By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 9, 2006

HOUSTON

In the first year of the YES College Preparatory School, community service was as important as reading, writing and mathematics. The public charter school's name stands for Youth Engaged in Service, and its mostly low-income students moved through city neighborhoods like young social workers, practicing their academic skills by collecting information on bus routes, health clinics and many other real-world topics.

"The kids loved it. It was great," said Chris Barbic, who was in his twenties when he started the school in 1995. "But there were huge gaps in what they knew. The kids could tell you the intricacy of transportation systems in Houston, but a lot of them didn't know who George Washington was."

Barbic then read the works of University of Virginia education and humanities professor E.D. Hirsch Jr., who recommended a Core Knowledge learning program -- full of history, literature, art and science. "That changed my life," Barbic said. "I went from what we had to content, content, content, content."

A decade later, Barbic said he has finally found the middle. He said he knows that progressives -- with their focus on real-life experiences -- and traditionalists -- with their focus on the three R's -- have been fighting for a century over how to teach reading, math and just about everything else. But he is part of a group of educators who say combining the two teaching methods is the way to produce the very best schools.

"We see lots of people blending these approaches," said Martin J. Blank, staff director of the coalition for community schools at the Institute for Educational Leadership in the District. Students become involved in community projects, and those experiences are used "to teach core subjects such as writing, math and science, and to improve reading," he said.

The James Irvine Foundation recently announced the creation of ConnectEd: The California Center for College and Career, as part of an effort to expand work-based learning programs that integrate high-level academics.

Several new inner-city schools, such as YES, have lengthened their day to eight or nine hours and are using the extra time to incorporate progressive and traditional methods that many educators have thought to be antagonistic to each other.

At KIPP SHINE Prep, a charter elementary school here, Principal Aaron Brenner is using the traditionalist Saxon math textbooks and the progressive Everyday Math textbooks series and finds 90 percent of his kindergartners are doing first-grade work. "We are able to address the different learning styles and brain functions of our large and diverse group of students," he said.

Some educators on both sides of the old debate say they think the marriage of opposites will fail or produce schools that compromise away their best parts.

"If we want kids to be deep thinkers, then why blend an educational model that features deep thinking with one that's focused on memorizing a list of facts?" asked Alfie Kohn, an author, lecturer and leading proponent of progressive educational philosopher John Dewey. Dewey and his followers are often called constructivists because they want students to construct their knowledge and skills through exploration of their lives and their environment.

Karen Budd, a mathematician and parent activist in Fairfax County who is opposed to Dewey's views, said she shares Kohn's doubt that the two sides can be joined. "Rich content with lots of constructivism mixed in is like saying we are going to let the free markets work, but we are going to mix in collectivism," she said.

New York University educational historian Diane Ravitch said she would be happy if "a new generation of educators figured out that nontraditional means of teaching can be merged with a solid academic curriculum," but she also said, "It would be a miracle."

Other experts are more hopeful. Hirsch, who conceived the Core Knowledge program that inspired Barbic, said those who think it has to be taught in a traditional way are wrong. "The logic was Core Knowledge has traditional content, ergo it must also have 'traditional' pedagogy," he said. "We don't specify pedagogy."

The conflict between project learning and book learning "is false," Blank said. "There is lots of content in the real world that young people can experience that will make learning meaningful. And nearly everything in the real world can be found in state standards."

Kenneth Bernstein, a teacher at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt who tends to be on the progressive side of the argument, said, "I have no trouble with people trying a variety of approaches to education. What is, in my opinion, most likely to make a particular approach successful is that the persons using that approach believe in it, get a buy-in from students and parents and not apply it rigidly when the needs of the students are otherwise."

More on the traditionalist side, Mark Ingerson, a teacher at Salem (Va.) High School, said he admired a teacher who, after teaching World War II, had his students visit and collect oral histories from veterans of that war. "This doesn't work well unless the students firmly understand the facts about the Battle of the Bulge, D-Day, Omaha Beach, bunkers and other specifics," he said.

Barbic said he and his teachers continue to merge the two approaches at his oldest school, the sixth through 12th grade southeast Houston campus, set up in portable classrooms on an old horse farm, as well as on two new campuses and a fourth soon to open. Community projects are still important at YES; Emily Venson, a teacher supervising a project on ethics, said her students pick topics of concern to the community, such as toxic spills or police brutality, then investigate, write and present a report.

At the same time, the school has achieved the highest level of Advanced Placement test participation in Houston by requiring that every student take at least one AP course and test before graduation.

Ismael Nieto, a 12th-grader at the school whose father is a carpet installer, had good scores on three AP tests last year and will take three more this year. AP U.S. history, he said, was "a lot of late nights trying to catch up with your reading," but his teacher, Kimberly Dolibois, broke the class into small groups that "worked together to make sure everyone in the group understood what we were reading." After AP tests are over this month, he'll tackle his ethics project.

Barbic said he does not think the school would have been able to combine traditionalism and progressivism so comfortably if he had not seen the best and worst of both. "There are still things we probably need to work on," he said, "but I think we have gotten to a pretty good place."