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Sol Stern has recently written a piece published in the City Journal late last year.

He discussed the issue of school choice and school reform. Sol Stern's original paper can be found at http://city-journal.org/2008/18_1_1_instructional_reform.html

His cogent paper was reacted to by several scholars, included E.D. Hirsch and others such as Jay P. Greene, Diane Ravitch, Neal McCluskey, Matthew Ladner, Thomas W. Carroll, Andrew J. Coulson and Robert Enlow. Their reactions and discussions can be found at http://www.city-journal.org/printable.php?id=2501

In this interview, Professor Hirsch delves into some more of the issues involved in depth and examines some of the issues surrounding this discussion

1) Let's discuss what you agree with in terms of Sol Stern and school choice, and what you disagree with him on.

I don't disagree with Sol Stern.I welcome his skepticism in light of the poor average performance of charter schools.By way of prelude, though, I am enormously grateful to the charter movement.It has enabled several hundred Core Knowledge schools to come into existence.

2) Let's talk about "educational incoherence"---I have a feeling this term is going to sweep the nation in this election year as some curriculum individuals may focus on this as a cause of our serious educational malaise. What do you mean by "educational incoherence"?

Children go to school for more than a decade because learning is gradual, and there is a great deal to be learned – especially in matters relating to general knowledge and the build up of vocabulary.If the specific content for each grade level does not build on what went before and prepare for what will come after, there will be big gaps, and boring repetitions.Those are the conditions that now prevail in charter schools and regular schools.A great deal of school time is being used unproductively, and the hardest hit by this incoherence are disadvantaged children.

3)  I consider the Core Knowledge curriculum to be a robust, exemplary example of what students should learn, and what students should know. By the same token, what are the specific skills ( such as writing, math, and critical thinking) that students should learn?

Critical thinking skills cannot be learned in the abstract.They always pertain to concrete knowledge of subject matter.I review the scientific literature on this in The Schools We Need.Writing skills are obverse of reading skills.They both depend more on knowledge of the unspoken within the language community than on knowledge of the spoken.The main, somewhat revolutionary point I have been making is that teaching content is teaching skills, where as teaching formal processes is, in the end, teaching neither content nor skills.This is not only clear in the scientific literature, it is also clear from comparative results.Students who have had been taught coherent knowledge are more highly skilled than those who have been taught "skills."See the (unfortunately repressed) book by the late Jeanne Chall: The Academic Achievement Challenge

4) If a charter school were to adopt a Core Knowledge Curriculum- would that charter school offer substantial, significant competition to a public school?

Of course, if the public school overcame its anti-academic doctrines.BUT my aim has been to encourage public schools to adopt good coherent curricula.If there were a good neighborhood school nearby and an equally good school five miles away most parents will choose the nearby school.So nearness offers a supreme competitive advantage.Hence, the best way to foster parental choice is to make all the local schools into good schools rather than take the indirect (and so far not very successful) path of setting up alternatives.

5)  Do you feel that the state standards are way the hell too "loosey goosey" or too vague and nebulous or that there is simply no accountability to make sure that students can do the things stated in the "state standards"?

The state standards in language arts (where students spend most of their time in early grades) are empty of content.It's all process.They are not standards at all in a meaningful sense.And they cause reading tests to be hugely unfair, because the topics in passages on reading tests always assume content knowledge that has not been taught in the schools.

6) What do you see as the "fundamental failing" of the choice movement?

It has been too hands-off, too laissez faire with respect to the concrete aims of education in the United States at this time and place --- as though some invisible hand would solve that problem by individual parents making individual choices.On the contrary, education is a community-centered enterprise that aims to enable everybody to learn and communicate and be effective in the public sphere.That requires a community orientation, not an individualistic one.An analogy from the automobile industry would be the need for the community to build good roads and set emission standards.Then the car models could compete.

The charter movement overlooks the community dimension which requires a common core curriculum in order to train teachers well, and to offer good textbooks, as well as serve children who must move from one school to another – a huge problem overlooked in the theory of the charter movement.All of that requires a community not an individualist orientation.

Paradoxically, once that orientation is gained by people in the educational world as well as the charter world, the need for charters will be far less pressing.

7)  In this election year, I believe that all pupils in the schools in America should know a bit about our history, our country, our geography, our history- and by that I mean, from the settling of the country to present time. Do you agree?

Yes.

8) You kind of comment on some "quasi divine" agency- the magic of the market, the wisdom of the locality, and perhaps even "voodoo curriculum specialists" to develop a solid curriculum. Is the issue the curriculum, the adherence to the curriculum or accountability to a specific curriculum?

The quasi-divine entity is the black box of the free market that will produce a good school without our having to know what makes a good school.The marketeers leave that to somebody else – those closest to the scene and with the greatest interest in the outcome.But alas, there is no reason to believe that these well-intentioned people will know what they are doing.It seems to me that most of the charter schools are operating on the same faulty theories as the regular schools.Why should we wait around for the "genius of the market" to sort all this out, while many thousands of children are being deprived of a good education in both charters and regular schools?

9) You indicate that we need to pay attention to what Sol Stern is saying- What do you think are the most cogent points that he has made, first in his December 2007 article and in this January rebuttal to some of his critics?

Surely, the essential point is that the condition of being a charter school is an external, secondary characteristic of a school.The primary characteristic is whether it's a good school over a long stretch of the years needed for a good education.

Whether it is a charter or not is irrelevant to that key criterion.Hence, Stern point that we should pay attention to the substance of schooling, not the externals of market organization, which has not worked in this case.

Published February 16, 2008