The last thing that Hawai'i's schoolchildren — or any others across the U.S. — need is a standardized core curriculum.

The core curriculum being shilled by self-proclaimed "curriculum experts" like E.D. Hirsch Jr. and auto dealer-turned-education-expert David H. Rolf (Advertiser, Island Voices, April 18) is nothing more than "The Greatest Hits of the Dead White Guys Society" (I must note that I have nothing against white guys, being at least a marginal one with my Italian and Irish heritage).

Canonical literature like Shakespeare and concepts like the Enlightenment should be part of everyone's education throughout the U.S., and so should locally important content like ethnic history, arts, languages and literature.

No one, whether in Hawai'i, Iowa or Alaska, should be subjected to a rigid, imported, one-size-fits-all curriculum. Institutional rigidity and boredom drive students to drop out of school.

Hirsch and Rolf's rotten-to-the-core curriculum proposal may be on its way to us courtesy of Senate Bill 3059, which calls on the Department of Education to come up with a standard curriculum for the state school system.

The bill does not specify which curriculum should be used, leaving that decision up to educators. But there's no question in my mind which curriculum Rolf and his supporters want.

This core knowledge curriculum treats students like identical assembly-line auto parts.

American public schools have made enormous progress in the past 50 years with an increasingly diverse population that is expected to stay in school through 12th grade.

Prior to the Bush administration and its No Child Left Behind debacle, federal National Assessment of Educational Progress data showed rising achievement for almost every grade level in reading and mathematics (with no declines).

Even better, pre-No Child NAEP was showing a dramatic closing of the achievement gap between non-white and white students, and between lower-income and upper-income students. Hawai'i students have held steady or made gains on NAEP in most subjects over the past decade, although improvement is still needed in all areas.

The advances in U.S. public education have been based on constructivist teaching, where learning is seen as a complex process of building on students' existing knowledge, interests and experiences to construct deeper and broader understandings. A skilled teacher must adjust learning activities and materials to meet various students' needs and interests and scaffold their learning — that is, provide strategic assistance so that each learner can succeed.

So powerful are constructivism and authenticity that Newmann and Associates found that they eliminate the achievement gaps typically associated with race and economic class.

Applying constructivism and authenticity in diverse cultural settings like Hawai'i makes both the instructional approach and the content of curriculum accessible for students and families of all races, ethnicities, language backgrounds and income levels.

Margaret Maaka and Pamela Lipka and dozens of my school colleagues and I have found in our Hawai'i school research that constructivism and authenticity are crucial for connecting with and motivating diverse students from Kalihi to Kahului, and helping everyone to make dramatic learning gains.

Hawai'i already has extensive curriculum guidelines — the Hawai'i Content and Performance Standards, developed by a local, independent body of experts. When applied flexibly by skillful, caring teachers, and without undue test pressure by No Child and its state DOE enforcers, the HCPS can allow a teacher in Kea'au or Kahala to use constructivism to scaffold between children's natural curiosity about their local community and universal concepts and skills like tradeoffs, forms of government, weighing evidence, reading for key information and data analysis.

Authentic learning tasks, such as studying community accomplishments and problems, along with authentic assessments, such as being evaluated on a presentation of testimony to policy-makers, are the kinds of content and experiences our students need. This is vastly more motivating and teaches far more than a rigid, irrelevant core curriculum manufactured by "national experts" from the Mainland.

Schools and districts that combine localized, democratic governance with constructivism and authenticity have achieved remarkable gains in student achievement, attendance, graduation and post-secondary education, overcoming challenges of poverty, multiple first languages and entrenched bureaucracies — contexts much like Hawai'i.

The DOE had started to decentralize and democratize in the late 1990s by shifting authority to its "complex areas," which consist of one or more high schools and their feeder elementary and middle/intermediate schools.

However, the threats of No Child, and now rotten-to-the-core curriculum, are exerting a re-centralization pressure on the DOE and its schools, teachers and children.

The last thing Hawai'i needs is further colonization by a Mainland core curriculum, or further centralization of power in the DOE.

Just say no to SB3059. Say no to rotten-to-the-core curriculum.

Paul Deering is a professor in the University of Hawai'i College of Education. He wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.