This column by Diane Ravitch describes a small victory, and gives proof that continuing to pound away on the importance of good pedagogy in the public schools is important and can bear fruit. The New York City schools chancellor has announced a pilot program that will introduce the Core Knowledge approach in the first and second grades of ten low-performing schools. The Core Knowledge Program, developed by E. D. Hirsch, stresses the importance of content knowledge in the acquisition of basic skills, as well as phonics and vocabulary, and has been successful in many schools.

Charter schools and vouchers are good and worthy ideas, but they can only go so far. If you think of the students who have to be educated year after year, regardless of ability or disability or language or background or preparedness or anything, you see that there is no substitute for working to improve the public schools themselves.

In that regard also, an interesting article details an educated young mother’s favorable encounter with her daughters’ public school. The author, Sarah Tsing Loh, who is also a performer and radio host, points out that there are a lot of resources and opportunities available in the public school system, but many poor minority parents do not know how to access them. The arrival of educated and demanding middle-class parents can make all the difference. Veritable miracles came to pass as she got involved in her daughters’ minority-majority school in inner city Los Angeles. Loh always revered Jonathan Kozol’s writings on education, but when she asked him on her radio program what he thought of encouraging more middle-class parents to try to the public schools, he all but ignored her, continuing instead with his tirades against the filthy, underfunded, prison-like conditions of an intractable system that has crushed the hopes of thousands of children, and so on, evidently preferring to curse the darkness rather than light that proverbial candle.