Understanding and Reporting on Academic Rigor: A Hechinger Primer on Reporting Rigor

“Every year the buzzwordschange, old ideas are recy-cled or repackaged andthen resold as The Answer to all our educational woes.… Rigor is just common-sense stuff. … Teach the kidsthe basics and then provide them various opportunitiesto use them, change them, apply them, assume owner-ship for them.”

Carol Richtsmeier, high school journalismteacher, Midlothian, Texas

“California’s K-12 math standards are already ‘rigorous’– both difficult and inflexible (think: rigor mortis) – soall I do is teach to them. … Teachers wouldn’t have tospend their time thinking about how to add rigor to theircourses if they just focused on academic content and did-n’t try to make excuses for students who don’t measureup. Want rigor? Hold students to your standards!”

Darren Miller, high school math teacher,Sacramento, Calif.

“Rigor is to academic work what careful practice and nuancedperformance is to musical performance and what intenseand committed play is to athletic performance. When wetalk about a ‘rigorous course’ in something, it’s a coursethat examines details, insists on diligent and scrupulousstudy and performance, and doesn’t settle for a mild orinformal contact with the key ideas.”

Robert Talbert, associate professor ofmathematics and computing science,Franklin College, Franklin, Ind.

TEACHERS

onRIGOR

Recent Hechinger Publications:

From Contracts to Classrooms:Covering Teachers UnionsApril 2007Reporting on Classrooms and TeachingOctober 2007The Hechinger Institute Guide toEducation Research for Journalists July 2008Leadership and Learning July 2008Making Sense of the Dollars:Reporting on Higher Education Budget CutsNovember 2008

Image credits:Page 16 illustration . . . . . . . . . .Justin Snider Page 17 photo . . . . . . . . . . . . . .courtesy of Janice Crowley Page 19 photo . . . . . . . . . . . . . .courtesy of the Southern Regional Education Board Back cover photo . . . . . . . . . . . .courtesy of the College Board Design, cover illlustration . . . . .Bruce Colthart Creative LLC Printing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Liberty Graphics Inc.

Rigor: It’s All the Rage, but What Does It Mean?

Journalists must ask hard questions to make an abstract concept concrete for readers.

By Joanne Jacobs and Richard Lee Colvin

Understanding and Reporting on Academic Rigor: A Hechinger Institute Primer for Journalists

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Remember the three Rs? Get ready to add a fourth: rigor.It’s

the

buzzword in education. From presidents to prin-cipals, billionaires to school board members, governorsto teachers, everybody seems to be either promising rigor,demanding rigor, or deploring the lack of rigor in Americanschools. And journalists, more often than not, are simply repeating their words.“It is time to expect more from our students,” PresidentBarack Obama said in March 2009, adding to the cho-rus. “It is time to prepare every child, everywhere in America, to out-compete any worker, anywhere in the world.It is time to give all Americans a complete and competi-tive education from the cradle up through a career.”But translating that rhetoric about rigor into class-room reality will not be easy, and it will mean that jour-nalists need to know more about the origins of the newpush for rigor. The tension between ideals of academicexcellence and universal access to education has been anenduring theme in American public education all the way back to Horace Mann and the “common school” move-ment in the early 19th century. Generations of educatorsand politicians have struggled to reconcile high stan-dards with the laudable goal of helping all students achieve. The crusade grew more intense in the late 1980s, whenstates began upping their graduation requirements after warnings that a “rising tide of mediocrity” in America’sschools threatened to destroy the nation’s economy.

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Ever since, the idea that with the right support all stu-dents can master rigorous content has dominated publicpolicy discussions and put a new spotlight on the idea of rigor. Political and business leaders are turning up the pres-sure on schools in response to weak U.S. performance oninternational tests, rising college completion rates inmany countries, the digital revolution, increased eco-nomic competition and the deregulation of economies inIndia and China. (See “Why Some Educators Are Lookingto Europe, Asia” on page 9 for details on how the UnitedStates fares globally.)Rigorous schools are touted as a potent weapon inthe fight against industrial decline. Today, more than 40percent of manufacturing jobs require a postsecondary degree or certificate, and that percentage is rising. In addi-tion to computer skills, entry-level machinists are expectedto know algebra and geometry.

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Even an auto mechanicneeds college-level skills to read a factory manual andanalyze diagnostic data.Ninety percent of jobs in the fastest-growing sectorsof the economy will require a postsecondary education inthe future.

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Demographers, economists, business leadersand education policy experts believe the United States isnot producing enough well-qualified college graduates tofill those jobs. The summary report for a 2008 summiton academic rigor concluded that the United States is “anation in the midst of an educational crisis that threatensto undermine our position in the world.”

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The price tagfor that decline is huge. In April 2009, the managementconsultants McKinsey & Co. calculated that if U.S. stu-dent achievement had been comparable to that of Finlandor South Korea in recent years, the size of the economy in 2008 would have been $1.3 trillion to $2.3 trillion greater.

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The nonprofit world has embraced the push forgreater rigor as well. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation(which sponsored this primer) has spent $2 billion inrecent years to raise college-ready high school graduationrates, in part by pro-moting greater class-room rigor. “Likemany others, I havedeep misgivingsabout the state of education in theUnited States,”former MicrosoftChairman BillGates told a con-gressional com-mittee in 2008.

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“Too many of ourstudents fail to grad-uate from highschool with the basicskills they will needto succeed in the21st-century econ-omy, much less pre-pared for the rigorsof college and career.…Our record onhigh school math and science education is particularly trou-bling.”States are responding to this pressure by beginningto require students to take algebra, geometry and labo-

CAROL JAGO

In academically rigorous literature classes,students read challenging texts: classic and con-temporary, fiction and nonfiction, poetry anddrama. Students learn how tointerpret, analyze, and evalu-ate what they read. They enjoytalking about their reading andemploy literary terminologynaturally when explaining whatthey see on the page.In terms of books, moreis more. In academically rigor-ous classrooms, students read at least one bookevery two to three weeks – ideally more. At anygiven moment students will be reading one bookas a whole class and another of their ownchoice. Summer reading is mandated, butmore importantly, much anticipated by studentswho look forward to spending hours doingwhat they have learned to love.

Carol Jago has taught middle and high school inSanta Monica, Calif., and directs the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA. She is incoming president of the National Council of Teachers of English.