Best of the Core Knowledge Blog

Join the conversation!

Core Knowledge to Make Curriculum Available for Free
February 1, 2010
After more than two decades of publishing and distributing its K-8 Core Knowledge Sequence exclusively to Core Knowledge schools, the Foundation is planning to make its proprietary curriculum available for free online.

Willingham: Reading Is Not a Skill
September 28, 2009
Dan Willingham observes that teachers tend to teach comprehension as a series of “reading strategies” that can be practiced and mastered. “Unfortunately it really doesn’t work that way,” he writes. “The mainspring of comprehension is prior knowledge—the stuff readers already know that enables them to create understanding as they read.”

Why Standards Aren’t Sticky
September 25, 2009
We do not lack clarity on our goals for public education. We lack clarity on how to achieve them.  The common core standards movement as currently conceived is a start.  What is needed is a national curriculum. 

President Obama’s Standards-Based Speech
September 8, 2009
The arguments over President Obama’s speech to school children inadvertently shines a light on the content-free “process standards” that drive schooling in most states.  If listening and responding to a Presidential address is not a valid use of school time, the question becomes, “What exactly do you think children should be learning all day?”

The “Curse of Knowledge”
August 18, 2009
An intriguing experiment by a Stanford graduate student illustrates perfectly  why background knowledge is the key to reading comprehension—and why teaching reading strategies to low-income learners isn’t enough. 

21st Century Skills and the Tree Octopus Problem
February 5, 2009
The 21st century skills movement has a problem that can’t be solved by all of the innovation, creativity and information literacy lessons under the sun, yet it can be deftly handled by a little bit of science knowledge.  Call it the tree octopus problem.

Reading War II: Content Knowledge vs. Reading Strategies
January 19, 2009
Most of us think about reading in a way that is fundamentally incorrect, writes Dan Willingham.  We think of it as transferable, meaning that once you acquire the ability to read, you can read anything. It’s true for decoding—the ability to translate written symbols into sounds.  But in order to understand what you’re reading, you need to know something about the subject matter. And that doesn’t just mean that you need to know the vocabulary—you need to have the right knowledge of the world.