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If we hope to create a truly equitable and excellent public school system in the coming decades, then we must begin by asking what we, as a society, consider to be the most consequential goals of public education, and for whom. What sort of curriculum would best serve the public good? And, perhaps even more important, who do we imagine that public to include? Who is the “we” that our schools should aim to serve?

There is no doubt that a key goal of education is to prepare active, engaged, and intellectually robust adults and community members. As the philosopher Amy Gutmann (1999) has argued, public education is the only viable venue for preparing all young people to engage in the civic arena. In a recent report published by the National Academy of Education (Lee, White, & Dong, 2021), my colleagues and I sought to flesh out this idea in more detail, specifying the kinds of knowledge, reasoning, and discourse that provide the necessary foundation for effective civic engagement and action. We concluded that all students require a solid grounding in academic content and skills from across the traditional subject areas, including an understanding of how abstract concepts and modes of reasoning relate to real-world public problems. Further, we concluded that all students must develop a number of key intellectual dispositions and habits of mind, including an eagerness to engage with complex ideas, assess the credibility of evidence, explore multiple points of view, sift through moral and ethical dilemmas, empathize with people from differing backgrounds, and appreciate the power of literature and the arts to teach about others’ experiences and worldviews.

For example, consider the challenges that American citizens have faced during the pandemic. COVID-19 has called upon all of us to know something about probabilistic reasoning, viral spread and mutation, and how to interpret data displays of mathematical distributions and patterns. It has highlighted the need to understand the complex and layered processes of political decision making in the U.S., including the overlapping purviews of federal, state, and local decision making. We need to understand how the rights of individuals relate, legally and ethically, to the interests of the broader public. And we need to be aware of the ethical considerations that come into play when the perceived interests of one community come into conflict with those of another.

When asked to envision the kind of public education I would hope to see in the coming years, I imagine a K-12 curriculum that is designed to prepare all young people for civic engagement in the face of such complexities.

A curriculum that embraces complex content

As we’ve learned from recent debates over the teaching of social studies and U.S. history — particularly the ongoing controversy over critical race theory — students’ opportunities to learn about and practice civic discourse depend on the nature of the content we include in the curriculum.

It’s worth noting that the highly partisan nature of these debates have illustrated precisely what we might hope to avoid by preparing students for democratically informed civic participation. For example, Stephen Toulmin’s (1984) influential approach to the teaching of argument requires middle and high school students to reason in complex and rigorous ways: When they make a claim, they must support it with evidence; in turn, they must be able to show that the evidence actually supports the claim, and they should back up this reasoning with additional explanation and examples. Using Toulmin’s model, countless teachers have successfully taught young people to define their terms carefully and build and defend their arguments using precise language. And yet, in the recent debates about critical race theory, we’ve heard numerous elected officials make arguments that fall far short of this standard, relying on claims that have no supporting evidence.

Students’ opportunities to learn about and practice civic discourse depend on the nature of the content we include in the curriculum.

Setting aside the shortcomings of this public discourse, though, it’s clear that these heated exchanges over critical race theory are most essentially about the content of the curriculum: What do we want our children to know and understand about the complexities of our history? Should they learn about the conundrums and contradictions of the American experience (which has included practices, laws, and policies that have oppressed particular populations), as well as learning about the many opportunities that our structure of governance offers, including opportunities for the public to change such practices, laws, and policies?

These struggles over what our students should know about our history are rooted in deeper, long-standing conflicts about who counts as the “we” in American life and who counts as the “other.” Noting that our public schools tend to teach a Eurocentric curriculum, across all academic subject areas, critics have long argued that it would be more appropriate to adopt a multicultural framework throughout the K-12 curriculum, one that better reflects our diversity and the demands of a multicultural democracy (Banks & Banks, 1995).

I argue, moreover, that if educators were to better understand how various cultural, political, and religious traditions have shaped the academic content areas, then they would be better equipped to prepare students for both their civic and intellectual lives. For example, if the science curriculum touched on not just contemporary ideas and theories but also the history of science — exploring, say, how the Catholic Church responded to Galileo’s insistence that the earth revolved round the sun — then students would gain a more sophisticated perspective on the complex ways in which scientific knowledge develops over time, both shaping and shaped by the cultural and political contexts in which scientists work (Osborne et al., 2001).

In the 1970s, I taught 3rd grade in an African-centered school that I helped found. At the time, educators were in the middle of what was called the New Math movement, which emphasized conceptual understanding as well as procedural knowledge. My colleagues and I aimed to ensure our students understood African and other contributions to mathematical knowledge and thinking. So when I taught the base 10 system, I taught about its Arabic origins; I taught about the base 20 system created by the Yoruba people in West Africa; I taught about the use of base 5 in the design of the abacus in China and elsewhere, and I taught about the base 2 system used in computer programming. I reasoned that students would develop a deeper conceptual understanding of the function of bases, would understand that mathematical practices are socially constructed, and would understand that human communities across space and time have contributed to the forward flow of knowledge — in this case, in mathematics.

My point is that if we expand our perspective of what academic content should be included in the curriculum, even in a subject like mathematics, we can build more robust disciplinary understandings as well as helping students understand how social, cultural, and political forces influence the construction of knowledge. Ideally, too, this can promote a more democratic conception of who belongs to the “we” in academic and civic life, and it can problematize who is positioned as the “other.”

Pedagogy rooted in knowledge of learning and development

Curriculum, whether commercially designed or designed by teachers, includes content that reflects the most current and robust understanding of what students need to know and be able to do, typically as defined by a set of published academic standards. For example, the Common Core State Standards represent our most current conception of what it means to master reading comprehension, literacy more broadly, and mathematics. Similarly, the Next Generation Science Standards represent a contemporary perspective on what students should know and understand in the sciences (and they reflect the field’s growing emphasis on requiring students to master cross-cutting concepts in science and engineering).

However, curricula and their guiding standards don’t just include content alone. More important, they aim to have students do work that mirrors the practices and modes of reasoning that are characteristic of the academic content areas, so that they replicate, as much as possible, the work of experts in these fields. Learning to engage with such practices and modes of reasoning are based on what we think of as constructivist models of learning (Bransford et al., 1999); they hold that all people learn by exploring, making and testing predictions, monitoring the success of our understanding in relation to the goals we set, and testing phenomena we experience against models we have developed from prior experiences or knowledge.

Students tend to learn more deeply when they sense that what they are learning is relevant.

In addition, our most current understandings of human learning and development (National Academies of Sciences & Medicine, 2018; Osher et al., 2018) hold that how we perceive ourselves, others, the tasks we perform, and the contexts in which we learn influences the goals we set and the motivation, effort, and engagement we bring to our activities. That is, the emotional salience we attribute to experiences matters greatly to learning; students tend to learn more deeply when they sense that what they are learning is relevant.

Today’s multidimensional conception of learning and development — which is fundamentally different from the conceptions that guided educators in past decades, including behaviorist models and models that treated learning as purely cognitive — has powerful implications for pedagogy, enabling teachers to structure environments that support robust, enduring knowledge-building (Lee, 2017a, 2017b). At the same time, however, efforts to integrate this model into public education have run up against challenges.

For example, the Common Core State Standards for reading comprehension note, in their introductory material, that students tend to require different kinds of instruction at different grade levels, reflecting both their changing developmental needs and their changing educational goals, interests, and contexts: In the early grades, it’s important to emphasize the foundational skills of decoding and fluency, but in the later grades, teachers should focus on helping students make sense of the more demanding and specialized texts they encounter in literature, social studies, science, and even mathematics classes. However, the grade-level standards themselves fail to reflect this shift — they make only minor distinctions between the nature of reading comprehension in the primary grades and the challenges of comprehending material in the content areas. And as a consequence, the Common Core has given rise to commercial curricula, assessments, and teaching practices that do little to meet the needs of older readers, missing important opportunities to help all students reach equitable outcomes.

While our curricula are often misaligned with our standards and neglect what we know about learning, we also face a related challenge having to do with teachers’ knowledge of the content areas. Many teachers — especially in the early grades — understand children’s developmental needs, but don’t themselves have the deep conceptual disciplinary knowledge needed to support academic learning. In mathematics, for example, educators themselves often say that they aim to help students develop a sophisticated kind of mathematical reasoning, which involves the ability to conceptualize multiple pathways for solving problems, to understand relationships among concepts and procedures, and to apply mathematical knowledge to ill-structured real-world problems. However, in elementary schools, which should prepare children to succeed in high school algebra (or to take algebra before they get to high school), most elementary teachers have little formal coursework in mathematics, and few have the sort of conceptual understanding that would allow them to teach their students to reason mathematically.

More than two decades ago, LiPing Ma (1999) documented stark differences in the level of mathematical content knowledge shown by teachers in the U.S. and China. When she asked 5th-grade teachers in the two countries to solve problems involving the division of fractions with unlike denominators, all of the teachers could solve the problem using a familiar procedure. However, when she asked why they used the procedure, not one U.S. teacher could give an explanation. By contrast, every Chinese teacher offered multiple explanations of how and why the procedure worked and how it translated to real-world problems. Based on U.S. students’ performance on the mathematics portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), we have little reason to think that things have changed much since then. Overall, math scores have improved somewhat since 1990. However, children appear to become less and less proficient in mathematics as they move into the later grades, when knowledge of procedures becomes less important, and a conceptual understanding becomes essential.

While teachers’ preparation to teach in developmentally appropriate ways in the disciplines represents one key challenge, another is how narrowly we think about the role of language in learning. Our attitudes toward language and learning often reflect deeply held assumptions about the deficiencies of people we view as “other” (Lee, 2009), as when we lower our expectations for, or even demonize, children who are English learners or who speak dialects of English that are presumed to be non-standard. Further, we assign deficits to children based on their social class, on the assumption that poverty inherently impedes their ability to learn. This misconception is antithetical to what we know from developmental and learning sciences and shortchanges many students who are quite capable of learning in the disciplines.

These pedagogical challenges have to do partly with the content we include in the curriculum and partly with the kinds of intellectual work we ask of students. It’s not sufficient to ask what young people need to know and be able to do within and across the content areas; we also need to ask what ends this will allow them to pursue. What purposes are served by this knowledge and skill? For instance, how can and should academic content knowledge address the demands of civic engagement? And, equally important, we need to wrestle with our conceptions of human potential across the diverse cultural communities our schools serve, asking why and how we assume that students from some communities are capable of engaging a rigorous curriculum, but not others? Such inequities are built into our education system, though they fly in the face of what we know about human potential within and across diverse cultural communities.

Finally, while research in cognitive psychology, social psychology, human development, the neurosciences, and the learning sciences have converged around many big ideas in recent years, none are more important than the understanding that our brains are malleable throughout our lives and that our social relationships structure how and what we learn (Cantor et al., 2018). If we hope to build a public school system that creates robust opportunities for all children, then we will have to ensure that both of these discoveries inform all of public education’s key functions (e.g., teaching; school management; and district, state, and federal leadership) and organizational structures (e.g., teacher preparation and licensing, school accountability systems, teacher and student assessments, and so on). We must no longer steer children into dead-end curriculum tracks based on the assumption that they have deficits and cannot change and improve. We must constantly remind ourselves that nothing matters more than the kinds of relationships we build among educators, children, and families. And because we understand that prior knowledge contributes to new learning, we must keep in mind that children’s diverse experiences, knowledge, and backgrounds make invaluable contributions to what and how they learn in every content area.

A possible future

So, if we were to fully embrace the civic purposes of public education, while acting on what we know about learning and development, then what might we expect a typical school to look in the coming years? More specifically, let’s imagine that this typical school is situated in a low-income neighborhood, serving children who are not white and middle- or upper-middle class.

In an ideal world, of course, neighborhoods would not be segregated by race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Further, even in schools that do enroll mainly white and affluent students, the curriculum wouldn’t focus only on European contributions to knowledge building. Nor would any school prevent certain groups of students from having access to the most rigorous instruction (e.g., who gets into honors and Advanced Placement classes or who gets to take algebra in the 7th or 8th grade). However, given the kinds of political organizing that would be necessary to desegregate neighborhoods, diversify the curriculum in majority-white schools, and end all tracking, and given how systemic and historically persistent are the barriers to bringing about such changes, I think it’s more realistic to assume that our imaginary school exists in the kind of district context that exists today, in this case one that is characterized by a concentration of minoritized status and poverty.

As I see it, our school will have strong social supports in place to promote the well-being of its students and educators. It will be a genuine learning community, one in which teachers have frequent opportunities to question and analyze their own practices, learn about the latest findings from the evolving science of human learning and development, and reexamine the content-area knowledge and skills they aim to teach, rather than viewing that knowledge as static. Further, teachers and school administrators will be responsive to the demands of the children and families they serve, and they will understand that all students are fully capable of learning, changing, and improving. They will view commercial curricula as resources, not recipes. They will give students regular opportunities to learn about the historical foundations of knowledge — including the contributions made by many communities across the world — and give them frequent opportunities to apply what they learn to real-world problems. They will use multiple forms of assessment that can provide insights into all of the kinds of knowledge-development that matter to student success, including not just measures of academic performance but also assessments of motivation, growth mindset, identity formation, and more. And to the extent that the school and district measure student outcomes, they will assess not just students’ ability to solve problems but also the processes they use to solve those problems, generating data that can be used for diagnostic and formative purposes.

To create and sustain such a school will, of course, require a larger ecological system of supports, too. To make this sort of teaching and learning possible, public schooling writ large will have to improve the professional education of teachers, principals, and other administrators (preservice and in-service); licensing and accreditation policies; local, state, and federal systems of accountability; and school and district funding. We will have to develop systems of assessment that are built on the principles I have described, incentives for commercial developers to create curricula that are aligned with these principles, and professional organizations committed to developing all of these capacities. And, finally, our educational leaders will have to make broad efforts to engage the public in genuine civic discussion and debate about the purposes of public education, the value of intellectual diversity, and how best to challenge Americans’ persistent deficit narratives about children and families who they perceive as the “other.”

 

Note: This series is supported, in part, by the Spencer Foundation.

 

References

Banks, J. & Banks, C. (1995). Handbook of research on multicultural education. Macmillan Publishers.

Bransford, J., Brown, A., & Cocking, R. (1999). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience and school. National Academy Press.

Cantor, P., Osher, D., Berg, J., Steyer, L., & Rose, T. (2018). Malleability, plasticity, and individuality: How children learn and develop in context. Applied Developmental Science, 1-31.

Gutmann, A. (1999). Democratic education. Princeton University Press.

Lee, C.D. (2009). Historical evolution of risk and equity: Interdisciplinary issues and critiques. Review of Research in Education, 33, 63-100.

Lee, C D. (2017a). Expanding visions of how people learn: The centrality of identity repertoires. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 26 (3), 517-524.

Lee, C.D. (2017b). Integrating research on how people learn and learning across settings as a window of opportunity to address inequality in educational processes and outcomes. Review of Research in Education, 41 (1), 88-111.

Lee, C.D., White, G., & Dong, D. (Eds.). (2021). Educating for civic reasoning and discourse. National Academy of Education.

Ma, L. (1999). Knowing and teaching elementary mathematics. Erlbaum.

National Academies of Sciences, Education, & Medicine. (2018). How people learn II: Learners, contexts, and cultures. National Academies Press.

Osborne, J., Ratcliffe, M., Collins, S., Millar, R., & Duschl, R. (2001). What should we teach about science? A Delphi study. Evidence-based Practice in Science Education Research Network.

Osher, D., Cantor, P., Berg, J., Steyer, L., & Rose, T. (2018). Drivers of human development: How relationships and context shape learning and development. Applied Developmental Science, 24 (1), 6-36.

Toulmin, S., Rieke, R., & Janik, A. (1984). An introduction to reasoning. Macmillan Publishers.


This article appears in the November 2021 issue of Kappan, Vol. 103, No. 3, pp. 54-57.


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The Spencer Foundation teamed up with Phi Delta Kappan to publish a series of thought pieces about the kinds of schools and learning opportunities it may be possible to create in the coming decades. Grantmakers for Education organized a series of conversations for our members around the themes being explored and implications for grantmaking. Join funders, researchers, educators, students, and advocates in exploring what may be possible.

If we hope to create a truly equitable public school system in America in the coming decades, we must begin by asking what we, as a society, consider to be the most consequential goals of public education, and for whom. What sort of curriculum would best serve the public good? Who do we imagine that public to include? Who is the “we” that our schools should aim to serve?

Speakers: Dr. Pamela Cantor, Founder and Senior Science Advisor, Turnaround for Children; Dr. Joe Davis, Superintendent, Ferguson-Florrissant (MO) School District; Dr. Carol Lee, Professor Emerita of Education, Northwestern University; Judy Wurtzel, Senior Director, Education Grantmaking, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies. Moderator: Dr. Joshua Starr, Chief Executive Officer, PDK International.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Carol D. Lee

CAROL LEE  is the Edwina S. Tarry Professor Emerita of Education in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. She is coeditor, with Na’ilah Suad Nasir, Roy Pea, & Maxine McKinney de Royston, of the Handbook of the Cultural Foundations of Learning .