Doing a Texas Two-Step Around Education Reform

Watering down new high-school graduation standards will shortchange students, employers and the country.
By CHARLES COOK AND TERRENCE MOORE

For decades, policy makers have gone back and forth adopting the latest fads in school reform without any measurable improvement in learning. The latest trend in Texas is to de-emphasize the liberal arts and increase instructional time spent in math, science and technology.
        As the Texas legislature convened last month, a coalition of anti-testing organizations, including Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment, promoted a plan to gut the state's tough new high-school graduation standards. Instead of passing 15 end-of-course exams, a student would graduate by passing two or three. More than 800 Texas school boards have adopted a resolution to water down requirements.
     We disagree. States across the country are increasing graduation standards, and Texas cannot afford to water down its own. A proposal to eliminate exams in world geography and world history as a graduation requirement, for instance, is shortsighted. Ever-lower expectations lead to one predictable outcome: a profound ignorance of the world among young people in an era when international events and evolving fiscal and trade policies have a personal impact on communities, businesses and individuals in every corner of the U.S.
         Who hasn't heard or seen the signs of this ignorance? To cite one of many now-familiar results, there is the 2008 report "Still at Risk: What Students Don't Know, Even Now" by Frederick Hess. It found that nearly 25% of 17-year-olds surveyed nationwide could not identify Adolf Hitler. More than 25% believed Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World after 1750. Forty percent could not place World War I as occurring between 1900 and 1950. Nearly 40% could not identify the Renaissance as the period in European history noted for cultural and technological advances.     
        Allowing young people to graduate as historical or geographical illiterates is myopic for another reason. Training them for getting jobs is not good enough; graduates of public schools are also citizens. Ask any physician today whether politics affects his livelihood.
        We have a different approach to equipping students to face the future, one that has the weight of millennia of human experience behind it: a rigorous classical education. Such an education (called liberal-arts at the college level) does not shortchange math and science. On the contrary, those subjects are studied with more rigor than can be seen in today's public schools.
        Students also learn the fundamentals of English grammar; American and world history through the reading of primary source documents; and the great stories of human struggle and yearning told by the greatest storytellers—Homer, Shakespeare, Milton and Melville. They study the principles of liberty and self-government as articulated by the Founding Fathers and the ennobling beauties found in painting, sculpture and song. Yes, the children have to learn Latin, too, just as the Founding Fathers did, because that language gives the greatest insight into the vocabulary and grammar of our own tongue and the Romance languages, including Spanish.
          Certainly America needs as many engineers and computer scientists as the country requires in the 21st century. But that does not describe what lies ahead for the vast majority of young people entering the marketplace. The most common complaints of American employers is that job applicant and recent hires lack communication skills and higher-level thinking skills. More plainly, many applicants cannot read a memo, they cannot express themselves in speech or in writing, they lack the ability to think through difficult problems.
        We think that students who have been taught to write forcefully by studying Shakespeare and Tom Paine, who have learned to speak by studying the speeches of Cicero and Abraham Lincoln, who have learned to think through difficult problems by studying the Constitution through an analysis of the Federalist Papers, and who revel in the rigors of Latin grammar will have no difficulty in reading the boss's memo.
       Training young people in the liberal arts and sciences also will better prepare them to become "the boss" when it is time for the present cohort of bosses to retire. Those on the front lines of hiring employees in this state see the need for a classical education. Now parents are increasingly demanding such an education for their children. We know this in part because the number of schools that have come to Hillsdale College each spring in search of graduating seniors to recruit as teachers of classical subjects has more than doubled in the past five years.
       Before long, we will begin to see how well the approach works. Responsive Education Solutions (ResponsiveEd), the largest charter-school system in Texas, in collaboration with Hillsdale College, is providing students the opportunity to receive a rigorous classical education tuition-free. Founders Classical Academy is a public charter school that opened near Dallas in August 2012. The response has been almost overwhelming. The school initially started with 450 students and will educate more than 700 next year.
       Classical-curriculum schools in other states, such as Ridgeview Classical Schools in Colorado, generally have waiting lists of over a thousand applicants. The graduates of such programs go on to college to study the liberal arts and sciences. Typically, the biggest complaint of these graduates is that their freshman courses were too easy.
       As ResponsiveEd and Hillsdale College continue to open classical schools across the country, we want to see other schools, including noncharter public schools, brought up to a serious level of accountability as well.
       Jobs do not create the human mind; the human mind creates jobs. As a result, the very best education—the kind the Founding Fathers had—is what will produce good workers and good citizens. The challenge for those who want to eliminate testing in world history and geography or other subjects in Texas is to explain how students are prepared for a global economy when they are not required to learn anything about either the globe or the economy.

Mr. Cook is CEO of ResponsiveEd, a charter-school district with over 60 schools in Texas. Mr. Moore is a Hillsdale College professor of history who advises the college's Barney Charter School Initiative. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324081704578233814190553202.html

Sport Rules

The New Media Journal.us [IL]
All-Athletics

by Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review
April 29, 2009


The Boston Globe has been publishing for 137 years, and the news that it may have to fold has distressed its many readers. Each Fall, Winter and Spring the paper publishes a special section, of 14 pages or so, on notable local public high school athletes and their coaches. There is a mention of athletes and coaches at local prep schools as well.

The latest Boston Globe's Winter "ALL-SCHOLASTICS" section arrived, with the "ten moments that stood out among the countless athletic stories in Massachusetts." There are reports on the best HS athletes and coaches in Skiing, Boys' Basketball, Girls' Basketball, Boys' Hockey, Girls' Hockey, Boys' Track, Girls' Track, Boys' Swimming, Girls' Swimming, Preps, Wrestling, and Gymnastics. The Preps and Gymnastics parts consolidate boys' and girls' accomplishments, perhaps to save space (and cost).

Each full-page section also features photographs of 9-16 athletes, with perhaps a twitter-sized paragraph on their achievements. In addition, there are 30 photos and tweets about some coaches, spread among the various sports. There are 26 "Prep" athletes mentioned, from various sports, but I didn't see any "Prep" coaches profiled. For each high school sport there are two "athletes of the year" identified, and all the coaches are "coaches of the year" in their sport.

There may be, at this time, some high school "students of the year" in English, math, Chinese, physics, Latin, chemistry, European history, U.S. history, biology, and the like. There may also be high school "teachers of the year" in these and other academic subjects, but their names and descriptions are not to be found in The Boston Globe, perhaps the best-known paper in the "Athens of America" (Boston).

It may be the case, indeed it probably is the case, that some of the athletes featured in the Winter "All-Scholastics" section today are also high school students of math, history, English, science, and languages, but you would not know that from the coverage of The Boston Globe. The coaches of the year may in many, if not all, cases, also be teachers of academic subjects in the Massachusetts public and private schools, but that remains only a guess as well.

When the British architect Christopher Wren was buried in 1723, part of his epitaph, written by his eldest son, Christopher Wren, Jr., read: "Lector, si monumentum requiris, Circumspice." If you wanted to judge his interest, efforts and accomplishments, all you had to do was look around you. His work was there for all to see.

The work of Massachusetts high school athletes and coaches is all around us in The Boston Globe on a regular basis, but the work of our high school scholars and teachers is nowhere to be seen in that public record.

If one seeks a monument to anti-academic and anti-intellectual views and practices in Boston today, one need look no further than The Boston Globe. I read it every day, and I will be sorry to see it fold, if it does, but I will not miss its attention to and recognition of the academic efforts and accomplish-ments of Massachusetts secondary students and their teachers, because there is none now, and never has been any, no matter how many reports on education reform and academic standards it may have published over the years. If you ask how much The Boston Globe editors (and I am sure The Globe is not alone in this) care about the good academic work now actually being done by high school teachers and their students in Massachusetts, the answer is, from the evidence, that they do not.




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"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
fitzhugh@tcr.org; www.tcr.org
Varsity Academics®