Schools are getting an unprecedented infusion of federal funds. To improve students’ life chances, they should spend it on something that’s generally overlooked: an elementary curriculum that builds academic knowledge.
The federal government is disbursing about $122 billion in education funding as part of the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan (ARP). Combined with pandemic-related funds already given out, the aid amounts to nearly $190 billion to be spent over the next two years. The effort is being called “the largest single federal investment in K-12 education we have ever seen.”
Rather than trying to advance a specific vision of reform, as with Obama-era education grants, the money is just supposed to help schools reopen safely and “expand opportunity for students who need it most.” States and districts have wide latitude on spending. The Department of Education’s suggestions include everything from improving ventilation to extending “learning and enrichment programs.”
Local education officials who chafed under previous spending restrictions may be wishing for more guidance now. “How do we leverage one-time resources not to buy one-time things but to really change the system?” Nebraska Chief Academic Officer Cory Epler has been quoted as asking. “It’s not just about replacing every HVAC, but how can we also make sure every kid is ready for grade-level instruction so we don’t lose our students with disabilities, English language learners, or students in poverty?”
For Dr. Epler and anyone else asking those excellent questions, I have some thoughts:
Be circ*mspect about the label “evidence-based.” The one requirement in the ARP is that districts use at least 20% of the funds on “evidence-based interventions” to address learning loss.
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That sounds straightforward, but the term could just mean there’s one study showing positive effects. Meanwhile, there could be—and often are—more studies that go the other way. Or the organization that runs the program might have decided not to publish studies that didn’t come out the way they hoped.
Even when an intervention is supported by lots of studies, they may only focus on short-term effects; many studies last only six weeks or less. To “really change the system,” you need long-term results.
It’s also important to ask what an intervention is being compared to; if the control group got something unlikely to have much effect, there could be something else out there that would work even better. And there are some promising ideas that, for whatever reason, simply haven’t been studied yet. They might be worth trying.
Not all tutoring is the same. Tutoring is one of the few interventions backed by lots of evidence. Experts are recommending “high-dosage” tutoring that’s frequent and intensive, and many states and districts are including it in their plans.
Tutoring can work for math and foundational reading skills like phonics, which even many older students struggle with. But much if not most tutoring is directed at supposed reading comprehension skills: having kids practice “finding the main idea” or “making inferences,” using easy-to-read books on random topics.
That approach mirrors the standard elementary curriculum, and it won’t work any better with tutoring than it has in the classroom. Reading comprehension depends far more on academic knowledge and vocabulary than on abstract “skill”—which is probably why studies show that with reading tutoring, there’s “a pattern of declining returns” at higher grade levels. That’s when texts start assuming more academic knowledge, and if kids haven’t acquired it because they’ve only been practicing comprehension “skills,” their comprehension will suffer.
Ideally, schools would provide tutoring not just in math and phonics but also in the social studies or science topics covered in the curriculum, because those are the subjects most likely to build the knowledge that enables reading comprehension. But I’m not aware of any large-scale tutoring programs in those areas. One reason may be that elementary schools have cut back on or eliminated those subjects to make more time for teaching comprehension “skills.” And if schools do spend time on those subjects, that’s often when struggling readers are pulled from class for tutoring, which only risks putting them further behind.
Adopt a knowledge-building elementary curriculum. This isn’t one of the DOE’s suggestions, but it’s our best bet for addressing Covid-related learning loss—as well as the learning loss that has been going on for decades for the most vulnerable students.
Because of the dominance of reading and math at lower grade levels, kids often arrive at high school without the background knowledge they need to succeed. That’s particularly true if they’ve had limited opportunities to acquire academic knowledge outside school. Our failure to systematically build kids’ knowledge starting in kindergarten underlies the gap in test scores and other education outcomes between students at the upper and lower ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, a gap that has only gotten wider during the pandemic.
It’s best to use the same curriculum across as many grades as possible. Building knowledge is a gradual, cumulative process. A consistent curriculum will help ensure kids have the background knowledge they need to understand and analyze the new information they’re expected to learn.
Is building knowledge “evidence-based”? There’s plenty of evidence that background knowledge is hugely important to comprehension. There’s also evidence that better curriculum can lead to significant gains in student achievement. But most of that evidence relates to math. There’s less evidence that building kids’ knowledge boosts reading comprehension, as reflected in standardized tests, largely because that kind of change can be difficult to measure. But the evidence that does exist is hugely promising.
What about cost? A knowledge-building curriculum doesn’t necessarily cost any more than one that doesn’t build knowledge. States have regular cycles for adopting new curriculum, but there could be eight or ten years between “windows.” Districts would be wise to use their Covid relief money to buy better curriculum as soon as possible, without waiting for another cycle.
How can you identify a knowledge-building curriculum? That can be tricky. An organization called Ed Reports was established in part to help, and its early ratings of literacy curricula were largely reliable. But recently Ed Reports has given high ratings to curricula that, like those that dominate the market, manage to be both ridiculously overstuffed and thin on content.
I know of several elementary curricula that cover different bodies of knowledge in different ways. They all spend at least two or three weeks delving into a meaty topic, and they all expose every student in a class to challenging texts on those topics. A non-exhaustive list would include Core Knowledge Language Arts, Wit & Wisdom, Bookworms, and EL Education. No curriculum is perfect, but any of these will do a better job of equipping students for academic success than the standard approach.
Train teachers to implement the curriculum well. Simply adopting a knowledge-building curriculum isn’t enough to ensure success. Many teachers will need intensive, ongoing support that’s grounded in the specifics of the curriculum. An organization called Rivet Education can help schools and districts decide how to provide that.
Don’t stick with “skills” because of politics. In the current polarized environment, states and districts may be inclined to shy away from anything that specifies content, especially in social studies. But withholding academic knowledge from children and then holding them accountable for knowing it, as we currently do, is the essence of unfairness. And large majorities of students lack basic knowledge of history and civics, something that jeopardizes not only their own futures but the future of our democracy.
If no knowledge-building curriculum exactly suits your needs, supplement or tweak one. Those in left-leaning areas may feel that none of the knowledge-building options adequately centers the experience of Black and brown students. At the other end of the political spectrum, some may find certain texts or lessons in a curriculum too “woke.”
But rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, districts should adopt an existing curriculum and add or substitute materials that cover what they feel is missing. Creating curriculum from scratch is hard, and most educators haven’t been trained to do it.
One group of educators is publicly posting its efforts to supplement modules from EL Education to make them more culturally responsive. For a unit on the rainforest, for example, the group proposed additional texts on African rainforests and a poem by an indigenous writer.
The United States already spends over $700 billion a year on K-12 education, with little to show for it, especially for the most vulnerable students. For the sake of those students, let’s do something fundamentally different with the $190 billion coming down the pike.
