The big news in the world of education reform this week is a speech the President delivered yesterday to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. I've embedded some of the most controversial portions of the speech in a video below for you to judge for ourself, but the bottom line from the speech is similar to what Mr. Obama has been saying for more than a year now, dating well back into his campaign. In sum, President Obama is taking the same kind of post-partisan approach to school reform as he has to many other issues, trying to find common ground with disparate elements of both parties on issues such as early childhood education, funding, teacher pay, and charter schools.

But I want to talk about a particular sentence of the President's speech because it caught my attention, especially in light of a pretty revealing study I just came across. About halfway through his speech, Mr. Obama declared:

"I'm calling on our nation's governors and state education chiefs to develop standards and assessments that don't simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity."

Now this is a loaded statement. The only way to read it free of any controversy is to suggest that Mr. Obama was simply calling on educators and policy makers to devote more resources and attention to improving the quality of standardized tests, which is how I hope and largely believe he intended it. But perhaps a more natural reading is that the President, like a large segment of the educator population who support a liberal view of curriculum, wants schools to focus less on facts, rote memorization, and test-taking and more on critical thinking and creative problem solving--the kinds of skills our children allegedly lack but will need in the 21st century.

Now I've done a fair bit of talking with students across the country, and one thing you can say to a room full of young people to get their agreement is that their schools should stop teaching them to memorize random facts and should instead teach them the kinds of "critical thinking skills" that they'll need in life. The line works well with parents too; it's a no-lose statement. No reasonably intelligent person, it would seem, would build an education on a foundation of fact memorization and test-taking when they could instead be learning how to solve problems on their own. And if only America's schools could get back to the glory days where we were #1 in the world in education and where our kids all thought critically in schools instead of being forced to take the same boring basic subjects, memorizing facts and so on and so on.

Sound right to you? Sure. Except the whole premise of the argument is unfounded. America has never had an education system that emphasized "critical thinking" over learning basic facts, memorization, and other boring standardized test type materials. This Phi Delta Kappan study bears out that fact rather convincingly: a host of studies on classroom instruction over the past four decades have shown striking consistency: around 90% of the time in school classrooms is made up of teacher-directed instruction and individual student work today, just as it was in a 1983 study and a 1984 study based on data going all the way back to 1970.

But surely NCLB has torpedoed the level of intellectual freedom our children experience in some way, right? All those standardized tests every year and the "teaching to the test" that must be happening has to have some kind of narrowing effect on what our kids learn, if not how they learn it, right? Kids today aren't learning the arts and music because our schools only care about their reading and math test scores, right? Apparently that's not true either. According to the PDK study, before NCLB and the accountability wave of the late 90s, schools spent 37% of their time on English, 17% on math, and 13% on related arts, with 5% each to science and social studies. Today, the numbers are 34% English, 16% math, 11% related arts, and roughly 6% each on science and social studies. If NCLB has torpedoed our kids diverse learning experiences, it's been a pretty gentle attack.

So at the end of the day, this whole "21st Century Skills" debate is something of a red herring. America's schools have always placed a higher priority on basic math facts, reading and grammar skills, and science and social studies facts than they have on music, the arts, and other non-academic courses. And those subjects have always been taught in teacher-centered classrooms, not in free-flowing, collective project type learning communities. One could certainly argue that this is a problem because it hampers creativity and so on, but in truth, that argument is based in theory, not in the history of our schools.