The Knowledge Deficit


Book Description

Provides an analysis of the state of modern American education to trace a link between a lack of reading comprehension and poor performance and furnishes specific tools for parents to enhance a child's ability to read with comprehension.




The Knowledge Deficit


Book Description

The Knowledge Deficit illuminates the real issue in education today -- without an effective curriculum, American students are losing the global education race. In this persuasive book, the esteemed education critic, activist, and best-selling author E.D. Hirsch, Jr., shows that although schools are teaching the mechanics of reading, they fail to convey the knowledge needed for the more complex and essential skill of reading comprehension. Hirsch corrects popular misconceptions about hot issues in education, such as standardized testing, and takes to task educators' claims that they are powerless to overcome class differences. Ultimately, this essential book gives parents and teachers specific tools for enhancing children's abilities to fully understand what they read.




The Knowledge Deficit


Book Description

An insightful thinker on what schools teach shows why American students are losing the global education race and performing worse than students in other industrialized countries.




Why Knowledge Matters


Book Description

In Why Knowledge Matters, influential scholar E. D. Hirsch, Jr., addresses critical issues in contemporary education reform and shows how cherished truisms about education and child development have led to unintended and negative consequences. Hirsch, author of The Knowledge Deficit, draws on recent findings in neuroscience and data from France to provide new evidence for the argument that a carefully planned, knowledge-based elementary curriculum is essential to providing the foundations for children’s life success and ensuring equal opportunity for students of all backgrounds. In the absence of a clear, common curriculum, Hirsch contends that tests are reduced to measuring skills rather than content, and that students from disadvantaged backgrounds cannot develop the knowledge base to support high achievement. Hirsch advocates for updated policies based on a set of ideas that are consistent with current cognitive science, developmental psychology, and social science. The book focuses on six persistent problems of recent US education: the over-testing of students; the scapegoating of teachers; the fadeout of preschool gains; the narrowing of the curriculum; the continued achievement gap between demographic groups; and the reliance on standards that are not linked to a rigorous curriculum. Hirsch examines evidence from the United States and other nations that a coherent, knowledge-based approach to schooling has improved both achievement and equity wherever it has been instituted, supporting the argument that the most significant education reform and force for equality of opportunity and greater social cohesion is the reform of fundamental educational ideas. Why Knowledge Matters introduces a new generation of American educators to Hirsch’s astute and passionate analysis.




Books to Build On


Book Description

The invaluable grade-by-grade guide (kindergarten—sixth) is designed to help parents and teachers select some of the best books for children. Books to Build On recommends: • for kindergartners, lively collections of poetry and stories, such as The Children’s Aesop, and imaginative alphabet books such as Bill Martin, Jr.’s Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and Lucy Micklewait’s I Spy: An Alphabet in Art • for first graders, fine books on the fine arts, such as Ann Hayes’s Meet the Orchestra, the hands-on guide My First Music Book, and the thought-provoking Come Look with Me series of art books for children • for second graders, books that open doors to world cultures and history, such as Leonard Everett Fisher’s The Great Wall of China and Marcia Willaims’s humorous Greek Myths for Young Children • for third graders, books that bring to life the wonders of ancient Rome, such as Living in Ancient Rome, and fascinating books about astronomy, such as Seymour Simon’s Our Solar System • for fourth graders, engaging books on history, including Jean Fritz’s Shh! We're Writing the Constitution, and many books on Africa, including the stunningly illustrated story of Sundiata: Lion King of Mali • for fifth graders, a version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that retains much of the original language but condenses the play for reading or performance by young students, and Michael McCurdy’s Escape from Slavery: The Boyhood of Frederick Douglass • for sixth graders, an eloquent retelling of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the well-written American history series, A History of US . . . and many, many more!




Dismantling Deficit Thinking in Academic Libraries


Book Description

"Explores the history of deficit thinking in higher education. Discusses pedagogical models that recognize students' prior knowledge and experiences. Provides a series of principles for anti-deficit teaching. Explores practical application of these principles in various academic library environments"--




Cultural Literacy


Book Description

A must-read for parents and teachers, this major bestseller reveals how cultural literacy is the hidden key to effective education and presents 5000 facts that every literate American should know. In this forceful manifesto Professor E. D. Hirsch, Jr., argues that children in the United States are being deprived of the basic knowledge that would enable them to function in contemporary society. They lack cultural literacy: a grasp of background information that writers and speakers assume their audience already has. Even if a student has a basic competence in the English language, he or she has little chance of entering the American mainstream without knowing what a silicon chip is, or when the Civil War was fought. An important work that has engendered a nationwide debate on our educational standards, Cultural Literacy is a required reading for anyone concerned with our future as a literate nation.




Funds of Knowledge


Book Description

The concept of "funds of knowledge" is based on a simple premise: people are competent and have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge. The claim in this book is that first-hand research experiences with families allow one to document this competence and knowledge, and that such engagement provides many possibilities for positive pedagogical actions. Drawing from both Vygotskian and neo-sociocultural perspectives in designing a methodology that views the everyday practices of language and action as constructing knowledge, the funds of knowledge approach facilitates a systematic and powerful way to represent communities in terms of the resources they possess and how to harness them for classroom teaching. This book accomplishes three objectives: It gives readers the basic methodology and techniques followed in the contributors' funds of knowledge research; it extends the boundaries of what these researchers have done; and it explores the applications to classroom practice that can result from teachers knowing the communities in which they work. In a time when national educational discourses focus on system reform and wholesale replicability across school sites, this book offers a counter-perspective stating that instruction must be linked to students' lives, and that details of effective pedagogy should be linked to local histories and community contexts. This approach should not be confused with parent participation programs, although that is often a fortuitous consequence of the work described. It is also not an attempt to teach parents "how to do school" although that could certainly be an outcome if the parents so desired. Instead, the funds of knowledge approach attempts to accomplish something that may be even more challenging: to alter the perceptions of working-class or poor communities by viewing their households primarily in terms of their strengths and resources, their defining pedagogical characteristics. Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms is a critically important volume for all teachers and teachers-to-be, and for researchers and graduate students of language, culture, and education.




Handbook of Research on Challenging Deficit Thinking for Exceptional Education Improvement


Book Description

Exceptional education, also known as special education, is often grounded within exclusive and deficit mindsets and practices. Research has shown perpetual challenges with disproportionate identification of culturally and linguistically diverse students, especially Black and Indigenous students. Research has also shown perpetual use of inappropriate placement in more restrictive learning environments for marginalized students, often starting in Pre-K. Exceptional education practitioners often engage in practices that place disability before ability in instruction, behavior management, identification and use of related services, and educational setting placement decisions. These practices, among others, have resulted in a crippled system that situates students with exceptionalities in perceptions of deviance, ineptitude, and perpetuate systemic oppression. The Handbook of Research on Challenging Deficit Thinking for Exceptional Education Improvement unites current theory and practices to communicate the next steps to end the current harmful practices and experiences of exceptional students through critical analysis of current practices, mindsets, and policies. With the information this book provides, practitioners have the power to implement direct and explicit actions across levels to end the harm and liberate our most vulnerable populations. Covering topics such as accelerated learning, educator preparation programs, and intersectional perspectives, this book is a dynamic resource for teachers in exceptional education, general teachers, social workers, psychologists, educational leaders, organizational leaders, the criminal justice system, law enforcement agencies, government agencies, policymakers, curriculum designers, testing companies, current educational practitioners, administrators, post-grad students, professors, researchers, and academicians.




Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty


Book Description

This influential book describes the knowledge and skills teachers and school administrators need to recognize and combat bias and inequity that undermine educational engagement for students experiencing poverty. Featuring important revisions based on newly available research and lessons from the authors professional development work, this Second Edition includes: a new chapter outlining the dangers of grit and deficit perspectives as responses to educational disparities; three updated chapters of research-informed, on-the-ground strategies for teaching and leading with equity literacy; and expanded lists of resources and readings to support transformative equity work in high-poverty and mixed-class schools. Written with an engaging, conversational style that makes complex concepts accessible, this book will help readers learn how to recognize and respond to even the subtlest inequities in their classrooms, schools, and districts.