The Core Knowledge Blog

The Ridgeview Classical School in Fort Collins has been rated among the top three schools in Colorado since it was founded in 2001. Its success stands as a sharp rebuke to the dominant anti-intellectual pedagogy of most American schools. The secret of its success? The Core Knowledge curriculum in Kindergarten through 8th grade, and a traditional, Classical-Liberal curriculum in high school. An article in the Grand Junction Sentinel highlights the school and its remarkable achievements.

“They have phenomenal success,” Denise Mund, senior consultant with Schools of Choice at the Colorado Department of Education. “Their school for years was the No. 1 school in the state. This year, they were third, but repeatedly, they have had phenomenal success. I attended their graduation ceremony last May. I was very impressed.”

Read the article, but also spend some time with the school’s journal, The Conversation. To read these reflections on teaching and learning, is to see what a school can be—or more accurately should be. An essay in the journal by Tara Mertens, a student with learning disabilities who graduated from the school in May contrasts the emptiness of her “high achievement” at her previous school with the rigorous curriculum and legitimately high expectations she found at Ridgeview.

“My teachers at previous schools cut down my work load and never expected me to grow,” she writes. “They never challenged me or took the time to sit down and work on strengths and weaknesses. After so many years of never feeling as if you can do better than you are expected to do,you start to believe it. As time went on and I started junior high it only got worse. I started to develop a false feeling of satisfaction in my work. I had a 3.7 grade point average and I was doing well in all my classes. What I didn’t or rather didn’t want to realize was that my resource teacher was really earning the grade for me. I was helped so much that it began to handicap me. I was never expected to write a paper on my own or to take a test without a textbook. I had no idea what I was capable of doing.”

The Sentinel quotes a fifth-grader who is learning Singapore math and using algebra to solve problems, studying Leonardo DaVinci in art, and the Renaissance in history. Alfie Kohn and others who have dismissed Core Knowledge as “rote memorization” should heed the teacher at Ridgeview who says of Core Knowledge, “It’s just dynamic. The core curriculum has changed the way that I teach. It is set up on a sequence of things that should be learned and starts at rudimentary levels in kindergarten, first and second grade. I think it’s history-based, and music and art are right in the curriculum. It’s all put together in a very sequential plan.”