In last month’s column, I joined the beleaguered defenders of the Common Core standards. The evidence shows that American children leave school having learned less than peers in other nations—27th of 34 nations tested in math, 17th in reading and 21st in science. Mobility recommends some level of standardization of “scope & sequence”—what children learn when—particularly in the elementary grades. The expressed goals of the architects of Common Core are hard to argue with—that reading instruction should challenge students to think about the content, not simply decode the superficial meaning of the words; that nonfiction should receive greater emphasis; that math should focus on analytical, not simply technical, skills; that instruction across the disciplines should reinforce independent thinking. Read more »
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In 1975, Marva Collins founded Westside Preparatory School in Chicago’s Garfield Park neighborhood, a place of persistent and concentrated poverty. Renamed Marva Collins Prep, the school targeted disadvantaged students, many of whom had been classified by the public school as learning disabled. She was able to spur them to achieve at levels comparable to students in high income neighborhoods. Collins’ success was profiled by CBS’s 60 Minutes in 1979 and became the subject of a movie in 1981 starring Cicely Tyson and Morgan Freeman.