Here at the Fordham office, the draft Common Core standards has not only brought an air of excitement, but also a nostalgic trip down memory lane. The illustrative texts included in the English Language Arts appendix are strong examples of what students should be learning from kindergarten to high school graduation. But instructional merit aside, they’re also great books. Oh, to be a kid again…

Frog and Toad Together (K-1) by Arnold Lobel: Who didn’t love this endearing amphibian duo? In kindergarten, they were the greatest pair since Bert and Ernie. And back before cars had TV screens, they had the added bonus of portability.

Charlotte’s Web (2-3) by E. B. White: Some book. A classic at any age, so good that even obvious questions such as “How did the spider learn to spell?” are overshadowed by an engrossing  plot and an enduring friendship.

Tuck Everlasting (4-5) by Natalie Babbitt: Right about the time that you first realize you’re eventually going to grow up, this book gives you hope that you can stay a kid forever. Or maybe that’s just how we around the office remember it now…

A Wrinkle in Time (6-8) by Madeleine L’Engle: No explanation needed. If you haven’t read this book, go find it immediately.

The Odyssey (9-10) by Homer:  OK, we’ll be honest, no one has nostalgic memories of slogging through The Odyssey the first time around; instead, it brings back *shuddering* flashes of a first encounter with footnotes. But without it, we would all be terrible at Jeopardy! today. Thus, two thumbs up.

The Great Gatsby (11-12) by Scott Fitzgerald: The final two years of high school feature a tour de force of great works (Jane Eyre, Macbeth, Death of a Salesman, A Raisin in the Sun) but none can touch Gatsby.  To still feel a twinge of fluttering heart at the sight of a green light in the distance—now that’s a good book.

–Janie Scull

I ran across an informative interview with Washington Post’s Jay Mathews about his new book, Work Hard. Be Nice: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America. The book explores in depth the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) and tracks the career paths of founders Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin. The interview with Jay was conducted by EducationNews.org. Check it out!

In a City Journal review of the new Malcolm Gladwell book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Laura Vanderkam praises his prose and calls it an “engaging” read. But she also quite bluntly calls out the author on his insistence that “it’s the best students who get the best teaching and the most attention.” She strongly disagrees – calling this “patently untrue.” And what does she use to back up her argument?

“A recent study from the Fordham Institute found that in the era of No Child Left Behind, teachers say they focus far more on their slower students than their quicker ones. Few American elementary schools group students extensively by ability, leaving the brightest students coasting through without ever doing the hard work that would allow them truly to excel later on. Many get bored and underachieve.”

That’s right! Fordham’s “High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB” indeed found that low-achieving students receive much more attention from teachers than do advanced students. Read more about it here.

Overall, Gladwell’s Outliers is an exploration of the complex forces that makes some people wildly successful — including “hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies.” Extremely hard work is also a key factor in the mix, he says. As Vanderkam notes:

“Gladwell devotes a particularly thought-provoking chapter to the KIPP schools-charter schools for low-income kids that specialize in extending the school day and ending summer vacation-as an example of how we might introduce a “Chinese” work ethic into American inner cities.”

Along these lines, Gladwell and Vanderkam might want to check out yet another top-notch Fordham publication: “Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism.” The book profiles 6 wildly successful inner-city schools, including a KIPP school, to find out what makes them work so well.

The Kauffman Foundation’s Ben Wildavsky reviews the new Charles Murray book in today’s Wall Street Journal, and doesn’t like what he reads. He describes Murray’s vision as “dismayingly fatalistic”:

One can accept the idea that inherent academic abilities are unevenly distributed while also believing that many low-achieving kids–and high-achieving kids, too, for that matter–could learn a lot more than they are learning now. International tests show that students in many other nations bypass American kids in reading and math. Could such comparative results really be a function of higher raw intelligence overseas–or are they more likely to reflect superior educational practices? It is telling that hard-headed education reformers like Eric Hanushek, Chester E. Finn and Jay Greene believe that we can do much more to boost the academic achievement of children upon whom Mr. Murray would essentially give up.

And:

While accusing education reformers of being wooly-headed romantics, then, Mr. Murray conjures up a romantic vision of his own. In his brave new world, the bell curve of abilities is cheerfully acknowledged; students and workers gladly accept their designated places in the pecking order; and happy, well-paid electricians and plumbers go about their business while their brainy brethren read Plato and prepare for the burdens of ruling the world. It is hard to believe that a dynamic, upwardly mobile society would emerge from such an arrangement, or “dignity” either.

Zing! Wildavsky concludes:

Mr. Murray says that he is deeply concerned about the dangers of overestimating the abilities of students. To which one might reply: Aren’t the dangers of underestimating their abilities vastly worse?

I think Wildavsky’s arguments are closer to the truth than Murray’s are, but let’s admit one thing. Education reformers do tend to be wooly-headed romantics (I speak from personal experience), so Murray’s realism is a helpful tonic for our soft edutopian world.

Are we really this far gone? The Wall Street Journal announced this morning, “Problem: Boys Don’t Like to Read. Solution: Books That Are Really Gross.” I salute the WSJ for this particular syntactic masterpiece of a headline, but let’s not jump on the bandwagon because we want to use the word “gross” on Page One.

I can understand why boys may not dig Charlotte’s Web or Little House on the Prairie, but there are plenty of other children’s or young adult books geared towards the rougher sex. What about The Jungle Book or some of Grimm’s scarier fairy tales? Plenty of children’s books are not about bunnies and rainbows–but are still age-appropriate for 5-, 6-, 7-year-olds. Yes, you might be keeping your son from blowing things up on his PlayStation, but isn’t reading a book about blowing things up just as bad? I would argue that the nuance of the English language and the rampant imagination of a typical child would make reading about something gory and inappropriate worse than seeing it on television.

The moral of the story is simply that we need to get all kids to keep reading, not by writing books that make them into adults that much sooner, but by being active and engaging parents who can relate The Pushcart War (a favorite!) to the contemporary world. This is about parents taking the easy way out, not about classic literature being outdated.

Japan’s famously demanding education system figures significantly in Natsuo Kirino’s new novel Real World, reviewed in Sunday’s New York Times books section:

“Real World” begins with a matricide. No longer willing to cooperate with the expectations of the “total idiot” who forced him to attend a prestigious high school even though he lacked the aptitude to succeed in such an environment, Worm bludgeoned his mother to death in what Terauchi, whose worldview allows no possibility of forgiveness or salvation, dismisses as a mindless, infantile response to frustration….

Welcome to present-day Tokyo, where “air pollution advisories” announce the arrival of summer vacation and where vacation isn’t a holiday from the 11-month academic year, but a break to be spent in cram schools taught by brainwashed college students who advocate studying hard enough to “spit up blood” as the avenue to a “tremendous confidence … you can build on for the rest of your life.”

Check out this Education Week article for a preview of Charles Murray’s latest book, Real Education. Want a glimpse? Referring to college-level textbooks, Murray argues that “We’re talking about material that only about 10 percent of high school graduates can understand.”

He calls that speaking “truth.” We call it fatalism. Yes, Dr. Murray, asking schools to achieve universal proficiency in reading and math is stupid, but so is settling for the results our education system is currently attaining. As a wise philosopher once said, there must be a middle way.

The New York Times reviews some handwringing about that which America’s k-12 schools have wrought. (Checker, too, has reviewed William Damon’s book; the piece is here.)