Core Knowledge has become a nationally recognized K-8 curriculum, built on an inventory of essential cultural, social and academic knowledge. Founder and Chairman of the Board of the Core Knowledge Foundation E.D. Hirsch, a former English professor at the University of Virginia, addressed the opening session of the Core Knowledge national convention in Atlanta in March. He outlined the reasons he thinks American schools need a CK approach.

The CK movement “is based on principles held by the best scientists,” Hirsch said, and contains the information that is “taken for granted” in spoken and written language in our society. “It doesn’t embrace a partisan ideology, except the classical idea of a democratic education, one that seeks to give the child only the best we can give them.”

One of the biggest problems with current educational practice, according to Hirsch, is that teachers find themselves in “an incoherent system.” Students receive an uncertain and uneven early preparation, focusing on short-run “quick and dirty” tactics such as drills to boost short-run test scores. This wastes the talents of both teachers and students, according to the CK founder, because they never take the time for the “slow, cumulative learning, deeply dependent on content,” that young students need.

North Carolina has eight official Core Knowledge schools for 2003-04, and many more that have implemented part of the CK curriculum. Official Core Knowledge Schools make the commitment that 80 percent of the teachers, in grades K-8, will teach at least 80 percent of the CK sequence.

Rudy Swofford, principal of Greensboro Charter Academy, offered some thoughts on Core Knowledge at his CK school. Greensboro has been open and operated by National Heritage Academies for five years. They’ve been an official Core Knowledge school for three years.

Swofford explained the success of the program at Greensboro by noting that, on end of grade tests, “93 percent or better of third-eighth-grade students are at or above grade level in math and reading.” The school was also named a school of excellence by the Department of Public Instruction last year. While some academies operate on an extended day, Greensboro’s school day is 8:15 to 3:15 for all grades — normal for middle school and slightly longer than a typical elementary schedule.

Although the CK curriculum doesn’t necessarily line up grade-for-grade with the North Carolina Standard Course of Study, Swofford is confident that the students get all of the material required by the time they finish middle school. The Core Knowledge Foundation is in the process of producing state-aligned guides for use in the classroom. According to Swofford, teachers at Greensboro “like the Core Knowledge curriculum because it is systematic and coherent.”

Teacher retention is not a great problem at Greensboro Charter, Swofford said.

Educators and school administrators began the weeklong Core Knowledge convention in Atlanta with a menu full of varied and engaging topics. More than 2,100 conferees gobbled up math and other workshops at breakfast, and sang the praises of rat for lunch at the Saturday keynote event.

Saturday’s luncheon featured a talk/performance by poet Jack Prelutsky. Prelutsky promotes literacy through witty, entertaining, and often incongruous themes.
“We remember things in rhymes, ” he says, “it’s the way that news was originally conveyed from town to town.”

Prelutsky claims his poems are inspired by his own experiences, to which he adds a touch of the fantastic. “Rat for Lunch!” was inspired, according to the author, by a visit to a Seattle restaurant. The author sang verses of “Rat for Lunch!” in comical style, while luncheon diners chorused “Rat for Lunch!” in the interludes.

“Rat for Lunch!” appears in A Pizza the Size of the Sun. A forthcomimg work — If Not For The Cat — is a collection of haiku; 17 poems in 17 syllables, written from the point of view of animals.

In the workshop “Elementary Mathematics: Identifying the Missing Pieces,” Dr. Liping Ma, senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation and author of Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics, discussed the link between understanding and teaching math.

Ma compared teachers in China and the United States to determine how well they understood the deeper math concepts behind elementary math. “On sheepskin, the American teachers seemed decidedly superior to the Chinese: they were all college graduates, and several had M.A.’s. The Chinese teachers had nine years of regular schooling, then three years of normal school for teachers — in terms of study time, a high school degree.”

Interviews with 23 U.S. teachers and 72 Chinese teachers, each about evenly split in experience, posed four questions about teaching math concepts. The questions covered subtraction with regrouping, three-digit multiplication, division by fractions, and the relationship between perimeter and area.

Only 20 percent of U.S. teachers had a conceptual grasp of the regrouping process in subtraction; 40 percent could explain the place-value concept used for partial products in three-digit multiplication. Nearly 90 percent of Chinese teachers understood these concepts.

Unfortunately, fewer than half of U.S. teachers could even compute division by fractions correctly. For area and perimeter, “most, though not all, could state the formulas. However, when it came to analyzing the mathematics, most were lost at sea.”

By contrast, according to Ma, some Chinese teachers “gave responses that more than answered the question,” or “suggested that the given problem was too easy and offered harder ones.”

Ma explained that American students and teachers are exposed to too many examples of some kinds of problems, and too few of others. Simple ‘combining’ in addition, she argues, is “overpresented.” Problems that require a deeper and more subtle understanding are “underpresented.” Underpresented types include ‘increasing’ and ‘finding a larger value.’

‘Increasing’ problems have a time element, which makes them more difficult. ‘Finding the larger value’ problems are less obvious due to larger numbers (eight apples are involved in the sample problem), and contain an implicit element of algebra that Chinese teachers seemed more comfortable with. “No such awareness of the algebraic backbone of arithmetic was shown by the American teachers,” Ma reports.

The solution? Give math students practice with harder concepts, and make math teachers math specialists. Since “American texts tend to be lavishly produced but disjoint in presentation,” teachers should have “texts that are coherent and promote self-study.” These steps, she says, can help teachers learn and transmit a coherent understanding of math.

Dr. Karen Palasek is assistant editor of Carolina Journal.