The Core Knowledge Blog

The following piece is an excerpt from an article published in the Spring, 2007, issue of American Educator. It was written by Antonia Cortese, Executive Vice President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Core Knowledge is not mentioned by name in the article, but our readership will recognize some popular CK themes.

For the complete article, please visit http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/spring07/GetReal.htm.

Reprinted by permission of American Educator.

By the time children from low-income homes enter school, they are, on average, already far behind their middle-class peers. At the beginning of kindergarten, disadvantaged children are three times more likely than other children to score in the bottom quartile on assessments of reading, math, and general knowledge. In terms of specific skills, they are much less likely than their more advantaged peers to be able to identify the letters of the alphabet or to count beyond 10.¹

But the actual challenge they face is even greater: The same home and community factors that lead to the school-entry achievement gap are at work over the summer. Middle- and upper-class children not only enter kindergarten knowing more, they continue learning more every summer.² As a result, although the evidence indicates that in school, poor, middle-class, and wealthy children actually learn at about the same pace, by fourth grade, students from low-income families are nearly three grade levels below their peers in reading and about two grade levels below their peers in math.³

Think about that. On average, disadvantaged children make as much progress in school as their more middle-class peers. They are typically not behind because they have had worse teachers or attended worse schools, but because they entered school way behind. Unless these children are provided a much better-than-average, highly accelerated education, they will leave school behind, just as they entered. Simply legislating that they, and their teachers, make better-than-average progress won’t change this reality. If we truly want to close the achievement gap, we have to find ways to make sure these children get a better-than-average education. They will need more, and they will need better: time, teachers, effective methods — the best we have to offer.

Meeting the challenge is partly going to be the work of the educational research community, who must continue to find more effective approaches to teaching and schooling. And, an important part of the answer is to be found outside the schools,⁴ in better healthcare, nutrition, and housing, and in community-based initiatives to enhance parenting skills.

But even as educational researchers try to find better answers and as we all push for more equity in social policy, there is an enormous amount that we can do now. Much trustworthy research has already identified five essential steps we should take: 1) Focus on teaching quality, and in particular, create the conditions and incentives that would stem the exodus of teachers from high-poverty schools and attract qualified teachers to them; 2) Improve student behavior by using effective approaches in the earliest grades to establish a positive, respectful school culture; 3) Diagnose reading problems early and intervene right away; 4) Provide a knowledge-rich, grade-by-grade core curriculum; and 5) Make sure that the schools that serve the neediest students get the extra attention, expertise, staff, time, and resources they need to meet the greater challenges they face.

[Points 1 – 3 and 5 have been omitted in this newsletter. Point #4 is detailed below. —CK Ed.]

4. Provide a knowledge-rich, grade-by-grade, core curriculum: Our focus on beginning reading skills can’t be allowed to crowd out content subjects. To comprehend more advanced material, children need a very large store of background knowledge — and the vocabulary that goes with it. For example, a student can’t comprehend a high school lesson (or even a sixth-grade lesson) on the atmosphere if he or she does not have some familiarity with water vapor and gasses, does not understand what outer space is, and does not know anything about altitude. And it’s pretty hard to understand the current debates about global warming if one doesn’t have at least a cursory knowledge of the atmosphere and how it can be damaged.

Much of the background knowledge that enables advanced comprehension is imbibed as a matter of course by middle-class children. Plus, these children’s initial knowledge acts like a magnet, allowing them to more quickly and easily pick up new knowledge at a faster rate.²¹

But again, poor children are not so lucky. We don’t have good research on exactly how far behind they are in accumulating background knowledge, but vocabulary is considered a good surrogate for background knowledge. Research tells us that in their first three years of life, children from low-income families have, on average, been exposed to roughly 30 million fewer words than children from professional families. The result? The disadvantaged three-year-olds have vocabularies of about 525 words, and their advantaged peers have vocabularies of just over 1,100 words.²² When these disadvantaged children enter kindergarten, they will learn new material less quickly and easily than their middle-class peers.

If we are to bring these children to high levels of reading comprehension, we can’t wait one minute to begin building their knowledge base. What does that mean, practically? That the educational content we impart to students must be well-chosen and efficiently sequenced in the curriculum. We can’t afford to teach Charlotte’s Web twice and classic Greek myths not at all.

First, there has to be agreement on the vital knowledge that children must acquire to become advanced readers. And, that knowledge needs to be distilled into a clear, specific, grade-by grade curriculum sequence that can guide teachers’ instruction. Second, that curriculum can’t delay the systematic teaching of rich content. The broad, knowledge-rich curriculum that children need can begin in kindergarten (or earlier), by immersing children systematically in such fascinating content as classic fairy tales, insects and frogs, Langston Hughes poetry, or the way Picasso used color and shape in his paintings.

Third, part of this knowledge curriculum will need to be conveyed to kindergarten through third-grade children orally (since their reading skills are limited), through a thoughtful, well-sequenced series of knowledge-building discussions and read-alouds.²³ That will require new kinds of instructional materials and opportunities for teachers to build their understanding of this approach to building background knowledge.

Finally, we must resist the encroachment of instruction in beginning reading skills on the rest of the school day. I’ve heard of many cases where elementary schools devote their 90- to 120-minute reading block solely to skills instruction, leaving little time for teachers to offer instruction in science, history, geography, and the arts. As absolutely essential as early reading skills are, research suggests that instruction in such skills should not take all of this time.²⁴ The rest of the block should be dedicated to imparting the necessary background knowledge. This will require that administrators, as well as teachers, at every level understand the relationship between background knowledge and later reading comprehension — and the need to devote large portions of the school day to building that knowledge.

Antonia Cortese is executive vice president of the American Federation of Teachers. This article is based on remarks she made at AFT’s Winter 2007 Executive Council Meeting.

1. National Center for Education Statistics (2001). Entering Kindergarten: Findings from the Condition of Education 2000. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education.
2. McCoach, D.B., O’Connell, A.A., Reis, S.M., and Levitt, H.A. (2006). “Growing Readers: A Hierarchical Linear Model of Children’s Reading Growth During the First 2 Years of School.” Journal of Educational Psychology, 98(1), 14-28. Also see Alexander, K.L., Entwisle, D.R., and Olson, L.S. (2001). “Schools, Achievement and Inequality: A Seasonal Perspective.” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 23(2), pp. 171-191.
3. National Center for Education Statistics (2007). National Assessment of Educational Progress 2005 Assessment Results. See http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/nrc/reading_math_2005. In reading, while students who are not eligible for free or reduced-price lunch attained an average scale score of 230 points, those who are eligible scored 203 points. In math, while students who are not eligible scored 248 points, those who are eligible scored 225 points. The research community generally accepts that on the fourth-grade NAEP, 10 points is roughly equivalent to one grade level.
4. Rothstein, R. (2004). Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap. Washington, D.C.:Economic Policy Institute.
21. Willingham, D. T. (2006). “How Knowledge Helps: It Speeds and Strengthens Reading Comprehension, Learning-and Thinking.” American Educator, Spring 2006, p. 30-37.
22. Hart, B. and Risley, T.R. (2003). “The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap.” American Educator, Spring 2003, p. 4-9.
23. Hirsch, E.D. (2006). “Building Knowledge: The Case for Bringing Content into the Language Arts Block and for a Knowledge-Rich Curriculum Core for All Children.” American Educator, Spring 2006, p.8-29, 50-51.
24. Foorman B.R. and Schatschneider, C. (2003). “Measurement of teaching practices during reading/language arts instruction and its relationship to student achievement.” In Vaughn, S. and Briggs, K. (eds.), Reading in the Classroom: Systems for the Observations of Teaching and Learning (pp. 1-30). Baltimore:Brookes Publishing. Also see, Torgesen, J.K., Rashotte, C.A., Mathes, P.G., Menchetti, J.C., Grek. M.L., Robinson, C.S., et al. (2003). “Effects of teacher training and group size on reading outcomes for first-grade children at risk for reading difficulties.” Unpublished manuscript, Florida State University, Tallahassee.

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