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"The untold story of the root cause of America's education crisis--and the seemingly endless cycle of multigenerational poverty. It was only after years within the education reform movement that Natalie Wexler stumbled across a hidden explanation for our country's frustrating lack of progress when it comes to providing every child with a quality education. The problem wasn't one of the usual scapegoats: lazy teachers, shoddy facilities, lack of accountability. It was something no one was talking about: the elementary school curriculum's intense focus on decontextualized reading comprehension "skills" at the expense of actual knowledge. In the tradition of Dale Russakoff's The Prize and Dana Goldstein's The Teacher Wars, Wexler brings together history, research, and compelling characters to pull back the curtain on this fundamental flaw in our education system--one that fellow reformers, journalists, and policymakers have long overlooked, and of which the general public, including many parents, remains unaware. But The Knowledge Gap isn't just a story of what schools have gotten so wrong--it also follows innovative educators who are in the process of shedding their deeply ingrained habits, and describes the rewards that have come along: students who are not only excited to learn but are also acquiring the knowledge and vocabulary that will enable them to succeed. If we truly want to fix our education system and unlock the potential of our neediest children, we have no choice but to pay attention"--… (more)
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Natalie Wexler believes that she's found the missing piece in our constant efforts to reform education: knowledge. We have focused on skills as an abstraction, rather than the content underlying them. This is why even as lower grade reading scores show signs of improvement, 8th grade scores remain low and high schoolers lack key skills and knowledge.
She begins with reading, which I honestly found the most compelling section of the book. Reading comes in two phases: decoding and comprehension. There is good evidence that decoding is best taught using phonics-based instruction (and here she goes into the "reading wars" between phonics based and whole language instruction). Although the evidence is robust here, I have seen researchers caution that we don't necessarily have a proven curriculum for teaching it. The UK has seen success with its focused synthetic phonics curriculum. She takes particular aim at Balanced Literacy (which she regards as primarily whole-language based despite its name) and its primary author, Lucy Calkins.
The second phase is comprehension. This is where our instruction really goes off the rails. Wexler brings cognitive science and experiments in to show that our background knowledge greatly influences our comprehension of the text: imagine reading a story about cricket (the game) without any knowledge of what a batsman, bowler, or wicket is? The skills based approach jibes with my experience of my kids' elementary school. Since skills are abstractions that can be applied to any piece of text, the content is less important. Kids are encouraged to focus on applying specific skills (making text-to-self connections, following a sequence of events) and less to building up a larger store of knowledge for use with later texts. The emphasis is on self-connection and relating to texts--a skill my autistic child has difficulty with, and which, Wexler points out, can interfere with content if allowed to take over a topic.
Here's where we meet her observational classrooms. Both teachers are young, with only a few years of experience, and teach in DC charter schools. Both are portrayed as having good basic teaching skills. One teaches using a traditional skills based curriculum, the other uses Core Knowledge. Later in the year, the first teacher refuses to continue; she's replaced by another young teacher at another charter school. Teachers #2 and #3 both quit as classroom teachers at the end of the year (#2 moves to a private school; #3 changes positions). While these stories were interesting, too often I felt I was reading anecdotes used as data. I had similar qualms about the visit to Michaela Community School in London, which firstly was a poor comparison as a secondary school (an age when American schools are moving to a more knowledge based model) and two, I know from regular UK news-reading that Michaela is extremely controversial for its opinionated (to say the least) headteacher and incredibly rigid discipline policies (which said head believes should be done everywhere). That was glossed over in the book. The problem here, of course, is that much educational research is poor quality and politicians aren't much interested in investing in it.
Wexler doesn't blame classroom teachers. In her view, many are doing a good job--with what they are taught to do. They are not effective because they are "bad teachers" but because they are tasked with delivering an ineffective curriculum. Further they are taught that reading is an independent skill--that students must learn to read before they can read to learn, and that the two cannot be done in tandem. Teachers are also taught that most science and social studies are inappropriate before grade 3, which turns K-2 into a solid slog of reading and math blocks. (Math, where content and skills cannot be separated cleanly, is generally omitted from this book.)
Curriculum, moreover, is a political third rail. Even when educators want to emphasize content more, deciding what to include incites a political storm. E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy raised outcries from the left, but today, the right is more active, objecting to Common Core and the AP US History revisions. It's easier to define neutral, politically uncontroversial skills. Wexler places some blame on teachers here, who are afraid of losing autonomy--but overly scripted lessons have been an issue, and longtime teachers have seen many trends come and go, all claiming to be evidence based.
One difficulty here is that the largest body of evidence Wexler gets is on Core Knowledge, E.D. Hirsch's curriculum. While she's largely enthusiastic about it, she does herself some intellectual credit and admits it's imperfect--its science is less inspiring to the kids than the English/social studies focused units. There can be many ways to implement a knowledge based curriculum, or even to tie skills to content based units. In first grade, my son's class spent six weeks learning about the rainforest and finished by each writing a report about a rainforest animal that they presented to the parents. The kids loved it, and they clearly had managed to use all their skills while focusing on a coherent, planned set of materials and topic rather than the typical reader.
There's a lot more to this book, and I do recommend it, though with some reservations.