Hawaii is the oldest public education system west of the Mississippi River, but only now are officials deciding whether or not to implement a curriculum throughout the statewide school district.

SB3059 SD2 HD1, which would establish a statewide curriculum, passed out of the House Education Committee Thursday, March 23, and will now move on to the House Finance Committee to determine funding for this initiative.

The push for a rigorous, common core curriculum did not come from the teachers’ union -- who testified against the bill, nor the Board of Education, but rather from the Hawaii Automobile Dealers Association (HADA).

HADA President Dave Rolf testified that the reason for his organization’s push was initially the rejection of reimbursement claims for warranty repair work done on cars by the Detroit manufacturer, because the written claims submitted by the Hawaii dealership’s auto techs were “not clear.” The quest for the creation of a research-based language arts and core content curriculum thus began.

SB 3059 states, “Although the State has established statewide standards and benchmarks, learner outcomes, assessments, promotion requirements, and graduation requirements, the legislature finds that Hawaii's public school system does not have a model curriculum to meet its goals.”

House Education Committee members questioned why the Legislature is involved in mandating curriculum when it is the Board of Education, which is empowered under Article X, Section 3 of the Hawaii State Constitution, to develop educational policy. In fact, the board did create Literacy Policy 2010 several years ago that states “the development of student literacy in all content areas and in all grade levels is an educational and cultural imperative.” The policy lays out exactly which skills students must develop and how the attainment of those skills will be measured. Unfortunately, the Department of Education leadership has failed to follow the board’s mandate.

Instead, the state-level DOE devised elaborate “standards,” and then collaborated with national vendors, such as Harcourt Inc. and American Institutes for Research (AIR), to foist progressive education theories -- reeking with assumptions about “social justice” and “diversity” that favor process over content -- on teachers and their students. Meanwhile, teachers are struggling to reach many of their students who have not even learned how to sound out words or organize those words into coherent sentences.

In Read It and Weep: Why Many Educators Advocate the Opposite of What Works, Dr. Sandra Stotsky attributes the education establishment’s resistance to proven reading instruction to willful indifference.

Confirming her theory is Dr. Jeanne Chall, a worldwide expert on reading research and instruction, who wrote before her death in 1999, The Academic Achievement Challenge. Chall’s lifetime of work led her to the following conclusions: teacher-centered versus student-centered instruction, especially for low-income children, results in higher student achievement in all subjects; beginning readers must learn the relationships between spoken words and written symbols using phonological instruction not whole language and instruction must be provided within a clear pedagogical structure.

Political forces corrupted common sense and proven education practices as early as 1970, when Paulo Freire published Pedagogy for the Oppressed and Kenneth and Yetta Goodman began the whole language movement with Reading: A Psycholinguistic Guessing Game. Freire, a Marxist, believed that phonics instruction was oppressive. The Goodmans believed that phonics imposed a false structure on dialect-speaking poor children and was a method preferred by Christian fundamentalists. Unbelievably, education colleges adopted these beliefs.

Now, 30 years later, parents and teachers are experiencing the fallout from progressive education theorists’ failed assumptions.

More than 80 percent of Hawaii’s public school children are not functioning at grade level and less than two-thirds of all public school students graduate from high school.

When Director Robert McClelland of the DOE Planning and Evaluation office states that the DOE’s broader mission is to "ensure that students learn to be fully engaged in the life of their communities," and Superintendent Pat Hamamoto opposes a rigorous, core curriculum in favor of waiting for children to experience what she calls an “a-ha” moment, legislators, policymakers, parents, communities and students should reject those failed theories and advocate for direct instructional methods. These basic core teachings will give students the skills to truly participate in our democracy as literate, productive citizens.

References:

Read it and Weep, Dr. Sandra Stotsky, Education Matters, March 2006

http://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/sessioncurrent/bills/sb3059_sd2_.htm

Laura Brown is the education reporter and researcher for HawaiiReporter.com and the education policy analyst for the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. She can be reached via email at mailto:laurabrown@hawaii.rr.com