I’m writing this from New York where I’m spending a few days visiting elementary schools. It feels odd to be back, particularly in my new role as an ‘educationalist’. The last time I was here I was enjoying 15 minutes of fame as a judge in an American food reality show called Top Chef. I flew over in business class, courtesy of NBC, and was whisked to Manhattan in a Lincoln Town Car. This time I’m the guest of Civitas, an education think tank, and the experience is very different.
They offered to reimburse my taxi fare from JFK but I thought I’d save them a few dollars by using public transport. This involved getting the AirTrain to Jamaica Station, followed by the Long Island Rail Road to Penn Station and a subway ride to my hotel. I estimated it would take me 90 minutes, and it might have done if I hadn’t got lost. As it was, it took me three and a half hours.
At one point in the small hours of Tuesday morning I was standing on a deserted subway platform in Queens with a pile of luggage beside me. I might as well have had a sign around my neck saying ‘Mug Me’.
The reason Civitas has flown me over is to visit some Core Knowledge schools — that is, schools following the knowledge-based curriculum devised by the American educationalist E.D. Hirsch. Civitas has adapted part of this curriculum for use in English primary schools, and the new primary I’ve helped set up in Hammersmith will be piloting it along with a handful of others. The head of Civitas thought it would be useful for the headmistress and me to see some schools that have been teaching Hirsch’s curriculum for over a decade.
So far, I’ve only visited one school, but it was a revelation. PS124 is in a neighbourhood that I never visited during the five years I lived in New York. Every child at the school is on free school meals and there wasn’t a single white face to be seen, apart from those of the teachers.
Approximately a fifth of the pupils have special educational needs and the vast majority speak English as a second language. They’re the sort of children that the critics of Michael Gove’s curriculum reforms would say cannot cope with learning grammar or reading classic works of literature. Expecting them to do anything of the kind will be a fatal blow to their self-esteem.
Well, I don’t know if there’s something in the water over here, but the kids at PS124 seemed to be coping remarkably well with Hirsch’s curriculum. We saw five- to six-year-olds learning about the War of Independence and six- to seven-year-olds studying Ancient Greece. In one classroom, an entire wall was given over to the medieval church — ‘Ad majorem Dei gloriam’ was written at the top — while another wall was devoted to Charlemagne.
In a corner of another classroom I noticed a pile of well-thumbed copies of Treasure Island — a set text for the nine- to ten-year-olds. Not surprisingly, these children score way above average in standardised state tests, and PS124 has been singled out as a beacon of hope among educationalists trying to tackle underachievement in deprived areas.
The school’s success is in large part due to Valerie Lewis, its pistol of a headmistress. She’s a small lady in her late fifties, but it was clear from the moment she greeted us at the school gate that she is a force of nature. She has the kind of pugnacious, indomitable personality that you need to take on the educational establishment. She has spent her career battling inflexible bureaucrats and bull-headed trade unionists and, against all the odds, she has won.
Back in the days when I was a regular in Virgin upper class, I used to joke that the trouble with turning left on a plane is that it makes it very difficult to turn right ever again.
I’d love to say that there’s now so much in my life of real value — the two schools, in particular — that I no longer care about such fripperies, but I’d be lying. There’s still a part of me that longs to go to glamorous parties and hang out with the beautiful people — just not a very large part. I’ve discovered a cause that’s larger than myself and, for the most part, I’ve put away childish things. Valerie Lewis may not be a movie star and her name will probably never appear in a gossip column, but I got more out of a few hours in her company than I ever did from attending the Vanity Fair Oscar party.
Comments