E. D. Hirsch celebrated his 90th birthday a few days ago.

What better time to remind ourselves of his contributions to American education? I hope Hirsch will forgive me if I do not dwell here on his practical and arguably greatest contribution—the establishment of the Core Knowledge Foundation, which has both produced outstanding curricular materials (many distributed without cost) and advocated for equitable, outstanding education for all. (I sat on the board of the foundation for some years.)

Instead, I'll focus on three profound ideas that Hirsch developed and explicated, and that have had a substantial influence on my thinking. 

1. The role of knowledge in reading. Background knowledge is the main driver of language comprehension, whether written or spoken.   Disadvantaged students are disproportionately dependent on schools to provide the background information that will make them effective readers because wealthy students have greater opportunity to gain this knowledge at home. These were the key ideas in Cultural Literacy. That 1987 volume became a best seller mainly because of the list at the back of the book, “What Literate Americans Know.” The list also gave Hirsch the undeserved reputation of an ultra-conservative because he was apparently advocating that school children spend most of their time memorizing the names of dead white males. You couldn’t hold that opinion if you actually read the book, but most people didn’t.
2. The importance of shared knowledge in citizenship. The American Founders recognized that this country, as a multi-ethnic society, faced a peculiar dilemma among nations; how to encourage a feeling of commonality and mutual responsibility among diverse citizenry? They saw a common body of knowledge as crucial to the cohesiveness of American citizenry where individuals held allegiance to other tribes—English, Scottish, German, etc. In The Making of Americans Hirsch argues for a “civic core,” and for the idea that each of us as individuals can and should have commonality in the public sphere, even as we have individuality and different group allegiances in the private sphere. The former does not diminish the latter.
3. The seeds of Americans' denigration of knowledge. Why would it be controversial to argue that children should share some common knowledge? The seeds of that idea lay in the Romantic response to the Enlightenment. Whereas Enlightenment thinkers esteemed knowledge of the world, the Romantics emphasized feeling, emotion, and especially esteemed the impulse of the individual. Whereas Enlightenment thinkers would emphasize social institutions as beneficial to human well-being and flourishing, Romantics depicted social institutions as problems, and portrayed humankind in its natural state as sanctified. In The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them and in Why Knowledge Matters, Hirsch has argued that early educational theorists were influenced by Romantics to a degree few appreciate, and that we today are inheritors of their mostly flawed assumptions about human nature. These assumptions lead to a reverence for individuality and for nature, and a corresponding denigration of knowledge deemed important enough for all to know.

 
Needless to say, a paragraph doesn't begin to do justice to each of these ideas. If they are not familiar, I encourage you to explore them further--I've already made it easy by including the links to buy the books!

Yesterday, the day of the student walkouts to protest gun violence, Robert Pondiscio published a blog  suggesting that participating students ought to face the usual consequences (whatever they might be at their school) for missing class.

I posted a link to this blog on social media with the provocative (but not inaccurate) title "Why students participating in the walkout today ought to be punished." A few people expressed puzzlement and a few expressed outrage, so I thought I'd explain.

Pondiscio's point is easily summarized with this quote: "By its very nature, an act of civil disobedience means the protester refuses to comply  with rule, norms, and expectations.”

Pondiscio goes farther than I would, saying that “compliance rob[s] the protest of any meaning,” and Andy Rotherham seems to agree in his own blog, saying that if students know in advance a walkout is consequence-free “it’s theater.” I think it's still meaningful to show support, but I don’t see how you can argue that it’s an act of civil disobedience or a walkout.

Rotherham touches on another theme that I agree with: adults coordinating the walkout, seeking ways to make it easy and "safe" for kids, fits a more general pattern of adults today exercising too much control over kids' lives, and keeping them safe in ways that ultimately backfire. (Watch for Greg Lukianoff and Jon Haidt's book on this subject, The Coddling of the American Mind.)

Both Pondiscio and Rotherham made another point that I found much more telling, and is the reason I thought the blog worth sharing: teachers and administrators allowing students to attend walkouts sets a terrible precedent.

My concern is that educators who suspended the usual consequences for students missing class did so because they agreed with the cause of the protesters. I do too, but it seems pretty clear that I can’t suspend a policy only for causes I agree with. So what happens when people want to cut class not to protest gun violence, but to support gun owners rights, or to lower the drinking age, or to show support for Nancy Pelosi or Donald Trump? “Slippery slope” arguments often make me roll my eyes, but in this case, I think it’s apt. Are students to be allowed to walk out of classes for any protest? (I imagine middle-school me, at the pizza place during math class, telling the vice principal between bites "This is the way I protest congressional inaction on term limits.")

Maybe there's a good argument for educators taking the role of sanctioning or punishing protests based on their content. I haven't heard it. 

In a 2014 commentary, Gail Lovette and I argued that many educators have a misconception about the teaching of reading comprehension. We suggested that they often think of comprehension as a transferable skill—as reading comprehension improves, it improves for all texts. We suggested, in contrast, the comprehension is highly text-specific and dependent on background knowledge.

Further, we suggested that all-purpose comprehension processes (e.g., monitoring whether you’re understanding, remembering to coordinate meaning across sentences and paragraphs) makes a contribution, but is not much susceptible to practice. As evidence, we cited eight meta-analyses that examined data from studies of comprehension strategy instruction. All of these analyses showed a sizable benefit for strategy instruction, but the amount of instruction or practice had no impact on the benefit. Our interpretation was the strategy instruction told students (who didn’t already know it) that things like coordinating meaning was a good thing to do, but such instruction can’t tell you how to do it, because the how depends on the particular meaning. The instruction can’t be all-purpose.

A new meta-analysis shows the same pattern of data.

Amy Elleman summarized data in a meta-analyis of 25 studies that used various methods to teach children to make inferences, and to apply them to texts. She examined three separate measures of comprehension: general comprehension, inferences in particular, and understanding of things literally stated in the text. She also separated the benefit of instruction to skilled and less-skilled readers.

The data showed “moderate to large” effects of instruction to general comprehension and to making inferences for both skilled and less skilled readers. The pattern differed for the “literal” measure, however, with skilled readers showing almost no gain but unskilled readers again showing a sizable gain. 

It’s somewhat surprising that these students showed such a large gain on an outcome for which they received no instruction…but it must be remembered that less skilled readers are often characterized as somewhat passive in their reading. Hence, instruction may have improved literal comprehension by prompting them tackle the task with more cognitive resources.
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Especially noteworthy to me was that Elleman observed no effect of what she called “Instruction intensity” i.e., number of hours devoted to inference instruction, as Lovette and I noted for the other eight meta-analyses.

This finding was not discussed in the article, but supports Willingham & Lovette’s interpretation of the effect of comprehension instruction: it alerts students to the importance of making inferences, and perhaps more broadly (for less skilled readers) that it is important to THINK while you read. But practicing inferences does not lead to a general inferencing skill for two reasons. One, as noted, inferencing depends on the particular text, and two, whatever cognitive processes contribute to inferencing are already well practiced from use in oral language---we continually draw inferences in conversation.
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As Willingham & Lovette suggested, comprehension instruction is a great idea, because research consistently shows a large benefit of such instruction. But just as consistently, it shows that brief instruction leads to the same outcome as longer instruction.