Skills, skills, skills! This is the modern day educational emphasis that teachers take for granted, but according to researcher and journalist Natalie Wexler, it is letting young kids down. The rest of the world is moving ahead while US literacy lags behind, and an increasing proportion of US kids fall short of proficiency standards across subjects—especially students from low-income families. The growing gap in achievement between the low-income students and higher-income students and overall decline in educated high school graduates prompts the question, “Are we missing something?” Wexler submits the problem and solution are straightforward, but whether or not educators embrace this alternative remains to be seen.

The Knowledge Gap refers to the glaring and widening differences in academic achievement between children from lower and higher socioeconomic backgrounds. The gap is also referred to as the achievement gap, the opportunity gap, and the test score gap, but at its heart, the issue is one of knowledge—knowledge of not just reading and math, but science and history.

A major problem with education today is the pervasive but misguided idea that teaching science and history before reading and math is developmentally inappropriate. Children need reading skills before they can delve into those topics, so the logic goes.

There are a few problems with this. One is that the research simply does not bear out this conclusion—neither do the standardized test scores, despite a heavy, heavy emphasis on skills. Another issue is that focusing on the skills of reading without any content leaves students learning reading in abstraction. As a result, “informational texts” and “main ideas” and “comprehension” don’t mean much to elementary school students. Moreover, science and history provide content and context that make learning possible and activate the skills, allowing them to “click.” What students don’t enjoy learning about Egyptian mummies and watching an explosive chemical reaction?

Without emphasizing content, students have no conceptual hooks on which to hang the lessons from even the most attentive, well-meaning teachers. With engaging science or history content, students learn to read faster and can comprehend better (in a word, acquire all the skills teachers are trying to instill), rather than just regurgitating abstractions related to reading. Unfortunately, the latter is standard fare for American reading education. This approach impedes reading and education because it waits to deliver content until students learn to read—an achievement that comes later and later, and, for many from low-income backgrounds, never. When these students haven’t learned to read, extra funding goes to doubling down on a defunct skills-heavy method of teaching, instead of giving them knowledge that would make learning possible, even enjoyable and relatable.

The Pour Over provides concise, politically neutral, and entertaining summaries of the world’s biggest news paired with reminders to stay focused on eternity, and delivers it straight to your inbox. It's free, too.

Check it out.

Standardized testing is on the rise, but there is no compelling evidence that it is actually helping kids learn. Despite astronomical spending, extensive testing, and a heavy emphasis on reading, large proportions of students score below proficiency benchmarks at elementary, middle, and high school levels. The vast majority of students are clueless about the world, too. History, geography, and politics—general knowledge in these topics is totally lacking. The lack is especially noticeable in low-income areas, where home life does not supplement classroom learning.

Schools educating low-income students tend to focus on narrow technical skills in math and reading until they “get it”—after which science, history, and civics can be introduced. But what if students never get to learn about those subjects because they never learn skills? And what if the best way for students to learn the skills is to provide pieces of context in which abstractions like “main ideas” and “inferences” can nest? Curricula that use content-rich texts to inform students about the world are vital for them to gain those skills.

This gap is a glaring and growing problem. Low test scores correlate to lower likelihood of pursuing higher education, of gaining employment and keeping it, of hope for the future. Inequality continues to soar and many low-income students enter universities only to be blindsided by their unpreparedness. They get stuck in supplemental courses for math and reading because their K-12 education let them down, and most of these students never get that coveted bachelor's degree.

What if the best way to teach kids to read is to introduce them to history and science earlier? What if reading comes naturally just through having a context, instead of assuming that students can’t learn history or anything abstract until they learn to read. Education is the last hope for alleviating intergenerational poverty.

The gap between middle class and the poor is a problem of knowledge—not skills.  The hope that more reading instruction and skills emphasis will raise test scores is a chimera, and there’s no data to support it. Adjusting the emphasis from skills to knowledge will give kids from low-income homes the best shot at a bright future.

The Common Core is a set of benchmarks developed and adopted around 2010 to redress the lack of cohesion between state standards and the shortcomings of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Educators began to realize that students were scoring far higher on state tests than national tests and began drafting unified common (though not “national”) standards. By 2017, 46 states had signed up, but the backlash from segments on the right and left was so severe that 21 states backed out of the initiative entirely or at least tweaked it to make it their own.

Contrary to popular belief, however, these standards don’t form a national K-12 curriculum. It’s more of a skeleton than the meat. Teachers and districts can adopt specific curriculum that align with Common Core benchmarks. What makes the Common Core unique is that it offers a different vision of education, one that includes skills but also gives more space for knowledge of the world. Civics, science, and history benchmarks are introduced earlier in elementary school. The language that the Common Core’s architects use to justify this shift is the need for “content-rich” texts.

The main difficulty with the Common Core is that the standards require students (many of whom do not have an adequate knowledge base) to handle complex texts. Under Common Core, students are expected to understand these texts without the background that makes that understanding possible in the first place. This is a fair criticism, but for this and all the other issues with Common Core literacy benchmarks, they are slowly facilitating a paradigm shift away from skills-heavy curricula and toward a framework that makes expanding the student knowledge base a real possibility.

A small-but-growing minority of teachers see the need for skills and knowledge, embracing the tension. By emphasizing content-rich texts, Common Core’s standards have helped awaken this awareness that will challenge students and become not only an opportunity to test their comprehension of the text, but to increase their knowledge base through the text itself.

What does Common Core’s knowledge emphasis look like in practice? Let’s look at Nevada as a case study.

Before Nevada adopted Common Core in 2011, their teachers organized lessons around state standards. One researcher and administrator named Aaron Grossman discovered that less than 20 percent of the standards showed up in the actual tests and that it was the same standards every year. So administrators and teachers learned to zero in on those “power standards,” as they are often called.

Adoption of Common Core threw Nevada’s education into confusion. Top administrators and politicians assured teachers that little would change, but Grossman discovered there were significant differences between state standards and the newly adopted Common Core. As he did more research, he found that one of the chief architects of CCS (David Coleman) was offering a different vision of education, particularly with his emphasis on putting challenging, complex texts in front of students—and not just with the purpose of getting the main idea or drawing inferences, but learning about the world from the text itself.

In a pilot project called the Core Task Project, Grossman and several others asked 18 teachers from various Nevada schools to give a complex text to students and see how they handled it. The piece was an essay by famed physicist Richard Feynman about his father’s influence on his life and career. Many teachers resisted at first, arguing that the text would be difficult to the point of demoralizing for their young students, especially those from low-income backgrounds and those without English spoken at home. Grossman asked that the teachers simply give it a try and report back.

Much to the teachers’ surprise, students struggled with the text, but loved the challenge and offered insightful responses. In some classrooms, students requested more assignments like it. Even English language learners (ELLs) were engaged with the text and enjoyed the assignment. This left many of the teachers to conclude they had sorely underestimated their students.

Word got around of David Coleman’s ideas and the Core Task Project. The same teachers came back for another session and with them scores of other teachers and principals. This time, they tried another experiment, focused on the poem “The New Colossus,” about the Statue of Liberty, penned in 1883. Teachers were asked to give the poem to the students. It was far more complex even than the Feynman piece, with vocabulary and allusions that even many adults would miss. Again, teachers thought Grossman and the Core pilot group were crazy, and once again, students struggled but embraced and enjoyed the challenge the text presented—including students still learning English and those with learning disabilities. In fact, many teachers reported that students struggling with English and disabilities were the most engaged and working the hardest to grasp the meaning of the texts.

As the Core Task Project grew and gained traction, more and more of these stories of teachers and students excited about learning kept popping up.

Coleman has become a controversial figure for his Common Core Standards, but stories like these corroborate his intuition that close readings of complex texts bridge the knowledge gap between low-income and high-income students. And more than that, they show that children getting excited about learning is not an idea reserved for starry-eyed, first-year teachers. It is a real possibility.

Nevada’s experiments with content-rich materials are not a one-off. Neither are the excited students who are far more engaged and beginning to enjoy reading instead of struggling with it.

There is a modest but growing movement of districts across the United States adopting new, content-rich curricula aligned with the Common Core, including cities like Detroit and Baltimore. Following the adoption of Common Core standards, New York created its own K-12 curricula from scratch, called EngageNY. It was an enormous undertaking, but EngageNY curricula became a nationwide sensation. The EngageNY website garnered millions of visits and then millions of curricula downloads. Within a few years, the number of downloads reached 20 million. States and districts would use EngageNY material as a template and adapt it for their own purposes. Nearly a third of math teachers were using it and a quarter of English language arts teachers. Textbook titans were scrambling as small grassroots movements began disrupting their market share.

These are all very encouraging signs, but even if districts embrace content-rich material that promotes close readings of texts, teacher buy-in will likely be a slower process. Teaching for knowledge as well as skills is a different approach to educating, and many teachers are undoubtedly comfortable sticking to what they have known. Even those instructors who do buy in are fighting a great deal of pedagogical conditioning.

Convincing teachers will require reorienting their gut-level intuitions through new experiences. This will entail a hands-on, trial-and-error approach to professional development, much like Grossman and Nevada’s Core Task Project accomplished by introducing texts to students and seeing if they stick.

The biggest immediate challenge to this end is the dearth of informed trainers who could instruct millions of teachers nationwide. The move away from reading comprehension toward content-rich material is not just an abstract dream, but a grassroots movement beginning to gain both traction and credibility. This is exciting news for all students, especially for low-income students who want to learn but have been hindered by misguided pedagogy.

Ironically, the best way to improve student skills like reading comprehension is to emphasize knowledge. Making space in the curricula for close readings of challenging, content-rich texts that expose kids to the broader world effectively teaches kids to read and gives them the opportunity to enjoy reading. If the content movement grows, it could prove the most revolutionary way to bridge the knowledge gap. 

Read Great Books, Drink Fine Tea. Gold River Trading Co. is an American tea and hot chocolate company that serves modern pioneers forging new frontiers and charting new paths. Blended and packed in the USA, Gold River's specialty blends pair well with great books, gold rushes, and interplanetary space travel. Shop now and receive 10% off using discount code “THINKR” at checkout.

These insights are just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of The Knowledge Gap here. And since we get a commission on every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.