Connecticut has been struggling to understand the stagnation and actual decline in its 4th grade reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The problems began in 2002. I believe that it is not simply coincidence that the implementation of No Child Left Behind also began in 2002. Now more than five years later education critics from both ends of the political spectrum are questioning the paradoxical consequences of the law - principally that even more children are left behind.

E. D. Hirsch, Jr. has long been an ardent critic of public education. He has developed a curriculum called “Core Knowledge” and has written extensively on his beliefs. I have not been a great fan of Hirsch’s prescriptive curriculum. He is , however, emblematic of a growing number of conservative critics who are awakening to the downside of the standards and accountability movement when the result is a narrowing of the curriculum.

Hirsch expressed his analysis in an article in the Washington Post on February 16 titled The Knowledge Connection.

Why has the No Child Left Behind law left so many children behind? According to the latest scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the reading achievement of eighth-graders has declined since the law was passed in 2001, and the large reading gap between advantaged and disadvantaged children — “the achievement gap” — has stayed where it was. Today’s eighth-graders had recorded gains in fourth grade, but these have not led to improvements in later grades — when reading scores actually count for a student’s future.
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Studies of reading comprehension show that knowing something of the topic you’re reading about is the most important variable in comprehension. After a child learns to sound out words, comprehension is mostly knowledge. Many technical studies support the assertion that after students can fluently sound out words, relevant knowledge is the crucial difference between students who are good or poor readers. In light of the relevant science, an analysis of the textbooks and methods used to teach reading and language arts — for three hours a day in many places — indicates some of the reasons for the disappointing later results. These test-prep materials are constructed on the mistaken view that reading comprehension is a skill that can be perfected by practice, as typing can be. This how-to conception of reading has caused schools to spend a lot of unproductive time on trivial content and on drills such as “finding the main idea” and less time on history, science and the arts.

E.D. Hirsch Jr. is an author, most recently of “The Knowledge Deficit,” and chairman of the Core Knowledge Foundation.