The Science in Gove's Speech

2/6/2013

Michael Gove, Secretary of Education in Great Britain, certainly has a flair for oratory.

In his most recent speech, he accused his political opponents of favoring "Downton Abbey-style" education (meaning one that perpetuates class differences), he evoked a 13 year old servant girl reading Keats, and he cited as an inspiration the late British reality TV star Jade Goody (best known for being ignorant), and Marxist writer and political theorist Antonio Gramsci.

Predictably, press coverage in Britain has focused on these details. (So, of course, have the Tweets.) The Financial Times and the Telegraph pointed to Gove's political challenge to Labour. The Guardian led with the Goody & Gramsci angle.

But these points of color distract from the real aim. The fulcrum of the speech is the argument that a knowledge-based curriculum is essential to bring greater educational opportunity to disadvantaged children. (The BBC got half the story right.)

The logic is simple:

1) Knowledge is crucial to support cognitive processes. (e.g., Carnine & Carnine, 2004; Hasselbring, 1988; Willingham, 2006).

2) Children who grow up in disadvantaged circumstances have fewer opportunities to learn important background knowledge at home (Walker et al, 1994) and they come to school with less knowledge, which has an impact on their ability to learn new information at school (Grissmer et al 2010) and likely leads to a negative feedback cycle whereby they fall farther and farther behind (Stanovich, 1986).

Gove is right. And he's right to argue for a knowledge-based curriculum. The curriculum is most likely to meliorate achievement gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students because a good fraction of that difference is fueled by differences in cultural capital in the home--differences that schools must try to make up. (Indeed, a knowledge-based curriculum is a critical component of KIPP and other "no excuses" schools in the US.)

I'm not writing to defend all education policies undertaken by the current British government--I'm not knowledgeable enough about those policies to defend or attack them.

But I find the response from Stephen Twigg (Labour's shadow education secretary) disquieting, because he seems to have missed Gove's point.

"Instead of lecturing others, he should listen to business leaders, entrepreneurs, headteachers and parents who think his plans are backward looking and narrow. We need to get young people ready for a challenging and competitive world of work, not just dwell on the past." (As quoted in the Financial Times.)

It's easy to scoff at a knowledge-based curriculum as backward-looking. Memorization of math facts when we have calculators? Knowledge in the age of Google?

But if you mistake advocacy for a knowledge-based curriculum as wistful nostalgia for a better time, or as "old fashioned" you just don't get it.

Surprising though it may seem, you can't just Google everything. You actually need to have knowledge in your head to think well. So a knowledge-based curriculum is the best way to get young people "ready for the world of work."

Mr. Gove is rare, if not unique, among high-level education policy makers in understanding the scientific point he made in yesterday's speech. You may agree or disagree with the policies Mr. Gove sees as the logical consequence of that scientific point, but education policies that clearly contradict it are unlikely to help close the achievement gap between wealthy and poor.

References

Carnine, L., & Carnine, D. (2004). The interaction of reading skills and science content knowledge when teaching struggling secondary students. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 20(2), 203-218.

Grissmer, D., Grimm, K. J., Aiyer, S. M., Murrah, W. M., & Steele, J. S. (2010). Fine motor skills and early comprehension of the world: Two new school readiness indicators. Developmental psychology, 46(5), 1008.

Hasselbring, T. S. (1988). Developing Math Automaticity in Learning Handicapped Children: The Role of Computerized Drill and Practice. Focus on Exceptional Children, 20(6), 1-7.

Stanovich, K. E. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading research quarterly, 360-407.

Walker, D., Greenwood, C., Hart, B., & Carta, J. (1994). Prediction of school outcomes based on early language production and socioeconomic factors. Child development, 65(2), 606-621.

Willingham, D. T. (2006). How knowledge helps. American Educator, 30(1), 30-37.

13 Comments

Chris

02/06/2013 12:45pm

Twigg missed an opportunity here to help the knowledge-based curriculum camp and the skills-based camp (think 21st century skills) get on the same page (ah, politics). If he's concerned about preparing students for a competitive workforce he should be pushing Gove to think harder about skill contexts and the pedagogical approaches used to help students gain background knowledge. It's important to remember that background knowledge is facts reinforced by experiences, in and out of the classroom. It's possible to develop the knowledge and skills concurrently, but it does require that we think of knowledge-based in a more dynamic way, instead of what is still often a passive receipt of information that slowly diminishes student motivation.

Scott McLeod link

02/06/2013 12:48pm

Calls for a 'knowledge-based' curriculum are interpreted by most educators and policymakers to mean a 'knowledge ONLY' curriculum. If we look at Bloom's taxonomy, research (including work done by Dean Pianta there at UVA) shows that P-12 students overwhelmingly live at the 'lower' levels of Bloom's and rarely get to venture beyond into 'higher-order' thinking.

When you're an adult, of course, no one cares about what you know. They care about what you can DO with what you know. We hear over and over again from employers and colleges that they need people who can THINK, not just be told what to do. Our P-12 system rarely gives students a chance to be critical thinkers, collaborators, or problem-solvers at high levels.

We all recognize that much of what we 'knew' in school is now long gone, relegated to the dustbins of our minds because the disconnected, decontextualized facts and procedures that we regurgitated at one point in our lives to show our 'learning' had no meaning or relevance or authenticity to us beyond the short-term impetus of a required assignment or exam. How much of the content and procedures that you 'learned' in school do you actually remember, Dan? Like the rest of us, some. And some additional stuff comes back at surprising times. And much is gone, never to return without relearning it all over again.

Hirsch's laundry lists of 'things kids should know' exacerbate the problem because they're not accompanied by skills, dispositions, actions, or behaviors that we want students to possess. We should be focusing on what we want kids to BE, not just what we want them to know. To do that requires us to deliver MORE than a mere knowledge-dominant learning experience. In your own book, you said that what kids and teachers should focus on are big ideas, and I believe you had it right. So calls for knowledge-based curricula are well and good, as long as they don't become 'knowledge only' in practice. Right now we're not doing such a good job of that in our classrooms or with our policymaking and assessments.

Dan Willingham

02/06/2013 2:00pm

@Chris @Scott Yes, I agree with both--abstracting, we shouldn't get lost in the calls for knowledge and forget that skills capitalizing on this knowledge will not appear of their own accord, but must be systematically taught.
The other danger attending the knowledge curriculum is if one takes the next step and poses vigorous tests of said knowledge. . . and end up with all the problems we've seen here. (I blogged on this after Gove's *last* speech).

Douglas Hainline

02/06/2013 6:32pm

I think the problem is this: the people who have in practice discarded teaching factual knowledge, have not replaced it with teaching the "21st Century Skills" they claim to champion.

For example: mere memorization of the times tables does not at all guarantee that one will be able to solve word problems in mathematics. But I would be willing to bet good money that children who do not know their times tables, will also not be able to solve complicated word problems.

The attraction, for weak teachers, of the "skills not knowledge" line is that the factual knowledge children have been taught (or not) is easily testable, whereas "higher order thinking", "skills" and so on is not so easily testable.

I think there may be a class bias here too: in the United Kingdom, knowledge of historical facts has been minimized in schools, in favor of developing the ability to assess historical sources and other 'creative' things. The latter is a proxy for a skill that the children of educated, verbally-fluent, middle class parents will pick up naturally, but that children from less privileged backgrounds are not so good at.

Andrew Vivian link

02/06/2013 11:42pm

No-one disputes that we need some background knowledge in order to build our understanding of the world, but it is drawing a long bow to use this as an argument for a "knowledge-based" curriculum.

My observations, from working in classrooms with British teachers, albeit outside the U.K. is that there is a tendency by weaker teachers to perpetuate class bias by assuming that some students are not capable of higher order thinking and are, therefore, consigned to repetitive, low-level tasks that actually perpetuate their lack of understanding - these kids remember facts, and can demonstrate understanding (in Bloom terms) but cannot make connections or evaluate their learning, which really disadvantages them in the current century.

There are schools and school systems which demonstrate, beyond question, that if students are exposed to good attitudes and skills, the knowledge automatically follows.

Also, you actually can Google everything, if you know how to make connections.

Darin Schmidt link

02/07/2013 6:09am

Mr. Vivian makes an interesting point. While I agree in principle with Dr. Willingham and the Cultural Literacy folks, I wonder how much knowledge is "enough." The curriculum bias mentioned also manifests itself in the US, particularly in schools under the gun to "get those scores up."

Douglas Hainline

02/07/2013 6:27am

It is certainly true that weak teachers probably prefer to teach 'facts' -- knowing that -- rather than skills -- knowing how. And they do a poor job of that, I suspect.

I think we have to talk about specifics, because no reasonable person will absolutely deny the importance of either.

Specifically, should children learn dates in history, for example? Should they know -- to, within, say, fifty years -- when the Romans arrived in Britain (either time); when Henry the Eighth reigned? When the English Civil War occurred? Should they know their times tables? That an identity for the difference of two squares is the product of their sum and difference? That the further a planet is from the sun, the longer it takes for it to make a complete orbit? That in humans, the difference between males and females is due to differences in a certain chromosome (XX vs XY)?

I believe that any educational system that does not teach these facts, and several tens of thousands more like them, is failing its children. And the ones who really suffer are the children from homes where this knowledge is not absorbed automatically because it is 'in the background'.

Now, I absolutely agree, that 'facts' can be taught in a horrible, flat, boring way, as just lists of disconnected things to be memorized and regurgitated on a multiple-choice exam. I totally agree with people who oppose this sort of soul-destroying 'education'.

But they can also be taught in a lively, interesting manner, especially now with the enormous number of free videos available via YouTube.

And once children have a base of factual knowledge, they have the resources to consider 'higher order' questions: is there a pattern in history? Why did the Romans make so little impact on the natives they ruled for three centuries? Was the English Civil War a disguised class struggle? Can we find other interesting algebraic identities -- how about the difference of two cubes? Why is it the case that outer planets take longer to go around the sun?

Google is great if you know what you're looking for. If I want to find Mozart's exact birthdate, I turn to Google. If I want to learn more about the man, I go to Wikipedia. But if I have no idea who Mozart was, Google is useless.

I tutor children, and I had a tutee a couple of years ago -- aged 15 -- who didn't know what 3 x 6 is. (This person went to a private school, too.) Morally, the people who allowed this to happen are criminals.

I'm a great believer in teaching problem-solving skills -- I read Polya fifty years ago and have used his approach in my teaching for decades -- but if someone cannot quickly do elementary arithmetic, they're lost when it comes to more advanced material.

This seems so obvious to me that I cannot imagine anyone really disagrees. But evidently they do.

Douglas Hainline

02/07/2013 6:28am

Douglas Hainline

02/07/2013 6:28am

Douglas Hainline

02/07/2013 6:29am

Douglas Hainline

02/07/2013 6:29am

Mumbler

02/07/2013 6:45pm

Well, I'm afraid it seems to me that it's this blog post which has missed the point, and it's disappointing to see yet another commentator playing to the false dualisms of this debate. Nobody is saying that children should not be taught any facts. That's just a straw man Gove has set up.

Twigg (and I'm not generally a fan) is *right* to draw attention to the fact that Gove blithely ignores any information which does not fit with his prior assumptions or obsessions. There is a deeply worrying lack of proper dialogue in the process - and not just with the unions and the poor benighted teachers, but with *anybody* who dares to disagree. The Education Select Committee itself is clearly concerned about the running of Gove's department as a whole.

There are ways and ways of teaching facts, as a number of comments have noted. But take a look at the draft history curriculum and tell me you don't think that it's actually quite a bit mad in its content for 7-14 year olds. Not ambitious, not challenging, but completely unreasonable.

https://media.education.gov.uk/assets/files/pdf/n/national%20curriculum%20consultation%20-%20framework%20document.pdf

There are clearly benefits to be derived from studying any of the topics listed; but such a number, at that educational stage, is surely inappropriate, unless it is assumed that they will be learned without any real engagement with the issues behind the headline dates and events.

There's more to it than that, too. This is a political game being played with children's futures. Have you not stopped to wonder why such an unfeasible, inflexible and unattractive curriculum is being suggested, in a context where the current regime wants to move as many schools to academy status as possible? perhaps you are unaware that academies and Free Schools are not as tied by the National Curriculum as ordinary state schools are. Independents are not tied to it at all. This means that becoming an academy will become much more attractive. And who benefits financially from the academies programme? Big donors to the Conservative Party.

Remember that Gove's own adviser has a history of working with the New Schools Network. There are potential conflicts of interest all over the place. Please don't be so naive as to think that this is entirely about the education of disadvantaged children, and whether their lack of cultural capital is holding them back. If that were really the concern (and I believe you're absolutely right that it should be, although I don't believe that in this case it is), then the obvious and sensible thing would be to give those children careful, targeted support in various ways, not to redraw the entire curriculum for all state school children, a large number of whom are not culturally disadvantaged in the least.

Nick von Behr link

02/09/2013 7:36am

There are numerous debates going on currently about evidence-based policy and policy-based evidence. Experts names are thrown around and of course there is no such thing as bad news when it comes to publicity about your own research. PISA took this line on its benchmarking surveys, decided to show national rankings to get more attention, and look where we are now on this: http://behrfacts.com/2013/01/31/my-education-system-is-better-than-yours/. Facts are relative and need to be agreed in order to be relevant. The History curriculum is a great example as we are all continuously adding to it as we live and breathe, but the full interpretation of what actually has happened is subjective i.e. this event was good/bad/of no significance depending on your political and philosophical views on life. Let's please not pretend this is a 100% objective approach. But what matters in education is what actually happens in schools - is it realistic to ask a teacher to do this with a group of children? Unless you've been one you probably don't know and even then, again, it is your view only.

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