Great article, until he starts going off on Core Curriculum Standards.
All centrally planned, top-down curricula will ultimately be geared to the lowest common denominator. The answer is in motivated and knowledgable teachers given the autonomy to place higher expectations and motivate students and impose consequences for failure.
We are having this fight right now in Texas as C-SCOPE is being imposed on teachers despite what their knowledge and experience tells them to teach. We need to train and employ more good teachers.
I’m not sure I agree with you there. You can have great teachers, but I think the article is saying that if there isn’t a coherent, cumulative curriculum in place going from preschool to the 12th grade, then kids won’t pick up nearly as many words, which are really just a proxy for knowledge. In math, this reality is much easier to understand. You can have a great 8th grade math teacher, but it won’t make much difference if you didn’t learn what you needed to know before you got there.