Blog – Page 7 – Core Knowledge Foundation

This post is published with permission from Amplify, the Core Knowledge Foundation’s publishing partner for the Core Knowledge Language Arts® program. This post, subtitled “How two Wisconsin researchers discovered that the comprehension gap is a knowledge gap,” examines an experiment that yielded interesting, and perhaps unexpected, results.

In Norway, Wisconsin, as in much of the state, cold winters are a way of life. People allow extra time to bundle up and then waddle through town like Michelin men edged with fur. For the few months that grass is visible, it is tightly shorn. Lake Michigan, 20 miles to the east, makes the climate a little milder, so that the first freeze comes with the end of the baseball season, and the last freeze with the start of the next. Houses appear recently painted, and the low-slung school buildings sprawl as if the architect was unsure how to fill such a generous plot of land.

In one of those buildings in 1987, two young researchers from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Donna Recht and Lauren Leslie, ran an experiment elegant in its simplicity but profound in its implications. They took over an empty classroom and created an 18 by 20-inch replica of a baseball field furnished with four-inch wooden figures. Over several days, they invited 64 students to enter the room one by one. Leslie silently handed each student the same story narrating half an inning of a made-up baseball game. They were asked to read the story and use the model to reenact the action. The passage began in the middle of the action:

Churniak swings and hits a slow bouncing ball toward the shortstop. Haley comes in, fields it, and throws to first, but too late. Churniak is on first with a single, Johnson stayed on third. The next batter is Whitcomb, the Cougars’ left-fielder.

All day long, Recht, dark-haired and ruddy, took copious notes, while Leslie, fair with eyes that expect you to try your best, ran through the task with a student. One 12 year old after another studied the passage and acted out the play:

The ball is returned to Claresen. He gets the sign and winds up, and throws a slider that Whitcomb hits between Manfred and Roberts for a hit.

Each student read carefully, laboring over every line, straining to capture each detail of the action.

Dulaney comes in and picks up the ball. Johnson has scored, and Churniak is heading for third. Here comes the throw and Churniak is out. Churniak argues but to no avail.

Every day, four-inch figures were pushed and pulled across the field, each motion representing the turning of the wheels in students’ brains as they worked through the play. Eventually, Recht gave each student a quiz designed to assess his or her baseball knowledge, while Leslie reset the pieces and ushered in the next kid.

It took two full weeks to work through the 64 students and another month to compile their scores and analyze the results before they were able to pinpoint who did best at correctly reconstructing the story. Was it:

Strong readers;
Kids with good knowledge of baseball;
It made no difference?

Pause for a moment to make your prediction before reading further.

To their surprise, Recht and Leslie found that reading ability had little impact on how well kids understood the story. But knowledge of baseball did. In fact, those who were weaker readers did as well as strong readers if they had knowledge of baseball.

“Prior knowledge creates a scaffolding for information,” explains Recht. “For poor readers, the scaffolding allows them to compensate for their generally inefficient recognition of important ideas.”* If those same kids were taking a state test, the SAT or any other standard test of comprehension, and the passage just happened to be about baseball, they would outperform everyone else. But if they encountered a passage on a topic they knew little about, they would fare much worse.

High-stakes tests don’t contain passages on baseball precisely because that would be unfair to kids who don’t follow the sport. But they do contain passages on the founding documents of the United States, animal ecology, and space exploration. (In [another article in this issue](/blog/article/the-10-knowledge-domains-that-will-give-your-students-an-advantage-on-parcc), we present analysis of over 100 PARCC and SBAC passages, showing the prior knowledge that would give students an advantage.) Beyond test taking, others have identified the prior knowledge necessary to succeed in college and life. Beyond school, writers of newspaper articles, magazine pieces and books all make assumptions about basic knowledge shared by readers.

What Recht and Leslie showed was that knowledge counts much more than we think in understanding text. They point out that an emphasis on teaching reading strategies—such as finding the main idea and summarization—has become very prevalent in US classrooms based on evidence that they help weak readers. But practicing these strategies over and over has diminishing returns—and comes at the cost of a crucial missed opportunity; building knowledge is at least as important.

It is hard to find the “main idea” of a piece of writing if you aren’t really understanding any of the ideas. Is a kangaroo rat large like a kangaroo or small like a rat? How does a rainforest feel when you are wearing a wool uniform like the English schoolboys did in Lord of the Flies? Prior knowledge can transform a poor reader into a capable one and a poor writer into a fascinating one.

*Recht and Leslie published their research in Recht, D.R. and Leslie, L., 1988. Effect of prior knowledge on good and poor readers’ memory of text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80(1), p.16.

This post is published with permission from Amplify, the Core Knowledge Foundation’s publishing partner for the Core Knowledge Language Arts® program. Susan Lambert, specialist in Early Literacy at Amplify, reminds us just how important a content-rich curriculum is for students today: “Encourage students to keep looking for more. And never be afraid they might learn more than you.”

When I was a teacher, his name was Jacob. He was the kid teachers remember. He knew stuff. He’d been places. And he wanted to know more. Not more about any topic, but one particular topic—the Ancient Romans.

It wasn’t the third grade curriculum I was teaching that ignited Jacob’s fire—it was already lit when he arrived. He consumed that content like a ravenous scavenger, and his enthusiasm for it was contagious. He understood the architectural intricacies of the Colosseum and the Roman Forum. In class discussions, he would contribute myriad details about how the Ancient Romans lived and how they died. Especially how they died: in the ashes of Pompeii, or in constant and highly successful stream of military campaigns. As he shared his vast knowledge of Ancient Rome with classmates, they too found themselves wanting to know more. Jacob would then march with them to the library and make book recommendations personalized to each of them.

I don’t remember if it was a parent or grandparent that first introduced Jacob to the Roman Empire, or if he happened upon it through a movie, a book or a museum visit. But of all the times I taught that unit, I was thankful to have his content knowledge and voracious curiosity as part of our learning community. He was a model of what happens when kids encounter lots of topics and find something that lights the mind’s fire.

But many kids never get opportunities like Jacob—neither at home nor school.

Enter the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and its goal of “well-rounded education.” ESSA represents the first reauthorization of federal education policy since No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, one of the legacy hallmarks of which was the narrowing of our elementary curriculum.

NCLB left us hyper-focused on reading and math skills, dehydrating the sponge of curiosity that every preschooler possesses. We lost time in the instructional day for content that develops knowledge and generates a thirst for more in critical areas such as science, history and the arts. Instead, we had to shift our concentration to skill development and test prep.

ESSA reintroduces us to broad, knowledge-based instruction that gives kids opportunities to see beyond schooling as skills. It encourages us to put an emphasis on knowledge and content that motivates the minds of our youngest learners and provides a place where our Jacobs can find their passion. Contrast that with the topics Kate Walsh, former director of Language Arts at the Core Knowledge Foundation, found in a survey of typical reading basals: what teddy bears look like; what makes grandmothers special; what could happen if everyone brought their pets to school.

Things of value are worth knowing by heart: the origins of worlds, the endless parade of peoples and cultures, the great and evil deeds of history, and the vast panoramic photograph that is nature.

Easier said than done? Maybe not.

Understand what teaching content is really about—dynamic, multi-faceted instruction and learning that meets multiple goals. I was reviewing an ELA lesson that was used on an exemplar website for teaching content. The content focus statement was: How are families around the world similar? The lesson didn’t actually teach anything about different families around the world; it used a literary text about a family. Students compared that family to their own. I’m not opposed to teaching about families, but teaching content goes much deeper. Find content, like the human body or Ancient Rome, that involves rich vocabulary and engrossing associated concepts—content that lends itself to layered analysis and thinking that sparks interest, which then leads to engaging and invigorating conversations.

Get special area teachers involved—e.g. art, music, physical education—to extend content learning in compelling ways. When I taught the Ancient Rome unit, I enlisted others to add color and action. My students studied and recreated various pieces of art, found rhythm in Ancient Roman music and recreated chariot races. Content like this unifies school communities and allows students to experience an inspiring and stimulating learning environment.

When kids discover new information, encourage them to share it with you, their families and peers. Nothing is more motivating in the learning process than affirmation. When a kid learns something new, they want to share it with you and with their peers. Make that “new learning” time part of your day—and encourage students to keep looking for more. And never be afraid they might learn more than you. Expect and hope that they will!

As we mark the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Cultural Literacy, we’d like to share this portion of an interview with E. D. Hirsch, Jr., originally posted by Amplify, the Core Knowledge Foundation’s commercial partner for nationwide distribution of professionally printed and packaged Core Knowledge Language Arts® classroom materials.

Amplify: How would you describe the driving principle behind Core Knowledge Language Arts®?

EDH: The whole Core Knowledge movement is an attempt to offer all students, quite systematically, the general knowledge they need to be good readers and learners.

Amplify: How did you come to realize this was the best way to teach students to read and write?

EDH: The aha moment came back in 1978, when I realized that the community college students we were testing along with University of Virginia students could read just as well as anyone else when the topic was familiar — “Why I don’t like my roommate,” etc. But their reading began to fall off drastically in passages about the Civil War, which they were not on familiar terms with. And this was in Richmond, Virginia. In boring down into the psycholinguistic research, I found that topic familiarity was the single most important variable in reading comprehension. This meant that the most important variable for general reading ability was general knowledge. There’s no such thing as abstract “reading skill.” It’s very “domain specific,” like most skills.

Amplify: Why haven’t more districts and schools adopted a similar approach to CKLA™ when it comes to their ELA programs?

EDH: Most professors of education who teach our teachers continue to regard reading as a general skill. It’s not altogether their fault. That was the understanding of reading until 30 or 40 years ago. But they haven’t kept up with the research.

For the complete interview, visit the Amplify blog.

This year, 2017, marks the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of the book that started the Core Knowledge movement.

In 1987 E. D. Hirsch, Jr., was working as a professor of English at the University of Virginia. He had published two books about Romantic poets, including Wordsworth and Blake, as well two theoretical studies of literary interpretation. He had also, perhaps to the surprise of his fellow literary critics, published a book in which he analyzed the skills of composition. But the biggest surprise, not only to his colleagues in the English Department but very likely to Professor Hirsch himself, was the response to the publication of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.

In Cultural Literacy, Professor Hirsch put forth a scholarly argument, based largely on evidence drawn from cognitive psychology, that reading comprehension requires not just formal decoding skills but also wide-ranging background knowledge. He argued that our public schools must go beyond their “educational formalism”—their belief that the task of education is to develop large generalized skills—and in addition focus on cultivating “cultural literacy.”

“To be culturally literate,” he explained, “is to possess the basic information needed to thrive in the modern world.” And what constitutes this basic information? Or, to invoke the book’s subtitle, what does every American need to know?

To answer that question, Professor Hirsch, along with two colleagues from the University of Virginia—a historian and a natural scientist—had undertaken a long process of research and consultation to develop a provisional list of the background knowledge needed to read and comprehend a publication like the New York Times. They offered the list as an Appendix to Cultural Literacy.

The response the book received suggests that many people scanned the list without reading the book’s theoretical argument. Many reviewers mistook the book as a tract for cultural elitism. They neglected to acknowledge not only the theoretical grounding of the argument but also the concrete social mission accompanying the theory—“What I wanted to do,” as Professor Hirsch explained in a later interview, “was to universalize elite culture.”

The publication of Cultural Literacy thirty years ago sparked both heated arguments and thoughtful discussions, many ongoing today. It also planted the seed that has flowered in the Core Knowledge Sequence and many other publications of the Core Knowledge Foundation (guided by Professor Hirsch’s editorial leadership), as well as the national network of Core Knowledge schools.

So, in this back-to-school season, we celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Cultural Literacy by sharing this excerpt from the Preface to the book that still shapes the public discussion of what our schools can be when dedicated to building community based on shared knowledge.

From the Preface to Cultural Literacy (1987)

To be culturally literate is to possess the basic information needed to thrive in the modern world. The breadth of that information is great, extending over the major domains of human activity from sports to science. It is by no means confined to “culture” narrowly understood as an acquaintance with the arts. Nor is it confined to one social class. Quite the contrary. Cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children, the only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now condemns them to remain in the same social and educational condition as their parents. That children from poor and illiterate homes tend to remain poor and illiterate is an unacceptable failure of our schools, one which has occurred not because our teachers are inept but chiefly because they are compelled to teach a fragmented curriculum based on faulty educational theories. Some say that our schools by themselves are powerless to change the cycle of poverty and illiteracy. I do not agree. They can break the cycle, but only if they themselves break fundamentally with some of the theories and practices that education professors and school administrators have followed over the past fifty years.

Although the chief beneficiaries of the educational reforms advocated in this book will be disadvantaged children, these same reforms will also enhance the literacy of children from middle-class homes. The educational goal advocated is that of mature literacy for all our citizens.

… The idea of cultural literacy has been attacked by some liberals on the assumption that I must be advocating a list of great books that every child in the land should be forced to read. But those who examine the Appendix to this book will be able to judge for themselves how thoroughly mistaken such an assumption is. … Cultural literacy is represented not by a prescriptive list of books but rather by a descriptive list of the information actually possessed by literate Americans. My aim in this book is to contribute to making that information the possession of all Americans.

The importance of such widely shared information can best be understood if I explain briefly how the idea of cultural literacy relates to currently prevailing theories of education. The theories that have dominated American education for the past fifty years stem ultimately from Jean Jacques Rousseau, who believed that we should encourage the natural development of young children and not impose adult ideas upon them before they can truly understand them. … He thought that a child’s intellectual development and social skills would develop naturally without regard to the specific content of education.

… In the first decades of [the twentieth] century, Rousseau’s ideas powerfully influenced the educational conceptions of John Dewey, the writer who has most deeply affected modern American educational theory and practice. … Dewey strongly seconds Rousseau’s opposition to the mere accumulation of information:

Development emphasizes the need of intimate and extensive personal acquaintance with a small number of typical situations with a view to mastering the way of dealing with the problems of experience, not the piling up of information.

Believing that a few direct experiences would suffice to develop the skills that children require, Dewey assumed that early education need not be tied to specific content. He mistook a half-truth for the whole. He placed too much faith in children’s ability to learn general skills from a few typical experiences and too hastily rejected “the piling up of information.” Only by piling up specific, communally shared information can children learn to participate in complex cooperative activities with other members of their community.

This old truth, recently rediscovered, requires a countervailing theory of education that once again stresses the importance of specific information in early and late schooling. The corrective theory might be described as an anthropological theory of education, because it is based on the anthropological observation that all human communities are founded upon specific shared information. … In an anthropological perspective, the basic goal of education in a human community is acculturation, the transmission to children of the specific information shared by the adults of the group or polis.

… The anthropological view stresses the universal fact that a human group must have effective communications to function effectively, that effective communications require shared culture, and that shared culture requires transmission of specific information to children. Literacy, an essential aim of education in the modern world, is no autonomous, empty skill but depends upon literate culture. Like any other aspect of acculturation, literacy requires the early and continued transmission of specific information. Dewey was deeply mistaken to disdain “accumulating information in the form of symbols.” Only by accumulating shared symbols, and the shared information that the symbols represent, can we learn to communicate effectively with one another in our national community.

by Robert Pondiscio

Robert Pondiscio is senior fellow and vice president for external affairs at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and formerly vice-president of the Core Knowledge Foundation.

There is, without question, a language of privilege in America that excludes those who do not speak it fluently. And it is within our power as educators and policymakers to influence children’s acquisition of that language. But doing so will require a degree of clarity and candor to which we are unaccustomed when we talk about education. E.D. Hirsch, Jr., has long been making the social justice case for giving disadvantaged children access to the knowledge and language that have long been assumed by the privileged and powerful.

To a degree that can be awkward to acknowledge, language is a cultural artifact, filled with assumed knowledge, allusions, and idioms that are a reflection of the culture that built, uses, and sustains it. Not for nothing did Hirsch title his 1987 bestseller on reading and language Cultural Literacy. That book and Hirsch’s subsequent work have tended to ignite firestorms of controversy, but critics have typically misunderstood Hirsch’s thrust. His object was never to establish a canon. Rather his is a curatorial effort aimed at cataloging the knowledge assumed by literate speakers and writers who take for granted that their audiences command the same base of knowledge and references. Hirsch’s project has been to inventory, to the degree possible, the mental furniture of the elites that enjoy privilege and opportunity, and to advocate for seeding their knowledge and language in every American classroom. This has long made Hirsch our best and truest voice for social justice in K–12 education.

But the idea that American schools should explicitly familiarize children—especially those from other countries, cultures, or traditions—with a uniform body of knowledge in elementary and middle school falls upon contemporary ears as awkward, anachronistic, even inappropriate. We are far more likely to honor or even revere a child’s home language, culture, and dialect. But we must seriously consider the possibility that this well-meaning impulse is quite wrong for all the right reasons.

Lisa Delpit, an African American literacy researcher and 1990 MacArthur grantee, has written persuasively for many years about the “culture of power” in American schools and classrooms and the “schism between liberal educational movements and that of non-White, non-middle class teachers and communities.” In her seminal essay, “The Silenced Dialogue,” she explains the implications of the culture of power:

This means that success in institutions—schools, workplaces, and so on—is predicated upon acquisition of the culture of those who are in power. Children from middle-class homes tend to do better in school than those from non-middle-class homes because the culture of the school is based on the culture of the upper and middle classes—of those in power. The upper and middle classes send their children to school with all the accouterments of the culture of power; children from other kinds of families operate within perfectly wonderful and viable cultures but not cultures that carry the codes or rules of power.

To say this is an uncomfortable topic among educators is to vastly understate things, especially among those who are earnestly committed to both progressive ideals and progressive pedagogy. “The Silenced Dialogue” and the book it spawned, Other People’s Children, are staples on the syllabus of teacher-education programs and spark heated debate and wounded egos. “Those with power are frequently least aware of—or least willing to acknowledge—its existence,” Delpit insists. She argues:

To provide schooling for everyone’s children that reflects liberal, middle-class values and aspirations is to ensure the maintenance of the status quo, to ensure that power, the culture of power, remains in the hands of those who already have it. Some children come to school with more accouterments of the culture of power already in place—“cultural capital,” as some critical theorists refer to it (for example, Apple, 1979)—some with less. Many liberal educators hold that the primary goal for education is for children to become autonomous, to develop fully who they are in the classroom setting without having arbitrary, outside standards forced upon them. This is a very reasonable goal for people whose children are already participants in the culture of power and who have already internalized its codes.

But parents who don’t function within that culture often want something else. It’s not that they disagree with the former aim, it’s just that they want something more. They want to ensure that the school provides their children with discourse patterns, interactional styles, and spoken and written language codes that will allow them success in the larger society.

To be highly proficient in the language of privilege requires mastery over not just an alphabet and rules of grammar, but also an enormous range of assumed knowledge, historical references, and cultural allusions that are commonly held by members of a speech community. “My kids know how to be Black,” one parent tells Delpit. “You all teach them how to be successful in the white man’s world.”

American education remains deeply reluctant to do this, since it requires overthrowing any number of traditions and practices—from child-centered pedagogies, assumptions about student engagement, and other progressive education ideals, to local control of curriculum, the privileging of skills over content, and the movement toward mass customization of education. Each of these in ways great or small work against the cause of language proficiency; in doing so, they make the task of educating for upward mobility more difficult.

It cuts against the received wisdom of pedagogical and political fashion, but if we are serious about breaking down the social barriers to upward mobility, there should be far more similarities than differences in education in the United States, at least at the K–8 level. The promise of preparing children for academic achievement and upward mobility depends upon a base level of language proficiency. Foundational knowledge across the curriculum not only sets the stage for further independent exploration, it provides the basis for language proficiency—for communication, collaboration, and cooperation between and among disparate people.

A version of this piece originally appeared on the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog. Portions of it originally appeared in Education for Upward Mobility.

Online Tools Build Skills with Core Knowledge Content

Two online services are integrating Core Knowledge content into their tools for building Common Core-aligned reading and language arts skills.

Quill, an online suite of grammar and writing activities for upper elementary to high school students, provides skill-building exercises that will soon incorporate Core Knowledge content. Quill will begin by adapting content from the Core Knowledge Language Arts® (CKLA) and Core Knowledge History and Geography^TM (CKHG) series.

Launched in the fall of 2014, Quill provides more than 300 writing, grammar, and proofreading exercises of about 10-15 minutes each, all organized by the Common Core standards. Quill also offers a diagnostic assessment to identify each student’s specific learning gaps and supply an individualized plan for improvement.

A nonprofit organization especially focused on meeting the needs of low income students, Quill offers its online tools free to teachers and students. A premium service (available at no cost to qualifying low-income schools) adds “in-depth data on student progress across national writing standards.”

To improve students’ writing skills, Quill relies largely on sentence combining. This strategy, Quill’s website explains, “requires students to examine the relationships between ideas, order those ideas, and then express them logically and succinctly.” Click here for an example of a Quill exercise using content from the CKLA materials on the American Revolution.

Online tools to improve reading comprehension are offered free by ReadWorks.org. According to the ReadWorks website, the service offers “the largest, highest-quality library of curated nonfiction and literary articles in the country, along with reading comprehension and vocabulary lessons, formative assessments, and teacher guidance.”

A non-profit organization, ReadWorks is incorporating Core Knowledge content into their popular “Article-A-Day^TM” feature, which provides brief nonfiction texts that help build students’ “background knowledge, vocabulary, and reading stamina.” Click here for the ReadWorks Article-A-Day^TM set adapted from the Core Knowledge History and Geography materials on The Age of Exploration.

The Core Knowledge Foundation welcomes both Quill and ReadWorks as partners in sharing the knowledge through educational technology, and we look forward to expanding our range of high-tech partnerships.

by Patricia Zissios, Ph.D.

In April 2017 Dr. Zissios received the Don Lacey Award for Excellence from the Virginia Association of Elementary School Principals (VAESP) for “her commitment to and demonstration of exemplary educational leadership.”

I am currently in my twenty-fourth year as an elementary school administrator in Virginia public schools. In two different districts, one suburban and one urban, I have worked at three different elementary schools serving three different student populations—one high poverty, one mostly English Language Learners, and one of mixed socio-economic levels. Throughout my long and varied experience, one constant has been my choice of curriculum—Core Knowledge. In each school and in each district, I alone among my colleagues embraced and supported the Core Knowledge curriculum.

Time and again, I’ve been asked—often by very skeptical voices—why I am so passionate about Core Knowledge. I might point to results. In each school in which I have served, the students outperformed their peers on district and state assessments. My current school, Lyles-Crouch Traditional Academy, a K-5 school in the city of Alexandria, and a Core Knowledge School of Distinction, is in the top five percent of schools in the Commonwealth of Virginia, meeting all benchmarks for all subgroups on the state Standards of Learning tests (Reading, 95%; Math, 92%; History, 97%; Science, 92%).

But to explain why I remain passionate about Core Knowledge, I really have to bring you into a classroom. When you observe a Core Knowledge lesson in progress, you will be amazed at the depth and breadth of knowledge students are exposed to.

I was recently observing a second grade class in which the teacher was conducting the CKLA (Core Knowledge Language Arts) lesson on the Pony Express. The students had previously been studying the Core Knowledge lesson on Westward Expansion. The students—keep in mind that these are second graders—had learned about the concept of Manifest Destiny, and about factors that enticed people to move west.

In their class open forum, the students recognized and discussed the growing need to send messages across greater distances. This specific CKLA lesson on the Pony Express taught students about the evolution of communication systems in the 1800s, including the implementation of this short-lived mail delivery system and the invention of the telegraph. During a discussion of the Pony Express, students made connections to an earlier lesson on the War of 1812. They interjected that the peace treaty was signed on Christmas Eve in 1814, but the news of the signing did not reach the troops in time to prevent the Battle of New Orleans. The students saw the problems created by slow communication. And they understood how, later, the need for faster communication eventually contributed to the demise of the Pony Express and the ultimate success of the telegraph.

The introduction of this faster means of communication engaged the students in asking and exploring many questions: Who invented the telegraph? How did it work? What is the difference between a telegraph and a telephone? What is Morse Code? Again, these were seven-year-old students from a socio-economically and ethnically diverse community!

My visit to this classroom reminded me of one thing that Core Knowledge is NOT. It is NOT rote memorization of scripted lessons or the completion of mindless worksheets. It IS, rather, the thought-provoking higher-order application of prior knowledge to new circumstances. It is a sequential, spiral curriculum that builds on previous learning as it expands and deepens students’ knowledge base.

Every time I visit a classroom, my passion for Core Knowledge is renewed. I have no plans to move to another school or district, but were I to do so, I would bring Core Knowledge with me. I know of no more effective way to prepare our students for our complex and changing 21^st century society.

Update: In August 2017, Lyles-Crouch Traditional Academy was among the schools to receive the Virginia Board of Education’s Excellence Award, conferred upon schools that “met all state and federal accountability benchmarks and made significant progress toward goals for increased student achievement and expanded educational opportunities.”

EdReports.org, an independent nonprofit organization that seeks to improve K-12 education by providing detailed reviews of instructional materials, has released its first round of reviews of English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum materials for Grades K-2. Among the six programs analyzed in this first round of reviews, two meet all criteria for alignment and usability in all grades—ReadyGEN from Pearson, and our own Core Knowledge Language Arts™!

EdReports.org enlists teams of educator reviewers to analyze materials based on clearly defined criteria grouped as three “gateways”:

Text Quality & Complexity and Alignment to Standards Components
Building Knowledge with Texts, Vocabulary, and Tasks
Usability

In its summary of findings on CKLA for grades K-2, EdReports.org notes that “the instructional materials . . . meet expectations for all criteria across Gateways 1, 2, and 3.” EdReports.org also notes that:

For grades K-2, CKLA materials “include strong foundational skills to support young students’ reading development as they move from learning how to read to comprehending complex texts.”
CKLA Teacher Guides provide “explicit and comprehensive” support.
CKLA texts for K-2 “are rich and rigorous, offering students a balance of informational and literary reading.”
The texts “are organized to support students’ building knowledge of different topics,” with plentiful “opportunities for students to analyze ideas and grow their vocabulary.”
The program’s design allows for “effective lesson structure and pacing,” and teachers are provided “strategies for meeting the needs of a range of learners.”

In a separate study conducted earlier this year, EdReports.org found that CKLA for grades 3-5 met all criteria for text quality, building knowledge, and usability. For the complete report on CKLA for grades K-5, visit EdReports.org.

A comprehensive program for teaching skills in reading, writing, listening, and speaking, CKLA also builds students’ knowledge and vocabulary in literature, history, geography, and science. For Preschool to Grade 3, most CKLA materials are available for free download. Professionally printed and packaged CKLA classroom kits are available for purchase from Amplify Education.

The following paragraphs are excerpted from a newly published article in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, in which Core Knowledge founder E. D. Hirsch, Jr. explores the complex nature of nationalism and its relation to public schooling in the United States. “My thesis,” writes Hirsch, “is that our young people’s low opinion of their own country has been intensified by the current disrepute of nationalism in any form in our schools and universities. This anti-nationalism has been a big mistake.” Hirsch goes on to explore the role of schools in fostering “the right kind of nationalism.”

The image of America as a melting pot is now almost universally rejected as an outdated conception. It’s said that a better metaphor is that of a mosaic. That’s indeed a more fitting image than melting pot for our variegated nation. But mosaics are highly unified works of art, put together with glue and grout. In the United States, those binding elements are our national language and its public culture, including laws, loyalties, and shared sentiments, that make the language intelligible. If the sense of national unity now seems to be threatened, it is not just because of globalization, economic change, and new technologies—the usual explanations. Another causal factor needs to be adduced.

Over the past six decades, changes in the early grades of schooling have contributed to the decline of communal sentiment. Under the banner of “Teach the child not the subject!” and with a stress on skills rather than content, the decline in shared, school-imparted knowledge has caused reading comprehension scores of high school students to decline. Between the 1960s and 1980s, scores dropped half a standard deviation and have never come back. In addition, school neglect of factual knowledge, including American history and its civic principles, joined with a general de-emphasis of “rote learning” and “mere fact,” induced a decline in widely shared factual knowledge among Americans. This not only weakened their ability to read and communicate; it has left them with weaker patriotic sentiments, and with a diminished feeling that they are in the same boat with Americans of other races, ethnicities, and political outlooks.

My calling attention to these educational outcomes is something one might expect from a political conservative who is complaining about political correctness and a decline of patriotism. But my intended primary target audience is my fellow liberals.… I seek to address those whose main political and social objectives include greater equality of education and income, and higher status for previously neglected or despised groups….

My thesis is that our young people’s low opinion of their own country has been intensified by the current disrepute of nationalism in any form in our schools and universities. This anti-nationalism has been a big mistake, a self-inflicted wound on our individual and collective state of mind…. Such lack of national identity in a modern nation leaves the field open to narrow ethnic enmities and political polarizations.…

Our schools now exhibit a diminished sense, once widely held, that a central goal of American schooling is to foster national cohesion—“out of many, one.” … The right kind of modern nationalism is communal, intent on including everyone….

Declining national pride is coupled with declining knowledge of national history and ideals. Ignorance of the historical ideals that have animated our imperfect realization of them has thus been accompanied by a strong suspicion of any form of nationalism, including our own….

This summer, Judith Kogan of NPR produced a report for the Fourth of July featuring interviews with Massachusetts schoolchildren who had not the slightest acquaintance with, indeed had never heard of, “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” or “America the Beautiful” or “God Bless America.” Kogan interviewed teachers who explained that songs like “The Star-Spangled Banner” were too militaristic, and that “God Bless America” mentioned God. Other patriotic songs, they said, were too narrowly nationalistic, and might offend children from other nations and cultures.…

People are attached to their nations by a sense of belonging to a language community and its accompanying set of values and traditions.… A shared linguistic culture enables people to imagine a community that extends far beyond one’s locality.… Acculturation into a national culture (which may of course include plenty of international knowledge) is still the chief task and duty of national systems of schooling. Our schools believe that they are valiantly teaching the national language, but the current “word-study” and “strategy-study” approaches of schools need to be abandoned in favor of “knowledge-study.” …

To be effective as citizens and workers, every schoolchild needs to gain access to the public sphere and its standardized language, as well as to share a sense of belonging to a country that is worthy of devotion. This public sphere can be changed and improved—but only gradually, and with tact. It is important to abolish evil elements of our past culture, but it’s also important to offer every child access to the currently shared public culture.

The CK Online Assessment

The Core Knowledge online assessment is a work in progress. In its current form, it uses online tools available from ProProfs. The assessments are embedded into a customized website for each participating school.

The assessment was designed with certain goals in mind—specifically, it should:

be a formative assessment, not summative
be brief so as not to take too much time away from instruction, and user-friendly for both teachers and students
not be a “got ya” for teachers but instead a tool to help them focus, refine, and improve their teaching
provide results/data to teachers in fairly short order
go beyond a traditional “fill in the bubble” test and instead include a mix of question types, including multiple choice, true/false, matching, fill in the blank, short answer, and brief essays.

All assessment items except the short answers and essays are automatically scored by the software.

How the Year 1 Pilot Worked

Six Core Knowledge schools, both public and charter, participated in the first year of piloting online assessments in grades 3–8 for two Core Knowledge domains: Science, and History and Geography. These schools are in four different states in different regions of the country and represent a wide range of demographics and socio-economic levels. Approximately 1,000 students were included in the pilot.

Pilot schools agreed to give at least three assessments during the school year. Most schools decided to assess at the end of each quarter. At each school, teachers received training on how to administer the assessments and interpret the results.

After each assessment, I have visited the schools and had grade level meetings with teachers. Each meeting has transformed this project. For example, in some grades we have changed the look of the assessment to resemble state assessments so that students can become familiar with the format. We have also included more question types that students will see on their state assessments. We have added “challenge questions” and, with the help of the teachers, created essay questions that specifically pertain to concepts emphasized by the teacher in her or his class.

After the first assessment, some schools chose to administer the assessment after every domain rather than wait until the end of a quarter. Many teachers initially wary of the assessments have bought into the idea. The assessments have given them an opportunity to reflect on how effectively they are teaching their domains and how well their students are learning. Teachers are using data from the assessments to become more focused and thorough in their instruction.

Year 2 Pilot: CK Schools Needed!

Teacher feedback and collaboration are vital to making this project a success moving forward. That’s why we are now looking for Core Knowledge schools interested in joining the pilot for Year 2. To find out more about the online assessments or becoming a pilot site, please use our online Contact Form and begin your message with the words ASSESSMENT PILOT.

Would you like to see some sample assessments? Maybe you would like to take one of the assessments? Feel free to explore this website.

There are so many fantastic Core Knowledge schools out there—we are looking for a few that want to share their knowledge and passion and ideas to help promote student success.

The Baseball Experiment

From the Preface to Cultural Literacy (1987)

The CK Online Assessment

How the Year 1 Pilot Worked

Year 2 Pilot: CK Schools Needed!