Introducing Linda Bevilacqua,
President of the Core Knowledge Foundation

by Diana Brewster

Linda Bevilacqua, the new president of the Core Knowledge Foundation, has been with the Foundation for ten years as both Director of the Preschool Program and Vice President. Prior to joining the Foundation she taught in Head Start and conducted Head Start teacher practicums. She has a master’s in Special Education from the University of Virginia, and she completed an additional year of advanced study under a fellowship from the Peabody College at Vanderbilt University. Eager to apply what she had learned, she worked for several years as the supervisor of learning disabled programs for the Chesterfield County school district, which is near Richmond, Virginia, and has a broad demographic of upscale suburbanites and rural poverty. After her first child, Alyssa, was born, Linda wanted to work more from home, and she became the Executive Director of the Learning Disabilities Council of Richmond (http://www.ldcouncil.org/), an advocacy group. There she wrote a parent guide for working with children with learning disabilities, which has since undergone continued development.

A few years later, Linda answered an ad in the Washington Post for an education writer at the Core Knowledge Foundation. Dr. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., known as Don to his friends, called her back and said he had something completely different in mind for her. He invited her to an interview at his house, where they immediately started discussing his ideas about preschool education. He told her that he was particularly interested in her fluency in French because he wanted to study the French preschool system and use it as a model for Core Knowledge. He was interested in how well France integrated its immigrant populations through its educational system. He said, “Would you like to have a position where you could change the future of the American preschool system?” At the end of the meeting, “he loaded up [her] arms with a stack of books” and told her to “take a look at these and get back to me with how you would go about creating a Core Knowledge Preschool program.”

Linda recalls thinking “Well, that seems odd, I guess I’m hired!” She spent time in France observing preschool programs and meeting with people in the Department of Education. Don said to her, “Linda, you better hurry up because they are becoming enamored of the American schools and they will have the same mess we have now!” [See our article about French Education in this and in previous issues of Common Knowledge to see why Hirsch’s was, indeed, a prescient observation.—Ed.]

Linda brings to her position her incisive intellect, her wealth of experience in education, her ability to connect compassionately with other people, her willingness to listen carefully and come up with practical strategies for problem solving, and, not least, her sense of humor.

“I think I have a very good understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of Core Knowledge, particularly as they link to language development and the development of content knowledge.” She is eager to demonstrate the integration of the new Core Knowledge reading program, now in development, with the Core Knowledge Sequence curriculum outline. Her focus for the last ten years on early childhood, and her preceding experience in the public schools, gives her a clear perspective on the complete education cycle from preschool through grade 12. “My real passion at this point for the Foundation is to try to reach out to other like-minded people and organize with them so that we can bring a content-rich education to all children. I love being here because we are looking at what we can do to help kids who have less access to quality education.”

According to Linda, people used to talk about “readiness to learn” as if there was a magical tipping point at which a child becomes mature enough to advance. “Ready to learn” can be a disabling assumption; it presumes there isn’t anything anyone can do to facilitate learning and that it’s a natural process that happens on its own in a child, apart from any influence or conditions. Linda describes her epiphany of realizing that “readiness to learn” is based on what you’ve already been exposed to, and that this is empowering to teachers. A teacher can provide experiences that promote a child’s development. Linda’s insight was that there is no such thing as “not being ready to learn.”

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