Core education courses for knowledge seekers

January 4, 2003

Core Knowledge schools need teachers prepared to cover their content-rich curriculum, and they're not coming out of the ed schools.

So the Core Knowledge Foundation, with support from the Olin Foundation, has commissioned a series of syllabi for 18 semester courses that cover the liberal arts preparation it wants its teachers to have.

That was the easy part. The hard part will be to get anyone involved in teacher training to take them seriously.

The syllabi for these three-credit, semester-long college courses intended primarily for future elementary school teachers were prepared by respected scholars in their fields who have demonstrated their commitment to improving K-12 education.

The one on art history, for instance, was written by Bruce Cole, formerly professor of fine arts at Indiana University and now chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The syllabi are all available on the Web at coreknowledge.org, and they're free for the taking. That is, anyone "who wishes to use, reproduce or adapt them for educational purposes is welcome to do so" as long as they are not marketed by third parties.

These are solid courses, as you would expect from people who think E. D. Hirsch Jr. had the right idea when he transformed his crusade for "cultural literacy" into a school curriculum.In fact, teachers who feel their own education didn't prepare them well could very well use the syllabi as a self-study guide to firm up weak spots in their preparation.

There are a good many teachers who do feel that way, according to a survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics in 1999 that found only 36 percent of new teachers thought they were "very well-prepared" to teach to their state's standards.

The syllabi for a two-semester math sequence are by David Klein, professor of mathematics at California State University at Northridge.

Now, having a separate math sequence for prospective teachers goes against conventional wisdom, which specifies that teachers should have to take regular math courses as separate ones rapidly get watered down. And that does happen, although the Core Knowledge mindset offers considerable protection against the removal of content because students claim it's too hard for them.

One difficulty with the conventional wisdom, though, is that virtually nothing one learns in a college math major is relevant to what an elementary school teacher needs to know and be able to do.

Even for middle-school teachers, a math major is basically a filter to screen out people who hated math and didn't understand it, and who will successfully transmit their own experience to their students.

Klein recommends starting the math course with a diagnostic test on arithmetic. "Many elementary school teachers and prospective elementary school teachers are unable to carry out arithmetic calculations at the sixth-grade level," he writes.

I also looked at the composition and grammar syllabus, writing being an interest of mine. It's by Mary Epes, now retired, but formerly a professor of English at York College of the City University of New York.

Teaching grammar is out of fashion nowadays, whether it's the Latin-based grammar that I learned from Mrs. Wellington in eighth grade or the modern analysis of English that linguists have developed over the past 50 years. At least partly as a consequence, college writing programs are a disaster. Students don't have the words or the concepts even to talk about what they need to improve their writing.

The same issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education that carried a column by the authors of the new, 1,800-page Cambridge Grammar of the English Language also had an article describing Ivy-League hand-wringing about the fact that their students can't write papers and they don't know how to teach them.

Not that many teachers come from the Ivy League, but it's hard to believe matters are better elsewhere. And if college graduates don't write well themselves, they'll have difficulty teaching anyone else to write.

These courses were designed to fit with the Core Knowledge curriculum, so they would be ideal for teachers in schools that use that curriculum, now more than 700 in number.

But the foundation believes they'd be excellent preparation more generally, because "the Core Knowledge standards (on which these syllabi are partly based) overlap with most state standards, but tend to be more detailed, specific and comprehensive."

The Core Knowledge people are confident and ambitious. Who'll follow their lead?