Episode 7: America’s Education Past and Future
Thanks for joining me for another episode in our America’s Education Past and Future mini-series. I left off last week’s episode with the promise of looking at our pedagogy and curriculum. Before we dive into that, I want to just define a few things.
First, pedagogy is the how. It is the methods you use to teach content. Standards are what you teach or the content. Curriculum provides the scope and sequence for the standards to be taught and combines it with the how it is to be taught, pedagogy.
I want to discuss each of these components separately and then look at how they are woven together and the impact they have on the quality of our education. However, I want to remind everyone of what I said in episode one. I am in no way shape or form shaming anyone when I discuss these topics. We do what we do in education today, because that is all we have known, until now. This includes me. I have taught in the current system and lead teachers in this system. Yet, with so many people shedding light on the current state of our education system, we cannot continue to ignore it.
I believe Albert Einstein once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
It is time to get off the pedagogy Ferris wheel of the progressive model, and stand firm on the pedagogy of our past, the classical Christian education model. More on that soon!
Let’s start with pedagogy. Any educator can tell you that you spend the last two years of college learning all about pedagogy and putting it into practice. This is where your professors teach you how to teach.
In today’s education system, pedagogy is constantly changing. I like to call it the pedagogy Ferris wheel. If you stay in education long enough, the strategies you were told to use to teach come back around wrapped in a shiny new package.
I cannot tell you how many times I have heard educators who have been it longer than me say, “This is what they had us doing 15 years ago, just under a different name.” Raise your hand if you have said that or heard that before. I know I am not the only one raising my hand right now.
Outside of the fact that content areas have been untwined and siloed, nothing about educational pedagogy has stayed the same. Right now, we are in the Science of Reading kick. The science of reading offers numerous effective strategies. And in case you did not know this already, the Science of Reading has been around since the 1980s. It is just back in a new shiny package.
Whatever the new pedagogy is, it drives our curriculum, which is built off our academic standards. Yes, we are going there. The highly controversial topic of Common Core standards.
In 2004, David Coleman launched the Common Core initiative. It was sold as a way to make academic standards the same across the nation. So that no matter where you were in the country, all 6th graders were learning the same set of skills. This meant moving from one state to another would not adversely affect a child’s academics. In theory, they should be able to hop right in where they left off at their previous school.
I don’t think anyone had an issue with having a set of national academic standards. This is evident by the fact that all but nine states adopted these new standards. What made common core an issue was all the things behind the scenes. Data mining, new pedagogical approaches, significant historical content revisions, and the implementation costs of these new standards.
With forty-one states adopting the common core standards, curriculum companies quickly rewrote all of their curriculum to align to these standards. All subjects took a hit, but I would say math and history took the hardest hits. With the rewriting of curriculum progressives were able to literally rewrite history to meet their agenda.
Suddenly, the heroes of our nation’s past were evil. Men and women who were once viewed as being on the side of wrong, now to be praised for their contributions to society. Think about how many of our founding fathers have been slandered by our new curriculum. That is just the tip of the iceberg. Do we even study our founding documents anymore?
In David Barton’s book, Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant, he mentions a conversation he had with a well-accomplished attorney. The attorney was adamant that the words separation of church and state were in our constitution. David responded by pointing out that those words are not mentioned in any of our founding documents. At the attorney’s insistence that they were, David asked him to find the phrase in the constitution. The man could not and responded with, “I can’t believe this! In law school they always taught us that’s what the First Amendment said!” (Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant, by David Barton page 5.)
David was floored to discover that this attorney had never read the Constitution he was to uphold, because no one required it. If the reading of founding documents is not required in law school, then it isn’t happening in our K-12 public schools either.
In case you missed the earlier episode where we discussed separation of church and state. These words are contained in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson in 1801 in response to the Danbury Baptist Association and their expression of concern over the government taking over religious freedoms. He was assuring them that because of the wall of separation, they had nothing to fear. Here is the excerpt from his letter:
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, . . .I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between church and state. (Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant, by David Barton page 12.)
The wall of separation was erected not to limit public religious expressions but rather to provide security against governmental interference with those expressions whether private or public. (David Barton, Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant, page 12-13)
Now let’s look at what common core standards did to math. Parents, how many of you can longer help even your elementary-aged children with their math homework? I believe every parent listening has their hand up.
Educators, how many of you get frustrated because students do not know their basic math facts and cannot perform basic calculations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division? Again, I am pretty sure every educator’s hand is up right now.
With Common Core came a new pedagogy for teaching math. This new pedagogy introduced radical teaching methods for arithmetic, prioritizing process over accuracy.
Hold the phone. Did you hear what I just said? It does not matter if they can get the right answer or not, because it is all about the process. So, I can praise Johnny and say he has mastered the skill of addition when he tells me that 2 plus 2 equals 5, because hey he got the process correct. When we add two numbers, we get a bigger number.
If you do not believe me on this one, then please watch the video on common core by David Barton. In this DVD he shows a video of a training given to teachers as they prepared to implement the common core standards.
Again, with forty-one states adopting the common core standards, curriculum companies rewrote their math curriculum. The straightforward, no nonsense math curriculums like Saxon math were shoved out for a more “rigorous” math curriculum that taught students five or more ways to add numbers. Leaving confused and frustrated parents, educators, and students in its wake with students bearing the brunt of this movement.
After researching and learning more about our nation’s educational history, I truly believe Common Core was yet another strike from progressives to sink our ships in this game of Battleship. These new standards not only rewrote our history to fit the progressive’s agenda, it created a separation between parent, child, and educator. With parents frustrated by these new math methods, they can no longer help their child learn basic math skills. Teachers pull back and keep all work at school, because students do not fully understand the math concepts and have no one at home to help. The cycle continues until there is a great divide.
I have touched on curriculum a little bit while talking about standards. Curriculum brings pedagogy and standards together in a logical scope and sequence. We have discussed math and history. As we look at curriculum, I want to touch on reading and science.
Most states, even some states who did not adopt common core standards, may have common core standards without realizing it. My state recently adopted the Next Generation Science Standards or NGSS. These are connected to Common Core just wrapped in, you guessed it, a new shiny package. Again, I highly recommend David Barton’s DVD Common Core. As he shares a little bit about the NGSS and Common Core Standards.
I have a screenshot of a 4th grade NGSS standard. For those of you listening to the audio version of this episode, you can find this image in my blog post.
There is a lot going on in this standard. The NGSS committee had to create a guide to help teachers unpack these standards. As you move up through the grades, they get more and more complex. Here is a statement from the NGSS website:
The NGSS and other Framework-based standards ask educators and students to approach teaching, learning, and monitoring student progress in new and different ways, grounded in students making sense of phenomena and solving problems using the three dimensions of science together. These resources are designed to help educators unpack the standards and understand what they mean for classroom instruction and assessment.
Again, a new pedagogy for teaching science is introduced. All curriculum companies, you guessed it, rewrite their science curriculum to align with these new science standards and the pedagogy that goes along with it.
Reading curriculum is just as bad. When you take the time to dig into it, you see teachers are told to teach multiple reading skills simultaneously without explicit instruction on any of these skills. Lessons approach a skill as if students already know how to, for example, finding the main idea and supporting details. If you don’t know what main idea and supporting details are, then you cannot successfully identify it in a text, which limits your comprehension of said text.
Reading is complex and, yes, you use multiple reading skills automatically and simultaneously while reading a text. It has been said many times reading is thinking, and that is true. However, when you are first learning to read, you need explicit instruction on these skills to develop them, so that you can employ them to think as you read, moving from learning to read to reading to learn.
The newest pedagogy wrapped in a new shiny package, for reading, is the Science of Reading. It has some great strategies for breaking down these skills into explicit step-by-step instruction. Throughout my training, they emphasized that instruction must be explicit and systematic.
When talking with a dear friend and educator about reading curriculum options, she pointed out that she had gone through two Science of Reading trainings where they stressed the need to be explicit and systematic. Her school had just adopted a new reading curriculum that has been on the rage because it is aligned to the Science of Reading. Yet she pointed out that it is neither explicit nor systematic.
Serving as a curriculum director, I have found the same. Our committee has spent an entire year digging through curriculum that our state put on a list of highly qualified curriculum, yet not one of them had explicit or systematic instruction. And a couple of them had some extremely inappropriate content. They all had stories, fables, and legends from other countries without reference to our nation’s own stories, fables, and legends.
They have slowing erased even our historical literature, all in the name of creating global citizens. I say you cannot know where you stand in a global society, when you don’t know your own heritage. But I digress.
Let’s come back to curriculum. We should scrutinize the curriculum; if it fails to meet the standard, we should toss it out. My school is looking at writing our own curriculum because no pre-made boxed curriculum meets our standards or our student’s needs.
I could go on and on about curriculum, but I will wrap this episode up with a few things for you to mull over. First, check your state standards because even though I live and work in a state that did not officially adopt the common core standards, they still went back and rewrote our standards to mirror common core but slapped our States’s name in front of it. Second, if you have been riding the pedagogy Ferris wheel for so long you are on repeat, get off! No pedagogy introduced in the last one hundred years has helped our students’ academic success. In fact, it has brought it down.
Hang in there! We have hope because our nation once had a pedagogy, standards, and curriculum that led to the quick rise and success of America. Which is why we used to have people from other countries coming to visit and learn about our education system. Wouldn’t it be nice to get back to that? To spend our days celebrating our student’s academic success rather than beating our heads against the wall because nothing is working, and our students are not learning. Oh, and to have a classroom of polite, well-behaved students so you can spend your time teaching rather than managing behavior issues.
Sounds pretty amazing to me and I have a feeling it does to others as well. Join me for the next episode as we jump off this Ferris wheel and look at a solution that has already been proven to work. We just have to have the courage to make the change and go for it.
Resources and Links
Book- 4 Centuries of American Education by David Barton: https://shop.wallbuilders.com/index.php/four-centuries-of-american-education.html
Book – Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant by David Barton: https://shop.wallbuilders.com/index.php/separation-of-church-state-what-the-founders-meant-book.html
Book – Battle for the American Mind by Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin: https://battlefortheamericanmind.com/
Website – NGSS: https://www.nextgenscience.org/understanding-ngss-design/understanding-ngss-design
DVD – Common Core: https://shop.wallbuilders.com/index.php/common-core-dvd.html
