You could say “better late than never,” but sometimes late is just plain too late.

To at last start to solve the “knowledge deficit” among New York City public school students, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein recently announced a pilot program in ten city schools based on the reading curriculum of E. D. Hirsch Jr.’s Core Knowledge Foundation.

Of course, those of us who have been advocating this approach for too long to remember rejoice at this news. But I for one can’t help joining education critic Sol Stern in sounding a well justified sour note: “I can finally say something nice about one of Klein’s curriculum choices,” he commented to the New York Times. “Unfortunately, it’s just a few schools in the sixth year of his administration. But at least it looks like he’s educable.”

The fact is that Klein made a fatal error when he first took over the city schools by basically handing the reading curriculum over to trendy “progressives” at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Lucy Calkins, a leading professor there, promptly instituted the unproven and ineffective balanced literacy program. This decision has, tragically for students, torpedoed educational progress in New York.

What does Calkins have to say about the new Core Knowledge Project? She harrumphs:

The 10 schools participating in the Core Knowledge pilot should try to also include other approaches in their curriculum. For example, she said, she hoped there would still be time “to teach revision strategies in a writing workshop or the skills of inference in a reading workshop — that you’re not only talking about the subject.”
Still, she said, “This could be calling us to a new and better balance.”

The good professor just can’t admit her pedagogical approach doesn’t work. As for Klein, he may be “educable,” but his modest tilt toward a content-rich curriculum might come too late to matter in the education of significant numbers of students.