This is a letter to the editor written in response to Prof. Paul Deering’s opinion on core curriculum in Hawaii’s schools.

Teaching should not be limited only to what an individual teacher knows or feels like teaching. But that is the premise of Prof. Paul Deering’s rant against a core curriculum in Hawaii’s schools, because he feels that students are doing just fine. (The Honolulu Advertiser, Opinion, 4/28/06).

A report by WestEd (1) entitled, “Student Achievement in Hawaii: Final Report” dated July 1, 2004 found that the opposite is true. Here is a summary of the findings:

• K-12 student achievement in Hawaii is very low. Substantial improvement on the HAS, SAT-9, NAEP and SAT-I is necessary before performance can be considered acceptable.
• Using NAEP as the primary measure of student achievement, students in Hawaii perform very poorly as compared to the rest of the nation.
• Hawaii’s national ranking is consistently at or near the bottom of states across various student assessment and performance indicators.

Overall, 4 out of 10 students in Hawaii’s public schools are proficient in reading. Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Caucasian students fare better, with a little better than half of all students performing at grade level. Proficiency levels in Mathematics are much lower across all demographic groups and are near the bottom nationally.

Public school students who take the SAT-I to qualify for entrance into college had the lowest combined verbal and mathematics score (951) out of 23 states with at least 50 percent participation rate.

Therefore, despite Prof. Deering’s claims, all evidence shows that the Progressive Education Movement -- where teachers leave children to their own devices in hopes they will somehow discover bodies of knowledge cultivated from worldwide civilizations throughout the ages -- is a terrible failure.

Teachers like Deering may be averse to the discipline of teaching a curriculum that will allow Hawaii’s students a chance to be on equal footing with other students nationally and globally, but parents expect no less for their children. That must be a parent’s choice. Deering, of course, may freely perform the non-curriculum experiment on his own children.

(1) As one of the nation’s Regional Educational Laboratories, WestEd is the U.S. Department of Education-designated national Assessment Specialty Laboratory.

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