty of reforming American education so that social class and racial identity have less impact on long-term life chances, and by the way those two categories, racial identity and social class, are not one and the same, although in The Knowledge Deficit they are blurred. They overlap the categories, but even controlling for social class, black and Hispanic students are far behind white and Asian peers. On average, non-Asian minorities students are graduating from high school with roughly an eighth-grade education. If you control for social class, you reduce that gap by approximately a third. We do not entirely know why. Part of the problem is one that Don Hirsch identifies, differences in parenting styles that involve differences in exposure to a rich vocabulary in the home. On the other hand, children of recent Asian immigrants who grew up in families in which little English is spoken are, on average, doing extremely well in school. At the same time black middle-class children in, let us say, Shaker Heights, Ohio, other tiny suburbs like it, are woefully behind their white classmates. I do not think that the Hispanic picture should greatly concern us. They learn English, they move up the socio-economic ladder over the generations; but we should be very worried about America s black children. Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson who is, of course, black himself, has written, The greatest problem now facing African-Americans is their isolation from the tacit norms of the dominant culture, and this is true of all classes. And that brings us to the sticky issue of culture and its relationship to school achievement. When we are talking about black intercity kids particularly it is an issue that Bill Cosby and, subsequently, Juan Williams recently wrote a book that is basically a gloss on Cosby have confronted head-on. They both put education at the center of their agendas, but their description of the problems that educators must tackle is deeply sobering, although not unfamiliar. May 2004 -- some of you may remember this. Cosby threw away his script when he was talking to a glittering black-tie audience on the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board. Ladies and gentlemen, he said, the lower economic and low middle economic people are not holding up their end of this deal, the deal being rights accompanied by responsibility. Too many young men are dropping out of school, fathering children, from whom they run away, populating prisons. We cannot blame white people, he went on. Black parents buy $500 sneakers for their kids but will not spend a dime on programs to teach them how to read. It was a speech full of anger and of pain. He went on: & putting their clothes on backwards& and, of course, I can only give you a taste of this. Putting their clothes on backwards, is that not that a sign of something wrong? Is that not a sign of something when she has got to dress all the way up to the crack, names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed and all that crap; and yet we are not Africans. Those people are not Africans; they do not know a damn thing about Africa. Moreover everyone knows it is important to speak English, except to these knuckleheads. These people are fighting hard to be ignorant. Juan Williams s book entitled, Enough, asks why black leaders do not tell poor black families that they have the power to improve the education their kids are receiving. And the study says they make excuses for black criminals and they tolerate gangster rap as authentically black despite its deluge of guns, half-naked women, odes to quickie sex interspersed with advertisements for alcohol. Civil rights leaders, he goes on, should be telling parents they need to monitor the education of their children, oversee their homework, make sure they are off to school in the morning, resting and ready to learn. And they should tell kids that the Charles Murray formula first laid out in a 1986 AEI paper is right. The root out of poverty is simple - finish high school. Take a job. Hold on to it. Marry when you both have that job. And without education and that job -- and have children only after you are 21 and married. Cosby and Williams are describing a mountain of cultural change to climb for education reformers concerned with high-poverty African-American students, a mountain that is so dauntingly high that very few schools will be able to climb, whatever their curriculum. Those that do teach what looks very much like a Core Knowledge Program, but these terrific schools also become the parents that Juan Williams and Cosby want every child to have. Don Hirsch at one point in his book says schools with highly disadvantaged children, should try to become super effective middle class homes, by which he means language-rich settings. But super-effective middle-class homes have other ingredients that are essential to learning - they provide an education and self-discipline; they expect their kids to follow the Charles Murray formula and to understand the necessity of hard work, speaking proper English, and so forth. The best schools that I have observed know that middle-class habits and middle-class knowledge are part of an indispensable package that is the precondition for social mobility in America. Students must be at school on time and come with their homework finished; their desks must be orderly. Their conduct in the classroom must be conducive to learning. They are expected to be polite to teachers and their classmates, and to look at people whom they are speaking with and who are speaking to them; they do not run in the hallways or create chaos in the lunch rooms. They understand they are to work and they are told that at the end of the day their future is in their own hands. They are responsible for making the right choices in life. The schools can open doors for them but only the students can decide to walk through them. Such schools are extremely rare for a series of depressing reasons. Here is one story that gives just a peek at the promise that make for such educational mediocrity in most urban schools. One of the really good charter schools in Boston& and I agree not all charter schools are good by any means. But one of the really good charter schools in Boston has just hired a new history teacher whom I recently met. She graduated with a summa from the University of Chicago. She was a Rhodes Scholar; she had two masters degrees, one in education. She taught very successfully for four years in a suburban school. She is charming and she is clearly presentable. Everything you would want. But she decided she wanted to get out of the suburban school and to help the hard-to-teach kids in the mostly mediocre schools in Boston, go some place in life. She wanted to see if she could make a difference. She did not get a single offer from a Boston district school, in other words, a regular Boston school. They did not care about her summa from Chicago or her Rhodes scholarship; all BAs were the same to them. In fact, they probably saw her as a threat. When Boston schools opened in September they still had lots of vacancies; they still did not want her. Every charter school in the city made her an offer. And as I said, she took one of them. The academic skills of the teachers before they arrive in the misguided Ed schools that Don Hirsch described so well, those academic skills are a bigger problem than I think Don acknowledges. Too many teachers were never good students themselves. They are not the super-effective middle-class parent surrogates that Don Hirsch wants to see in the classroom. These are young people who want a license and a job, a job that will be secure after two or three years, even if they are not much good at teaching. The Ed schools, in other words, compound a preexisting problem, and that will not be solved until the work conditions in the schools are changed and academically skilled young people gravitate to education. Beyond the problem of a dreadful hiring process and mediocre teachers lies a heap of other troubles: Principals who are not instructional leaders, superintendents and their staffs who often got their job through a system of cronyism and nepotism and do not want outsiders helping to improve their schools; they are territorial and defensive; departments of education filled with bureaucrats who are guardians of a regulatory regime that has a little to do with education; interest groups with their counter-productive agendas; multi-cultural police worrying about interfering in a culture of the students, however dysfunctional that culture is; state legislators and local school board members in the pocket of teachers unions; union contracts that run 300 pages long and micro-manage every minute of the day; a lack of real accountability on the part of district schools or teachers; flat salary scales that depend on endurance and Mickey Mouse courses, and that fail to reward scarce skills or effective teaching; rules about discipline that make order in the classroom extremely difficult to impose; regulations that allow disruptive kids to keep disrupting the education of others. Well, this list could go on for sometime. Of course, there are exceptional schools, some miraculous pockets of good education, including the Core Knowledge Schools. But the great ones that I have seen are all charter schools in which very unusual principals have the authority and the autonomy to manage their budgets, hire whom they want, fire the ones who do not work out, set hours and instruction, insist children have much more learning time than in the usual public school, financially reward instructors whose kids are on track to real knowledge, know that they themselves will be replaced, or their schools will be closed, if the students do not learn and so forth. Don Hirsch has absolutely the right prescription for a sound curriculum. It should be in every school along, however, with a concerted effort at attacking the dysfunctional culture and deep alienation from learning that the Cos and Juan Williams, among so many others, have described, and along with the basic structural changes as well. I am not holding my breath; the entire system needs to be burned to the ground in my view, and in a way that cannot come back. In the meantime, however, do read The Knowledge Deficit. It is an elegant book. I learned a lot despite my gloom and doom. I thought it was wonderful. Thank you. Frederick M. Hess [moderator]: Thank you Abby. Lynne? Lynne V. Cheney: I just want to say Abigail, you were tough. And I appreciate it. Well, it is an honor to be here with Don Hirsch whom I have admired for so many years and who has done some of the finest intellectual work on education because as you pointed out, I think he is not an education person so he is able to come at it from a fresh standpoint. And to be here with Abby Thernstrom who has done such fine work on the ground in education as well as taking it on in an intellectual way, your work in Massachusetts is much appreciated. When I read Don Hirsch description of what schooling should be, and in The Knowledge Deficit you have a fine description of this, I think of my own childhood. In kindergarten and in first grade we learned in phonetics, and at the same time our teachers read to us. I particularly remember The Wind and the Willows and wanting everyday to hear the next chapter that was coming along so that we would have the extension of our vocabulary, the cultural context that we needed to understand the words that we were learning to decode. I also remember this, and this dates me so terribly but, oh well. They encouraged us to listen to story-book records. Now this involves 78 records, which I doubt many of you in this room have even seen. But my favorite one, and it told stories, again, it was the vocabulary enhancement, the enrichment of cultural literacy that we needed to be able to really read. My favorite one was called -- I do not remember the name of it but it was about little red-headed boy named Sparky. He had this amazing talent - he could hear trains talk. He would listen to the whistles and he would listen to the wheels and he could hear the trains talk. And, of course, it was a wonderful story because this particular skill earned Sparky no end of ridicule from his schoolmates, until, one day, he heard the trains saying and the clank of the wheel, left-front-wheel, left-front-wheel, meaning the left-front wheel was about to come off and so Sparky was able to alert the town and saved a terrible accident from happening. We even learned to diagram sentences and I cannot remember at what point in my career this happened. I think it was Ms. Henry [phonetic] who did it and she even made it seem like fun. But it might have even been earlier than high school. So we did all of the things that are in Don s prescription; this was in the 40s and 50s when, as Lawrence Cremin has described and as Don has just indicated, progressive education was at its height. It was conventional wisdom of the time, I think, is how Lawrence Cremin puts it. So what was happening is I had model teachers for the most part; they simply had never been infected with the disease. Moreover they were tough. And I do not think that in Natrona County High School in Casper, Wyoming, progressive education really ever had much of a chance. My hope, and I think it is probably one that is well-founded, is that there are many teachers today who know what the conventional wisdom is, the conventional education wisdom is, and who shut their doors and teach phonics, teach context, give the kids good things to read. Teach them, even, to diagram sentences. And I just want to express again the idea that the nation owes you, Don, a great debt for pointing out value, the importance of teaching in this way, the importance of helping kids come to a level of cultural literacy. But I think it is probably tougher now for a teacher to go against the grain than it was when I was growing up, when many in this room were growing up. I think that the education establishment has become much stronger and I think that the whole system of teacher preparation is even more relentlessly posed in the opposite direction from what this wonderful book, The Knowledge Deficit, indicates that it should be. It does seem to me, though, that if I were to pick one way to change American education -- Rick has done a wonderful job in thinking about this. That is the place I would go at is in teacher preparation; and it is not going to be easy. In fact, I spent frustrating months of my own thinking about this, and it breaks your heart time and again. You read about a new reform in the paper or one of the education bulletins, and you get so excited, you think, Oh my gosh, they are going to change. Something new and fresh is coming along. And then you get into it and your heart sinks because you discover it is the same-old-same-old with a new coat of paint. One of my favorite stories along these lines comes from -- I do not know, it is five or six years ago now. Education Week, which I read for the rigorous adrenalin rush I get from it, had an article on its front page, headlined Tests to Reflect New Teachers Subject Savvy. Hooray. You know, this is exactly what -- you have done such an effective job of showing what needs to be done. We need teachers who know the subject matters they are teaching, and the new tests, the praxis tests that new teachers have to take for the most part were, according to this story in this headline, going to be beefed up so the teachers will know more subject matter. Great; good thing. Then you start getting down into the details of it and, of course, the subject matter is going to be decided by the so-called subject matter associations. Now the National Council of Teachers of English, one of those subject matter associations, could not care less. Well, I do not mean to exaggerate; it is almost there. They could not care less what literature teachers know about Shakespeare s plays or Lincoln s speeches. What they care most about is that teachers master a theory that, in fact, devalues knowledge. That teachers, rather than standing at the center of the classroom and imparting knowledge to children, they are not supposed to do that. That is called being a sage on the stage and you never want to do that. They are supposed to be facilitators while children go about acquiring their own knowledge. They are supposed to be a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage. So your heart sinks a little bit, you read about the National Council of Teachers of English. Then you read about the National Council for the Social Studies, and your heart sinks further. This is an organization whose purview includes history but who, again, like the NCTE, the Council of teachers of English, conceives of teachers as facilitators who, rather than teaching a subject, arrange for students to have experiences through which they can learn the subject. The social studies council standards - now this I admit, it has been five or six years since I looked at them - were about 180 pages long but managed to be silent on what specific people, events, places that students should learn. As silent as the English language are at standards or about what literature they should read, instead of saying that students should know who James Madison was or when the civil war occurred, the social studies standards declare that they should have experiences that provide for the study of the way human beings view themselves in and over time. There is no requirement that they know what the Federalist Papers were or how we elect the president, instead, they should have experiences that provide for the study of how people create and change structures of power, authority and governance. The best projects for satisfying these abstract aims, as social study standards made clear, are not ones that involve contemplation of the past but those that encourage political activism in the present, such as eighth graders lobbying to change the local school board s budget priorities or high school students examining their complicity as consumers in the exploitation of workers and resources. Now all I am doing is exemplifying the point that Don Hirsch is making, but showing how the people who are in charge of the status quo have become so skilled at maintaining it. They promised reform and, when you look, it is not reform, and, meanwhile, it keeps all of us busy who are so interested in reform so that real reform never happens. It could hardly be more frustrating, though there is one thing that is more frustrating than that, and it is the whole notion that the aim of school should not be intellectual. And, of course, you described this beautifully in your work time and time again. As one professor at Princeton put it, the deadly notion that schools first priority should be intellectual development is one we need to take on. It should not be intellectual development. It should be, in this view, social justice. Now social justice is a very important thing and something we should all be concerned about. But the idea that somehow we will achieve this by doing away with the intellectual aim of schooling -- well, it makes the point that Abigail was making; it is to do a grave injustice to students who come from homes where they have not had the opportunities to gather the knowledge they need to become literate and active participants in a civic society. The last point I would like to make, and I do this with deep respect for Don Hirsch -- hear the butt [sounds like] come in here? It does seem to me that what The Knowledge Deficit does is make a plea for a national consensus about what kids should know, and, boy, have I been down that track. I have to say that despite my great respect for you, Don, I am not convinced. A national consensus about what kids should know sounds exactly like national standards to me. I think one of the lessons of the not-so-distant past is that national standards are dangerous, easily corrupted and immensely influential. I do not want to revisit an old fight, except to raise this cautionary note, and remembering one of the entries in cultural literacy by George Santayana: Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. I would hope that we are not moving in a direction toward national standards. You also said in your opening remarks that if you object to a proposal, you ought to offer a counter-proposal. So let me say that in terms of reaching a consensus on what kids should know, we ought to do it on a state-by-state basis. And there are some states, like Massachusetts, that will do it very well; and there are other states - I will not name examples - that will do it abysmally, but at least you have not damaged the whole nation. And you have allowed some states that can do it well to do it well and to serve as models for others that are not doing it well. And, hopefully, with such fine spokespeople as you and Abby and my colleague Rick Hess, we can raise the consciousness of states that are not doing it well so that we can do what I know everyone in this room thinks we ought to do, and that is give our kids, all of our children, the kind of schools they deserve. Frederick M. Hess [moderator]: Thank you, Lynne. Don, you want to share some more thoughts or any response? E. D. Hirsch: Well, I am not so sure that I want to dissent from the dissents. I agree with Abby s points about the difficulty, but I was thinking, as she was going down the list, the litany of difficulties, particularly the cultural problems in the African-American community -- one of the reasons I stopped teaching was that I started forgetting names of authorities in seminars. Right now I forget the name of that wonderful French historian who wrote Peasant Into Frenchmen, but somebody here may help me. Frederick M. Hess [moderator]: You are the only person here who ever knew it. Eric Donald Hirsch: Well, in any case, but anyway, the point was we were all peasants once, and it is true there is particularly acute despairing anti-culture that makes& and Lynne also made this point. It makes the situation now harder than it has ever been with those communities, and I am sure that that is true. But I do think we cannot overlook that the function of schooling has been to change culture; it is not that cultures are something that kids come to, ready-made. As a matter of fact, one of the most interesting points that has come out in recent sociological, psychological studies is that the peer group is far more influential than the parents. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, but if it suddenly becomes -- that means a school has the possibility of changing culture involving culture, and so that I do not think Abby wants to give up on that possibility. I think she was raising, calling my attention to the fact that it is not going to be easy. Lynne s point about the national curriculum, I have actually, since I wrote that book, decided that from a policy standpoint, quite apart from whatever political or other dangers there might be in getting the federal government involved& the agency of actually creating a national curriculum is something that I have not actually thought through. But I do think the right way to go is for at least one state, or even possibly a big district somewhere, to have a real curriculum. That is to have something -- and even for all my admiration of California s history standards and the things that Massachusetts has done, there is no state in the country that has anything that I would call a curriculum; nothing that looks like, say, the core curriculum of Finland or the core curriculum. And by the way I have mentioned Finland because Finland made the highest scores in eighth-grade reading in the world. And it is not that we are not all Laplanders or whatever people, it is because we do not have the kind of schooling that is conducive to reading comprehension. I just said the summary is that if you want reading scores to go up then we should educate children. So I want to agree with both of my respondents in that sense. In so far as though we need to end up with something more common than -- I see Lynne being fearful of the mechanism of getting there, and the horrors that could occur in trying to get there -- no, but I would like to see a gradual movement in that direction by having some models. Somewhere, some state, some districts actually have a curriculum, a set curriculum of the kind that Kandel was saying we need, and which the entire history of education in United States since the teens and the 20s has supposed [sounds like]. We need to reverse that intellectual trend. That idea is the idea that has created most of the problems, it seems to me, that we have. Frederick M. Hess [moderator]: Sure. Abigail Thernstrom: Don, I think Hispanics are the equivalent of your peasants, as it were. They are a classic immigrant group, and my point is we have a special problem today with African-American kids. Of course, the function of schools is to change culture; I am simply saying to change culture for these kids in a very broad and very fundamental sense, part of it has to involve keeping kids away from those destructive peer group influences by much longer school days by creating alternative peer groups with alternative values. I mean, you are into building from the ground up. And just one comment on Lynne s opposition to national standards, and I am with her on that, in opposition to my friend Diane Ravitch. But I do think that Lynne and I wonder what you think of this. I think that there is -- and I am in complete agreement with what Don Hirsch says: We do not have any state including Massachusetts that has, you know, what we would like to see. But I wonder if there is not a kind of intermediary step that might make a lot of sense? Get three good states together or three states that are important and have the potential for putting together solid standards. And if you had California, Massachusetts and Texas or whatever, instead of one state as a national model, a consortium of three states, I think you would begin to get some place. Now how I even get -- now 10 years as a member of the State Board of Education but about to step down, how you even get one state to the point at which we want to is very, very tough going. Lynne V. Cheney: I think that sounds perfectly reasonable as long as there is no federal funding involved. Abigail Thernstrom: I agree with that. Question and Answer Frederick M. Hess [moderator]: Well, with that why do we not open it up for questions? See who is going to have the mike. Lauren and Julie over here, if you catch one of their eyes -- again, please wait for the mike. Please identify yourself by name and affiliation, and please actually ask questions. Jerry? Jerry Sroufe [audience member]: Thank you. I am Jerry Sroufe with the American Educational Research Association. Usually on my federal income tax return I say educator but, henceforth, I will say educationist. I have a question for Professor Hirsch. You made a very compelling case that what we are doing and reading, for example, is not working and your chart explains that. Do we have evidence that is equally compelling that the core curriculum will be successful? Eric Donald Hirsch: There are two kinds& excellent question -- two kinds of evidence for that. One is large scale evidence; the large scale epidemiological evidence is international, that is, where reading is best, reading achievement is highest is in school systems which have accumulated coherent year-by-year curriculum. I mentioned Finland as one example, so that is one kind of evidence. The evidence from Core Knowledge Schools is very compelling when it is longitudinal, which is what it would have to be; that is, several years of the students actually experiencing a coherent curriculum, not a knowledge-oriented curriculum. By the way, Core Knowledge Schools are not ideal exemplars of this because of the fact that all of our schools face this problem that Kate Walsh [phonetic] has well-documented in the [indiscernible] in the textbooks that are available to schools in teaching-reading. None of them is knowledge-based; none of them offers the child a coherent education. So Core Knowledge Schools could be much improved, too, if that missing element were supplied. But, yes, the evidence that that kind of curriculum does lead to higher reading achievement is quite compelling for both the small scale longitudinal studies, and to me the much more impressive -- international evidence. [Audience member]: My name is [indiscernible] research fellow at the National Council in Teacher Quality. I want to ask all the panelists. It seems like there is a real tension in education reform right now between, on the one hand, an urge towards centralization and, on the other hand, an urge towards de-centralization, school choice being the biggest form of decentralization - let each person do it their own way and the best one will sort itself out. On the other hand, find a group of experts at the top who will research it, come up with some conclusions, and then send those out through the channels in Washington to all the different places who need them. And I was wondering if the panelists could speak to the issues of decentralization, centralization, how they are playing out in this corps curriculum issue? Abigail Thernstrom: I will say something. You want to say something, Rick? Frederick M. Hess [moderator]: No. I have spoken of this [indiscernible]. Never in Core Knowledge, but this is a good question. Abigail Thernstrom: Yes, it is a very good question. I do not think any of the school choice advocates - and I am a real school choice advocate - thinks that you just let a thousand flowers bloom without any standards and without any accountability. I do not think public money should go to schools that do not meet standards and do not succeed in teaching kids. But I also think it is extremely difficult to teach children who do not want to be in a particular school or to have teachers in a school who basically do not want to be there - it is the wrong school for them. They are the wrong principal, the whole culture of the school is wrong. I think it is part of the recipe of good education that teachers can say to a child, Look, you do not want to be here? You do not want to go along with the rules of the school? Bye. There are other places you can go to and I got a long waiting list. So in creating the kind of culture that I think you have to in school, you do have to have choice both on the part of teachers, part of principals in choosing those teachers, part of families themselves. But that does not mean you do not have the kind of standards that Don Hirsch and Lynne Cheney are talking about. Frederick M. Hess [moderator]: Don, do you want to speak? Eric Donald Hirsch: I think that you want to distinguish the decentralizing and the centralizing issues. They are not necessarily concerned with the same aims. The point of centralizing or normalizing curriculum, by the way, it would not be necessary if there were not such high mobility rates among disadvantaged children, but there is a very strong ethical and practical argument for normalizing the sequence in which children learn things, specific content year-by-year because of the hardship that is imposed on children s education when they have to move from one school to another, which all of you here I am sure know the problems of inter-city mobility. So you want to be sure that the sequence of learning is normalized, is centralized. But how those learnings are imparted is an art, not a science. I mean, local determination and local situations are critical in doing that, and I personally I am in favor of local autonomy as far as possible in all the modes of delivery and decisions at the principal s level and so on. I am not in favor of autonomy, however, in the teacher saying, Well, I like this book. I think we are going to teach this year, and actually we have Charlotte s Web three years in a row. The child gets Charlotte s Web three years in a row because the teacher s autonomy is -- I do not think that kind of local. So that is a basic point. I think we have to distinguish the structural procedural autonomy, local control, from curriculum. Curriculum is a critical issue that from the standpoint of the child, it seems to me, should be centrally decided, at least at the core; not every detail. Abigail Thernstrom: But I think that last point is very important, at the core and not in every detail. Peggy Orchowski [audience member]: Peggy Orchowski; I am a journalist with the Hispanic Outlook on Higher Education. I raised my kids in Europe for a while; it seems to me the biggest difference between the schools there, and here -- and my father is a professor of education and absolutely went to the wall over our system of comprehensive education. And yet the schools which seem to me to be very successful in Europe were more specialized in that they had the middle [indiscernible] like a 16-year old and would get out at a certain time. The kids who were more professionally oriented would go to the next level, the kids who were academically oriented to the next. You had science schools. You had performing arts schools. You had literary and social science schools. So this is the other side of the centralized decentralized. What about specialized versus comprehensive schools? Eric Donald Hirsch: I am an amateur. I have views on that, too. I think that the most successful schools of that kind are only specialized after, what, sixth grade, six or seven something like that. And I think that is a critical, critical point because you want the elementary schools, which are the schools I am most concerned with and where the die is cast, in my view, you want those to be common schools in the original medium [sounds like] of the term common schools. But it makes all the sense of the world for differentiation to occur later after you have a really good foundation, got high literacy, got reading comprehension, math skills and the rest. Lynne V. Cheney: Well, I would worry about it even after sixth grade. I mean, how many of you in this room knew what you wanted to do in sixth grade? I certainly did not; I thought I wanted to be Debbie Reynolds. That was my Frederick M. Hess [moderator]: They have specialized schools for that? Lynne V. Cheney: I do not know. Maybe you go to performing arts. They did not have that in Natrona County, but I really think that everyone deserves a liberal arts education through high school, and that the idea of specializing, particularly in this country, where we do not have a good track record in delivering any kind of vocational education, would be a mistake. In the German vocational schools they are sophisticated, and you continue foreign language study, and the study of history though it may be in a different form than if you were headed for university. But I would be very worried about specializing too much before the end of high school. Now there is an exception to this. In Virginia there is this high school called Thomas Jefferson High School, which specializes in kids who are very good at math, and it is very successful. It is the most successful in Virginia, I think, in terms of its overall test scores. And the kids do very well not just in math but when they take their SATs on the language arts section as well. So that is a different kind of specialization, which I would be in favor of but this tracking kids after sixth grade, I do not like the schools to work programs that were so popular a few years ago just because I do not think anybody really knows whether he or she wants to be, well, until they have reached their majority, and then probably not even then. It takes a while. Bonny Wattel [audience member]: My name is Bonny Wattel. I am just a private citizen, interested. Mr. Hirsch, you have, I believe, won me over with the argument today as I understand it, but I would like to make sure I understand your argument in context. When I first heard your name, which was many years ago, the debate about education was something along the following lines: There was a focus by progressive types that we need to move away from rote-learning of facts; for example, history should not be what date did this occur and who is this person. The idea should be to tease out the themes, how to think, not what to think. I remember when in my mother s education she won medals in Latin and the death of Latin in the schools was viewed as an emblem of how schools are becoming were more relevant -- so on the one hand, more relevant and useful teaching how to think, not just what to think. Could you put into context the themes you are drawing out today with were you stood in that debate? Eric Donald Hirsch: I think you have to understand that the educational -- dare I say educationist, but educators -- the dominant view of education has gained a mastery of rhetoric. They are brilliant at defining the non-progressive view in terms that are quite repellent. If you believe in kids having a coherent course of content or information or knowledge, those are words that I would prefer to use. That is called rote learning of mere facts. It was interesting to read Kandel s piece in 1939 because it was true back then, too. They had already mastered this technique of defining traditional education as something quite soul-deadening and repellent, and not real education at all. And I think it was very successful; it was very successful with you. I have always myself felt that what I was hearing that was rote was that argument, that that was just repeated. It was not true but it was something that was learned by rote, and very effective. Other things that, you know, even back then, to learn by traditional modes are to learn actual information was considered Right-wing because -- just like phonics was considered Right-wing in the heyday of the whole language movement. So that mode, because it is authoritarian, you see - the teacher says, We know something that you kids have to learn. You learn it; that is authoritarian, therefore, maybe even fascist. So it is sort of fascist to have a curriculum. That is the kind of rhetorical undertone and the very effect that has been very effectively carried out, and I do not know whether it can be effectively resisted. But it is a political problem. It is really interesting rhetorical problem. Abigail Thernstrom: One of my favorites is if you expect children to learn the multiplication tables, you are guilty of drill-and-kill because you are killing their imagination. You are killing their ability to figure this out for themselves which was part of the most recent Reform Math Movement: Do not teach them to multiply. Let them figure it out for themselves. Do not teach them the Pythagorean Theorem; let them figure it for themselves because to do otherwise is to be authoritarian and drill-and-kill. I mean, part of the answer is what is wrong with rote learning? I was at a school in Newark a few years ago where I saw one of the teachers play a game with the kids. There was a big map of Europe on the wall; it had no cities named or anything on it. No country lines actually. Well, yes, it must have had country lines but they were not labeled with the name of the country. And the game was the teacher would say, Okay, we are going on a trip. Start in Paris. Go 30 miles south then go 100 miles east, then go 150 miles north, then go southeast to certain distance. Where are you? And all these hands would go up; they had learned by rote the map of Europe. What is wrong with that? Lynne V. Cheney: They are knowing the capitals. Abigail Thernstrom: [Cross-talking] knowing the capitals in the United States as you said, knowing, feeling the times -- you cannot learn science without rote learning. Frederick M. Hess [moderator]: Yes, sir. Tyler Lloyd [audience member]: My name is Tyler Lloyd. I am with the Domestic Policy Council at the White House. Mrs. Cheney, you mentioned that if you would change one thing, you would start with the teacher preparation, and, Ms. Thernstrom, I was very impressed by the story you shared about the teacher who was so capable and so well qualified who, instead of seeking the best position for her, was trying to make a difference somewhere and that there was a struggle with that. What is being done now? What can be done to improve the quality of the teachers in the schools? Abigail Thernstrom: I would defer to Rick Hess. You have done so much work on this. Frederick M. Hess: Not enough. A short answer: I think that it is a great question in this context. It raises a couple different sets of challenges. Somebody like me& Don, we were laughing before the event started; Don is like, You are a structuralist. And I am, like, Yeah. I mean, these issues that Don writes about and we wrestle with, they are the toughest part of this. I mean, these are the most complex that require the most judgment. Jerry s question was a good one. It is very hard to build a rock-solid empirical case for any of this. So it is always partly a case of judgment and intuition and reason. So one set of questions, and what are we doing to prepare teachers to teach curricula effectively? Questions of instructional technique, pedagogy and the rest of it. And the answer is, we do not have, actually have, a particularly good foundation of knowledge as to what good instructional technique is; we do not know exactly how do you effectively teach this curriculum, I would argue. Others in the room may disagree. A second set of questions, what are we doing to improve the caliber of people going to today s classrooms? Forty years ago, it was less of a threat; it was less of a challenge because talented of college-educated women did not have a whole lot of options, so by default they went into the nation s classrooms. So we wound up with a stock of really impressive, really intelligent teachers simply because we closed all the other doors. Well, those same folks do not have to be teachers anymore. And so what we have gotten now is a dilemma in which we have a whole bunch of assumptions about how do you recruit and attract and keep teachers that are set up for a world that no longer exists? So now, not only do we have this problem of not being able to train and prepare people for the challenges of pedagogy and instruction of curriculum, but we have also got this problem that we are not even attracting a reasonable percentage of the best and brightest, so it has got people we are not real pleased we are attracting who are also ill-equipped for the challenges at hand. So truly two distinct sets of issues; one is the technical challenge, and then the second is how do you attract the smart talented people we want to attract to schools, whether or not they are necessarily equipped for the task at hand? And I think they are both -- Don [indiscernible] second one, or Abby. Abigail Thernstrom: Yes, I mean, that seems to me, and I said this in my talk. You cannot attract really academically skilled young people to the profession of teaching, well, for one thing, until you turn it into a profession, which it is not. I mean, what profession has flat salary scales? Lynne V. Cheney: What about Teach for America? Abigail Thernstrom: Well, Teach for America is a very interesting example. First place, teach for America insists that the young people who go through, end up in the inter-city school actually also get an ed degree, ed school degrees, while -- after they have started teaching - mistake number one. Mistake number two, they are union members. They are not out from under unless they are in a charter school from under the collective bargaining agreements. And, by the way, when I said 300 pages, the Boston contract is more than 300 pages. And three, a high percentage of TFA graduates do end up leaving teaching; and they tell me the most incredible stories about how much they were hated in the schools because they got there early in the morning to work with kids who were behind, and that was a no no, et cetera. Some of those who leave teaching do end up in education in another form, but it has not got a good record of success in my view. Too many compromises were made. Frederick M. Hess [moderator]: Yes ma am? Deirdre [audience member]: Good afternoon. My name is Deirdre from M-Kate [sounds like]. I wanted to find out what your position is on performance-based assessments and the role of knowledge married with skills in the classrooms? Thank you. Lynne V. Cheney: My heart sinks when I hear words like performance-based assessment because it sounds good but I do not know what it means. I suspect if Abigail and Don and I were to sit around and come up with a performance-based assessment I would like it quite a lot. But that does not mean that every performance-based assessment is one that I am going to think has content. And I worry. When I look at the Praxis exams, for example, which is one of the gateways for teachers, they do not have much subject matter in them. There is an interesting proposal that - oh, I am having trouble remembering a name, too, Don - Professor at Tennessee John Stone has come up with that looks at a teacher s record over years. You know, part of the problem with looking at the record in one year is that you do not know what students the teacher has. And maybe she brings them from point X to point Y, but maybe the students in another class she would not have been so successful with, maybe they would have been brighter, and so there would have been a gap to make up or maybe they would have been less bright and harder to work with and she could not have done it. But John Stone did have a plan, has had a plan that looks at a teacher s record over years. It is very complicated statistically, but it would solve one of the problems inherent in performance-based assessments. Again, though, performance-based assessments skirts around the issue of content. Eric Donald Hirsch: Just a technical point. The record of performance-based assessment in being either valid or reliable is very low. It is a very bad record and technical people in psychometrical -- in the field of psychometrics have moved away from performance-based assessments. That does not mean that it is rejected in every context; certainly it is very important for teachers to -- there are so many demands for good teaching that are not just -- if that was the implication of your question, that are not resolved just by taking a subject matter test, I think we would all probably agree with that. But basically you do not want to -- take the example of medicine; there was an element of performance-based testing in the medical profession up until about 20 or 30 years ago when they discovered that performance- based testing was quite unreliable. So the psychometrical literature does not support performance-based testing used heavily either by -- for students or by perspective teachers. Abigail Thernstrom: On the other hand I have never been in the school in which everybody did not know which teachers were really effective in imparting learning to their kids and which teachers were running videos in the classroom. And I would add to the performance, the question of assessing performance, differential pay for highly skilled teachers teaching subjects that are -- teaching in fields in which highly skilled teachers are hard to find; that is math and science. Why are we not paying math and science teachers who are so difficult to find good math and science teachers? Why are we not paying them more than French teachers? That is called the market. In every other sphere of the economy we believe in markets but not in schools. Gary Ratner [audience member]: Gary Ratner, Citizens for Effective Schools. I would like to ask a question that has a policy focus that builds off what you say. Professor Hirsch, you noted that No Child Left Behind and the Standards Movement, both fairly recent policy initiatives have produced I think what you call meager results. At the same time, No Child Left Behind has a goal that I think we probably all subscribe to, which is that all kids should be brought to an academically proficient level. And if you are going to do that, it ties right into what you are saying. If you are actually going to accomplish the goal, you would have to have a challenging curriculum at all grade levels for virtually all kids. And that is not the case now, widely not the case, particularly for poor minority kids. So this is the question: From a policy point of view, what would the panel think of a federal policy that would come in as an amendment to the elementary and secondary education at No Child Left Behind [indiscernible] just coming up with a re- authorization in which the federal government would say, would go beyond just saying the goal is academic efficiency? Would go beyond just talking about saying there should be a challenging curriculum? It would say, States and localities, if you are going to get federal money you must have a challenging curriculum at grade level in every grade. We are not going to tell you the specific content of the curriculum. We leave that to the states and the localities. We will have the states and then ultimately the federal government review your standards if you want to call it a [inaudible] curriculum to be sure that there some chance that the system might actually work because [inaudible] challenging curriculum at grade level as taught? Frederick M. Hess [moderator]: [Audio glitch] arguably actually, NCLB does require that, of course, that states in submitting their compliance materials for No Child left Behind law are actually required to submit both assessments they use and standards that underlie them. Gary Ratner [audience member]: But it is not being implemented. That is so far from the reality right now. There is no enforcement. Frederick M. Hess [moderator]: Well, I guess [indiscernible] the question would be -- so actually write the Department of Education [indiscernible] the Department of Education has indeed signed off on either on preliminary or final form or on each of these state packages, which is state package including the standards. But you are right. At least as one of independent observer [indiscernible] familiar with somebody s materials that it is not within three leaves [sounds like] and a shell of what Don is talking about in terms of standards. Is there some kind of language that you would like to see calling from more specificity from states? Eric Donald Hirsch: Actually, that is a great question; if something like that were passed, which I have trouble imagining, still, and then the question -- I have trouble imagining that it then it could be implemented. But it would be marvelous, but I will point out that the one place where No Child Left Behind has succeeded, it seems to me, is fourth grade reading scores; those have benefited from the No Child Left Behind Act. And that, paradoxically, is the one area which has just come in for a scandal, the reading first program, because that program insisted that you have to have a phonics-oriented early reading program which was just what they have been pilloried for in this recent GAO report. But what it illustrates is that you have to pay attention to the nitty-gritty, and not just do some structural thing if you want the law actually to have some effect; and that was the area where they actually paid attention to the nitty-gritty. They said, This program is phonics oriented and it is okay. This program is not and we are not going to fund it. They were actually paying attention to a specific elementary reading or decoding program. Those programs themselves have flaws but they do very well in getting you up to speed in decoding which is why fourth-grade reading scores, by the way, are primarily fluency and accuracy of decoding. Later scores involved comprehension. That basically is one of the subjects of the book. Abigail Thernstrom: Maybe Lynne will not agree with me on this, but the Feds have a really hard time monitoring quality. And let me tell you a story very briefly, a Massachusetts story. Somebody I know raises, gets from the federal DOE a pile of money for the instruction of teachers in better math education. These teachers are teaching math; they do not know math. They need to have math workshops and so forth. Raises federal money; raises some local corporate money. The superintendent of the district -- it is four specific districts the superintendent in this district got this money in his hands. His staff goes to work in using it, and at the end of the day, forget it. The money is just going down the drain. It makes you want to cry what is happening with this money, because it is nothing good. And the Federal Department of Education will never understand that this money has not gone to anything useful. Frederick M. Hess [moderator]: Lynne, last word. Lynne V. Cheney:  I would be terrified if they were to include such a caveat, and I am already worried because Rick tells me there may be one already. There is one, one federal requirement for teaching that I think has been valuable. Senator Byrd has mandated that everybody will study the constitution. And I think that is probably a good thing, but if we are to go beyond that it would cause me great concern and nightmares at three AM. Frederick M. Hess [moderator]: Well, always useful kind of ammunition for educational policy in general. Abigail Thernstrom: I was going to say it is the only [cross-talking] about education. Frederick M. Hess [moderator]: I would like to thank what the panel has done. I particularly would like to thank you for taking the time to be with us today. Abby and Lynne, thank you so much. [End of File] [End of Transcript]    </body></html>