Reform movements of any kind rarely succeed without an ongoing, determined grassroots effort. The following letter was submitted by Julie Wrinn to her local newspaper in Lexington Kentucky. We have included it in this newsletter to encourage other parents and teachers to maintain pressure on leaders within their communities and states to enact real curricular reform. Write a letter to your newspaper, your school board, school principals, other parents, and elected officials. Tell them you believe in the mission of the Core Knowledge Foundation, tell them why it is important for our children and society, and tell them where to get more information. Slip them a copy of the Core Knowledge Sequence if you have to!

Bring Core Knowledge to Fayette County Schools

by Julie Kuzneski Wrinn

While the rest of the world opines about religion and politics, we parents save our most cherished beliefs and deepest concerns for how our children are educated. Every parent has an opinion, and on May 9 we were privileged to have a large and welcoming forum for our ideas. Superintendent Silberman deserves our thanks for his efforts to give every parent a voice in improving our schools.

I attended the forum to deliver news about the Core Knowledge Foundation and to advocate for our schools to adopt its K-8 curriculum. Core Knowledge is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization founded in 1986 by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., a retired professor from the University of Virginia. Parents may have noticed his series of books, What Your First Grader Needs to Know, with separate volumes for preschool through grade eight. The Foundation conducts research on curricula and serves as a hub for a growing network of Core Knowledge schools. So far, this network includes eight elementary schools across Kentucky.

In 1990 the Foundation convened educators, researchers, teachers, and parents to undertake a daunting task: constructing a specific sequence of topics for each elementary grade in every subject. Tests and standards are ubiquitous from the local to the federal level, all the way to No Child Left Behind. However, these requirements rarely specify whether children should learn about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad in first grade or third grade, or when they should learn about atoms, or ancient Egypt, or Picasso. Individual schools, grades, and teachers have that burden, for better or worse, often resulting in gaps and repetition due to lack of coordination across grades. For example, the Kentucky Department of Education’s “core curriculum” for teaching “light, heat, electricity, and magnetism” in grades 1–4 contains only two bullet points. “ Students will understand that:

magnets attract and repel each other as well as certain kinds of other materials;
electrical currents move through electrical circuits. Electricity in circuits can produce light.”

The Core Knowledge Sequence, by contrast, is vastly more specific, helpful, and ambitious, yielding sixth graders who are ready to grasp the law of conservation of energy because they have been building specific knowledge that prepares them for it.

In Kindergarten, they learn the concept of magnetism, of forces we cannot see; in first grade, they learn the concept of atoms, and names and examples of three states of matter; in second grade, they learn about magnetic poles; in fourth grade, they learn the concept of electric charge and how atoms are made of smaller particles; in fifth grade, they learn how atoms form molecules and compounds, the periodic table; and finally, in 6th grade, they learn about kinetic and potential energy, how energy is conserved in a system, and three ways by which energy is transferred.

Teaching these topics in a predetermined sequence provides every child with a shared and cumulative foundation of knowledge. Imagine a similarly exhilarating momentum of learning in all of the Core Knowledge subject areas — Language Arts/English, History and Geography, Visual Arts, Music, Mathematics, and Science — and you’ll wish you could go back to school with your child to brush up on your own education. So many teachers, after decades in the classroom, have found that a change to the content-rich curriculum of Core Knowledge has rekindled their enthusiasm for the subject matter and for the great vocation of teaching itself. Both test scores and parents’ feedback over the past fifteen years in Core Knowledge schools attest to the dramatic improvements in learning.

But it must be said that this emphasis on knowledge goes against many current trends in American education, including such concepts as child-centered schooling, critical thinking skills, and multiple intelligences. These trends have resulted in a widespread prejudice against factual knowledge. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., demonstrated that literacy depends on familiarity with a broad range of shared knowledge taken for granted by speakers and writers. For example, as explained on the Core Knowledge website: “When a sportscaster refers to an upset victory as ‘David knocking off Goliath,’ or when reporters refer to a ‘threatened presidential veto,’ they are assuming that their audience shares certain knowledge. One goal of Core Knowledge is to provide all children, regardless of background, with the shared knowledge they need to be included in our national culture.”

The Foundation provides an array of textbooks and training for teachers and schools that adopt its curriculum, but it makes no explicit claims about teaching methods; that is left to the expertise of individual teachers and schools. Furthermore, the curriculum itself is designed to compose only half of the grade’s instruction, leaving the other half, once again, for individual teachers and schools.

My hope is that Fayette County will join some six hundred other public, private, and parochial schools across the United States in adopting the Core Knowledge Sequence for its K-8 students.

Julie Kuzneski Wrinn is a mother of two sons, a freelance editor, and the president of the Friends of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference.