THE SCHOOLS WE NEED

Reviewed 5/27/2006

Cover shown is the paperback edition.

Access to this book courtesy of the

THE SCHOOLS WE NEED And Why We Don't Have Them E. D. Hirsch, Jr. New York: Doubleday, August 1996				Rating: 5.0 High
ISBN-13 978-0-385-48457-2
ISBN-10 0-385-48457-7	317pp.	HC/GSI	$24.95

Errata

Page 22:	"A 1925 study published by William C. Bagley of Teachers College, Columbia University, powerfully illustrates that research into the social outcomes of schooling and into the relative influence of the home greatly depend on the educational context in which those researches are conducted."
	Missing comma: S/B "study, published by William C. Bagley of Teachers College, Columbia University, powerfully".

Page 47:	"Throughout the world, just one way has been devised to meet that double challenge of educational excellence and fairness: to teach definite skills and a solid core of content appropriate in an effective manner in each year of preschool and grade-school education."
	The highlighted wording seems awkward. I submit it S/B "to teach, in an effective manner, definite skills and a solid core of appropriate content". (On the other hand, it could be poetically desired to teach the content appropriate, to trip the light fantastic, to sing the body electric, to dare the siege perilous...)

Page 57:	"The practical consequence of these hoary slogans, however, are anything but benign..."
	Number error: S/B "is anything but benign".

Page 151:	"First, expertness in the skill depends upon the automation, through a great deal of practice, of the repeated formal elements of the skill, thus freeing the conscious mind for critical thought."
	I would have used "expertise". But "expertness" is a real word and probably fits better, meaning as it does "proficiency".

Page 161:	In 1982, Brophy and his colleagues summarized some their later findings on the effective teaching of beginning reading."
	Missing word: S/B "some of their later findings".

Page 195:	This result meant that the district's usual test scores were significantly overstating students' knowledge and skill—a distortion that is undoubtedly widespread."
	Why "undoubtedly"? See full text below.

Claims about the baleful influence of tests on teaching have been mainly anecdotal—until recently. Not long ago, Daniel Koretz conducted a well-designed experiment that exposed the breadth of the corruption which had long been suspected. He simply gave to a group of students in an urban public school district an additional set of standardized tests, which happened to be unfamiliar ones, not currently used in the district. Koretz wanted to determine how well the students would fare if both they and their teachers were unfamiliar with the specific tests the children would be taking.

Although the two standardized tests were highly correlated with each other, the children performed much worse on the unexpected test than on the familiar one. This result meant that the district's usual test scores were significantly overstating students' knowledge and skill—a distortion that is undoubtedly widespread. Clearly, the most probable reason for the difference in student performance on the two tests was that teachers were focusing their instruction narrowly on the specific kinds of items that would be tested—precisely in order to help achieve the misleadingly favorable results.

– Pages 194-195

In other words, Hirsch here cites a single study of a single school district, and asserts that the "teaching to the test" abuse it finds must be widespread. This is an unsupported conclusion. While I happen to believe Hirsch is right, he hasn't proven it here, and that weakens his case considerably.

Page 204:	But so long as tests remained focused on lower skills, and so long as the states provided no incentives for teaching higher ones, the practical effect of the basic-skills movement was indeed to neglect higher-order skills."
	The construction of the last clause in this sentence is wrong; it should be something along the lines of "was indeed the neglect of higher-order skills."