Back in 2000, a panel of reading experts convened by the federal government issued a report that reviewed the research on how children learn to read. The findings of the National Reading Panel helped shift reading instruction away from ineffective techniques that involve having students guess at words and toward systematic instruction in phonics. No doubt many children have benefited as a result.

Now there’s a move afoot in Congress, spearheaded by Rep. Josh Harder (D-Calif), to convene another NRP. After all, advocates say, there’s been quite a bit of research related to reading in the 25 years or so since the last panel issued its report.

Harder has managed to get language that would fund a new NRP into the House budget bill for 2027—which, it should be noted, has not yet been enacted into law.1

The bill calls for the new NRP to address some issues that the earlier panel didn’t take up. Those include “the relationship between reading books rather than passages in building reading stamina; the relationship between writing instruction and reading comprehension; optimal amounts of time for different aspects of reading and writing instruction in the average classroom; [and] the essential components of effective reading curricula.”

The bill also mentions an examination of the relationship between teacher preparation, professional development, and effective reading and writing instruction, along with “out-of-school factors” like oral language.

These issues are worthy of attention, and a new report could address some misconceptions that have proliferated in recent years. Literacy instruction has come to center far too much on excerpts or brief passages; some students graduate from high school without ever having read an entire book. And it’s welcome news that writing is mentioned in the bill. The first NRP said nothing about writing, despite evidence that writing about texts can boost reading comprehension.

The “optimal amounts of time” issue could help prevent schools from spending way more time on phonics than the 20 or 30 minutes experts say most kids need. Some schools reportedly spend as much as two hours a day on phonics, leaving little or no time for things like read-alouds—or actual reading by students.

Inevitably, however, there are some important components of reading that didn’t make it into the bill—for example, familiarity with complex sentence structure, which recent research indicates is more important to comprehension than vocabulary, especially at higher grade levels. And the bill’s passing mention of research regarding “early reading development and instruction” suggests that the drafters see reading instruction as limited to the early grades—when in fact, students at higher grade levels often desperately need support in decoding more complex vocabulary and sentence structure.

No Mention of the Role of Knowledge

Of course, the panel wouldn’t be limited to looking at the factors listed in the bill. But a crucial factor I worry a new panel would overlook is the same one that was overlooked by the original NRP: the role of background knowledge in reading comprehension.

The original NRP report vastly oversimplified the process of comprehension by focusing on evidence related to teaching reading comprehension strategies like “asking and answering questions” or summarizing.2 One reason, apparently, was that the panel prioritized experimental and quasi-experimental studies that met the gold standard of a randomized controlled trial—studies in which there is a “treatment” group and a comparable “control” group. Such studies allow researchers to infer that the “treatment,” or intervention, actually caused whatever changes they observe.

The panel’s decision to focus on such quantitative studies is understandable—when it comes to phonics. The “whole language” advocates of the 1980s and 1990s who opposed systematic phonics instruction often relied on qualitative, observational studies of reading instruction.

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The problem with such studies is that it can look like kids are learning to read even if they’re not. They might, for example, have just memorized the simple words they’re being asked to read rather than having learned the phonics patterns that would enable them to transfer their decoding skills to words they don’t already know. To ensure the reliability of its conclusions, the NRP wanted to exclude those observational studies.

But the panel applied the same criteria to studies of reading comprehension, and in that area such a standard can be misleading. There are hundreds of experimental studies showing that teaching certain comprehension strategies can improve reading scores. But there are other factors—like background knowledge—that are actually more important to comprehension but far more difficult to study directly.

Strategy Instruction Is Easier to Study

One reason there are so many studies of strategy instruction is that researchers can see the results on standardized tests very quickly—even after just a few hours of instruction. Most research studies last no more than six weeks, so if you’re looking to publish positive results, strategy instruction is a highly attractive subject to focus on.

We also have studies demonstrating the role of knowledge in comprehension, but most are limited to showing that it’s helpful to have knowledge of the topic you’re reading about. If you’re a baseball expert, for example, it’s clear that your comprehension of an article on baseball will be better than that of someone who knows little or nothing about baseball—even, perhaps, if they’re a better all-around reader.

But some reading experts discount those studies because they don’t measure the effects of background knowledge on general reading comprehension. For that, they say, you need to use standardized tests that rely on passages unrelated to any particular topic. Those tests purport to measure comprehension skill or ability in the abstract.

But it’s virtually impossible to do that. Background knowledge and vocabulary almost inevitably affect comprehension, especially as grade levels go up and reading passages become more complex. As cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham has said, standardized reading comprehension tests are actually “knowledge tests in disguise.”

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We do have a handful of studies showing that building children’s knowledge of lots of topics, in a logical fashion, improves their general reading comprehension. But those studies also indicate that it can take three years or more to see the results. Studies that last that long are difficult to conduct and extremely expensive.

So it’s not surprising that there are more studies of strategy instruction than of knowledge-building. That doesn’t mean strategy instruction is more effective than knowledge-building; it just means it’s easier and less expensive to study. In fact, without a minimum level of relevant background knowledge, no comprehension skill or strategy is likely to work.

The Risks of a Second NRP

The original NRP’s failure to mention knowledge as a factor in comprehension helped entrench a pre-existing belief among many educators that teaching comprehension skills and strategies was all you needed to do to enable students to understand text. We’ve been paying the price ever since—or rather, students who are less likely to acquire academic knowledge outside of school have been paying that price.

It’s not clear what a second NRP would conclude about the role of background knowledge. One possibility is that it would cast its net farther than the original panel in terms of data—including not only the multi-year studies showing that building knowledge can boost standardized test scores but also the ample evidence on the importance of knowledge from the field of cognitive science.

This wouldn’t necessitate relying on relatively subjective observational studies. There are many experimental studies showing that having prior relevant knowledge stored in long-term memory expands the capacity of working memory to understand and absorb new information.

The other possibility, though, would be that the panel would again limit its focus primarily to experimental studies conducted by reading researchers. If a new report simply weighs the total number of studies of strategy instruction against the total number of studies of knowledge-building, without considering other data and factors, it could declare that the evidence shows that strategy instruction is more effective than knowledge-building. That might be an even worse outcome than the first panel’s failure to mention knowledge-building at all.

There are reasons to believe that might happen. Not only does the NRP bill fail to mention the role of knowledge in comprehension, its sponsor, Josh Harder, seems unaware of the issue. Harder was recently a guest on a podcast produced by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank. One of the hosts, Fordham president Michael Petrilli, set Harder up to address the knowledge issue, saying this:

[The] National Reading Panel did not say much about the importance of knowledge building. This was something that even back then, E.D. Hirsch had been writing about and arguing about for quite some time, and marshalling a lot of evidence that reading comprehension, once you do learn the foundational skills, is largely about learning history and science and other kinds of content and vocabulary.

But that was not a part of the National Reading Panel report. And you could argue maybe that’s why it took us so long to finally get to the point, really just very recently, that we start to see more people talking about the importance of that.

So I guess the question is, what if a new National Reading Panel gets it wrong? Isn’t there some risk of mischief here?

Rather than discussing knowledge, Harder talked about the importance of gathering evidence on implementation. “The biggest problem that we have on reading right now,” he said, “is that almost every state has passed a science of reading bill, but very few states are actually seeing sustained gains in student outcomes.”

It’s undoubtedly true that one reason most states haven’t seen sustained gains is that implementation is often flawed, But another likely reason is that virtually none of those states require that schools build the knowledge that kids need to understand the increasingly complex text they encounter as the grade levels go up.

It’s also worrying that Harder’s bill specifies that the panel is to include “leading scientists in reading research,” along with education school faculty, reading teachers, and school administrators. Without representatives from the broader community of cognitive scientists—and, ideally speech and language pathologists, who have been more aware of the role of complex syntax in comprehension—we’re likely to get another panel that views reading comprehension in isolation from learning in general.

Of course, it’s possible that the make-up of the panel would go beyond what the bill calls for—or that the “reading researchers” appointed to the panel will take a broader view of reading research than their predecessors. Even if that’s the case, there’s still the risk that the report will be misinterpreted. If, for example, it provides a list of factors backed by research, educators may see that as a checklist rather than items to be integrated into instruction—which is what often happened with the first NRP.

It’s common these days to attribute all the problems in our education system to problems with math and reading instruction—and, when it comes to reading, to problems with instruction in reading individual words. But those problems are just the tip of a very large iceberg. If we want to improve education outcomes, we need to connect reading and writing instruction to the “content areas” like history and science—and bring instruction in all those areas in line with evidence from cognitive science.

I’m not sure another federally convened panel will have much effect—or at least, not a positive one. But if we’re going to have a panel, I would prefer one focused on learning, and not just on “reading.”

Alpha School, as I discussed in a previous post, is a fast-growing network of private schools that relies on AI-powered “tutors” to deliver academic learning in just two hours a day, with the remainder of the school day devoted to “life skills workshops” that students choose. Alpha claims its students learn 2.6 times faster than average, as measured by standardized tests that track the progress of millions of students across the country.

There’s a big debate going on about Alpha School’s model, one that seems to have divided the “science of learning” community. I’m not going to rehash that debate here (see my previous post), although I will note that doubt has recently been cast on Alpha’s claim that its model can work for virtually all students, not just the ones whose parents can afford the pricey tuition.

I’m going to focus on one area of Alpha School’s model that I’ve learned more about since my last post on the topic: how Alpha teaches writing.

Alpha has developed its own instructional app, called AlphaWrite, which appears to have been used for the first time during the 2025-26 school year. At the time I wrote my previous post, I had no access to AlphaWrite, but I noticed, based on a screen visible in an Alpha promotional video, that it seemed to resemble a method of writing instruction I’m very familiar with: The Writing Revolution.1 I’m the co-author of a book describing the method, which was created by my co-author Judith C. Hochman.

I still don’t have access to AlphaWrite, but a recent post in a Substack newsletter called Austin Scholar, written by a recent Alpha graduate, provides a detailed description. The post is a response to my own previous post about Alpha, where, in Austin Scholar’s words, I expressed “confusion around how Alpha teaches the humanities, writing included.”

An App Built on The Writing Revolution Method

I’m still confused about how Alpha teaches the humanities, but Austin Scholar is quite clear about where its approach to writing instruction comes from—and it turns out my hunch was right.

“AlphaWrite,” she explains, “is a mastery-based writing tutor built on the same evidence base as The Writing Revolution’s Hochman Method: explicit instruction from sentences to paragraphs to essays, embedded in content that matters to students.”2 (I’ve added that emphasis, which I’ll come back to in a moment.)

To say the tutor is “built on the same evidence base” as the Hochman Method is an understatement. To a large extent—but with one crucial omission—AlphaWrite is a copy of the Hochman Method.

The app starts students on sentence-level activities drawn from the method and then moves on to guiding them through outlining paragraphs and essays in basically the same way that the method does.3 As the method requires, the app also gives them lots of guided practice and prompt, targeted feedback—almost certainly, as Austin Scholar suggests, more individualized practice and feedback than most teachers with classes of 25 or 30 students would be able to provide. (For a brief description of the method, see this article.)

According to Austin Scholar, the switch to AlphaWrite in some Alpha schools during the last school year produced dramatic gains. “This year,” she writes, “students who used AlphaWrite grew 3.6x in language and 3.3x in reading—compared with 1.8x and 2.2x for students at the same campuses who didn’t use it.”4

Personal Interests Rather than Curriculum Content

It’s possible that AlphaWrite could do a good job of teaching writing. But the app’s creators have overlooked a crucial component of the Hochman Method: it’s designed to be embedded in curriculum content. AlphaWrite, in contrast, is—as noted above—“embedded in content that matters to students.” And the model assumes that the content that “matters to students” is anything but the content of the curriculum.

Instead, AlphaWrite encourages students to write about their personal interests. “If kids only ever write five-paragraph essays about topics they don’t care about,” Austin Scholar argues, “they probably won’t be able to fall in love with writing (or, at the very least, it will be more difficult).”

She herself loves “Harry Potter, Ironman, and the beach,” so all of her writing lessons involved those topics.5 If students aren’t as clear as she is about their passions, AlphaWrite helpfully provides suggestions. The list, as reproduced in Austin Scholar’s post, goes like this: Fortnite, Harry Potter, Social Media, Video Games, Basketball.

Regardless of whether the topic is generated by AlphaWrite or the student, the app then provides suggestions for an angle that’s manageable as an essay topic. If a student chooses “Video Games,” AlphaWrite might suggest, among other options: “Explain how video game consoles have evolved over the decades and their impact on the gaming industry.”

Once students have “mastered the mechanics,” Austin Scholar says, they can use their new writing skills “on things that matter to them.” That appears to take place in Alpha’s afternoon life skills workshops, where, she says, they might write “social posts, scripts for videos, pitches for businesses, and even publishable articles.” Or they might write creatively in “storytelling-heavy workshops.” But not, apparently, about anything in the academic curriculum.

The Limits of Personalization

Except for the AI element and the life skills workshops, all of this should sound familiar. The twin mantras of personalization and student choice have dominated education orthodoxy for a long time. And sure, we need both of those things to some extent. But Alpha claims to be departing from education orthodoxy in ways that align with cognitive science. And encouraging students to write only about their personal interests conflicts with cognitive science.

In typical classrooms, one problem is that if students are writing about 25 different topics of their own choosing, it’s hard for teachers to give effective feedback. That’s because a teacher probably won’t have enough knowledge of each topic to recognize when students are going off the rails. Maybe that’s not a problem with an AI tutor, which can store a lot more information than a human being (although who knows if all of it is accurate).

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But the other problem with personalization is that it can prevent kids from learning about things they need to know. As education writer Lisa Hansel has noted, there are two kinds of personalization. One kind gives all students “personalized pathways to mastering a well-rounded curriculum,” which could be terrific. The other, though, involves “personalized content,” which, Hansel warned over a decade ago, could be “the next flood of snake oil.” It’s that latter kind of personalization that AlphaWrite facilitates.

“If allowed to choose my own content in elementary school,” Hansel wrote, “I would have become an expert in princesses and dogs.” Instead, she got exposure to lots of content she didn’t choose, and by the time she got to high school, her interests “were as broad as [her] elementary curriculum had been.”

Writing About Curriculum Content Boosts Learning

Alpha School might respond that they are providing students with a well-rounded curriculum; it’s just in the area of writing that kids choose their own topics. I have yet to see evidence that Alpha does a good job of covering social studies and literature. But even if they do, separating writing instruction from the content of the curriculum is still problematic.

For one thing, the theory behind AlphaWrite is that if students master writing skills on topics they love, they’ll be able to transfer those skills to whatever else they want—or need—to write about. If students build a “love of writing” through AlphaWrite, Austin Scholar says, they’ll be more likely to write “their literary analysis on their own instead of with ChatGPT.”

Maybe. But will writing essays about video games and social media enable them to write “literary analysis”? Writing skills are transferable to some extent, but not entirely. Plus, in the real world, not to mention college, people do often have to write about topics they don’t already love. It’s not a bad idea to get some practice doing that.

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Beyond the issue of transferability, though, writing isn’t just a set of skills. Ideally, it’s a way of learning. Studies show that when students write about texts they’ve read, or content in any subject area, it generally enhances their learning. Evidence from cognitive science suggests that’s because writing provides opportunities for retrieval practice, which enables students to access information readily in the future, and for elaboration, which can deepen comprehension.

The decisionmakers at Alpha understand that if students outsource the writing process to generative AI, they’ll miss out on the learning that writing can enable. Alpha co-founder MacKenzie Price has called chatbots “cheatbots.”6 But it’s equally true that if you attach the writing process to content that has nothing to do with the curriculum, as AlphaWrite does, students also miss out on a lot of learning.7

It may be easier to motivate students to write about things they already love, just as it’s easier to get most kids to eat ice cream than to eat vegetables. But most of us don’t feed our kids a steady diet of ice cream, because we know that’s not good for them. And sometimes, if you introduce kids to well-prepared vegetables, they actually develop a love for them.

A Strain of Anti-Intellectualism

I still haven’t visited an Alpha School, although I hope to—and I’m trying to keep an open mind until I do. But now that I know more about AlphaWrite, it seems to be in line with a troubling strain of anti-intellectualism that is baked into the Alpha ethos.

At Alpha, kids are encouraged to get through the necessary academic work with their AI-powered tutor in just two hours, so they can get “time back” for the fun stuff—as though academics itself could never be fun. The life skills workshops have nothing to do with academics, apparently on the assumption that the abilities to understand history or analyze a novel aren’t life skills. And AlphaWrite is based on the premise that kids can learn to love writing only if they write about basketball or Fortnite—not about To Kill a Mockingbird or the American Revolution.

I’m not saying we need to turn all children into intellectuals. But I’ve seen schools and classrooms where kids do get excited about academic content—and yes, excited to write about it. At the very least, educators shouldn’t be communicating the message that such a thing is unlikely or impossible.

Instead of assuming that literary and historical topics don’t “matter” to students or can’t inspire “love,” how about teaching the subjects in a way that enables students to become enthusiastic about them? From what I’ve seen, guiding kids to write about those topics, using a method like The Writing Revolution, can be a great way to do that.

History—or, to use a more general term, social studies—has long been the red-headed stepchild of the American education system. Disrespected, neglected, derided: you name it. The very idea of teaching history to young children has been seen as “developmentally inappropriate,” despite the absence of evidence to support that view. And the concept of “social studies” was invented largely to downplay the supposedly boring and irrelevant study of history in favor of theoretically more engaging subjects like economics.

Teachers are often left to come up with their own materials for social studies instruction, and they get little support in how to deliver them. In the elementary and middle school grades, social studies has been marginalized in favor of the “tested subjects”: math and reading.1

That’s most likely to happen in schools where test scores are low, on the theory that if you want to get reading scores up, you need to spend more time on reading. Especially after second grade, much of the time spent on reading is devoted to practicing “comprehension skills,” like making inferences, rather than acquiring any particular knowledge or digging into meaty texts.

But six years ago, a study by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute turned up a surprising data point: when students spend an additional half hour per day on social studies in elementary school, their reading scores are higher by fifth grade. An extra half hour on reading, on the other hand, is not linked to higher reading scores. While the study itself can’t tell us why, the likely explanation is that kids who get more social studies are able to acquire more of the knowledge and vocabulary they need to understand the passages on the reading tests.2

Ideally, social studies will be taught for its own sake. We should recognize that an understanding of the past, along with other social science knowledge, is essential for a grasp of the present and for shouldering the responsibilities of citizenship in a democratic society.

Unfortunately, it’s not unusual for students to graduate from high school without having acquired basic knowledge like who won the Civil War, or what “Washington, D.C.” is. But it’s been hard to get schools to appreciate the importance of history and geography. One likely reason is that while all states require reading tests, few require tests in social studies.

A New Focus on Social Studies

Some people, however, are now seizing on the evidence that social studies can boost reading scores as an argument for focusing more on social studies. And I say: terrific. I’m in favor of whatever works to get schools to spend more time on the subject—and to figure out how to teach the content in ways that make it both engaging and memorable.

An increasing number of elementary and middle schools are using literacy curricula that incorporate social studies content, to varying degrees—an approach that can work well to build the kind of knowledge that fuels reading comprehension. But it’s not a substitute for actual social studies. For one thing, if teachers believe that what they’re really teaching is reading comprehension, the focus can easily drift toward skills and away from content. That would be less likely to happen if the subject were labeled “social studies” rather than “ELA.”

But it’s hard to find an effective social studies curriculum. One reason is that every state has its own set of social studies standards. There are areas of overlap, but the drafters of each state’s standards often introduce the same or similar topics at different grade levels. They also want students to learn about the history and geography of their particular state. That’s understandable, but it means there’s no national market for social studies curricula the way there is for literacy, math, and science. As a result, most curriculum publishers don’t want to invest in creating them.

State-Created Social Studies Curricula

One solution to that problem is for a state to create its own effective social studies curriculum, aligned to its own standards. Louisiana and Massachusetts have each done that—and most recently they’ve been joined by Kentucky.3 As in Louisiana, Kentucky officials are partnering with the Core Knowledge Foundation to adapt its K-8 history and geography curriculum to the state’s requirements. The curriculum will be available for free to all districts, with some grade levels coming on line for the next school year and the remaining grades the year after that.

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I don’t know whether policymakers in Louisiana and Massachusetts were motivated by a desire to boost reading scores, but it appears that those in Kentucky were, at least in part. The state department of education, in announcing the new curriculum, noted that “deep knowledge in civics, economics, geography and history strengthens students’ reading comprehension, vocabulary, and academic language.” On the History Matters podcast, the state’s chief academic officer, Micki Marinelli, recently expanded on the connections between social studies and literacy, remarking that “we are all teachers of literacy.”

We the People

Another route to better social studies instruction is to focus on aspects that all state standards have in common—especially U.S. history and civics. That’s what a program called We the People, developed by the Center for Civic Education, has been doing since 1987. Aimed at elementary through high school grade levels, it covers not only constitutional principles and government structures—the typical content of civics classes—but also the history that is necessary for students to understand and analyze them.

Students in grades three to five learn, for example, about the colonial era and the American Revolution; middle schoolers delve into John Locke’s influence on the framers of the Constitution; and high school students explore more arcane issues like the Quebec Act of 1774. The curriculum guides students to connect historical content to current events as well as civics.

A key feature of the program is its culmination in a simulated congressional hearing. Panels of students present prepared statements on a particular topic to groups of judges, who then ask follow-up questions—including some that students don’t know in advance—and provide feedback. Middle and high school students are eligible to participate in district, state and national competitions, while elementary students, or any other students, can simply participate in simulated hearings in their own schools or classrooms.

Last year, the Delaware Department of Education was awarded an $8.7 million federal grant to pilot a project called Literacy for We the People, geared to grades 4 through 8. The idea is to harness the power of history and civics instruction to boost students’ reading, writing, and speaking abilities. The DDOE’s grant partners are the Center for Civic Education, the Civics Education Research Lab (CERL) at Georgetown University, and the Delaware Center for Civics Education at the University of Delaware.

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Earlier this month, I visited the university’s campus in Newark, Delaware, where 21 teachers and four mentors who are the first participants in the program were engaging in four days of professional learning. I arrived on the last day, when teachers appeared before a panel of judges, in groups of five or six, to present their “testimony,” just as their students will eventually do. The teachers had spent the previous three days acquiring information about the questions they would address, writing their statements, and prepping for the judges’ follow-up questions.

The teachers tackled issues like the Founders’ reasons for setting up three branches of government and the deficiencies in the Articles of Confederation that led to the adoption of the Constitution. During follow-up questioning, the judges asked them to explain things like how the balance of power between the federal government and the states has changed over time. The responses were often a mixture of personal opinion and historical details, including Supreme Court cases, that supported them.

Professional Development

One promising feature of Literacy for We the People is that it includes professional development, including not only the “summer institute” I observed but also ongoing collaboration among teachers during the school year. A curriculum is a crucial starting point, but educators generally benefit from guidance on how best to implement it.

According to Scott Abbott, assistant director of the Delaware Center for Civics Education, the program includes an “educator toolkit” consisting of literacy routines that will help teachers prepare students for writing their testimony and delivering it at the simulated hearing—routines that teachers practiced themselves at the summer institute.

In addition, the fact that the program incorporates both writing and oral language—and requires students to present their ideas and think on their feet in a more or less public setting—could well provide a significant boost to student learning. Like debate, a simulated congressional hearing is a way of attaching high enough stakes to learning that students expend the effort required to absorb and retain the information. A study by CERL of the We the People program found it boosted students’ civic knowledge by 31 percent as compared to a control group, with the strongest gains often among the historically disadvantaged.

Unlike most states, Delaware does test social studies at multiple grade levels—every year in grades 4 through 8, and again in grade 11. But as with most standardized state tests, students aren’t held accountable for the results—and testing alone doesn’t ensure they’ll retain the information. Speaking with some seventh grade teachers at the University of Delaware event over lunch, I asked if their students seem to remember the social studies content they’ve had in previous years. They shook their heads wearily. One responded, “They don’t even remember on Monday what they learned on Friday.” Maybe Literacy for We the People can change that.

Evidence that the approach can boost literacy comes from an earlier “We the People” program called Civics Empowers All Students, or CEAS. That program focused on helping elementary and middle school educators teach writing through the curriculum content. Basing their analysis on the written work that students created for the simulated hearings, CERL researchers found that—according to a rubric they created—participating students’ writing was far better than average.4

CERL will also be studying the effects of the Literacy for We the People program. Donna Phillips, president and CEO of the Center for Civic Education, said the expectation is that the explicit literacy routines included in the program will yield improvements in state literacy test scores.

That, however, may take time. Knowledge-building interventions generally don’t show results on standardized literacy tests after just one year—or even two. But whether or not scores improve quickly, the fact that students are writing about history and civics content—and preparing to be questioned about it—is likely to help them remember and understand it.

The plan is to expand Literacy for We the People to more teachers in Delaware, and to teachers in other states, in the coming years.

The Four Question Method U.S. History Curriculum

Yet another promising development on the history education front is the unveiling of the Four Question Method U.S. history curriculum. I’ve written previously about the method, which provides a highly effective framework for approaching any historical topic. In developing the curriculum, the method’s creators, Jon Bassett and Gary Shiffman, have applied their framework to topics generally covered in an eighth grade U.S. history course. Teachers who piloted the curriculum gave it rave reviews.

I recently had the opportunity to review the first four units of the student reader and was impressed by its crisp, engaging narratives, judicious selection of primary sources, and thought-provoking student activities.

In a neat twist on the argument that social studies boosts literacy, Bassett and Shiffman advocate for importing the kind of advances seen in literacy instruction in recent years into history instruction. It’s time, they wrote in a recent post, for the field of social studies to have its “Sold a Story” moment—following the lead of the “science of reading” movement in rejecting ineffective practices in favor of those grounded in the science of learning. That, in fact, is what their curriculum does.

If your curiosity is piqued, consider signing up for a free one-hour webinar on August 13, during which the 4QM team will walk participants through Unit 2, “American Independence.” The webinar is designed for teachers who are planning to use the curriculum, but it’s open to anyone.

You might come away with some new knowledge of American history—and, if you’re a teacher, some new ideas about how to show students that learning history is not only important but also, potentially, fun.

Gifted and talented, or “G&T,” programs are both highly contested and highly sought-after. Among the criticisms are that the label implies a fixed and general trait, when in fact measures like IQ fluctuate—especially before age 12—and individuals may be “advanced” in one area and not others. Individuals who get the label when young sometimes feel under pressure to succeed in everything they try their hand at. Beyond that, there’s little or no evidence that participation in a G&T program has any effect on cognitive ability.

The most common criticism, however, is that the programs, which disproportionately serve white and Asian students, exacerbate societal inequality. G&T programs that begin in elementary school, or even middle school, often serve as pathways to selective “exam” high schools, which in turn serve as pathways to highly selective colleges. Similar or worse demographic disproportions obtain at those higher levels. A case in point: New York City’s most selective high school, Stuyvesant, recently admitted 777 students, and only three of them were Black.

And yet, G&T programs—and their close cousins, the selective high schools—have proven difficult to modify or abolish. The families whose students win admission, or hope to win admission, defend the programs fiercely. They often see them as a legitimate reward for academic merit or at least, as one New York school counselor put it, their “only chance to give students an education slightly better than what’s otherwise offered in a city where almost half of students fail to meet an already low bar for grade-level performance.”

Bias in admissions criteria

A fundamental problem is that the criteria used for admission to G&T programs inherently privilege students who are already privileged. The programs generally begin in third grade, although in New York City G&T begins in kindergarten, and students are usually admitted through a combination of cognitive testing and teacher recommendations, both of which can incorporate biases.1

The cognitive tests, which are basically IQ tests, are largely dependent on knowledge and vocabulary that children of highly educated, affluent families are more likely to have acquired. One test for preschoolers shows children images of four animals: a duck, a cow, a cat, and a pig. They’re asked to point to the one that says “oink.” It’s not hard to imagine that many children who live in urban environments will be stumped, even if they can eliminate one or two of the possibilities. If they come from a non-English-speaking family, they may have learned that pigs make a different sound.2

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Schools can provide all students with the kind of knowledge and vocabulary that some are able to acquire at home—in fact, that’s arguably their mission. Unfortunately, many aren’t even striving to do that, at least in the elementary grades. They often focus on supposedly abstract reading comprehension skills rather than the content in history, science, and literature that actually boosts not only reading comprehension but also IQ scores. Even when schools do adopt a knowledge-building approach, it’s likely to take years before students from less-advantaged families acquire enough knowledge and vocabulary to be competitive against their more-advantaged peers.

All of that suggests that if we want to see G&T programs that equitably reflect the true distribution of academic talent, we need to adopt knowledge-building curricula beginning in the early grades, along with the explicit teaching methods that are aligned with scientific evidence—and wait until at least middle school before trying to identify the kids who could benefit from advanced classes.

A G&T study in Florida

But a study of G&T programs in a large urban district in Florida suggests that at least for some bright economically disadvantaged students, early identification can make a huge difference. The district, which appears to be Broward County, doesn’t rely on teachers or parents to nominate children they see as promising. Rather, the district tests all second graders, in class, using a nonverbal “ability test.” Kids who test above a certain score are then automatically referred for IQ testing, which is used to determine their eligibility for G&T.

Generally, the qualifying score is 130 points. But under what the district calls “Plan B,” students whose family incomes are low enough to get them free or reduced-price school meals or who are English language learners can qualify for G&T with a score of 116. After the district introduced “Plan B,” the share of children in those groups who were identified as “gifted” tripled, jumping from 1.4 to 4.3 percent.

Students who enter the G&T program in third grade can remain in it through high school, and along the way they get special counseling and an individualized education plan. They’re placed in separate classrooms during elementary school and get priority for advanced math and some other classes in middle school, along with counseling on advanced classes when they transition to high school.

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The study followed about 3,500 students from elementary through high school, comparing a group that entered the G&T program via Plan B with another group whose IQ scores were just below the gifted threshold. That allowed researchers to “estimate the causal effects of program participation.”

Dramatic effects on non-cognitive outcomes

As with other studies of G&T programs, this one didn’t find evidence that participating in G&T programs improved students’ cognitive skills as measured by test scores. But the researchers did find some dramatic effects on “non-cognitive” outcomes, especially for boys. The G&T boys were, for example, 69 percent more likely to finish algebra 1 in middle school than the control group. In high school, they took twice as many AP classes, on average. Despite taking more challenging courses, the G&T students’ high school GPA remained around the same as that of the control group.

The largest impacts were on students who reported the lowest enjoyment of learning when they were third graders. Within that group, G&T girls were 50 percent more likely to graduate from high school on time and enroll in college—and boys were more than seven times as likely to do those things.

For whatever reason, girls seem to have better non-cognitive abilities than boys, on average. Participating in the G&T program essentially brought the G&T boys’ non-cognitive abilities up to about the level displayed by the girls in the control group.

The Florida study has at least a couple of important implications. First, assessments of cognitive ability—in other words, test scores—don’t measure everything. Factors like motivation and, perhaps, self-confidence count for a lot when it comes to sticking with school and taking more advanced courses. From what I’ve seen in classrooms and heard from teachers, the students who act out in class are often smart kids who are bored. Saving them from that boredom by giving them access to more challenging schoolwork—or more advanced peers, or even just the message that they’re smart—could alter the trajectory of their lives.

Universal screening and ongoing support

Second, if we want G&T programs to serve as engines of social mobility—and not just an escape valve for relatively affluent parents who can’t afford or don’t want to spend money on private school tuition—we should focus on economically disadvantaged students who are bright but disengaged from school, beginning around third grade. As in the Florida district, we should identify those kids through universal screening, using a nonverbal initial assessment, and provide them with support throughout high school.

In the long run, if we want to more accurately identify academic potential across the socioeconomic spectrum, the most effective approach is to provide all students with the kind of education that allows them to show us what they’re truly capable of doing. I’ve spoken to many teachers who have been amazed by what students can do once they’re given a content-rich curriculum and the kind of instruction that enables them to understand and analyze complex test. Another benefit of that approach is that it makes schooling more challenging and engaging for all students, including those from more advantaged families—so it could reduce the demand for G&T programs among that demographic.

But in the short run, an approach like “Plan B” could help save many bright but unmotivated students from veering off track.

Alpha School—a chain of private schools that claims to have revolutionized education with the help of AI—has been around since 2014, but it’s having a moment. With campuses rapidly sprouting in affluent parts of the country, it’s claiming to enable students to learn at a rate that is 2.6 times faster than average while spending only two hours a day on academics.

During those two hours, each student is served a personalized menu of lessons. Rather than assuming that just because a student is in, say, fifth grade, they should be doing fifth-grade work, Alpha uses an AI-powered app to pinpoint where the student needs to begin—either higher or lower than “grade level”—and provides appropriate material. The app then provides prompt, targeted feedback. When students have mastered a particular level of difficulty, it gives them more challenging material.

There are no human teachers. Instead, Alpha provides “guides,” whose role is to motivate students to do their best with the app.

Alpha says this approach results in dramatically faster growth for students at any ability level, as measured by standardized test scores. For elementary and middle grades, those tests are MAP assessments—an acronym for Measures of Academic Progress—that are given to millions of students across the country throughout the school year. Most Alpha students are in the top one percent for growth on the MAP. At the high school level, outcomes are measured by the SAT and AP tests. The average SAT score at Alpha is 1470, and 90 percent of students get 4s or 5s on the AP.

Academics occupy the morning at Alpha School. What about all that “time back,” as Alpha calls it, that students get in the afternoon—the additional four hours or so that, in a traditional school, would also be spent on academics? That’s when kids at Alpha get to participate in group “workshops” designed to teach “life skills.” They can choose to learn how to assemble furniture from IKEA, put together a Rubik’s cube, engage in juggling or public speaking—or even, in at least one instance, own and operate an Airbnb.

Division Within the Science of Learning Community

Alpha School and its parent company, 2-Hour Learning, argue that the tired, inefficient era of “a teacher standing in front of a classroom” must come to an end. Perhaps not surprisingly, not everyone agrees—and I have some serious reservations myself.

Before I summarize the critiques of others and add my own, I should mention that I have never visited an Alpha School, nor have I been able to get any official information from 2-Hour Learning or anyone at Alpha. I submitted an inquiry but have not heard back, and I’ve been advised by another writer who has been trying to reach them that I should not hold my breath. Still, I’ve reviewed lots of publicly available material, including a lot from Alpha itself. If I should hear anything from 2-Hour Learning or Alpha that is relevant to this post after it’s published, I will update or correct it.

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Alpha has claimed they have “globally renowned learning scientists” helping them build their model, based on decades of research. And indeed, at least two prominent advocates for science-aligned instruction, Carl Hendrick and Zach Groshell, are consulting with Alpha and helping them develop their instructional apps. Hendrick says he started out a skeptic but came away from a visit convinced that Alpha was engineering “the best conditions for learning through curriculum design and learning science.” Groshell has called Alpha’s approach “cognitive load theory in a bottle.”

Others within the science-of-learning movement remain skeptical, however, for various reasons. Jared Cooney Horvath is doubtful that success with an AI-assisted tutor, or on tests that mimic that situation, will transfer to other learning contexts. Robert Pondiscio questions Alpha’s confident, even arrogant tone and points out they haven’t made their underlying data available for review by independent third parties. Dylan Kane notes that learning via a screen is fundamentally different from human-powered instruction; for example, studies have shown that reading on screens results in weaker comprehension.

Paul Kirschner, who has co-authored two books with Hendrick, agrees with all of the above and adds that academic subjects shouldn’t be viewed as “just administrative hurdles that kids have to clear before their ‘real’ education and learning can begin.” In addition, several people have questioned whether Alpha’s model would work with students from less affluent and highly educated families. Tuition at Alpha can run as high as $75,000 a year.1

Before I get to my own doubts, I’ll acknowledge that the Alpha model does appear to align with cognitive science in many respects. As Alpha co-founder MacKenzie Price has argued, an AI tutor can do things classroom teachers generally can’t—like meeting each student where they are and providing the specific level of challenge they need. Unlike human beings, AI is endlessly patient and non-judgmental, offering just-in-time explicit instruction and retrieval practice—techniques grounded in cognitive science principles that few teachers learn about during their training.

An Amazon Cart of Pink Stuff

And Alpha seems to have solved a fundamental problem that has plagued instruction-by-computer: lack of motivation. Generally speaking, a human teacher is more likely than a digital device to inspire students to apply themselves. One source of motivation at Alpha is the desire to get more “time back” by mastering the material at a rapid clip. Another is the guides, who act as cheerleaders. Yet another, which is less publicized: rewards for achievement.

In one online Alpha video, Price interviews an Alpha graduating senior named Elle who recalls that when she first started at the school in third grade, she was only in the 50^th percentile on the science MAP test. Elle’s guide assured her that she could get to the 99^th percentile and promised to buy her an Amazon cart full of pink merchandise she had picked out if she hit the 90th (she was into the color pink at the time). She reached the 95^th percentile eight weeks later and claimed the cart.

In the video, Elle says that it wasn’t just the merchandise that motivated her but the confidence her guide expressed in her ability. Still, there was a lot of pink merchandise in the mix.

Evidence suggests that this kind of “extrinsic” motivation doesn’t last once the rewards disappear. And some argue that if people are already intrinsically motivated, extrinsic rewards can backfire. People may think: if this stuff is so unpleasant that I have to be bribed to do it, maybe I don’t actually want to do it without the bribe.

But one Anonymous Alpha Parent, who I’ll call the AAP, has written that even though his kids are self-motivated to learn, the incentive system has “turbocharged” their learning without reducing their internal drive. Of course, that’s far from a scientific study.2

My own critique of the Alpha model rests partly on some details and partly on fundamental principles. I’ll start with the details, some of which are significant.

What About the Humanities?

My sense is that AI-assisted tutoring works best for math, and maybe science, where learning proceeds in a more clearly hierarchical, sequential fashion. With math, as Price says in one video, “If you only get 70% of division problems correct you’re gonna really struggle in fractions, which require mastery of division and multiplication.” With literature or history, the sequence of learning isn’t as clear, and the universe of concepts to be learned is far less finite.3

Indeed, Alpha has called math its “crown jewel,” showing growth even for students who perform at the highest levels. But it’s not just that the Alpha model works best for math. It’s not clear to what extent Alpha even tries to teach anything other than math, science, reading—and writing, which I’ll get to shortly.4

When I left a comment on Paul Kirschner’s Substack raising this question, someone going by the moniker of “turing hamster,” who identified himself or herself as “an engineer on the literacy team at Alpha,” assured me that “all the main academic subjects are covered in the Alpha / Timeback curriculum: Reading, Language, Math, Writing, Science, Social Studies.” I asked for more detailed information but didn’t get a response.

Meanwhile, none of the Alpha videos I’ve watched say anything about social studies, with one exception: a video showing that within the two-hour academic block, students spend 25 minutes on social studies.5 Repeatedly, however, the eye-popping scores that Alpha boasts about are limited to math, reading, science, and sometimes writing. That may be because standardized tests like MAP don’t cover social studies content, which varies from state to state. In any event, we don’t really know how dramatically Alpha students are “growing” in terms of social studies knowledge, or if they’re growing at all.

How Is Social Studies Taught?

The AAP’s comments on social studies are somewhat contradictory. “Instead of classes in history, geography, economics and political science,” they write at one point, Alpha covers that material through passages in its AlphaRead reading comprehension tool. At another point, the AAP says that social studies—along with science and “language,” are “mostly on iXL.” A typical lesson, the AAP writes, consists of a YouTube video followed by problem sets with “third party tools.”

I Googled iXL and discovered it’s an online personalized learning tool—or, as the website claims, a “comprehensive K-12 curriculum.” For each grade, four subjects are listed: math, language arts, science, and social studies. Next to each subject is the number of “skills” covered.

For fifth grade, for example, social studies covers 123 “skills.” These include reading a map—which is, yes, a skill—but also content like “The Thirteen Colonies,” “World War II,” and “American symbols, landmarks, and monuments.” If you hover over one of the subtopics, you find a brief text relating to, say, “New England colonies: religion and government,” followed by multiple choice questions.

What About Whole Books?

I saw no indication in publicly available information that Alpha students read entire novels or any whole books—although one Alpha parent quoted in an article in The Cut insisted, “My kids do read books.”

Zach Groshell, who is helping Alpha write its math apps, has said that he wouldn’t send his own daughter to Alpha “because she loves reading whole books.” More recently, Groshell said on X that he is sending his daughter to an Alpha school, but it’s a specialized one that follows Montessori principles, Alpha’s “Montessorium.” He added that he’s not sending her there because of whole books, “which are across models,” but because of “fit.”

The head of the Montessorium, Matt Bateman, told me in an email that at his school, which serves children ages 5 and 12 years, “every student is assigned five or six whole works of literature per school year.” He added that “when a student is in a literature circle” they meet twice a week in groups of two to four for discussions led by a guide, along with written responses.

Other Alpha campuses, Bateman said, include whole-book reading on students’ “check charts,” which list certain tasks to be done outside of the two-hour academic block. “There’s an assessment for each check chart item,” he told me, “including books.”

Bateman said that he’s working on two “pilots” focused on reading whole books across the network in a way that aligns with Alpha’s model. But it’s not clear that model can accommodate a group of students reading and discussing a common novel because it is (rightly, Bateman believes) “skeptical about whole-class pacing.”

According to the AAP, some parents at the flagship Alpha school in Austin wanted more academic afternoon workshops—not just “life skills,” but subjects like writing, history, and economics. They were told they should try sending their kids to Alpha’s school for gifted and talented students.6

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Again, Alpha’s model may work best for math and science, where the content lends itself more to right and wrong answers, than to the humanities. There are, of course, right and wrong answers about historical facts and the plot elements of novels. But there’s also a lot of nuance and questions that should be up for debate—not just with an AI tutor but with a teacher and classmates.

In the course of such discussions, students should be articulating and defending their ideas, as well as listening to arguments that go in a different direction and learning how to engage in civil disagreement. They should also have the opportunity to be collectively transported, through the medium of fiction, to another time and place—to share laughter and maybe tears with others. I’m not convinced a bot can provide that experience.

How Does Alpha Teach Writing?

For writing, Alpha uses its own proprietary program, AlphaWrite, to which outsiders are not allowed access. (I tried.) I did, however, manage to glimpse a screen showing a writing activity in an Alpha promotional video. To my surprise, the activity resembled one in a book I co-authored called The Writing Revolution.

On the screen was this directive: “Write a set of sentences using the conjunctions ‘because,’ ‘but,’ and ‘so.’”7 The sentence “stem” students were to work with was “Drums are an essential part of a band …” One of the suggested answers was, “Drums are an essential part of a band because they make a lot of noise.”

Leaving aside whether that answer makes sense, one problem is that the activity isn’t embedded in any curriculum content. It’s fine to introduce a new concept using everyday content like “drums,” but a key principle of The Writing Revolution method is that it should be embedded in the content of the curriculum as much as possible. Writing about content has the potential to deepen comprehension in a powerful way. Why waste that potential on random sentences about drums?

The AAP acknowledges that AlphaWrite is weak and the school is “taking it back to the drawing board.” As of the time he was writing, in June of 2025, he felt that Alpha students had no “real edge” over students in traditional schools as far as their writing skills were concerned.

Chatbots Are “Cheatbots”

Writing, as I’ve suggested, isn’t just a skill but also a potentially powerful lever for learning. And one risk of an AI-powered academic program is that students will use AI to subcontract out their writing, thereby missing out on a lot of learning. MacKenzie Price seems to be aware of this, earning kudos for saying that will never happen at Alpha. “Chatbots in education,” she has said, “are cheatbots.”

And yet: A reading specialist named Savannah Ngo has written about her visit to an Alpha School campus in California, where she was assigned to work with some children in K-2 during the “life skills” portion of the day. The kids were reading aloud books they had written, in preparation for doing so before an audience of parents, and Ngo was giving them feedback on their reading fluency and volume. So far, so good.

“But the snag came,” Ngo wrote, “when I sat down with the first student who immediately clarified to me that he had not written this book but actually he just typed in the computer and AI wrote it. As soon as he started reading, this became obvious. The story was saccharine and tidy in that artificial way that AI does so well and I’m afraid the child learned almost nothing from the experience. It might as well have been an older sister who wrote the book for him and told him to pass it off as his own.”

A one-off? Possibly. But even if Alpha students generally aren’t using AI to do their writing for them, it’s not clear what kind of writing they’re being asked to do and who, or what, is evaluating it. Do they write essays? Research papers? Does any human being read them?

Fundamental Problems with the Model

Even if Alpha figures out a better way to cover history, literature, and writing through its AI tutors, I would remain skeptical about the model. To be clear, I’m not against AI-assisted learning, period. The evidence indicates it can be highly effective in certain circumstances, including some of the ones in which Alpha uses it. I just don’t think we should hand over academic instruction entirely to bots.

Why limit human interaction to “life skills” workshops rather than integrating it into academic learning? Yes, using human teachers may be less efficient, but education isn’t solely a matter of efficiency. Some of its most important aspects, like learning to bounce around ideas about academic topics with one’s teacher and fellow students, may require something other than the shortest path to acquiring information.

Plus, as others have pointed out, Alpha’s model treats the “learning” part of school as something to be gotten through as quickly as possible in order to get to the good stuff. Is that really the message we want to send to kids about the life of the mind? Isn’t there also some good stuff to be found there?

You might say you can’t argue with success: I mean, look at those scores. In one video, Price boasts that graduates of Alpha have been admitted to colleges like Stanford, Vanderbilt, and USC. And the videos of Alpha students, including those at the high school level, show them to be bright, enthusiastic, articulate kids.

But test scores don’t measure everything. Yes, I and others have argued that standardized reading comprehension tests essentially reflect knowledge and vocabulary. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that students who ace multiple-choice questions on the SAT, or even the AP—which at least requires writing—are capable of mining a complex text for meaning, reflecting on it deeply, and expressing themselves coherently. Like others writing about education, I’ve spoken to quite a few college professors—including some at highly selective colleges—who have told me that in recent years their students are no longer capable of doing such things, despite presumably having high test scores.

It’s clear that many students and their families are happy with their experience at Alpha. But I have to wonder how graduates will fare in college, where—at least for now—they will encounter, perhaps for the first time, the supposedly antiquated model of “a teacher standing in front of a classroom.” How will they adjust to lectures, seminars, and more than three hours a day of academic work? Maybe some will do fine, but I suspect others will struggle.

Nevertheless, Price argues that Alpha’s model will work for almost all students and will spread along with growing interest in its apparent success. That may be happening already. Last year its parent company, 2-Hour Learning, got approval to open a tuition-free virtual charter school in Arizona.

But based on the information I have, I would advise caution. Even if Alpha’s data on growth in test scores is solid, those scores may not reflect the kind of education that can enable all students to reach their full potential.

In one video, Price acknowledges that sometimes the Alpha approach doesn’t work—including when parents aren’t “philosophically aligned with the model.” If I had school-age children, at this point I would put myself in that camp. And I suspect quite a few other parents would as well.

Update, 7.26.26: A clarification about Zach Groshell’s decision to send his daughter to Alpha’s Montessori school was added.

Update, 7.27.26: Additional comments from Matt Bateman about Alpha’s approach to whole books were added.

Rose Horowitch, a twenty-something staff writer at the Atlantic, has a knack for going viral. Two years ago, her article about the “elite college students who can’t read books” brought much-needed attention to that problem. A recent follow-up, “The End of Reading is Here”—a cover story—is spurring a tsunami of discussion as well.

As with her piece on college students, Horowitch isn’t breaking new ground so much as digging into and expanding upon information that’s already out there. When I first read her recent piece, I thought it was well done but much of it seemed familiar.1 In fact, I wrote an article myself, months ago, that touched on many of the same points.

But obviously, and understandably, not everyone has been reading the same things I have. They’re seeing Horowitch’s piece as a startling wake-up call. And Horowitch has done her homework.

According to an email from the Atlantic to subscribers, she “conducted 90 interviews, sifted through numerous studies, and yes, read several books on the subject.” She’s managed to weave all that together into a fluent, perceptive, and engaging article, which undoubtedly helped with virality. It doesn’t hurt to have a platform like the Atlantic and an eye-catching headline.2

For those who haven’t been following this discussion, and/or don’t have a subscription to the Atlantic, here are the headlines. There’s been a steep decline in the number of Americans who read books or even longish articles, especially among adolescents and younger adults. While some view this as a “literacy crisis,” Horowitch argues that it’s more accurately seen as the emergence of a “postliterate” society.

Americans can read, by and large, and in fact they’re probably reading more than ever. But what they’re reading are snippets: emails, texts, brief posts on social media. The shift away from reading started decades ago, with the advent of TV, but the internet, digital devices, and generative AI have put it on steroids. People aren’t engaging in the kind of reading that demands sustained attention and the ability to absorb complex ideas.

That kind of reading, the evidence suggests, brings cognitive benefits: the ability to think logically, analytically, deeply, and perhaps creatively. By the same token, Horowitch argues, the disappearance of that kind of reading will lead to—has perhaps already led to—cognitive decline. With short-form videos and images replacing even brief texts, we may be re-entering the kind of oral culture that produced Homeric epic poems.

Those who absorb information through listening rather than reading respond best to epithets, repetition, and descriptions of violence, and they’re not bothered by self-contradiction because they can’t remember what the speaker said before. Donald Trump’s communication style, Horowitch observes, “is perfectly suited to an oral society.”

Just a Niche Hobby?

If, like me, you’re a member of a book club, or you live in a neighborhood with a thriving independent bookstore—or perhaps you’ve even written books that are selling pretty well—you may be thinking: Really?

Horowitch acknowledges that books are continuing to sell, but she points out that it’s not a mass phenomenon. “Just 20 percent of adults accounted for more than 80 percent of all books read last year,” she writes.3

Perhaps it was ever thus, unless you go back to the nineteenth century, when authors like Charles Dickens commanded huge audiences. But Horowitch argues that “being a person of letters confers less status than it once did.” She quotes a historian of reading who says it’s becoming “a niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids.”

“For most people,” Horowitch concludes, “a life of letters is an economic dead end.”

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But there’s another possibility. It’s too soon to know for sure what the AI revolution will bring, but some within the tech world are saying that a background in the humanities will become more valuable. As AI takes on more tasks, we’ll need fewer people who can write code and more who can write, or at least read, books—and thereby think about problems in ways that a Large Language Model probably cannot.

To some extent, that’s already happening. Enrollment in computer science courses at Stanford has declined for the first time in 20 years. AI firms are hiring philosophy majors, paying them big bucks to ponder questions of consciousness.

“The people who are reading hard books and are still writing have built these brain circuits, and they’re comfortable with cognitive strain,” computer science professor Cal Newport told the New York Times. “These are the people with real value if everyone else has fried their brains.”

That raises a possibility Horowitch doesn’t touch on: if the death of reading coincides with the birth of AI, people with the “niche hobby” of reading books and other complex texts could come out on top. Those people are likely to already be on top, and always have been, in the sense that they come from more highly educated and well-resourced families. But if AI ends up making it lucrative to be a deep thinker in an age of brain rot, we could end up with an even more unequal distribution of wealth than we have now.

The Role of Education

Horowitch paints a pretty bleak picture: we’re heading for an apocalypse, and there’s basically nothing we can do to avert it. But if there’s anything that can be done, it probably lies with K-12 education.

Education surely isn’t the sole cause of the decline in reading, and it almost certainly isn’t enough to turn Dickens into a best-selling author again—or level the societal playing field. Some kids, like Horowitch herself, will end up cognitively well developed because their families encouraged deep reading, even if their schools didn’t. Still, a change in the nature of schooling is our best hope for turning out young adults who are at least capable of sustained attention and analytical thinking, regardless of their family background.

Horowitch does nod to the role of education, both in exacerbating the problem and possibly addressing it. She notes that schools “might have been expected to resist the impulse toward shorter passages and shallower reading. Instead, they spurred it on.” Under pressure to raise standardized reading test scores, educators have mimicked the test format: short excerpts or brief passages followed by comprehension questions.

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That’s all true, but there’s a deeper cause than testing. Even before the federal No Child Left Behind legislation made tests so important 25 years ago, educators had come to see reading comprehension as a set of skills, like “making inferences,” despite evidence showing that background knowledge is far more important to comprehension. As a result, they often focused their instruction on skills rather than on any particular text—although they were more likely to use whole texts to do it.

The rise of standardized tests, which purport to measure those skills, certainly intensified the focus on skills instruction and contributed to the use of excerpts rather than whole texts. But the identification of reading comprehension with “skills” is deeply entrenched, and it would take more than eliminating the tests to reverse it. Among other factors, there’s been a marked decrease in homework—partly because kids just aren’t doing it—and it’s hard to get through a whole book if all the reading has to be done in class.

To the extent that whole books are still being taught, some kids are getting more books than others. Horowitch cites, and bemoans, a 2025 RAND study finding that middle and high school English teachers assigned, on average, zero to four books during the school year. She doesn’t mention that teachers in schools serving students from low-income families and historically disadvantaged minorities generally assigned fewer books and were far more likely to assign no full books. Those “book assignment inequities” start in elementary school, the researchers found.

As Horowitch wrote in her previous article about college students, if you’re expected to read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school. Similarly, if you’re expected to read a book in high school—or middle school—it helps to have read a book in elementary school.

To get kids hooked on reading, it’s best to reach them early, before they’re seduced by social media and glued to their phones. And if book readers will have an advantage in the era of AI, it’s imperative that all children get exposure to books—not just the ones lucky enough to have well-stocked home libraries and highly literate parents.

What Some Schools Are Doing

Horowitch notes that some states have banned cellphones at school and that some educators are pushing back against excerpts. But she’s dubious about what education can do. “If these acts of defiance against a postliterate culture seem futile,” she writes, “the holdouts lose nothing by trying.” In other words, good luck with that.

But there’s more going on in schools than Horowitch acknowledges, especially at the elementary level. Literacy curricula that incorporate whole books—and build the knowledge that actually fuels reading comprehension—are gaining ground. Judging from the speaking requests I get, and from book sales, an increasing number of educators are realizing that if we want to produce literate adults, we need to teach not only reading but writing—and writing is probably the most effective way to build the ability to engage in analytical and complex thinking.

If kids don’t get access to books in elementary school, middle and high school isn’t too late to at least acquaint them with the experience of sustained, deep reading. Even college may not be too late, if colleges are willing to help. Students may want to put away their phones and get immersed in a book but just can’t do it on their own.

A course at the University of Pennsylvania called “Existential Despair” requires students to hand over their phones once a week, from 5 p.m. to midnight, and spend that time reading an entire book and then discussing it. The students who enroll include those who are planning to go into business or engineering or nursing—not necessarily the humanities. But they haven’t read a book in years and want to “experience something new” before graduating. Last year, 400 students applied for the course and only 41 got in. By the end of the course, participants have read 17 novels and, according to the professor, will become “lifelong readers.”

Of course, it’s too soon to know if that’s true—and there’s no guarantee that the experience of reading books in school will ensure that behavior continues into adulthood. But at least people will have had the experience of plunging into a lengthy, complex text and making sense of it—which, in the case of the Penn course, includes grappling with questions about how humans deal with things like pain, anxiety, and despair. That’s the experience that all students deserve to have at some point, including at lower grade levels, in an age-appropriate way, both because of the experience itself and the lasting cognitive benefits such grappling can bring.

We should all care about enabling students who come from less privileged circumstances to share in that experience, and not only because we should care about those students as individuals. A functioning democracy depends on the cognitive abilities of the electorate. And a postliterate society could pose more of a threat than an illiterate one. Unfounded rumors and falsehoods have always spread, but they spread a lot faster in a society where almost everyone has access to the internet.

If the cognitive abilities of the American electorate decline on a large scale, we all suffer, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that the “end of reading” could mean the end of democracy as we know it. Horowitch’s article raises that specter; another title, in fact, could have been “Existential Despair.”

But as the college course by that name suggests, the situation may not be as bleak as Horowitch believes. In any case, rather than a dirge of despair, we need a call to action—and that call should focus on schools, which are in a unique position to act.

For decades, reading comprehension instruction focused primarily on having students practice skills and strategies—like “making inferences”—in isolation from any particular content, contrary to what the research indicates will work. That’s still happening in many schools, but an increasing number are shifting to an approach that puts building content knowledge in the foreground and brings in comprehension strategies as appropriate to the content.

That represents progress. But reading comprehension is really complicated, and there’s at least one more major component that has gotten short shrift: familiarity with complex syntax, or sentence structure.

One reason syntax has gotten so little attention may be that the problem often doesn’t become apparent until students reach higher grade levels, after reading instruction is assumed to be over. The syntax of written language is more complex than the syntax of oral language; it’s been found that even children’s literature uses more complex sentence structure than everyday conversation. Still, in the early grades, texts have relatively simple sentence structures compared to those kids encounter in middle or high school. A child may be a competent reader in second grade but then become a struggling one in sixth. Complex syntax is likely a significant factor.

Another possible reason for the lack of attention to syntax are the silos within the scientific community. Much of the research on students’ struggles with syntax comes from speech and language pathologists rather than reading experts. Syntax comprehension problems clearly do affect reading ability, but they’re often categorized as a “language impairment” rather than a reading disorder. If children are diagnosed as needing speech-and-language intervention, they may get help with syntax. But regular classroom teachers rarely get the training or instructional materials that would lead them to focus on that problem or equip them to address it.1

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Yet a third reason syntax hasn’t gotten more attention as a cause of reading difficulties is that it’s been hard for researchers to distinguish the role of sentence-level comprehension from that of vocabulary, which largely reflects content knowledge. For one thing, knowledge of vocabulary often goes hand in hand with familiarity with complex syntax.

Another factor, though, is that the tests used by researchers have generally been constructed in a way that blurs different possible factors. If, for example, a sentence uses both complex vocabulary and complex syntax, it’s not clear which of those is the obstacle to comprehension, or what their relative importance is.

A New Study Isolates the Role of Syntax

But in a study published last year, and featured recently on the Literacy Through Research Substack, researchers managed to disentangle the two factors, along with decoding, by creating a test that involved simple vocabulary and complex syntax. Using a sample of 161 Danish sixth graders, the researchers give the students a sentence like “The cat that the rat had bitten played on the ship,” which they were then asked to repeat verbatim. A “whodunit” part of the test gave the kids sentences like “George was kicked by Sam under the table.” They were then asked who did the kicking.2

Contrary to what some previous studies had found, the Danish researchers determined that some children who had strong vocabularies weren’t able to parse complex sentence structure, and vice versa. That indicates that vocabulary and syntax comprehension are indeed two separate factors.

In addition, the study found that syntax comprehension was “by far the best predictor of reading comprehension,” exceeding vocabulary by a significant margin. That suggests, they wrote, that “the biggest obstacle for the majority of typically developing children in this age group is not understanding the individual words in texts, but using syntactic signals to connect the word meaning into sentence meaning.”3

Types of Complex Syntax

Several types of sentence structure can interfere with comprehension. In addition to the use of the passive voice, there are “noun phrases,” which add modifiers to nouns—like “the raging three-alarm fire” instead of just “the fire.” As sentences get longer, with multiple clauses, it becomes harder to connect the subject to the appropriate verb. Even a relatively short sentence can pose a problem if it inverts typical English word order—for example, “It could have been her tone of voice that her boss reacted to.”4

This kind of syntax shows up increasingly as students progress through grade levels, especially in expository texts in subjects like social studies and science. It also appears frequently in the real world.

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A study done in 1982 found that the average sentence in a newspaper editorial was 20 words long and contained three clauses. Sentences may have gotten somewhat simpler since then, but it’s still not hard to find a complex sentence in a newspaper—like this one I just came across in the New York Times:

Instead of promoting economic policies, Mr. Vance, along with several Republicans including Representative Tom Tiffany, who is running for governor, and Representative Derrick Van Orden, who is running for re-election in a purple district he narrowly won in 2024, focused on castigating Democrats.

It’s not hard to imagine someone who is unfamiliar with complex syntax losing the thread that tells you who is “castigating Democrats.”

What Teachers Can Do

What does this mean for classroom instruction? One thing it should not mean is just having students memorize the difference between the active and the passive voice or the names of different grammatical structures. That won’t be enough, and could even be counterproductive.5 What’s important for comprehension is whether students can actually grasp the meaning of a sentence. It’s possible to know, for example, the definition of a subordinating conjunction but not be able to understand a sentence that uses one.

Nor should this mean giving students lots of random sentences and having them practice converting them from active to passive, or adding or subtracting dependent clauses. Doing some of that makes sense when introducing a new syntax concept. But once students have the basic idea, it’s likely to work best if teachers, of any subject, weave syntax instruction into the support they provide to help students understand the texts they’re expected to read.

In other words, syntax instruction isn’t a sixth “pillar of early literacy” that reading teachers should add to the “big five,” adopting a check-the-box approach. Rather, it’s something that needs to be integrated across the core curriculum, and deployed increasingly as grade levels go up.

Exposing children to complex syntax should begin early, through both oral language and read-alouds. One study found that preschool children who had been exposed to more diverse sentence structures were better able to understand those structures than their peers who hadn’t. For some children, that sort of passive, incidental exposure will be enough. But most will likely need more explicit instruction.

Identifying Syntax Problems

The first step is to pinpoint when syntax is interfering with students’ comprehension. One of the premier researchers in this area is Cheryl M. Scott, a speech-and-language pathologist and professor emerita at Rush University Medical Center. In one article, she recalls a therapy session with a fourth-grader named John that produced an “aha” moment. The grade-level text they were working with read in part as follows:

Thousands of pioneers went to live in unsettled land between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. This land was then known as the West. Land that was part of the United States but did not have enough people to be a state was called a territory. The land to the west of the Appalachian Mountains was divided into two territories.

At that point, Scott paused to ask John to write a question based on the text. He wrote, “Why was the appellation [sic] mountains divided into two parts?” Scott realized he had connected Appalachian Mountains to the verb divided, rather than the actual subject, the noun land, which was farther away from the verb.

Of course, an interventionist works with one student at a time, and classroom teachers don’t have that luxury. Students will inevitably vary in their understanding of syntax, as well as complex text in general, and it can be hard to uncover who in the classroom is lost. John, for example, is unlikely to have raised his hand to ask whether the subject of the sentence was Appalachian Mountains or land. For one thing, he thought he knew the answer.

But classroom teachers can tackle this problem too. When dealing with a text that is likely to pose challenges for students, it’s important for teachers to guide the whole class through the reading rather than to expect individual students to overcome syntax barriers on their own. And if a sentence appears that seems likely to pose a syntax challenge, teachers can pause to ask a question that reveals whether students have literally understood it.

Let’s say a science text includes this sentence, which uses a relative clause (in bold):

All insects that go through incomplete metamorphosis must shed their outer skeletons as they grow.

After reading the sentence aloud, the teacher could ask, “Do all insects shed their outer skeletons as they grow?”6 Students can answer orally, but if teachers want to assess the comprehension of every student in the class, written responses will work even better.

Using Writing to Teach Syntax

Writing, in fact, is probably the most powerful way to address syntax comprehension problems. If you explicitly teach students how to use constructions like appositives and the passive voice in their own writing, they’ll be in a much better position to understand those constructions when they encounter them in their reading.7

The sentence-level technique that has the most evidence behind it is sentence-combining, which involves giving students a series of short sentences and having them combine them into one longer one. But many students will also need explicit instruction in the various ways to do that, such as using dependent clauses.

The Writing Revolution 2.0, of which I’m a co-author, offers a number of strategies and activities designed to familiarize students with complex syntax. When embedded in the content of the curriculum, these activities can also improve retention of information, deepen students’ comprehension, and improve their analytical abilities.

No Silver Bullets, But …

Instruction in syntax isn’t a silver bullet for reading comprehension problems. Comprehension is far too complex a process to be susceptible to any one “bullet,” silver or otherwise. It’s also not something you can teach once—or just in the early grades—and then be done with. It’s always dependent on a mixture of decoding ability, background knowledge and vocabulary, and familiarity with complex syntax. Each of those components will interact in various ways, depending on the particular text and the individual student.

If students are reading about a topic that’s familiar, their knowledge can help compensate for gaps in their decoding ability and/or their familiarity with complex syntax, enabling them to make educated guesses about meaning. By the same token, though, explicitly addressing syntax comprehension can help students compensate for a lack of background knowledge—enabling them to understand and gain new knowledge from texts on topics that are not already familiar.

Teachers may not be thrilled to hear that there’s yet another aspect of reading they need to address, feeling they have their hands full already. But, as the authors of the recent Danish study point out, in some ways the crucial role of syntax in comprehension is good news.

Building knowledge and vocabulary is inevitably a slow process, because there’s so much of it that students need to acquire to become proficient readers. Vocabulary instruction can and should focus on words that are likely to pop up in academic or complex text repeatedly, but many words are specific to certain subjects.

Rules of syntax, on the other hand, are relatively limited in number. If teachers weave syntax comprehension into whatever texts they’re teaching, they may well find that students are better able to transfer those skills to new texts—and as a result are better able to learn.

Just in time for the nation’s 250^th birthday, the Texas State Board of Education has approved new social studies standards that are designed to foster patriotism—and are already exacerbating partisan division.

As with its recent approval of a required reading list for K-12 public schools, the Texas SBOE’s action on K-8 social studies standards has been a lightning rod for criticism, particularly from the left.1 Arriving in the wake of the Trump administration’s efforts to promote “patriotic education,” the standards have been attacked as pro-Christian and anti-Muslim, insufficiently appreciative of the contributions of women and minorities, and overly dense.

Before the standards were adopted, the American Historical Association issued an “action alert” urging people to weigh in against them. The standards, the AHA warned, invoke “Western Civilization” to “justify disproportionate attention to a single strand of European intellectual history at the expense of the broader human experience.”

Another line of criticism, also promoted by the AHA, faults the new standards for taking what it calls “an experimental and untested approach.” It might surprise lay people to learn that this untested approach is to present historical events in chronological order.

Putting the Standards in Perspective

I do see problems with the new Texas standards, but—as with the state’s new required reading list—it’s important to put the standards in perspective. They are indeed dense and quite specific about content to be covered, but most state social studies standards suffer from the opposite problem: vagueness.

A 2021 review of state social studies standards by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute identified only five jurisdictions that were “exemplary” in both civics and U.S. history, with 20 states getting a rating of “inadequate.” Illinois’s standards, for example, were deemed “so general as to be useless.” Those standards are still in effect, and as Fordham noted, the entire history strand, covering all grade levels, takes up only two pages. It lists four “conceptual topics,” like “Change, Continuity and Context.”

“Notably missing,” the Fordham report observes drily, “is any reference to historical content.”

Meanwhile, the performance of American students on national assessments in U.S. history and civics have been abysmal, with only 13 and 22 percent of eighth graders scoring proficient in those subjects, respectively. Forty percent scored below basic in history, and 31 percent did so in civics.

Many American adults, particularly younger ones, are unaware of basic facts about American history, like why the American colonies declared independence from Britain. Most young adults in the U.S., according to a recent survey, take a passive view of democracy, and almost a third don’t even value the concept. Vague social studies standards aren’t the only reason for this dismal situation, but they surely haven’t helped.

In 2021, Fordham gave the old Texas standards a B+ for civics and a C+ for history. The state’s history standards, the report observed, included holidays, patriotic symbols, and “somewhat arbitrary lists of influential individuals that manage to check both traditional and diversity boxes but have little historical rationale.”2

Some standards were ridiculously broad. One fifth-grade standard, the Fordham report noted, reduced the entire 20^th century to “a single twenty-eight-word expectation, mentioning industrialization, urbanization, the Depression, world wars, civil rights movements, and military actions, plus a few scattered names.”3

Content, Coherence, and Chronology

Running to 39 pages for the elementary grades and 33 for the middle grades, albeit including a lot of repetition, the new Texas standards cannot be faulted for lacking historical content. In fact, they go into such exhaustive detail that teachers will be hard pressed to cover it all in a meaningful way. Still, too much detail is better than none. And the new standards are clearly more coherent than the ones they’re replacing

The standards may not give as much attention to non-Western history and historically disadvantaged or marginalized groups as some would like, and they do focus a lot on Christianity. But they cover more non-Western and non-Christian topics than critics acknowledge. Fourth-graders, for instance, learn about the Middle Ages not only in Europe but also in Asia and Africa, with specific attention to Mansa Musa and the Malian Empire.

The standards also include some of Western civilization’s failings as well as its strengths. Contrary to the claims of the AHA, they discuss slavery in the 17^th and 18^th century at several grade levels, characterizing it as a horrendous institution and the cause of the Civil War.4 Various Indian tribes appear frequently, especially at lower grade levels.

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As for criticism of the standards’ chronological approach, that may require some explanation. After all, a chronological approach to history would seem to be logical. But generally, state history standards take a “spiraling” approach, reintroducing similar content at higher grade levels in greater depth. For example, Texas, like many other states, previously had students learn about U.S. history initially in fifth grade (albeit superficially, as suggested by that fifth-grade standard) and then again in eighth grade and high school.

In a press release, the chair of the Texas SBOE explained that the new chronological approach will enable students to “observe how one event led to another” and thereby gain a “deeper, more coherent understanding of the forces that shaped the modern world.” He added, “This is how historians work.”

But the historians at the AHA apparently disagree, since they’re the ones that called the chronological approach “experimental and untested.” Perhaps they mean it’s untested at the K-12 level. But you could argue that the standard spiraling approach, while “tested,” hasn’t been working very well.5

Early Grades and Texas Connections

In any event, the new Texas standards actually do “spiral” quite a bit—especially if you include the standards for K-2, which represent one of the most radical breaks with tradition. Generally, standards for that level focus only on children’s families and communities, on the erroneous theory that young children can’t handle or won’t be interested in material remote from their own lives.

Refreshingly, the new Texas standards take kids on a whirlwind tour of history, along with some traditional topics like “community helpers” and “American symbols.” Kindergartners learn about the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag at Plymouth, first graders about the Civil War (and Juneteenth), second graders about ancient civilizations, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812. All of these topics are revisited at higher grade levels.

The standards also depart from the usual approach by constantly striving to connect whatever topic they’re covering to American and Texas history. Sometimes that makes sense, and sometimes it doesn’t. For example, when third graders study Ancient Rome, it’s logical to connect Rome’s republic to the similar forms of government it inspired in the U.S. and Texas. But do kids also need to learn that Sam Houston compared himself to “the ancient Roman leader Gaius Marius who was honored for his military leadership”?

Similarly, it’s fine for fifth graders to learn that the invention of the printing press helped spread the ideas of the Reformation, but it seems like a stretch to insert a discussion of how that invention did the same thing for the ideas of the American Revolution over 300 years later. In any event, the pressure to make these connections results in some spiraling because aspects of American and Texas history and government are constantly popping up, sometimes in unexpected places.

Clovis vs. the Fertile Crescent

The push to include Texas and the U.S. during whatever era the standards are covering can also distort priorities. When students learn about ancient civilizations in second and third grades, for example, the standards also have them learning about the Clovis civilization, which flourished in North America—including parts of what is now Texas—about 13,000 years ago. That might be an interesting topic, but history standards focus on particular parts of the world in certain eras because that’s where influential things were happening, at least as far as we can now determine.

That’s why students, including those in Texas, learn about ancient civilizations in the Fertile Crescent. That area seems to have been where humans first made the transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers, giving them the free time to do things like invent writing and the wheel—inventions that had a huge impact on history. It’s fine for kids to also learn about the stone spear points made by the Clovis, but if we’re short on time, as schools inevitably are, I would opt for the Fertile Crescent.

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The rhetoric around the Texas standards has stressed that they’re designed not just to impart knowledge but also to convince students of the intrinsic superiority of the United States and, within those states, of Texas. The chair of the Texas SBOE declared that the previous incoherent standards resulted in “generations of students who do not know the greatness of America or its greatest state, Texas.” And the guiding framework for the standards refers to the founding of the U.S. and Texas as “the noblest experiment.” But the standards themselves, while undoubtedly Texas-centric, are more balanced than that rhetoric might lead you to assume.

Will the Standards Even Be Taught?

In any event, for all the impassioned debate over the standards, much will depend on how—and to what extent—they’re actually taught. Because few states require testing in social studies, standards for that subject often just sit on a shelf, or its digital equivalent, at least until high school. And if students haven’t learned anything about history, civics, or geography before they get to high school, many of them will lack the background knowledge to understand or absorb what they’re expected to learn there.

The push for “patriotic” standards like those adopted in Texas stems from a perception, on the right, that schools are indoctrinating students with a left-wing ideology that emphasizes the country’s failings. But the real problem, as James Traub has observed in a recent book, isn’t that kids are getting a biased view of history, either from the left or the right. It’s that they’re not learning much history, or civics, at all. That’s partly because the standards aren’t backed up by state tests.

Texas is one of the handful of states that does test social studies—but not until eighth grade. That used to mean a test in U.S. history. Under the new standards, eighth-graders will get a “Texas history capstone course,” which will incorporate “vertically aligned topics presented in Grades 3-7 in more complex and meaningful ways.”

Those topics stretch from the influence of the classical world on the founding documents of the U.S. and Texas through the presidency of Barack Obama. It’s an ambitious set of standards for one grade level, even if kids have encountered those topics previously. If they haven’t—and it’s likely many will not, unless Texas starts testing social studies earlier—it could be a disaster.

As with the new Texas required reading list, much of the intent behind the new social studies standards was admirable: to provide educators with the specifics that will ensure the state’s 5.5 million students get a content-rich, rigorous education. It’s unfortunate that some of those specifics have, in both instances, sparked partisan controversy that could result in distracting pushback from districts, schools and parents. That controversy could also reinforce the mistaken idea that there is something inherently politically conservative about specifying the content students should learn.

Look to Virginia

If other state officials are looking to beef up their social studies standards, as I hope many are, I would suggest they look to Virginia rather than Texas. A few years ago, that state’s board of education unanimously adopted a set of social studies standards that, while somewhat controversial, managed to avoid charges of Christian nationalism and America- or Virginia-first-ism. The board was specific about content to be covered in an even-handed way, noting as one of the standards’ foundational principles that “American is both exceptional and imperfect.”

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Virginia board was evenly split between Republican and Democratic appointees, and each side recognized the need to make compromises. The Texas board has a Republican majority, and votes on both the social studies standards and the reading list were essentially along party lines.6

Engineering an equal balance of Democrats and Republicans on a state board of education isn’t always possible—especially if members are elected rather than appointed, as in Texas. But I would hope that, whichever viewpoint commands a majority, board members will be able to imagine themselves in the shoes of those with an opposing perspective.

And whatever their political persuasion, those who make education policy need to recognize that unless standards specify content—and, ideally, are backed up by testing grounded in that content—students are likely to learn very little history or civics at all.

One popular explanation for declining test scores has been, basically, “because Covid.” But that analysis has been undercut by recent data underlining the fact that the decline has been going on since at least 2015, well before the pandemic hit.

That evidence has fueled another narrative, based on something that changed in 2015: the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which held schools accountable for raising reading and math scores—sometimes in draconian ways—was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, which backed off from that approach.

Democratic presidential hopeful Rahm Emanuel has called for a return to test-based accountability, arguing that the retreat from it is at least partly responsible for the decline in test scores. Some education commentators have also pointed to the end of NCLB as a factor.

But there are also problems with the “because ESSA” explanation. It’s true that test scores rose under NCLB, but most of that increase occurred during the early years of the regime. Progress basically stalled after 2008, the year of the Great Recession—and seven years before NCLB was replaced by ESSA. So another narrative is that changing socioeconomic conditions had more to do with changing test scores than NCLB did.

But when it comes to reading scores, even those narratives appear overly optimistic. Yes, math scores did improve under NCLB, for a while. But in 2018, a panel of reading experts convened by the governing board of the NAEP—the national tests in reading and math that are considered the most reliable barometers of progress—argued that reading scores had been essentially stagnant since 1998. Since 2018, they’ve only gotten worse.

True, ethnic and racial test-score gaps narrowed to some extent under NCLB, but the gap between students at the upper and lower ends of the socioeconomic spectrum didn’t budge. And gains in elementary school scores failed to carry over to middle and high school.

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None of this is surprising. It’s almost always easier to raise scores at lower grade levels, when the concepts and knowledge being tested are less complex. And it’s generally easier to raise math scores than reading scores. The usual explanation is that math is something kids learn at school, whereas reading skills are more dependent on what happens outside of school. That’s why kids from wealthier, more highly educated families generally do better on reading tests.

That’s true, but it doesn’t mean schools are powerless to boost reading outcomes in the face of societal factors. In fact, there’s much more that schools could do to improve students’ reading ability and to narrow those large and stubborn socioeconomic test-score gaps. But accountability for reading test scores did not and will not nudge schools in the right direction. In fact, that kind of accountability has been a major obstacle to improvement—and doubling down on it will only make things worse.

The Difference Between Reading and Math Tests

There’s a fundamental difference between test-based accountability for math and for reading, and it’s one that accountability hawks overlook at their peril: Math tests, at least theoretically, test students on concepts and skills they’ve actually been taught.

That’s not the case for reading tests, which purport to test abstract reading comprehension skills rather than any particular content. As Robert Pondiscio has observed, standardized reading tests have led to “mindless test-prep and instruction in ‘reading strategies’”—strategies that don’t work in the absence of relevant knowledge.

Under that instructional regime, the kids who are better able to pick up knowledge outside of school will continue to do better on reading tests—not because they’re better at deploying “strategies” but primarily because they have a greater store of academic knowledge and vocabulary to draw on. Standardized reading tests, as cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham has said, are really “knowledge tests in disguise.”

The focus on skills and strategies also explains why it’s so much harder to raise reading scores at higher grade levels. At lower levels, the passages on the tests are fairly simple, and students’ ability to just decipher the words plays a large role in their score. But as grade levels go up, the passages—which are designed to avoid topics kids might have learned about in school—assume that students are acquiring increasingly sophisticated knowledge and vocabulary.

If students don’t possess a minimum threshold of that knowledge, they never get a chance to demonstrate their ability to “make an inference,” or whatever the test purports to be measuring. And because knowledge acquisition is a gradual, cumulative process, by the time kids get to high school or even middle school, it may be too late to make up for all they’ve missed during an elementary school experience that was largely devoid of content.

Even more dismaying, it’s becoming clear that high scores on reading tests don’t necessarily equate to deep reading comprehension. For the last several years, college professors, including many at colleges that admit only applicants with top scores, have been reporting a marked decline in the ability of their students to navigate lengthy and/or complex text.

We Need Standardized Tests

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not against standardized tests per se. When test scores are broken down by student subgroup, including by race and income level, they reveal inequities in the system. That’s true even for standardized reading tests—although it’s important to recognize that they primarily reveal differences in the distribution of knowledge, not abstract skills.

Without standardized tests, these inequities are likely to be hidden. States, districts, and some schools can tout overall average scores that mask large internal gaps. And students at low-performing schools, along with their families, can be lulled into a false sense of achievement. An A grade at one school doesn’t necessarily mean the same as an A at another.

Standardized tests also guard against the often unconscious bias that is almost inevitable when teachers evaluate their own students. In his book Reforming Lessons, England’s former Schools Minister Nick Gibb describes what happened there when the pandemic forced the cancellation of externally graded exams given to high school students. Because the exams determine graduation and college admission, they had to be given—and teachers had to do the grading. The average grade rose significantly, especially for the college admissions test, where the percentage of students receiving the highest grades almost doubled in the space of two years. When teachers personally know the students they’re evaluating, it’s understandable that they tend to be generous.

Gibb also cites a study that compared grades given by teachers to their own students in the equivalent of fifth grade against grades from an external evaluator. It found that teachers gave lower grades to Black students and higher grades to Asian students. They also tended to underrate boys in reading and girls in math.

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So we do need test-based accountability—just not accountability for things that students haven’t actually been taught. Educators might believe they’re teaching the skills measured by standardized reading comprehension tests, but it’s just not possible to teach—or measure—those skills in the abstract.

Intentionally or not, we’ve been using tests to pressure schools to waste time on “comprehension” instruction and marginalize subjects that could build the knowledge and vocabulary that actually fuel reading comprehension. To correct that course, we need to attach accountability to standardized tests covering curriculum content, not just in math but in subjects like literature, history, and science.1

The problem is that in almost all states, schools are using a variety of curricula—or, in the case of social studies, often no curriculum at all. One possible solution is to ground passages on reading tests in the topics specified in state social studies and science standards. Or states could just require schools to follow a specific curriculum.

The Texas Required Reading List

Until recently, that idea seemed beyond the pale, given the strong tradition of local control over curriculum in the U.S. Some states have incentivized the use of certain curricula, but none has required schools to use a specific curriculum. As of Friday, however, the state of Texas appears to be on the road to bucking that tradition.

As I’ve noted before, Texas education officials have come up with an extensive required “reading list” in English language arts for grades K through twelve—a list that the state board of education has now endorsed, with a few modifications. The plan is for the list to become a statewide mandatory literacy curriculum, to which standardized reading tests will then be aligned.

Coverage of this move in the media has focused on controversy over the inclusion of Bible passages and a lack of cultural diversity in the texts on the list. But that overlooks an important part of the impetus for the initiative, which is to get away from the typical skills-focused approach to reading comprehension instruction and evaluation and towards one that focuses on building and assessing actual knowledge.

I have extremely mixed feelings about this development. I’ll be delighted, of course, if Texas—the state with the second-largest number of public school students in the country—abandons the flawed approach to comprehension that has held so many students back. And I agree with state officials when they say that Bible passages and works of classic literature are an important component of the cultural literacy students need in order to understand complex texts in a Western-dominated society. Texas is doing what I and other advocates for knowledge-building have urged: specifying content to be covered and attaching accountability to teaching that content.

But, as with its existing (non-mandatory) state-created literacy curriculum, Bluebonnet Learning, Texas officials appear to be crossing the line between building knowledge and advocating for a specific cultural and political perspective. In Bluebonnet, for example, some references to Bible stories treat them as received truth rather than literature.

And while there isn’t yet a curriculum attached to the state’s mandatory reading list, the inclusion or exclusion of certain supporting materials for anchor texts seems to reflect a particular political orientation. One supplemental reading for Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is Margaret Thatcher’s eulogy for Ronald Reagan. Meanwhile, there are no supplemental texts on McCarthyism in connection with Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, which is generally seen as an allegory about the anti-communism of that era.2

Avoiding Unnecessary Culture Wars

Those kinds of choices, along with resistance to any mandated curriculum, could well lead to pushback from school districts, especially those that would prefer not to get embroiled in controversies. One sign of potential trouble is that, at least as of a year ago, many Texas school districts were opting not to use Bluebonnet, despite financial incentives to do so. More broadly, Texas’s reading list could reinforce the mistaken perception that knowledge-building is an inherently conservative endeavor.

I can only hope there’s another state out there where officials will recognize the need to change standardized reading tests so they no longer warp instruction in ways that prevent students from reaching their full potential. Yes, choices have to be made when deciding which content should be taught and assessed. But they don’t have to be made in ways that only add fuel to distracting and unnecessary culture wars.

Wary as I am about what is going on in Texas, I’m even warier about a call for more accountability when it comes to reading test scores. Frankly, I doubt the relaxed accountability of ESSA has made much difference to reading comprehension instruction. The idea that comprehension should be taught as just a set of abstract skills and strategies is now so deeply ingrained that simply easing up on testing requirements isn’t enough to change that approach.

But attaching more accountability to reading test scores will only make it even harder to overcome entrenched practices, to the lasting detriment of millions of students. If we want to make real progress in improving education outcomes and narrowing test-score gaps, it’s crucial to add some much-needed nuance to the “accountability” conversation.

There are days when I feel we’re making real progress in aligning teaching with cognitive science—particularly, moving away from ineffective skills-focused reading comprehension instruction and towards an approach that centers knowledge-building.

One day earlier this week, for example, I did two remote presentations on literacy instruction and cognitive science that reached hundreds of teachers. After each one I was inundated with expressions of gratitude in the chat, while applause and heart emojis wafted across my screen. Clearly, many teachers are hungry for this information and receptive to the message.

Plus, more and more school districts are adopting effective knowledge-building elementary literacy curricula like Amplify CKLA, Wit & Wisdom, and EL Education. According to the Center for Education Market Dynamics, the combined total reach of those three curricula is now over 600 districts and seven million students. And that figure doesn’t include the other nine knowledge-building curricula currently available. I don’t have comparable figures for ten years ago, but I would guess that virtually no schools were using knowledge-building literacy curricula then, because such curricula didn’t yet exist.

No curriculum is perfect, of course, including those that build knowledge. They may not be implemented effectively—and some curricula that are labeled “knowledge-building” don’t actually do a good job of building knowledge. Still, many teachers around the country have told me that after they switched to a knowledge-building curriculum, their students were far more engaged and started achieving at levels they never would have expected. They frequently tell me that adopting such curricula has changed their lives, and, I hope, those of their students as well.

But some days I’m reminded, usually via email, that many educators out there haven’t gotten the message.

“Nonsense” Is Happening Daily

An elementary teacher I’ll call Ms. Smith emailed me because she was distraught at a test-prep lesson she had just observed: Students were given a six-paragraph excerpt from The Diary of Anne Frank and asked to “infer” how Anne felt about her friends—which, Anne confided to her diary in the excerpt, she no longer had.

The kids knew nothing of Anne Frank, including the fact that she was hiding in an attic, or of World War II. The teacher had been told not to provide any background information because if she did, students wouldn’t “learn to use the text evidence.” As a result, some kids “inferred” that Anne must have been autistic.

“This type of nonsense happens daily,” Ms. Smith told me, “but no one will take me seriously when I complain that it feels like a waste of a lesson.”

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Another educator, who I’ll call Ms. Anderson, told me she’s well-connected in education circles in her state but has “literally never heard anyone at the state or district levels talk about the importance of building knowledge and improving reading comprehension.” Nor do they talk about the science of learning. People are very aware of the “science of reading,” but to them it means only systematic instruction in foundational reading skills like phonics—and, perhaps, comprehension skill instruction of the type that Ms. Smith witnessed.

Ms. Smith and Ms. Anderson live in different states, and I’ve spoken in both of them about the importance of building knowledge, multiple times, including at statewide conferences. Apparently that’s not enough.1

I’m not ready to declare, as one longtime advocate for knowledge has, that knowledge-building curriculum can “never win.” It is winning in many places. But I do think we need to figure out if there’s more we can do to promote widespread change.

Change Practice and Beliefs Will Follow

My writing and speaking, like professional development in general, have been focused on giving educators information in the hope that it will change their beliefs. The assumption is that a change in beliefs will lead to a change in practice. That’s the way it works for some teachers, but clearly not for all.

In fact, the work of Thomas Guskey and other researchers suggests that we’ve gotten it backwards. The evidence shows that change actually starts with changes in teacher practice—plus, crucially, evidence showing teachers that those changes are resulting in improved learning. It’s the experience of successful implementation of a new approach, Guskey says, that eventually changes teachers’ beliefs. “They believe it works,” he writes, “because they have seen it work.”

And there’s the rub: If a knowledge-building curriculum is implemented well, which is in itself a big “if,” teachers should see that it “works.” But how will they know it’s working? You might assume they would just look to whether students are learning the concepts and vocabulary that have been taught. And some certainly do.

But because of their training and the institutional pressures to which they’re subject, many teachers look instead to scores on standardized reading comprehension tests. Those include not just the high-stakes tests at the end of the school year but also the “benchmark” tests used throughout the year to monitor progress. On those tests, the reading passages have nothing to do with the content students have been taught.

Those scores may not show improvement for several years, because that’s how long it can take for students to acquire the critical mass of knowledge and vocabulary that enables them to understand texts on topics they don’t already know about. So even if students are acquiring knowledge that will eventually improve their general reading comprehension, teachers may be getting feedback from tests telling them their students aren’t making progress—and that what they really need is more practice in, say, the “skill” of making inferences. That feedback can lead teachers back to their old ineffective approach.

Harnessing the Power of Testing

How can we ensure teachers get more accurate feedback about whether knowledge-building is working? One way—maybe the only broadly effective way—is to change the nature of state tests.

Testing is powerful. What gets tested, it’s frequently said, gets taught. Recent commentators say one big reason for declining student achievement is that we’ve loosened up on holding schools accountable for test scores. But while that may be true for math, it’s almost certainly not the case for reading comprehension.

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Standardized reading tests don’t just mislead teachers about student progress. They also distort curriculum and instruction in ways that hold students back. Most schools devote two or more hours a day to reading or “English language arts,” much of which is spent on instruction that mimics the tests: Read a random excerpt, then answer comprehension questions. As the Anne Frank incident suggests, that approach doesn’t improve comprehension.

But maybe it’s possible to use testing as a lever for bringing instruction more in line with cognitive science. I have a couple of ideas.

Test Social Studies Regularly

First, instead of putting the overwhelming emphasis on reading, along with math, states could start testing social studies regularly. Ironically, that might end up doing more to improve students’ reading ability than the current regime of requiring reading tests.

A study by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found that more time on social studies in elementary school is associated with improved reading scores by fifth grade, whereas more time on reading is not. Most likely, that’s because the kids who get more social studies are acquiring more of the knowledge and vocabulary that enables them to understand the passages on the reading tests.

You might think this data would lead schools that want to improve their reading scores to spend more time on social studies. But the study has been out there for six years now, and it doesn’t seem to have had that effect. Social studies, particularly in elementary school, is basically an afterthought.

Teachers are far less likely to be provided with a curriculum for social studies than for other subjects, meaning they have to cobble together materials themselves. They’re also less likely to get professional development or evaluation in that area.

A major reason, according to a RAND report, is that only “a handful of states” require tests in social studies that are factored into their accountability formulas. The obvious solution is to add tests in social studies, ideally in third through eighth grades and once in high school, which is what states currently require for reading and math.

Of course, teachers—and parents and students—are unlikely to be enthusiastic about more testing. In my ideal world, I would solve that problem by simply eliminating the reading comprehension tests and replacing them with social studies tests.

Students should of course read literature, and especially whole novels. But the emphasis on “English language arts” has distorted our educational priorities. Is it really more important for fourth-graders to learn about character traits and metaphors than about history and geography? Wouldn’t our democracy be better off if more kids knew which country we fought against in the American Revolution, or who won the Civil War, or that there’s such a place as Washington, D.C.?

As the country approaches its 250^th birthday, there’s been a lot of hand-wringing about how little students know about history and civics, but little effort to do anything meaningful about the problem.

Combine Reading and Social Studies Tests, Plus Writing

Realistically, though, we’re probably stuck with reading tests for the foreseeable future. So why not ground the passages on state reading tests in the social studies topics listed in state academic standards?

Those standards may not be great—and we certainly need better social studies curricula, especially at the elementary level—but at least they specify some content, whereas reading comprehension standards list only comprehension skills.2 And the Fordham study found positive results from additional social studies instruction based on the social studies standards we currently have, so apparently they’re good enough to improve reading ability.

My other testing innovation would be to place more emphasis on writing quality. Again, what gets tested gets taught, or at least gets attention. When Louisiana gave more weight to the writing section of its state literacy tests, districts began to pay more attention to writing instruction—which, like social studies, is a generally neglected area. Fortunately, most districts in the state were already using a content-rich curriculum, which gave students the raw material they needed to engage in writing. Like most curricula, though, it didn’t actually teach them to write.

Some districts discovered a method of explicit writing instruction called The Writing Revolution, which they could adapt to their curriculum, not just in ELA but across the board. [Note: I’m the co-author of a book describing the method and serve on the advisory board of The Writing Revolution organization.] When I visited one of those districts—Monroe City, a high-poverty area—I was told that the result was not only that students became far better able to write but also better able to learn.

“At the start,” high school teacher Justin Overacker told me, “the focus was on writing instruction. But something kind of unexpected, kind of amazing began to happen. We realized that teaching students to write clearly was actually teaching them to think clearly.”

Why? Probably because when teachers embed explicit writing instruction in rich content, they’re providing students with many of the benefits of cognitive-science informed instruction—notably, retrieval practice and elaboration, increasing their access to information stored in long-term memory and deepening their comprehension of whatever they’re writing about.

What I saw and heard in Monroe is a prime example of the process Thomas Guskey describes: First teachers’ practice changed, with training provided directly by The Writing Revolution organization to ensure successful implementation. Then they saw evidence it was working, both in their students’ writing and on state tests.

I haven’t done a study of whether teachers’ beliefs eventually changed, but I suspect many came to intuitively understand the power of science-informed instruction, whether or not they would put it in those terms. In any event, the process didn’t start with a change in beliefs. Teachers in Monroe told me they’d never heard of concepts like retrieval practice and cognitive load theory before changing their approach to writing instruction. They just wanted to help their students write.

Ideally, a state testing regime wouldn’t try to evaluate student writing in the abstract—which doesn’t work any better than trying to evaluate reading comprehension in the abstract. Writing ability is inextricably bound up with knowledge of the topic you’re writing about. So the writing prompts on state tests should be grounded in material students have learned about—like, for example, the content specified in state social studies standards.3

I’ll continue to write and speak about building knowledge and concepts like working memory as long as people want me to—or until I just can’t do it anymore. Even if I’m not reaching every educator, I’m reaching many of them, and that’s important.

But I’ll also hope that some state education officials out there are bold enough to experiment with state tests as I’ve suggested. I can’t guarantee it will work, but changing state testing regimes is likely to be our best chance for changing teachers’ practice in ways that enable all students to reach their full potential—and maybe, ultimately, changing teachers’ beliefs as well.

A recent analysis of millions of student test scores has declared that Washington, D.C., is “leading the nation.” Using a methodology that allows comparisons between scores from different state tests, a prestigious team of researchers ranked the nation’s capital first in both reading and math—that is, in terms of “growth,” which reflects improvement over time.

But if you go by test-score “proficiency,” or absolute numbers of students meeting a specific benchmark, D.C. doesn’t look so hot. A report by the D.C. Policy Center found that in 2025, only 26 percent of students scored proficient in math and only 38 percent in reading. No more than 16 percent of high school juniors and seniors met the bar for being “college or career ready” as measured by the SAT.

There’s a longstanding debate about which measure to look to when evaluating progress: growth or proficiency. Steven Wilson, a former charter school leader, opts for proficiency. He recently told The 74’s Jill Barshay that any jurisdiction where most students aren’t “functioning at grade level,” as in D.C., is “nothing to applaud.”

D.C. officials acknowledge there’s more to be done, but basically—pointing to growth—they’re trying for a standing ovation. “We are recognized as the fastest-improving urban school system in the country,” crowed Deputy Mayor for Education Paul Kihn in the wake of the national report, called the Education Scorecard.1

Both Measures Are Incomplete

One argument against relying on proficiency is that it rewards schools serving a more affluent demographic. It can look like the credit belongs to the school or the system, when in fact students are just coming in with more knowledge and skills than their lower-income peers, enabling them to score higher on tests. Meanwhile, a school across town serving a lower-income population might actually be doing a better job of raising scores, but because its students started out so far behind, it still gets characterized as low-performing.

Those who focus on growth also worry that relying on proficiency is just too much of a downer. Tom Kane, one of the authors of the Education Scorecard, told Barshay that his research team “chose growth in order to ‘combat’ what they see as an overly pessimistic narrative about public education.”

It’s also true, however, that a focus on growth can obscure continuing inequities—or even unfairly reward systems that simply increase their share of affluent students. I live in D.C., and I’ve been hearing officials here describe it as “the fastest-improving urban school system in the country” for at least ten years. And it’s true that scores for almost all student subgroups have gone up by a few percentage points. But if you look closely, it becomes clear that the “improvement” hasn’t narrowed the huge gaps between them.

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According to the D.C. Policy Center, the reading proficiency rate for white students—who, in D.C., are overwhelmingly affluent—is currently 58 percentage points higher than the rate for Black students and 61 points higher than the rate for the economically disadvantaged. Ten years ago, scores for white students were 56 points higher than those for either of the other categories. The rising tide may have lifted all boats, but it hasn’t brought them any closer. In fact, they’re slightly wider apart.

Many of D.C.’s public school students come from low-income families, so it can be easy to assume that overall achievement figures reflect their experience.2 For example, Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute, an education think tank, argues that you have to put the D.C. statistics on college-and-career-readiness in context. The fact that only 16 percent of high school students meet that bar doesn’t look so bad, he says, when you consider that “just 14 percent of students from the poorest quartile of the American population graduate from college.” Students from low-income families start school far behind, he points out, and “excellent schools can’t make up all of the difference.”

But Petrilli’s argument assumes that all of those college-and-career-ready D.C. students come from low-income families. In fact, they don’t. In 2025, only 4 percent of economically disadvantaged D.C. students met the college-and-career bar, while 70 percent of white students did. Surely an excellent school system should be able to do better than that.

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As the college-and-career-ready breakdown suggests, much of the “growth” in D.C. is attributable to the fact that the public school system, which used to be unbelievably dysfunctional, has figured out how to do things like heat school buildings, deliver textbooks to classrooms when needed, and ensure that teachers get their paychecks. That means that affluent parents are now more willing to entrust their children to the system—and those children are likely to do well on standardized tests, pretty much no matter what their schools do.

In addition, there are now a number of charter schools in D.C. that attract parents who previously would have sprung for private school tuition or moved to the suburbs.3 Charter school students, like those in traditional public schools, take D.C.’s state tests. Overall, the share of white students in the city’s public schools has grown from 4.5 percent in 2000 to about 14 percent today.

Education has certainly improved somewhat for kids from lower-income families, especially at high-performing charter schools serving that demographic. But the real question isn’t whether elementary and middle school test scores for those kids have gone up, which is what the Education Scorecard measures. It’s whether the academic achievement of high school graduates has improved—and that 4 percent college-and-career-readiness figure is revealing.4

Overlooking Fundamental Problems

It’s not that I take pleasure in being negative. Growth is something to celebrate. But too much focus on growth can lead to a sense of complacency and prevent policymakers from recognizing fundamental problems. They might believe that what they’re doing is working just fine and that to make more progress, they just need to do more of it.

I’m not familiar enough with D.C. schools to say definitively what the fundamental problems here are, but I suspect that a big one—at least as regards the traditional D.C. public school sector, which educates a little over half of public school students—is an inadequate curriculum, especially at the elementary level. If you don’t start building kids’ academic knowledge early, the gaps between high- and low-performing students increase every year and become almost impossible to narrow.

A little over a decade ago, DCPS officials decided to adopt a “knowledge-building” elementary literacy curriculum. At the time, I was told, there wasn’t one that was commercially available, so they recruited DCPS teachers to create a homegrown one, working over the summers.

Maybe that was an understandable choice at the time, but homegrown curricula are rarely effective. Creating a curriculum is a complex task, and most teachers have no training in how to write one.

I was given glimpses of the DCPS literacy curriculum about 10 years ago. While it certainly wasn’t the worst curriculum I’d seen, I was not impressed, and sources tell me it hasn’t gotten much better. Meanwhile, there are now a number of well-constructed, readily available knowledge-building curricula that DCPS could adopt. For some reason, though, officials have stuck with their homegrown one, and all but a handful of elementary schools are using it.5

I’m not saying a true knowledge-building curriculum is a silver bullet. It’s certainly possible to implement any curriculum in a way that doesn’t work. So you need good training and professional development for teachers, grounded in the specifics of the curriculum. But if you don’t have a content-rich curriculum, improving education outcomes for children from historically disadvantaged groups is going to be far more difficult.

EdReports and D.C. “Growth”

One problem that has affected thousands of districts across the country—and would probably affect DCPS too, if it wanted to adopt a published curriculum—is that it has become increasingly difficult to identify an effective curriculum. That’s largely because the most influential evaluator of curricula, EdReports, has given out some misleading ratings in recent years.

EdReports recently acquired a new leader, which might signal positive change. But that new leader is none other than the top DCPS education official, Dr. Lewis D. Ferebee. Predictably, in announcing his appointment, EdReports described him as the leader of “the fastest-improving urban school system in the country.”

In the same press release, Ferebee said that he has “followed and used EdReports’ reviews for years as a district leader.” But during his seven-year tenure as DCPS chancellor, he didn’t adopt an elementary literacy curriculum that had been reviewed by EdReports. And as far as I know, the home-grown DCPS curriculum he retained has never been reviewed by EdReports or any other independent entity. Maybe Ferebee will do a better job of distinguishing between effective and ineffective literacy curricula than his predecessor, but I haven’t seen anything to inspire optimism.

A focus on growth over proficiency may have helped Ferebee get his new job, but it’s not an accurate formula for evaluating success. Nor is proficiency alone. Nor, frankly, is any measure premised on standardized reading comprehension scores. They’re extremely blunt instruments for measuring progress, and they have a history of distorting curriculum and instruction in ways that hold kids back. If I ruled the world, I would get rid of them.

But given that I don’t rule the world, I’d say the best approach is to take into account both growth and proficiency and understand what each of them represents. And researcher Tom Kane has said that the next iteration of the Education Scorecard will also include the proportion of students who are proficient in a district and compare that data point to other districts with similar demographics.

That sounds like progress. But I hope the report will also break down proficiency rates for student subgroups, including those who are economically disadvantaged, and compare those. Those figures could be depressing, but they might also point up districts that aren’t just raising average test scores but also significantly improving the performance of their most vulnerable students.

What’s the main reason we don’t see more evidence-based instruction in schools? According to education researcher David Griffith, as quoted in The 74, it’s the “chaotic information environment that the typical teacher is subject to.”

“An older teacher tells you one thing,” Griffith said. “Your curriculum tells you something else. You read an article online written by some think tank and it tells you a third thing. Teachers want to do the right thing, … [but there’s a] lack of clarity … about points that really should be clear.”

Griffith was discussing the “science of reading”—and more specifically, a recent report he co-authored finding that nearly a third of early elementary teachers still use methods that conflict with well-established evidence. But his comments could apply to teaching in general.

There’s an enormous amount of research out there on education, but findings can conflict, and it’s not always clear which ones are reliable. Even if you know a study is trustworthy, it can be a slog to read and make sense of the highly technical language used to convey the results. (Ask me how I know.)

But there’s a new AI tool that can help. Yes, AI. I’ve written about the serious risks of allowing students unfettered access to generative AI, but AI can be hugely helpful—especially when used by teachers rather than students.1

The new tool, called The Evidence Checker, was devised by two science-of-learning researchers at the University of Toronto, Nidhi Sachdeva and Jim Hewitt, who publish an excellent Substack newsletter called, appropriately, The Science of Learning. Their goal is to communicate research findings in accessible prose and connect them to practical recommendations for classroom practice.

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In a recent post introducing The Evidence Checker, Hewitt and Sachdeva echo Griffith’s observations about the barrage of conflicting information to which teachers are subjected. They offer examples of questions teachers may be seeking clear, reliable answers to, like:

What does the evidence say about inquiry-based learning?

Will regular math quizzes in my grade 5 class increase student anxiety?

Of course, teachers could just pop those questions into ChatGPT or one of the other readily available AI models. What The Evidence Checker provides, essentially, is a well-designed prompt that tells the model in no uncertain terms what it is supposed to do.

“You Are a Research Assistant”

First, it tells the model who it is: “an educational research assistant” who is supposed to “think critically” about the user’s question. It’s not supposed to act like a “motivational speaker, advocate, consultant, or influencer.” Be accurate and clear, the prompt says, and avoid “unnecessary jargon.”

The prompt also outlines six steps for the model, beginning with a brief summary of the overall state of the evidence and ending with a short section titled “What should a reasonable evidence-informed teacher conclude?” Then the AI is supposed to “invite the user to ask follow-up questions” and suggest some they might want to pursue.

This sounds like a great template for prompting an AI model on almost any topic, education-related or not. But, I wondered, how does The Evidence Checker actually perform? So I decided to test it out, using a question I’ve already thought about quite a bit myself: “Should reading comprehension instruction focus more on building knowledge or on comprehension skills?” The Evidence Checker provides links to several AI models; I chose Perplexity.

In what seemed like the blink of an eye, I got back an impressive multi-page, clearly written essay that obeyed all of the prompt’s commands. (I’m no longer totally gobsmacked by how quickly AI produces answers, but I still find it amazing.)

The AI began by telling me that I was asking “the wrong either/or question”—which is what I would say myself if a teacher asked me if they should build knowledge or teach comprehension skills. But I was asking which we should focus on more, not which approach we should adopt to the exclusion of the other.

Still, the AI’s response was pretty good: “Reading comprehension instruction is strongest when it builds knowledge and vocabulary while also teaching a small set of useful comprehension strategies, rather than treating ‘skills’ as detached from content or assuming knowledge will emerge by itself.”

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Over the course of about 15 paragraphs, the AI never said exactly what I would have said, which is this: It’s not about comprehension skills and strategies versus building knowledge; it’s a question of what to put in the foreground. What works best is to put a particular topic or text in the foreground and bring in whatever skills or strategies can best help students understand it. I had a few other quibbles,2 but I do think the AI response would put users on the right track and enable them to pursue its suggested follow-up questions for more nuance.

On the other hand, when I put the same question to Perplexity without the detailed prompt from The Evidence Checker, the response was essentially the same, albeit briefer and with fewer citations—and ditto for when I put the question to ChatGPT. Still, if I had asked a question that was more obscure or more controversial, The Evidence Checker’s prompt might well have made more of a difference.

Reaching Teachers Who Aren’t Searching for Answers

The Evidence Checker can certainly help educators who are searching for answers backed by reliable research. At the same time, though, we don’t really know how many fall into that category.

That’s not a criticism of teachers. Pressed by the demands of a job that can be all-consuming, many will understandably rely on theories and approaches they were taught during their pre-service training. It’s natural to trust people in positions of authority, including professors at schools of education.

Unfortunately, for historical and systemic reasons, education orthodoxy often conflicts with what cognitive science has discovered about how people actually learn. Prospective teachers are generally told, for example, that it’s best for students to direct their own learning as much as possible, through inquiry and discovery. But the evidence clearly shows that when learners are new to a topic, explicit, interactive instruction works best.

And despite the clarity of the AI responses to my question about reading comprehension, the evidence indicates that most teachers—almost 60 percent--still see it as more dependent on generalizable skills than on background knowledge, which is what they’re likely to have learned during their training.3

“If we could somehow improve the quality of pre-service preparation,” researcher David Griffith says in the same interview I quoted from earlier, “we would really be making progress, because it is hard to change the practices of teachers who have been teaching for 15 to 20 years. It would be enormously helpful if teachers got the right message at the start of their careers.”

The Science of Learning, Revised

Which brings me to the other resource that could improve teachers’ effectiveness: a new edition of The Science of Learning, a document developed by a group called Deans for Impact. Like the original, which came out in 2015, the new version is designed to summarize key findings of cognitive science research and translate them into practical guidance.4

Deans for Impact aims to bring teacher prep programs more in line with cognitive science, so—while experienced teachers would no doubt find it useful, if they’re open to changing longstanding practices—it’s primarily aimed at teacher educators and prospective or new teachers.

The Science of Learning incorporates research that has emerged over the last decade and covers six general questions, such as “How do students understand new ideas?” and “How do students solve problems and transfer learning to new contexts?” Under each of these questions, the document summarizes several related “Principles,” alongside “Practical implications for the classroom,” and—a new feature—“Pitfalls to be wary of.”

A final section lists “common misconceptions,” such as this widespread one: “Memorization is just rote regurgitation that does not support learning and deeper conceptual understanding.” In fact, the document explains, when students have more knowledge stored in long-term memory, they have more capacity for complex thinking.

All of this is conveyed in clear, accessible prose. No doubt those who are seeking such a resource will find it extremely helpful.

But again: how many people, including teacher educators, are looking for this kind of guidance from cognitive science? It seems the number is increasing, and I’m hopeful that trend will continue, but change in academia is notoriously slow.5 And even if all teacher educators were to sign onto the principles laid out in The Science of Learning tomorrow, that would still leave millions of teachers in the workforce who didn’t get the benefit of that kind of pre-service preparation.

We Need to Go Beyond Educating Teachers

None of this is meant to detract from the value of The Evidence Checker or the new edition of The Science of Learning. They are worthy efforts, along with other initiatives to familiarize teachers with cognitive science, like the international network of researchED conferences. I just don’t think they’re going to be enough to move the needle significantly.

Aside from the fact that only a minority of U.S. teachers and teacher educators currently seem interested in these issues, there’s also the fact that it’s hard for any individual educator to effect significant change.

One reason is that, even with the practical guidance the resources provide, it can be challenging for teachers to figure out how to apply scientific principles to the specifics of whatever they’re teaching—especially if they’re given instructional materials or directives from administrators that conflict with cognitive science. The problem may be most intractable in the area of reading comprehension, where assumptions and practices that contradict the evidence—including standardized reading comprehension tests—are deeply entrenched.

Plus, no individual teacher has the ability to ensure that students get a coherent learning experience, where instruction at each grade level builds on knowledge and skills that have been previously taught. To make real progress, we need whole-school, or better yet, whole-district or even whole-state initiatives.

Those initiatives should include adopting detailed, coherent curricula that are themselves grounded in evidence from cognitive science. Ideally, these curricula will provide guidance in both what to teach and how to deliver instruction in a way that can enable all students to succeed. There are curricula that do that, but in the current landscape it can be challenging for decision-makers to identify them.

And even adopting a truly science-aligned curriculum may not be enough. The evidence suggests that, for a number of reasons, many if not most teachers using such curricula modify them in ways that dilute their effectiveness. So teachers will also need ongoing support delivered by people who understand the structure and objectives of the curriculum and can convey that understanding effectively.

Change Practice, and Beliefs Will Follow

Even if familiarizing teachers with cognitive science isn’t enough to ensure things change, it can certainly be helpful in explaining why change is needed. At the same time, I don’t think teachers need to know about cognitive science in order for students to get the benefits of science-informed instruction.

Most professional development, including that focused on cognitive science, is aimed at changing teachers’ beliefs in the hope that it will change their practice. But the evidence indicates that the dynamic more often works the other way: If teachers see their students clearly benefiting from an approach they’re asked to try, they’re likely to embrace it. Then their beliefs begin to change.

So in addition to efforts aimed at informing teachers and teacher educators about cognitive science, we also need initiatives that will directly change teacher practice. We should be targeting the creators and publishers of curricula—along with those who rate and select curricula and help teachers implement them. While we’re at it, we could also try to reach the psychometricians who design reading comprehension tests and the government officials who require them.

If more of those influential individuals had a firm grasp of the principles of cognitive science, millions of teachers and students might have an easier path to success.

I’ve written previously about the apparent trend away from assigning whole books in K-12 classrooms—a trend that has sparked concern. While most of the attention has been focused on the lack of novels in the high school English curriculum, some observers have also pointed out that the most popular literacy curricula used in the elementary grades, commonly called basal readers, rely entirely on excerpts. These curricula foreground supposedly general comprehension skills, like “making inferences,” rather than enabling students to understand any particular text.

As an alternative—and one that is likely to be more engaging for students and boost their reading comprehension—I and others have pointed to knowledge-building curricula that focus on content and use whole texts and books. But now some teachers and parents—it’s not clear how many—are accusing knowledge-building curricula of exhibiting the same flaws that plague the curricula we’ve criticized, including a dearth of whole books.

It can be difficult to respond to these complaints. For one thing, I haven’t visited the classrooms at issue or spoken directly to those who are complaining. And frankly, it’s tempting to just dismiss them, because they conflict with so much that I have seen and heard. But because the criticism may threaten the progress we’ve made on curriculum reform in the last several years, I’d like to try to understand and address it. And a recent study on the use of whole books in schools helps shed some light on the issue.

No More Books in Houston and D.C.?

The first incident that alerted me to this kind of pushback occurred last fall, when I was contacted by a columnist for the Houston Chronicle, Lisa Falkenberg. She had been hearing complaints from teachers and parents about a new elementary literacy curriculum mandated by the school district. Under the new regime, they said, rich children’s literature had been eliminated in favor of slideshows and read-alouds from teachers manuals.

One kindergarten teacher, I was told, used to read Langston Hughes and Robert Frost to her students. But the new curriculum had what the teacher described as an overwhelming focus on “strategies,” with instruction that was “very surface level.”

“Constant worksheets, kids sitting in their seats, looking at a screen all day,” the teacher wrote in an email I saw. “No books.”

My first reaction was that the curriculum must be one of those excerpt-focused basals. But eventually I realized that it was a version of CKLA—one of the knowledge-building curricula that I and others have held up as effective and engaging. When Falkenberg had first reported the complaints, education officials in Texas told her to read my book The Knowledge Gap, which they said provided support for the Houston curriculum. She was confused—as was I.1

Then in December, I saw an article in a local D.C. publication by a parent whose child attends the middle school in my own neighborhood. A newly mandated approach to English instruction, the parent said, “removes all full-length novels from the 8^th grade curriculum” and replaces them with short passages.2

The curriculum this parent was complaining about was called Common Lit 360. I’m not personally familiar with that curriculum, and I can’t say whether it truly builds knowledge, but its creators at least appear to understand the evidence relating to the role of knowledge in reading comprehension. It’s also clear from the publisher’s website that the curriculum does include whole novels.

Okay, not in 8^th grade. But students at that level do read a full-length play, Twelve Angry Men, along with a number of classic short stories, like “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe. In 6^th and 7^th grades, one novel is covered each year.3 I don’t think that’s enough, but at least the novels are substantial, thought-provoking works—The Giver in 6^th grade and Brown Girl Dreaming in 7^th.

The curriculum also includes “multimedia lessons” designed to provide students with background knowledge—for example, about the jury trial system before reading Twelve Angry Men. Perhaps those lessons include the “short passages” the parent was objecting to. But those passages aren’t the basis of the curriculum.

Too Few Novels in New York?

The third incident occurred about a week ago, when I came across a report in Gothamist, a New York City publication, saying that parents and teachers there are complaining about two middle school literacy curricula that schools are now required to choose between. They say both curricula cut back on the number of novels students read.

One teacher in the Bronx said that two decades ago, her students “often read 20 books a year.” Now, she was “hoping to get through” just four. A parent in Manhattan complained that his daughter was getting “reading assignments that look more like test prep with short excerpts followed by comprehension questions.” According to the report, teachers and parents say kids are being forced to “slog through mind-numbing exercises in workbooks, rather than nurturing the joy that comes from reading whole books.”

The new curricula at issue? EL Education and Wit & Wisdom. Like CKLA, both are curricula that I and others have praised for building knowledge and immersing students in whole, rich texts.

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During the first phase of its literacy curriculum overhaul, New York City required elementary schools to use either of those two curricula along with a third option, HMH’s Into Reading, which is essentially a basal reader. Most schools opted for Into Reading. But teachers and parents complained it lacked whole books and was boring, so the city eliminated it from the middle-school choices. Now the same complaints are being raised against the other two curricula.4

How to Make Sense of the Complaints

So what is going on here? Have we advocates for knowledge-building curricula just fooled ourselves into thinking they’re fundamentally different from the excerpt- and skills-focused curricula we’ve been criticizing?

At the risk of sounding defensive, I don’t think so. For one thing, these curricula do include whole books or at least whole texts. The Gothamist article notes that the two contested middle-school curricula cover four to seven books at each grade level.5 And while CKLA doesn’t include physical books of the kind you can buy at a bookstore, at least in the early grades, teachers do read aloud each day from texts that are connected and build knowledge cumulatively, These texts are more like book chapters than brief texts or excerpts.

No curriculum is perfect, of course—and even the best curriculum can be implemented in a way that doesn’t work. Poor implementation may be behind some of these complaints.6

But I’ve been in schools where I’ve seen CKLA, EL Education, and Wit & Wisdom working well, and I’ve heard glowing reports from many parents and teachers.7 Just the other day I met a parent who was raving about how much her children were learning since their elementary school (also in my neighborhood) adopted Wit & Wisdom and how much they—and their teachers—were enjoying it.8

The Houston complaints against CKLA, or something like it, are somewhat different from those about the middle-school curricula. As I mentioned, one complaint is that the curriculum doesn’t include “authentic” children’s literature. That is, the texts were written specifically for the curriculum, by anonymous authors. Basal readers used to rely on such purpose-built texts, many of which were insipid. That was one reason those curricula were scorned by many educators in previous decades.9

But a children’s book you can buy in a store isn’t necessarily better than one written for a particular curriculum. I haven’t read all the texts in CKLA, but the ones I have read are, for the most part, well done.10 And there are at least two advantages to using texts written specifically for a curriculum.

First, schools don’t have to buy books in addition to buying the curriculum (or, in the case of CKLA, downloading it for free from the Core Knowledge Foundation). More importantly, the creators of the curriculum can structure the texts to repeat important vocabulary and key concepts in different contexts, creating a “spiraling” curriculum that builds kids’ knowledge effectively. That’s what CKLA does.

Another complaint from Houston is that the texts are all digital, with kids seeing illustrations on screens during read-alouds. I’m all in favor of physical books, but I don’t think this is a fatal flaw. I’ve seen schools that use CKLA print out the text for kids, or parts of it. More fundamentally, the texts for early grade levels are more complex, by design, than what kids could read themselves.

Ideally, schools using CKLA will also give kids access to physical books designed for them to read or peruse on their own, relating to the topics they’ve learned about through read-alouds. I’ve also seen that done in classrooms, and CKLA includes lists of recommended books to supplement it.

Complaints from Middle-School Parents

The curricula at the middle-school level clearly do include some “authentic” texts, but not enough to satisfy some teachers and parents.

As I said, I do think middle schoolers should be reading more than the one novel (or full-length play) per year that the curriculum being piloted in D.C. includes. But a curriculum that includes intact short stories—and brings in short nonfiction articles or excerpts to provide background knowledge students may need to understand works of fiction—is different from one that relies on excerpts to try to develop comprehension skills.11 A short story may be brief, but students are reading an entire work as the author intended it to be read. And length isn’t everything. Reading a short story can be a more intellectually rigorous experience than reading a novel.

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One likely factor behind the complaints is that, as a recent RAND report illustrates, the number of whole books assigned by teachers varies from school to school—and that variation depends on lot on socioeconomic circumstances. The average number of books assigned in high-poverty secondary schools, the report found, was three per year, as compared to an average of four overall. And teachers at high-poverty schools were twice as likely to assign no books as teachers in low-poverty ones—12 percent as opposed to 6 percent.12

While the RAND report suggests that the “whole book” situation isn’t as dire as the media have reported, it also shows that the same ELA curriculum could represent an increase in whole books at one school and a decrease at another.13 And even within a school, expectations and reading habits can vary widely.

The complaining parents in both D.C. and New York appear to be highly educated and able to pass on high levels of literacy to their children. The New York parent is identified as an English professor, and the D.C. parent begins his piece by saying that he’s “the parent of … [a student] who loves to read,” adding that “we have books scattered on every surface in the house and we regularly have to do late-night patrols to check that the reading lights stay out after bedtime.” The schools their children attend—Deal Middle School in D.C. and the Manhattan School for Children in New York—have larger proportions of affluent families than most urban public schools.

You could argue that such schools should be exempt from district curriculum requirements, especially if those requirements end up decreasing the number of books students read. But if the curriculum is a good one—a determination that isn’t always easy to make—I think a better approach would be to add books for students who can handle more. And the RAND report makes it clear that many teachers already feel free to do that: among those who use a required curriculum, 60 percent supplement it with additional full books.

One reason to retain the required curriculum is that even at low-poverty schools, there are inevitably some students who come from less highly educated families. Those students may benefit from going at a slower pace that allows for the development of background knowledge they may not have.

Another consideration is that quantity isn’t everything. Yes, the curriculum should cover more than one full book a year, but I’m not sure that 20 books is necessarily better than, say, five. A lot depends on the length and complexity of the books—and of course, the teaching that enables students to understand and analyze them.

Change Is Hard

Some of the complaints about knowledge-building curricula aren’t just about a dearth of books. They’re about teaching methods that allegedly lead students away from “talking about books” and require workbook-like activities that look like test prep. But from another perspective, these same activities could look like providing background knowledge to enrich conversations about books, or deepening the understanding of new vocabulary, or developing writing abilities. Change can be difficult, especially if the reasons for it haven’t been communicated clearly.

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And some teachers may be communicating their own lack of enthusiasm for the new curricula. The reasons for that lack of enthusiasm may include regret at no longer being able to teach books that are personal favorites, resentment at losing some autonomy, and—particularly at lower grade levels—a feeling that complex material is “developmentally inappropriate.” More fundamentally, many teachers have been led to believe, through their training, that any curriculum created by a publisher is inferior to one they create themselves—even though creating curriculum imposes a crushing workload on them. A teacher’s lack of enthusiasm can easily become contagious.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. One third-grade teacher who had been asked to teach CKLA told me she was skeptical that her students would be interested in the topics it covered, like the Vikings and Ancient Rome. Nor did she find all the texts in the curriculum to be that interesting herself. But, she said, she read them all “as though they were the most fascinating things in the world.”

And lo and behold, she told me, her students thought the read-alouds were the most fascinating things in the world, They even went to the school library asking for more books on those topics. The teacher became a convert. And her third-graders were getting hooked on reading whole books.

A new study surveyed a representative sample of American K-3 teachers about the “science of reading,” finding some good news and some not-so-good. It was done by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank, in conjunction with the RAND Corporation.

Here are the highlights:

• The focus on the “science of reading” over the last several years has had an impact on the K-3 teacher workforce—to some extent. The not-so-good news is that only about half of teachers surveyed said they provide systematic instruction in phonics. But questions about specific practices yielded more encouraging responses.

• Alarmingly, teacher knowledge of the “science of reading” is lowest in schools serving students who live in poverty, where 41 percent of teachers were not clearly in favor of systematic phonics instruction. Students from low-income families are generally most in need of such instruction.

• Also alarmingly, teachers who said they relied on their pre-service training for knowledge of the “science of reading” knew less than those who had gotten training on the job—and those who said their pre-service programs emphasized the “science of reading” knew the least.

• State teacher licensure tests aligned to the “science of reading” are associated with better teacher knowledge of the subject.

• Many teachers are still using “questionable” reading curricula, like Benchmark Advance and Fountas & Pinnell.

Other commentators have already made a number of perceptive observations about the Fordham report, including:

• Even if teacher prep programs get better at conveying scientific evidence, which they certainly should, we’ll still need to ensure schools use effective curricula if we want to move the needle. (Robert Pondiscio)

• Even if teacher prep programs don’t get better, teachers can learn a lot from a good curriculum. The report’s findings suggest that professional development grounded in a specific curriculum is what works best. (Karen Vaites)

• The report recommends that states adopt lists of approved “high-quality” curricula. But many states already have such lists, and quite a few have included ineffective curricula and excluded effective ones, largely because state officials are relying on misleading ratings. (Also Karen Vaites)

• Many states (along with much of the media) have defined the “science of reading” to mean, basically, “phonics.” That leaves out other key factors, like the support teachers need to do a good job of teaching phonics—not to mention curricula that build the knowledge students need to understand increasingly complex text. (Andy Rotherham)

What Do We Mean by the “Science of Reading”?

I’d like to “double click,” as they say, on that last point. You may have noticed that I’ve been putting the phrase “science of reading” in quotation marks. That’s because it tends to get narrowed to “phonics” when in fact there’s also a lot of other “science” related to reading, and specifically to reading comprehension.

There’s been a lot of focus on the fact that the typical approach to teaching kids to read individual words conflicts with scientific evidence. But that’s also true of the typical approach to teaching reading comprehension, and there’s been a lot less attention focused on that problem. In brief: the typical approach tries to teach comprehension skills in the abstract, even though the evidence indicates that relevant knowledge is far more important to comprehension than general “skills.”

Share Minding the Gap

The Fordham/RAND researchers, to their credit, did take a relatively expansive view of the “science of reading”: they asked teachers what they knew about reading comprehension as well as phonics. But in their findings and recommendations, they often lump both aspects of reading instruction under the term “science of reading.”

For example, they urge states to adopt policies aligned with the “science of reading,” when in fact almost all states have already taken steps to do that, if you define the term narrowly. But almost none have done that if you define it to include “building knowledge.”1 In addition, the authors of the Fordham report don’t distinguish between curricula that cover only foundational reading skills like phonics and curricula that also build students’ knowledge.

Less Buy-in for Knowledge than Phonics

Given the lack of emphasis on knowledge-building curricula in state policies and most teacher prep programs, it’s not surprising that the level of teacher awareness on the comprehension side is even lower than it is on the phonics side. For example, 58 percent of teachers incorrectly said that reading comprehension depends on “a set of generalizable skills … that can be applied to most texts,” as opposed to “what students already know about the topic and the specific vocabulary used in a text.”

As with the phonics part of the survey, teachers did somewhat better when confronted with more granular questions. When asked about the best way to improve reading comprehension, for example, 60 percent said it was to build background knowledge through content-rich instruction across subjects. Still, the researchers concluded that about 14 percent of K-3 teachers “have little interest in a knowledge-based approach.” That’s twice as many as have “little interest” in using phonics, according to the report.

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Surveys like this tell us about teacher attitudes and what they think they’re doing. But they can’t tell us what is happening in classrooms, let alone whether students are actually learning more. Even if teachers think they’re teaching phonics or building knowledge effectively, that may not actually be the case.

I’m not blaming teachers. Most have not been equipped by their pre-service preparation, their instructional materials, or their on-the-job training to reliably recognize what is aligned with scientific evidence and what is not. And even if teachers have an understanding of what science supports, it isn’t always easy to translate that into classroom practice. Plus, old instructional habits die hard.

In one sense, the Fordham findings represent progress: if you had done this survey five or ten years ago, you almost certainly would have found fewer teachers endorsing the idea of teaching phonics or building knowledge. At the same time, the survey also reveals that a lot of teachers still aren’t on board with those concepts.

And even those who are trying to implement the concepts may be doing so in ways that don’t really work—which (as Andy Rotherham has pointed out) raises the risk that many will end up rejecting them as just another passing fad that didn’t live up to its promise.

AI and Writing

Speaking of surveys, the New York Times did another much less scientific one recently on AI and writing. They asked high school and college teachers how AI was affecting the way they assigned writing and got 400 responses.

The Times found that many teachers appear to be requiring students to write in class, often by hand, and in any case without the benefit of access to the internet and its seductive Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT. So: no more worries about who actually wrote the thing, the student or an LLM. But also: no more research papers or even three- to five-page essays.

“If there’s a downside” to this, Times education reporter Dana Goldstein commented, it’s that students’ handwriting is atrocious and hard to read. But I can think of some other big downsides.

One is that students who do all their writing in class are unlikely to have time to do much in-depth research or revising. Another is that even the relatively superficial writing they’re doing in class is eating up a lot of precious instructional time.

Many teachers have discovered that the only way to ensure students read a whole novel, or any complex text, these days is to do the reading in class—which obviously takes up a huge amount of time, especially at higher grade levels when novels are longer. And now students also need to do all their writing in class? It’s hard to see how this will work without limiting both reading and writing to extremely short texts.

Don’t Just Assign Writing—Teach It

I don’t have a real a solution to the problem, but one thing that might help is to actually teach students how to write rather than just assigning writing, which is what most teachers do. Again, this isn’t the fault of teachers. Few have gotten effective training in how to teach writing, and many have been led to believe that what works best is to have students just plunge in.

One teacher quoted in the Times article, for example, tells her students, “I want you to write out a really rough, terrible draft in your writers’ notebooks. And then I want you to scratch it out and rewrite it.”

That might work well for some students, but most will likely find writing easier if they’ve been taught how to create a linear outline before writing a draft—and how to construct good sentences, if they haven’t yet learned that.

Those techniques not only help ensure clearer, more coherent writing, but they also make writing a less overwhelmingly difficult task. And if writing is easier for students, they just might be less tempted to resort to tools like ChatGPT to do it for them.

It’s late October in a New York City classroom where students have been learning about American history since the beginning of the school year. A slight boy sits on a wooden stool facing a whiteboard, his legs swinging, as his teacher reads aloud the questions on the board in rapid-fire fashion.

“All right, let’s see if you know about the Constitution. The first document that set up a system of government was called the what?”

“Articles of Confederation,” the boy replies confidently, without hesitation.

“Did that work?”

“No.”

“So what happened at the Constitutional Convention?”

“The Constitution was written.”

“When was the Constitution written?”

“1787.”

“Why was the United States so radical at the time?”

“Because it was one of the first democracies since ancient times.”

So it goes, until the boy’s turn at bat is finished, the class applauds, and another student takes his place.

If you haven’t been in an American classroom lately, you might not think there’s anything unusual about this kind of quiz. But it’s far from typical. Many educators are told during and after their training that it isn’t necessary for kids to retain factual information. After all, they can always just Google that stuff (or these days, rely on AI).

Not only is it unnecessary, they’re often told, it’s downright harmful. Drilling kids on facts and dates, it’s said, will undermine their love of learning and deaden their souls. The word memorize is viewed with such deep suspicion in education circles that when I speak to groups of educators I rarely use it.

And yet, whatever you call it—memorization or retaining information—cognitive scientists have found that it’s the necessary foundation for all learning and higher-order thinking. The more factual information you have about a topic, the easier it is to learn more about it—and to think about it analytically. Googling information is far more inefficient and unreliable than being able to retrieve it, more or less automatically, from long-term memory.

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In that sixth-grade civics classroom, students learn the location of all 50 states and memorize 23 dates in American history, along with their significance. Do they find this soul-deadening? Not as far as I can tell from a bunch of artifacts, including classroom videos and student work, that the teachers of the class sent me. In one video, after two boys successfully engage in a timed oral quiz on the Depression and Franklin Roosevelt, the class erupts in cheers and one of the boys performs an impromptu victory dance.

One of the assessments these sixth-graders take is the U.S. Citizenship Test. It’s estimated that only 39 percent of American adults can get a passing score. For these kids, by the end of the school year, the pass rate is more like 85 percent.

Hobbes and Locke

But the class is not just about learning factual information; it’s also about using that information as a springboard for making connections and engaging in analysis. Students learn, for example about the different philosophies of government espoused by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. They also learn about American and Chinese history and the two countries’ systems of government. Once they have all this information under their belts—and have done some writing about it—they get the following writing assignment:

Which type of government is better for its people, the Chinese or American government, and why?

Describe each type of government, connect these to the philosophers John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, and explain the impact of the historical context of each country on its form of government.

One thing I haven’t mentioned: this isn’t a fancy private school or a selective public school for kids who are “gifted.” It’s a middle school called KIPP Beyond, part of the KIPP charter school network, located in Morningside Heights in New York City. According to its principal, Joe Negron, about 70 percent of students qualify for free or reduced price lunch, and the vast majority of families identify as Black or Hispanic.

Here’s an excerpt from one of the student responses to that question about the American and Chinese systems of government:

Because of its country’s history, the Chinese government prefers order over chaos. The Chinese government evidently follows the beliefs of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes because of its history. The philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, believed that a stronger government should be more preferred over a weaker one so that the people of its land could be more protected from the violence of each other. …

The American government more closely follows the beliefs of the philosopher John Locke because of its history with stronger governments. John Locke said he believed that a weaker government is better for its citizens than a stronger government so that they can be protected from the abuses of a too powerful government.

The student connects the Chinese affinity for strong rule to the country’s experience of disorder after the downfall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and goes on to argue that the oppressive British regime led the American colonists to opt for weaker government. He or she ultimately concludes that the Chinese system is better because, among other things, Chinese citizens are “a lot more protected from violence” than U.S. citizens are.

Another student came to the opposite conclusion: the U.S. system is better, he or she argued, because it “provides lots of freedom for its people” and has “a system of government where no one person can easily become corrupted and abuse their power.”

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Wherever they landed, these students weren’t just spinning opinions out of thin air. They were drawing on many facts they had learned about history and philosophy.

In addition to the topics I’ve mentioned, the class also explores the 14^th Amendment, Japanese internment during World War II, and immigration to the U.S. Students at the school hail from 60 different countries, and the discussion of immigration provides an opportunity for them to explore their own families’ stories.

Prioritizing Knowledge

How, you may be wondering, did this class come about? The curriculum was the brainchild of an educator named Jeff Li. After a brief career in management consulting, Li decided to become a math teacher, winning awards and then becoming a principal. Eventually, he rose to the position of executive director of Teach for America in New York City. But he missed the classroom and in 2012 went back to teaching. In 2021 he co-founded KIPP Beyond with Negron.

“I wanted to anchor two subjects that get short shrift in American schools—Social Studies and Physical Fitness,” Li told me in an email. “So I taught both.”

Li also told me that after reading my book The Knowledge Gap, he became convinced that “too few social studies classrooms prioritized knowledge.” So he constructed a civics curriculum that would. And he made sure that much of the knowledge students absorbed would relate to history and geography, as well as current events. As the History Matters Review tool puts it, “History is the foundation of social studies, providing the context that makes civics, geography, and economics meaningful.”1

In 2025, Li left KIPP Beyond to focus on a project called The Movement Factor, which grew out of his foray into teaching Physical Fitness. It’s premised on the idea that “we are wildly underusing movement to help kids thrive.”

But another teacher, Ben Esser, has taken over the sixth-grade civics class and is continuing to use Li’s curriculum.

“Having Ben take over my class made the decision [to leave the classroom] a lot easier,” Li told me in an email. “I knew he would take what I built and make it better, which is exactly what he is doing now.”

Esser has, for example, added writing activities adapted from The Writing Revolution method. He’s also instituted a system of peer tutoring, adapted from Li’s own approach to teaching math. Last year, Esser said, the pass rate on the citizenship exam went from 84 percent to 99 percent, an increase he attributes to peer tutoring.

Making Memorization Fun

Of course it can be boring and soul-deadening to memorize information, but Li and Esser’s class proves it can also be fun. Around the holidays, for example, the class learns a song called “On the 12^th Day of Civics-mas,” which culminates in:

On the 12^th day of Civics-mas, my country gave to me …

12+1 colonies

11 national holidays

10 amendments in the Bill of Rights

9 Supreme Court Justices …

And so on.

One caveat is that I haven’t visited the school or the class myself, and my assessment is based on artifacts selected by the teachers. Still, I feel I’ve gotten a better view of the class than I could have through a one-time or even two-time visit. Li and Esser put together a 50-slide “gallery walk” for me, with multiple videos and samples of student work.

A more significant caveat may be that it’s not clear to what extent this civics class can be recreated in other schools. At this point, the curriculum is being used in only one classroom and is not generally available. Even if it were, it’s not clear how much of the success of the class is due to the curriculum as opposed to its implementation.

Li and Esser both appear to be extraordinary teachers who understand how to engage and inspire sixth-graders. In one video, Li “punks” the class by making them think he’s reading aloud a “break-up note” he found after it was passed from one student to another. The kids, wide-eyed, hang on every word.

“You don’t have any respect for me,” Li reads. “You don’t give me a chance to say what I think … You don’t let me buy what I want.” The note, Li eventually says, is from “AC” to “KG.” After warning them not to try to figure out who those initials stand for, he reveals that it’s the “American Colonies” breaking up with “King George”—in other words, the Declaration of Independence.

Proof of Concept

But even if this exact curriculum, and this exact class, can’t be replicated widely, it stands as proof of the concept that kids can actually enjoy memorizing stuff and can then—and only then—use that stuff as the basis for pretty impressive thinking. It can make them feel, as one student put it in an end-of-year note to Li, “smart and strong.” (“Before,” that student added, “I had no idea that we fought a Civil War.”)

“The day I said I couldn’t memorize dates, the states that all looked the same,” another student wrote, “you always added the word yet and now I understand why because I did do it. I will never forget this 6^th grade year!”

“We learned so much about American history and geography,” wrote another. “I always looked forward to the beginning of class when the warm up was a blank United States to fill in with States.”

As the 250^th anniversary of the United States rolls around, and there’s so much concern about students’ lack of understanding of civics, I can only hope that other educators—including those at the elementary level—will buck education orthodoxy and give students not only the opportunity to engage in critical thinking about the country’s history but also the opportunity to acquire the knowledge that will fuel it.

In any event, my figurative hat is off to Li and Esser and what they have been able to accomplish with their sixth-graders. As one student wrote to Li at the end of the school year, “my time in social studies was great, somewhat magical.”

Indeed.

There are still plenty of boosters of education technology—including, recently, Melania Trump—but it’s impossible to ignore the tsunami of backlash against it. Among the most prominent critics is a teacher-turned-cognitive-scientist named Jared Cooney Horvath.

Unlike many scientists, Horvath doesn’t shy away from making bold claims. His recent testimony before a Senate committee, which has gotten two and a half million views on C-SPAN, is arresting.

“A sad fact our generation has to face is this,” he says. “Our kids are cognitively less capable than we were at their age.” Since the late 1800s, he continues, every generation has outperformed their parents—largely because of more access to education. But that changed around 2010. Why?

The answer, he says, “appears to be the tools we are using within schools to drive that learning.” In other words, computers and other digital devices.

Horvath goes into his argument at far greater length in his self-published book, The Digital Delusion, which is set to be re-released by Penguin Random House. He marshals a great deal of evidence, buttressed by over 120 pages of footnotes. He also explains why screens disrupt learning, relying on three “core principles” from cognitive science.

Why Screens Harm Learning

First, he says, digital devices are built for distraction, interfering with the kind of attention necessary for learning to take place. Plus, they’re the same kinds of devices kids use for entertainment—gaming, videos, social media—so their brains default to the kind of multitasking they’re used to engaging in when using those devices. Evidence shows we don’t actually multitask. We switch back and forth between tasks, making us less efficient.

Second, a key factor in learning is an empathetic relationship between the teacher and the student, and it’s impossible develop that kind of relationship with a device. Yes, a student might feel like they’re developing that kind of relationship, especially with generative AI, but that’s an illusion—and a dangerous one.

Third, learning acquired through a digital device is less likely to transfer to other contexts. Because devices generally make tasks easier, students may not be able to apply them in real-world contexts that present more challenges.

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Some have accused Horvath of overstating his case. Others have argued that he’s using ed tech as a scapegoat for other more fundamental problems. There’s some truth to those claims, but on balance I feel that Horvath’s message, and sense of urgency, is appropriate.

It’s clear that schools have been investing heavily in ed tech on the basis of very little evidence, and we need a corrective. That doesn’t mean we should ban all technology from schools—not even Horvath is really saying that. But schools do need to be far more thoughtful about adopting it.

Was Everything “Fine” Before Ed Tech?

The danger I see is that Horvath’s message will be interpreted to mean that ed tech has destroyed a system that was previously working well—which is, indeed, what he argues explicitly in his book. In his opening chapter, he lists several “myths” that he says “built” ed tech. Myth #1 is that “education is broken.”

“By nearly every meaningful international metric,” he writes, “schools are doing just fine. … If schools are ‘broken,’ then it was the influx of digital tools that broke them.”

To which I can only say: seriously?

Okay, as someone who has written a book that uses the phrase “America’s broken education system” in its subtitle, maybe I was primed to bristle at “Myth #1.” But the fact is, there are many students for whom America’s education system has not been working for a long time: students from families with low socioeconomic status.

Horvath includes a page and a half of citations to support his claim that schools are doing fine by “nearly every meaningful international metric.” These references cover, among other things, declines in racial and ethnic disparities and gender gaps—but curiously, not socioeconomic status.

In the U.S. at least, socioeconomic gaps had been widening for decades before 2010—the critical year when Horvath says everything started going down the tubes. The introduction of digital devices may have exacerbated those socioeconomic gaps in the U.S., which have widened in recent years, but it certainly didn’t create them.

Similarly, in a post on his Substack, Horvath maintains that the decline in students’ cognitive ability can’t be blamed on curriculum, which he says “is arguably more complex and demanding than at any point in history.”

Again: seriously?

It seems Horvath hasn’t been keeping up with complaints about the dumbing-down of curriculum content and the near absence of whole books in many classrooms, including at the high school level. (Even the anthologies designed to teach reading used to include far more complex text; check out the McGuffey’s Readers of the nineteenth century.)

Horvath notes that passages on the SAT have recently become significantly shorter, attributing that trend to the influence of screens. Maybe. But it almost certainly also reflects the fact that teachers have been relying on brief passages and excerpts because their training and curriculum have led them to focus on teaching comprehension “skills” rather than any particular content.

If you think you’re just teaching skills, it’s going to appear a lot more efficient to use a few paragraphs or a single chapter to do that rather than a whole novel. But the result is students who can’t get through, let alone comprehend, complex, demanding text—even at elite universities.

Problems Go Deeper Than Ed Tech

I’ve been in classrooms that had lots of ed tech where very little learning was taking place, and I’ve been in classrooms with very little ed tech where lots of learning was taking place. But the absence of ed tech doesn’t ensure learning.

Some of the problems that Horvath identifies as being inherent to ed tech can and do occur even without it. Ten years ago, I spent time in a first-grade classroom that boasted a “one-to-one” device policy, meaning every kid had their own iPad. The devices were definitely interfering with students’ ability to pay attention, as Horvath says they will. But so was the general noise level, which wasn’t unusual for an elementary classroom with or without technology. I’ll never forget the tiny girl who, one day, pleaded with her classmates to be quieter because she couldn’t think.

And then there’s the question of transfer of skills. It may be that skills acquired through a device don’t transfer well to the real world, as Horvath argues. But it’s also true that, guided by their training and materials, teachers spend many hours trying to teach skills that don’t really transfer at all. They may, for example, have students practice the supposedly abstract skill of “making inferences” instead of helping them acquire the knowledge and vocabulary that actually enable people to make inferences.

In addition, at least two of the “myths” that Horvath says sustain ed tech certainly existed before ed tech arrived: “Free Choice Leads to Better Learning” and “Kids Learn Best on Their Own.” These beliefs, which conflict with the findings of cognitive science, are deeply embedded in education orthodoxy. They will undoubtedly survive the demise of ed tech, should that occur, unless that orthodoxy changes.

As Holly Korbey has warned on her Substack, we need to beware of silver bullet solutions, including those pointing the finger at screens. Technology can boost rather than impede learning, when used wisely. But to use it wisely, we need to understand both what science says about how learning works and how typical classroom instruction, with or without technology, fails to align with that evidence.

When I speak to groups of educators around the country, teachers sometimes tell me their district is using a knowledge-building elementary literacy curriculum. I usually ask which one, because I know that not everything that’s labeled “knowledge-building” these days actually deserves that label. Lately, more than one teacher has responded, “Benchmark Advance.”

The last time that happened, I said I didn’t know much about it. But a few days later, I came across two Substack posts by Olivia Mullins, an elementary science teacher. (See here and here.) She’s developing a K-3 curriculum that combines science content and literacy instruction. She also has a PhD in neuroscience.

Mullins’ children attend a school that uses Benchmark Advance, so she has access to some—but not all—of its materials. With that caveat, she makes a convincing argument that the curriculum lacks both the depth and the coherence to do an effective job of building knowledge.

Benchmark Advanced is one of the most widely used English language arts curricula in the country—and it’s far from the only popular curriculum that suffers from these problems and is nevertheless labeled “knowledge-building.”

Understanding the difference between a faux knowledge-building curriculum and a real one requires a dive into details. I invite you to join me on that dive, because the distinction has huge consequences for educators and students—and ultimately, for all of us. Kids who get a true knowledge-building curriculum are far more likely to acquire the knowledge that will equip them for later academic success and for assuming their responsibilities as citizens of a democratic society. My hope is that a fairly detailed analysis will help others to recognize what distinguishes a real knowledge-building curriculum from one that only claims that label.

Faux Cohesion

Mullins’ posts focused on two units, one from first grade and one from second. The first-grade unit, called “Observing the Sky,” is an example of what she called “faux cohesion.” The brief articles all relate to the sky in some way, but they don’t refer to each other or build on one another. They don’t, for example, repeat key vocabulary words in a way that would enable children to retain them in long-term memory. Some texts have too little content, while others introduce too many concepts without adequate explanation.

Another problem is that the texts are all intended to be “decodable” for first-graders—meaning that they use simple words that mostly conform to the phonics patterns students have been taught, so that kids can read the texts themselves. But when children are still learning to decode—and really, until they become proficient readers—it’s far more efficient to build knowledge of a new topic by having teachers read aloud from texts that are more complex than those students can read on their own.1

There’s also the fact that, as Mullins noted, “Observing the Sky” isn’t a coherent topic. The unit is mostly about things relating to space, but it also includes an article about clouds—which, yes, you can observe in the sky, but which relate to the topic of weather, not space. And the unit has nothing about the planet Earth, which does relate to space but which you can’t “observe” in the sky—at least, not from Earth itself.

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The second-grade unit Mullins analyzed, called “Investigating the Past,” is even less coherent. It includes, among many other articles on a wide variety of topics, a six-sentence text on Alexander Graham Bell and the invention of the telephone; a poem about the disappearance of buffaloes; a fictional diary entry by a child on the Oregon Trail; and a three-paragraph article on Helen Keller that is mostly about tadpoles. None of these articles supply any explanatory context. (Mullins’ posts include images of parts of the articles in the unit.)

No Significant Changes

Mullins did caution that her comments might not apply to more recent versions of Benchmark Advance. But I reviewed information posted on the publisher’s website about what is presumably the current version, and—with the caveat that I didn’t have access to the entire curriculum—I didn’t see many significant differences. The units Mullins critiqued were still there, although there does appear to have been an effort to make them more coherent. “Investigating the Past,” for example, now seems to focus on dinosaurs. But the unit titles still describe broad themes rather than specific topics, and the “essential questions” attached to the units are still vague—for example, “Why is the past important?”

A senior administrator in a large school district, who I’ll call Mary Jones, told me that the district had used a 2019 version of Benchmark Advance and later piloted the 2023 version. Teachers found the two versions “very much the same.” The new version was still, Jones said, “very thematic. It didn’t go into any depth to build knowledge.” (This administrator, like everyone else I spoke with for this post, requested anonymity in order to speak candidly.)2

Some texts in the current version that I was able to review displayed the same problems Mullins highlighted in her posts: lack of depth and coherence. A second-grade unit on “Plants and Animals in their Habitats” includes brief texts on worms, ladybugs, and “urban birds,” along with a poem written from a mouse’s point of view. The text on worms is pretty clear, but it’s only four paragraphs, and there’s little overlap in concepts or vocabulary between it and the other texts.

And, like Mullins, I saw some articles that didn’t provide enough information for kids to make sense of the text. For example, the text on ladybugs mentions that they “eat juicy aphids” in the summer but never explains that aphids are bugs that eat plants—so when the next paragraph states that gardeners buy ladybugs in the spring, students probably have no idea why.3

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It sounds like a nice idea to include a poem—apparently every unit has one—but as far as I can tell, there’s no effort to explain that poetry can take license with the facts in a way that the surrounding nonfiction texts don’t. The poem portrays the mouse jumping into a swimming pool, for example, and “roaring” back at a thunderstorm. Will kids understand that these events are fictional?

The teacher’s guide that accompanies the curriculum is silent on that point. Instead, the teacher is instructed to do a “think-aloud” about a reference to the mouse “thumbing its nose” at an owl, explaining that this indicates “a teasing action.” But nowhere is the teacher directed to explain that mice don’t actually roar—or tease owls, for that matter, or even have thumbs. (Mullins made a similar point about a poem in the “Observing the Sky” unit that she had access to: it implies that the moon changes its size because the wind “eats” it.)

Why Is This Seen as “Knowledge-Building”?

I could go on, but it’s important to address another question: Why do so many educators and policymakers apparently believe that Benchmark Advance is a knowledge-building curriculum?

One reason might be Benchmark’s own marketing materials, in which practically every other word is “knowledge.” One of its videos, for example, claims that each of its units is “focused on a single knowledge-building strand or concept,” and that the curriculum builds “a depth of knowledge that you won’t find in other programs.” The video concludes, “Every unit, students demonstrate the knowledge they’ve built … Knowledge matters.”4

Of course, educators and policymakers can go through the curriculum and try to evaluate it themselves, but curricula are extremely dense documents—and many educators and administrators aren’t equipped by their training to distinguish accurately between curricula that build knowledge effectively and those that don’t.

Jones, the administrator in the large district that used to use Benchmark Advance, told me that teachers there were able to recognize that the curriculum wasn’t actually knowledge-building only because the district had invested in building teachers’ knowledge about the science related to reading comprehension. They understood that the curriculum not only needed to provide exposure to information about the world but also needed to do it coherently, in a way that enabled students to retain and analyze that information.

As a result, when the district piloted the 2023 version of Benchmark Advance, “we knew right away it was not knowledge-building, it didn’t align with the research,” Jones said. In many other districts, teachers aren’t equipped to come to that recognition.

“If kids are learning about a topic,” Jones said, “that’s ‘knowledge-building’ to some people.”

One former high state-level education official told me that several districts in the state were so disappointed in Benchmark Advance that they used pandemic-related federal funds to switch to a curriculum that actually does build knowledge. But I was told by a senior administrator in a district in that same state—in a small city located within a rural county—that teachers there “love” Benchmark Advance.

Making It Work

This administrator, who I’ll call Jane Smith, said that she herself saw the difference between Benchmark Advance and a true knowledge-building curriculum when the district was choosing between options in 2020. Benchmark Advance seemed to her to be “more of a basal,” with excerpts rather than full articles or novels. (A “basal,” or basal reader, is a term used to describe typical reading curricula, which focus on teaching reading comprehension skills more than on text content. The use of excerpts is a frequent problem with basal readers.) But, she said, teachers chose Benchmark Advance, and “they’ve been able to make it work.”

Smith said teachers feel it aligns with their state academic standards in science, social studies, and literacy. They also believe that, while the curriculum lacks depth, it’s “deep enough that we’re building the background knowledge [students] need.” Teachers told her the excerpts “are great because kids can check the whole book out of the library if it piques their interest.” Scores on the state reading test have also been rising, with over 56% of students in grades three to five scoring proficient, as compared to only 47% in 2019, before the pandemic.

Of course, as Smith noted, teachers in her district “don’t have anything to compare it to,” because they’ve been using Benchmark Advance for so long. It might be doing a better job than whatever they were using before—and there are almost certainly worse curricula than Benchmark Advance out there. But it’s not clear how it would stack up against a true knowledge-building curriculum.

It’s also not clear Benchmark Advance is solely responsible for the district’s apparent success. Teachers supplement it with other programs for grammar, phonics, and writing, Smith said. And they only use it for grades three through five. For K-2, they use CKLA. That could well be partly responsible for students’ performance at higher grade levels, since the positive effects of a knowledge-building curriculum have been found to continue even after kids are no longer getting it.

Misleading Curriculum Ratings

Given how dense curricula are, and how difficult it can be to determine their quality, many educators and decision-makers feel the need to rely on third-party sources that rate curriculum. Unfortunately, most of those sources often provide unreliable guidance. Benchmark Advance has received top ratings from the most influential of these sources, EdReports. That’s all it takes for a curriculum to get on many state adoption lists, which guide district decisions.5

Another organization that rates literacy curricula, The Reading League, has also given Benchmark Advance an extremely positive review. While TRL is known primarily for its efforts to promote evidence-aligned instruction in foundational reading skills, it also reviews curricula for their ability to promote comprehension.

Significantly, however, Benchmark Advance does not appear on a list of curricula identified by the Knowledge Matters Campaign as effective in building knowledge. I consider KMC’s list to be the most reliable guide to finding a truly knowledge-building curriculum, but it isn’t a comprehensive source like those of the other two organizations. It doesn’t attempt to evaluate whatever curricula are available and assign them specific ratings, a fact that may limit its influence. (I serve on the board of the KMC’s parent organization but have no role in its reviews of curriculum.)

The Reading League’s review of Benchmark Advance includes an example that illustrates the confusion about what makes for true coherence. The review notes with approval that the theme of “Government” runs across grade levels: “Rules at Home and School” in kindergarten, “Being a Good Community Member” in first grade, “Government at Work” in second, “Government for the People” in third, and so on.

That might remind people of a similar “knowledge strand map” you can find on the website of Amplify, the publisher of a curriculum called CKLA—which, unlike Benchmark Advance, does appear on KMC’s list of knowledge-building curricula. But the topics in CKLA are far more clearly defined than the broad themes in Benchmark Advance. To build knowledge of American history, for example, it covers Native American cultures in kindergarten, “American Independence” in first grade, the Civil War in second, and a deeper dive into Native Americans in third.

Easy to Use, But at What Cost?

A curriculum consultant I spoke with told me that one attractive feature of Benchmark Advance is that it’s relatively easy for teachers to use, especially as compared to most knowledge-building curricula. EL Education, for example, is particularly difficult to implement well, and unfortunately it’s often chosen by districts that don’t have the resources needed to make it work.6 Without the right kind of support, many teachers who use a knowledge-building curriculum end up changing the lessons to focus on comprehension skills, diluting their value.

What teachers truly need, if they want their students to succeed academically in years to come, is an effective-knowledge-building curriculum plus the support and guidance to implement it in the way that its creators intended. But the first step is a reliable source of information about which curricula truly build knowledge and which do not. As education writer Holly Korbey has observed, our current system of rating curriculum is “frankly bananas.”

As I mentioned, Benchmark Advance is not the only curriculum misleadingly “certified” as knowledge-building. EdReports has also given undeserved top ratings to other widely used programs, including Wonders (McGraw-Hill), Into Reading (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), and myView (Savvas, formerly Pearson). Districts spend millions of dollars on these programs, locking themselves into using them for as long as a decade. Meanwhile, many students are deprived of the opportunity to acquire the knowledge that could enable them to reach their full academic potential.

A further risk of this mislabeling is that some educators, like those in Smith’s district, will believe they are using a knowledge-building curriculum and want to stick with it even when the next opportunity to switch to another curriculum arises.

Then there’s the risk that teachers will see the “knowledge-building” label attached to a curriculum like Benchmark Advance and also recognize its shortcomings. Understandably, that could lead them to conclude that all knowledge-building curricula are similarly flawed, putting them off the whole idea of “knowledge” altogether.

If we don’t somehow get a more reliable curriculum rating system—along with better support for teachers using true knowledge-building curricula—I fear the growing movement towards knowledge-building curricula, which holds so much promise for all children but especially for the most vulnerable, could be significantly slowed or even derailed.

Imagine you’re a fifth-grader named Ana. In your English Language Arts class, you’re reading the children’s classic The Phantom Tollbooth. But testing shows you read below grade level. So you also get an “intervention” consisting of a computer program that gives you a text written below grade-level—on the topic of endangered species.

And you get tutoring, where you practice identifying “sight words” from a list the tutor found online—words that probably have nothing to do with either The Phantom Tollbooth or endangered species. Lastly, because English isn’t your native language, you get another intervention for multilingual learners where you practice the skill of determining cause and effect, using an article on the water cycle.

Now imagine you’re at a different school and you’re in fourth grade—but your name is still Ana, and your reading ability is still below grade level. Your ELA class is doing a unit on human anatomy, and today the text is a story about how blood circulates through the body.

Before class, in a tutoring session, you read an easier text on a related topic—red blood cells—building knowledge and vocabulary you’ll need to understand the classroom text. During class, you participate in a small group led by a co-teacher who reviews words that start with circ, like circulation—including circle and circumference—so you can grasp the idea that it’s a word root having to do with things that are round or go around. That helps you remember the meaning of circulation, as well as to figure out the meaning of other unfamiliar words using the same root that you encounter in the future.

These two hypotheticals come from two recent reports on the topic of “instructional coherence,” one from TNTP and the other from CCSSO (an acronym for Council of Chief State School Officers). There’s a good deal of overlap between the two reports—including the fact that, for some reason, the authors of both reports chose the name “Ana” for their hypothetical student. Each Ana needs help to engage in grade-level work, but they have very different experiences.

TNTP Ana—the first one described—gets a jumble of “supports” covering random topics. The assumption is that what she needs is just more reading, or more practice with comprehension skills like “determining cause and effect.” CCSSO Ana, on the other hand, gets a series of coordinated activities to help her understand the specific text she’s expected to read in class. “We call this experience,” the CCSSO report notes, “instructional coherence.”

Adding to Cognitive Load

Unfortunately, most kids are likely to get TNTP Ana’s incoherent experience. TNTP cites data from the RAND Corporation showing that teachers now use an average of five different supplemental programs every week to support differentiation and small group instruction. Rarely do those programs connect with each other or with the core curriculum.

“A typical school day for a low-performing student may include exposure to multiple curricula, conflicting instructional routines, and disconnected goals,” the TNTP report says. The CCSSO report notes that this mishmash is often well-intentioned. The assumption is that if a student isn’t learning during class, it’s because they need a different approach. But as both reports note, the daily barrage of different curricula, routines, and vocabulary only ends up adding to the cognitive load imposed on students who are already the most vulnerable.

Perhaps that’s why, as TNTP observes, a study of four districts in Tennessee found that the students who got the most “support”—those identified as needing “Tier 3” intervention—made less progress than similarly low-performing peers who got no support.

And it’s not just a few students who get such presumed support. In those Tennessee districts, nearly half of students qualified for Tier 2 and 3 intervention. (Regular classroom instruction is considered “Tier 1.”)

Coherence Across Subjects

Clearly, instructional coherence is needed across the curriculum. The CCSSO report uses, as one of its case studies, a school that takes different approaches to coherence depending on the subject area. For foundational reading skills like phonics, the school diagnoses the specific gaps an individual student has—rather than relying simply on a vague test score—and addresses them explicitly. For math, support focuses on the concepts and skills students need for upcoming lessons.

And for reading comprehension, rather than focusing on isolated “skills” using different topics—the approach poor TNTP Ana got—students get injections of the specific knowledge and vocabulary they need to understand the texts and concepts in the core curriculum. That might include reading a simpler text or watching a video on the same topic, in preparation for reading a grade-level text, and more time and support for understanding the grade-level texts themselves.

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In contrast, the TNTP report—despite offering a hypothetical focused on incoherent reading comprehension support—limits its discussion of coherence to foundational reading skills. That’s because the school district the report uses as a case study, Knox County, Tennessee, decided to begin its work on coherence in that area, according to Devon Gadow, TNTP’s vice president of national consulting. (The CCSSO report also chooses, as one of its two case studies, a school in Knox County—and the examples of instructional coherence from that school in the CCSSO report are also limited to foundational skills.)

Neither report identifies the specific curricula used in the schools they describe, just referring to them as “high-quality instructional materials”—a frequently misleading label. I was curious about which ELA curriculum Knox County was using, so I searched for information online and discovered it was Benchmark Advance.1

Is Benchmark Advance “High-Quality”?

That curriculum is widely used, but I was surprised to see it described as “high-quality.” I had just read two posts by Substacker Olivia Mullins that eviscerated its reading comprehension component, demonstrating that the texts and topics it included were too incoherent and superficial to build the kind of knowledge that enables comprehension (see here and here).

Mullins described Benchmark as lacking in “cohesion,” which is pretty much the same thing as lacking coherence. It struck me as ironic, to say the least, that reports focusing on the need for instructional coherence would choose to hold up as models schools that are using a curriculum that is itself incoherent in its attempt to build knowledge.

It’s not clear that Mullins’ critique is directly applicable to Knox County, because the version of the curriculum she wrote about may be older than the one used by the district. But based on conversations with others who are familiar with different versions of Benchmark Advance, and my own review of parts of the most recent version, its approach to comprehension hasn’t changed substantially. I’ll be addressing that issue in my next post.

Both the TNTP and CCSSO reports include recommendations for how states and districts can encourage instructional coherence, all aimed at aligning the extra support provided to struggling students with the core curriculum. Most of those recommendations make sense—but only if the core curriculum itself is actually “high quality” in all respects.2 For students in Knox County and many other places, coherent instruction limited to foundational reading skills won’t be enough to ensure they reach their full potential.

Nathaniel Hansford, a Canadian teacher and education blogger, is the lead author of a newly published meta-analysis of 71 studies of reading comprehension. It’s the result, he writes, of three and a half years spent screening over 1,500 studies and re-running analyses countless times—which involved “learning far more statistics than [he] ever planned to.” As far as I can tell, Hansford doesn’t have a formal background in statistics or mathematics, so this is an impressive achievement.

But the meta-analysis fails to provide much useful guidance. Do the benefits of comprehension strategy instruction plateau after just a few hours, as some have argued? Maybe yes, maybe no. Ditto, at least according to Hansford, for whether the benefits of building students’ knowledge increase the longer the process continues.

In any event, given that the knowledge-building interventions in the studies didn’t involve coherent knowledge-building curricula—they just incorporated some science or social studies content into literacy instruction—Hansford cautions that “conclusions drawn here should not be interpreted as direct evidence for or against knowledge-building models.”

Still, the meta-analysis contains a strong undercurrent of skepticism about the benefits of knowledge-building for reading comprehension, and it’s something other commentators have picked up on.

On his Substack, David Didau has described Hansford’s finding of relatively strong evidence for reciprocal teaching—which incorporates four comprehension strategies—as “inconvenient for advocates of ‘knowledge-rich’ approaches to education.” Harriet Janetos, another education Substacker, took the release of the meta-analysis as an occasion to criticize the “knowledge-building movement” for “setting up No Strategies Allowed signs” rather than identifying the strategies that are most likely to be helpful.

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Speaking as an advocate of knowledge-building, I don’t consider the findings in Hansford’s meta-analysis “inconvenient.” Rather, I find the whole endeavor of questionable value, partly because of the faulty premises of the underlying studies and partly because I believe the meta-analysis understates the evidence for knowledge-building.

I also don’t think it’s fair to say that the knowledge-building movement has set up “No Strategies Allowed” signs. Of course, there’s no official leader of the movement and consequently no single disciplined message. Some knowledge advocates may have argued, or appeared to argue, that all strategy instruction should be verboten.

In any event, it’s understandable that knowledge advocates have targeted skill-and-strategy instruction, given that it routinely displaces subjects like social studies and science from the curriculum. I’ve seen and heard of many instances of skill-and-strategy instruction being way overdone, but I haven’t encountered reports of American kids getting too much knowledge-building.

It’s Not About Choosing Strategies or Knowledge

Still, I and others have argued that it’s not a question of choosing between strategy instruction and knowledge. Rather, it’s about putting a particular text or topic in the foreground and bringing in whatever strategies—or skills or literacy standards—are appropriate to enable students to make meaning from it. That’s different from the typical approach, which is to use a text on some random topic to try to teach a particular strategy.

But back to Hansford’s meta-analysis. One problem is that he puts knowledge-building, or what passes for knowledge-building in the studies he includes, in the same category as strategy instruction. But knowledge-building is what actually enables students to use strategies, or at least to use them for more than the few weeks the typical study lasts.

Take the strategy of “making inferences.” Readers with ample knowledge of the topic are likely to make inferences automatically, while those who lack such knowledge may find it impossible. The same is largely true of the strategies of summarizing and “finding the main idea and key details”—although even students who are knowledgeable about a topic will often need explicit instruction in how to do those things.

The value of strategies is that they get students to pay attention to text they’ve read and ask questions about it. That can boost comprehension. But without a certain level of relevant knowledge, students won’t be able to answer the questions they’re asking, no matter how hard they try.

Failure to Transfer

In his post, Hanford says that “the most surprising result” of the meta-analysis was that the positive effects of content or background knowledge instruction didn’t reliably transfer from tests created by the researchers to standardized measures of progress. This was also true for the other interventions he analyzed. David Didau also called this finding surprising and one that should “give us pause.”

But it’s well known that when researchers use assessments they’ve created themselves, the “effect sizes” are typically larger than when they use assessments created by others. When researchers devise their own tests, they’re likely to measure the skill or content that was taught as part of the study. Standardized or “far transfer” measures, on the other hand, aren’t tied to any particular skills or body of knowledge.

That’s why researchers generally consider standardized measures more reliable indicators of whether an intervention has “worked.” The idea is that those tests are more rigorous because they assess whether students are able to transfer what they’ve learned to another context—which is, of course, the ultimate goal.

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But especially when it comes to knowledge-building, it’s difficult if not impossible to see transfer effects in the few weeks that most studies last. Students need to acquire a critical mass of general academic knowledge and vocabulary before they’re equipped to understand texts on unfamiliar topics. The only reliable way to enable them to reach that point is through teaching them about lots of specific topics, over a period of time, because information and vocabulary need a meaningful context in order to stick in long-term memory.1

Overlooked Studies Showing Transfer

In his meta-analysis, Hansford found that “content instruction” failed to show any statistically significant effects on standardized measures and only “negligible” effect sizes on researcher-created ones. He acknowledges that “some have suggested that content instruction may require long-term implementation to demonstrate effects.” But he claims that “the current evidence base was not sufficient to support or refute this claim.”

In fact, though, we do have evidence from at least two studies supporting that claim. For some reason, neither is included in Hansford’s database.2 Both studies found meaningful positive effects on assessments that tested “far transfer,” of the kind assessed by standardized tests, but only after three years.

None of the studies on “content” or knowledge-building that Hansford included in his database lasted more than 45 weeks. Given their short duration, it would have been surprising if any of them had turned up a medium or large effect size on a standardized measure.

Speaking of effect sizes, that’s another problem with the meta-analysis. An effect size is a way of comparing results from studies that use different measures. It can be “statistically significant,” meaning that the result is unlikely to be due just to chance, but that doesn’t necessarily make it meaningful in the real world. So researchers categorize effect sizes as small, medium, or large.

Hansford used his own classification scheme for evaluating the size of results, which appears to be similar to one called Cohen’s d. But as education researcher Matthew Kraft has argued, that framework is unrealistic for education interventions, the vast majority of which fail to produce effects that would even be considered small under its standards. Kraft has proposed a more generous framework for evaluating effect sizes in education studies using standardized measures.3

Hansford dismisses one meta-analysis, which he says is often used to provide support for knowledge-building, as showing only “small” effect sizes on comprehension. But the study’s authors characterize the effect sizes as “large.” The apparent reason for the discrepancy: Hansford used something like the Cohen’s d framework, and the authors of the study used Kraft’s.

The Risks of Relying on These Findings

Educators could misinterpret Hansford’s meta-analysis as a takedown of all knowledge-building curricula, despite his disclaimer to the contrary. Another risk is that they’ll use the findings as a guide to instruction in ways that could backfire. Hansford found relatively strong evidence for “reciprocal teaching,” which involves four strategies: predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing. But that doesn’t mean it will be effective when used in the abstract. Like any other type of strategy instruction, it’s unlikely to work if kids lack the knowledge they need to apply the strategies.4

And it’s not always the case that “strategy instruction” is ineffective in the early grades, as Hansford and Didau both advise—at least in the context of a knowledge-building curriculum. I’ve seen first- and second-graders making inferences and predictions and “comparing and contrasting” right and left, when they have the necessary information to work with and the right questions to guide their thinking, even if the activities aren’t labeled “strategy instruction.” With younger children those activities are largely done orally and based on read-alouds, but they lay the groundwork for independent reading comprehension later on.

Meta-analyses and studies of discrete comprehension interventions may also lead teachers to continue to see reading comprehension as something best taught in the abstract, divorced from curriculum content—even if for only a week or two—rather than activities to be woven into instruction in any subject and at any grade level. To make real progress, social studies, science, and even math teachers need to also consider themselves literacy teachers, just as literacy teachers need to see themselves as content teachers. It’s all connected.

“Content” Alone Is Not Enough

At the same time, it’s true that simply teaching “content,” whatever that means, is generally not enough to improve students’ reading comprehension. Knowledge-building requires more than just providing students with information. Ideally, teachers will also ensure that students literally understand the information, are able to retain it in long-term memory and retrieve it when needed, and can reflect on and reason about it.

It’s also crucial to ensure that students become familiar with the complex sentence structure and vocabulary of written language, which can pose a serious barrier to comprehension even for those with content knowledge.

The most effective way to familiarize students with complex syntax and vocabulary is to teach them how to use those things in their own writing. Explicit, manageable writing instruction is also the best way to ensure students retain and understand key information and develop the ability to think about it in complex ways. Unfortunately, Hansford’s meta-analysis doesn’t include the existing studies on links between writing and reading comprehension, not to mention on learning in general.

Rather than more studies and meta-analyses that try to isolate and evaluate discrete reading comprehension “pedagogies,” what educators could really use are studies comparing one actual literacy curriculum to another—not just to some undefined “business as usual.” They could also benefit from studies comparing different approaches to writing instruction.

Ideally, these studies would last three years or more. But given how expensive and difficult it is to conduct studies lasting that long, we’re unlikely to get them. There will always be many more studies of strategy instruction than of knowledge-building—not because strategy instruction in the abstract is better, but because it’s easier to see quick results, making it cheaper to study and more attractive to researchers.

“Reading comprehension isn’t simple,” Hansford advises in his blog post. “And anyone who tells you otherwise probably isn’t looking closely enough.”

Amen. It’s so complex that it can’t be developed and reliably assessed in a few weeks, or even in one or two school years. When translating the results of fairly brief studies into guidance for educators, it’s crucial to bear that fact in mind.

Update, 3.3.26: After hearing from Hansford via Twitter, I changed this post to clarify that Hansford did not use the Cohen’s d framework itself in his study. I also added some information to the footnotes concerning Hansford’s view that Kraft’s alternative framework doesn’t apply to the studies he reviewed and about the apparent omission of two long-term studies from his database.

In The Cradle of Citizenship: How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy, James Traub provides a vivid picture of what is happening in all too many middle and high school history and civics classes. Content is organized thematically rather than chronologically, lessons skim over or skirt historical facts, and students lack the basic knowledge to understand texts and concepts or participate in class discussion.

Roaming the country over the course of a school year, Traub finds these problems even at schools serving relatively affluent students, but they’re particularly evident in low-income communities. In one middle-school class on the Civil War, most kids don’t know the meanings of words like “abolitionist” and “secede.” Perhaps not surprisingly, a group of recent arrivals from Somalia have no idea what the Civil War was. The teacher directs Traub to a group of white kids who at least know the vocabulary. But, Traub observes, “none had a clear idea who Abraham Lincoln was.”

Things are no better at the high school level. In a sophomore U.S. history class, students don’t seem familiar with the concept of the U.S. Congress. When the teacher asks students to name some differences between the two Houses, he’s greeted with silence. Eventually a boy offers, “They get elected for life?” Which House he’s thinking of isn’t clear.

For those unaware of the ignorance of history and civics pervading American classrooms—which, to be clear, is a systemic problem rather than the fault of individual students or teachers—The Cradle of Citizenship will be an eye-opener. But Traub’s observations won’t surprise anyone who’s been paying attention to the situation. That includes, of course, many history and social studies teachers.

One such teacher, Lauren Brown, wrote this recently on her Substack.

There is a terrible game that history teachers play. It’s the one where a fellow teacher says,

“I had a student who didn’t know who fought to keep slavery, the North or South.”

And you reply,

“I can top that. I had a student who didn’t know who won the American Revolution.”

The evidence isn’t just anecdotal. In 2022, only 13 percent of eighth-graders scored Proficient or above on a national test of U.S. history, and 40 percent scored below the Basic level. These are the lowest scores in decades, and essentially no different from when the test was first given in 1994.

Traub does find a few bright spots—mainly in the “classical” schools he visits, where students are expected to grapple with full-length, complex texts from the Western canon and anchor their learning in concepts like “virtue” and “beauty.” But the classical model has unfortunately become associated with conservative politics and Christianity, and Traub suspects, as I do, that many families will find it unappealing.

Civics Isn’t Enough

The book makes a number of important points—not least that schools can’t meaningfully prepare students for citizenship if they fail to inculcate some knowledge of history. A civics class isn’t enough. “Citizens,” Traub writes, “are called on to make choices that depend on knowledge, not only of this or that issue but of how our nation and other nations have succeeded or failed in the past.” Indeed.

Traub also argues that policymakers need to define specific historical content to be covered, lest instruction veer off into unproductive generalities based on concepts like “inquiry.” And he details the political obstacles to defining that content that have been erected by partisans on both the left and the right.

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Those efforts are designed to prevent indoctrination, but Traub sees little evidence that’s a problem—at least, not compared to the much more pervasive problem that students lack the background knowledge to understand what they’re supposed to be learning.

But while Traub provides a vivid picture of that problem, he stops short of unearthing its root causes and recommending specific solutions. He notes, for example, that some students seem unable to remember concepts covered in class just a week before, but he doesn’t suggest any pedagogical approaches that might help—for example, retrieval practice, a concept well supported by cognitive science but unfamiliar to most American teachers.

What’s Going On in Elementary School?

One particularly puzzling omission is an examination of what is going on in elementary schools. At one point, Traub notes, astutely, that the difference between students in more affluent and high-poverty schools probably has less to do with the quality of the schools than with differences in kids’ home environments. Affluent families, which are generally more highly educated, are in a much better position to transmit academic knowledge and skills to their children.

“Only a very different form of schooling in the lower grades could make up for what the [low-income] students weren’t getting at home,” Traub writes. But he doesn’t explore what that “different form of schooling” might look like.

The fact is, most elementary schools aren’t even trying to build the kind of academic knowledge and vocabulary kids need to succeed at higher grade levels—and certainly not trying to build their knowledge of history. Instead, they’re focusing largely on math and supposed reading comprehension skills. An increasing number of elementary schools are adopting the knowledge-building curricula that have been developed in recent years, but they’re still a distinct minority.

When Traub does venture, briefly, into an elementary school, he finds a second-grade lesson focused on what it means to be a historian, rather than on anything actually historical, and a fifth-grade class getting just enough information about the U.S. Constitution to enable them, theoretically, to craft a constitution for their school.

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One reason elementary schools rarely teach history, or even social studies, is that—as social studies educator Nicholas D’Amuro has explained—states don’t require testing in that subject at the elementary level (and only rarely even at higher grade levels). Instructional time ends up getting monopolized by the tested subjects, reading and math, on the assumption that more time on those subjects will yield higher scores. The evidence indicates that won’t happen with reading.1

A more fundamental reason for the lack of historical content in the elementary curriculum is the widespread belief—unsupported by evidence—that young children can’t grasp history because it’s too abstract and remote from their experience. Even Traub seems to buy into this belief to some extent, suggesting that “there’s no reason not to begin [teaching history] in the later grades of elementary school.”

Why wait until “the later grades”? I’ve seen first- and second-graders become fascinated by historical topics, even including the War of 1812, when they’re presented as engaging stories. Traub makes the important point that history has good stories and that students like stories, but he seems to assume that’s not true in the early elementary grades.

The History Matters Review Tool

Those looking for a practical solution to the problem Traub identifies can take heart from the release this week of a rubric for evaluating elementary history curricula by the History Matters Campaign. (That campaign is affiliated with the Knowledge Matters Campaign, and I serve on the board of their parent organization.) The new “review tool,” designed to support states, districts, schools, and publishers in their curriculum efforts, is grounded in four “big ideas,” most of which overlap with Traub’s observations.

These ideas are:

• History is the foundation of social studies, providing the context that makes civics, geography, and economics meaningful.

• History should be taught as a story—rich with characters, conflicts, and consequences—so young students understand how events connect across time.

• Literacy and historical understanding should grow together, with reading, writing, and discussion grounded in meaningful content.

• Civics is best learned through history, as students encounter the people and debates that shaped our democratic ideals.

To translate these ideas into practical action, the review tool outlines 29 different criteria designed to ensure that elementary history curricula build knowledge, use rich texts (including a judicious deployment of primary sources), and prompt discussion and writing grounded in historical content.

Of course, in order for this tool to be widely used, we first need to recognize that it’s crucial to start teaching history in the elementary grades—and to teach it well. There are significant obstacles in our path, not least state social studies standards specifying that kids will learn only about their immediate environments below third or fourth grade.2

But if we can draw the connection between the lack of historical content at the elementary level and the lack of basic historical knowledge at higher grade levels that occasions so much hand-wringing, we might begin to make some real progress.