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1) Dr. Davis, I understand that you are heading up the incorporation of the Core Knowledge curriculum in New York City. How did this come about?

I am heading up the development of the Core Knowledge Reading Program, which is something we at Core Knowledge have been working on for several years now. We recently got New York City public schools interested in trying the program, which is very exciting.

To understand what is happening, it is useful to distinguish between the Core Knowledge curriculum, which has been around for almost twenty years now, and the Core Knowledge Reading Program, which is an attempt to create instructional materials that instantiate the Core Knowledge philosophy and bring it into the language arts period of the school day, and which is just beginning to be field tested.

The Core Knowledge curriculum has been used by hundreds of individual schools around the U.S., including a number of public schools in NYC.There are currently over 100 NYC schools participating in an initiative called "The Knowledge Network," led by Dr. Kathleen Cashin.

The Core Knowledge Reading Program is going to be piloted in ten NYC public schools this year. The NYC pilot program, which was just announced recently, came about after NYC Chancellor Joel Klein and Core Knowledge Foundation founder E.D. Hirsch exchanged emails about a year ago. Chancellor Klein had read Dr. Hirsch's book, The Knowledge Deficit, and understood Hirsch's argument that reading comprehension depends on knowledge.He began exploring possibilities for a pilot in NYC with the Core Knowledge Foundation leadership. The Fund for Public Schools, part of the NYC DOE, worked with the Foundation over the past year to secure private, philanthropic funding for the first year of this initiative.

2) What can you tell me about the structure of the program?

The Core Knowledge Reading Program is divided into two strands of instruction.

The first strand, the Skills Strand, aims to teach the mechanics of reading and writing.  It uses a powerful scheme of phonics instruction known as synthetic phonics, which has been relatively little used in the U.S. but has produced strong results and is currently gaining traction in the U.K.

The second strand, the Listening and Learning Strand, is intended to build up vocabulary and background knowledge that will help the children make sense of what they read. The L&L strand relies heavily on teacher delivered read-alouds and class discussion. The read-alouds include classic literary selections, fairy tales and poems, but they also go beyond traditional language arts content to introduce students to history, science, art, and music.

We think the two strands together will be a great one-two punch.  The Skills Strand should teach the students to decode fluently, while the L&L strand should help ensure that they have the breadth of background knowledge they will need to understand what the words they decode.

3) What grades will this affect and how will you ascertain the effectiveness of the program?

The New York City pilot begins this year with a field test of the kindergarten materials in ten NYC public schools that expressed interest in the Core Knowledge Reading program. These are schools that serve high-risk student populations, i.e., schools in which the majority of students come from very low-income families and/or families in which English is the not the primary language. We hope the program will continue with Grade 1 in 2009-2010 and Grade 2 in 2010-2011. But that will be contingent on success in year one and a continuation of funding.

The research division of the NYC Department of Education plans to use a quasi-experimental design to assess the reading achievement of students in the Core Knowledge Reading pilot schools, as compared to the achievement of demographically similar students in control schools using other reading materials and approaches. Within the next several weeks, students in both sets of schools will be administered nationally standardized reading assessments in order to establish a baseline performance. These same tests will be administered again at the end of the kindergarten. In addition, there will be formal observation of all teachers in the pilot classrooms to ascertain any possible correlation between the level of implementation of the Core Knowledge program and the level of student achievement. In addition, specific case studies will be conducted by the NYCDOE in three pilot schools to provide additional qualitative information.  

As far as the test are concerned, we hope to see a significant difference in word attack, word reading, decoding skills, and spelling by the end of the kindergarten year -- because the program has what we think is a very strong way of teaching the mechanics of reading.  Background knowledge and vocabulary take a bit longer to build, and gains don't start to show up on some tests until later, but, by the end of the three-year period, we hope to see the front  end of what we think will eventually be a very significant difference in vocabulary, oral comprehension, and reading comprehension.

4) Many years ago, I was fortunate enough to interview E.D. Hirsch. What is Professor Hirsch now doing and is he a consultant to this project?

He is now retired from teaching at the University of Virginia, but he is still very much involved with the Core Knowledge Foundation and the Reading program. The program is based on his insights into reading comprehension. It attempts to teach the material in the Core Knowledge Sequence, which he was instrumental in creating. He has also been a constant advisor to us as we develop the materials. In addition, he has also just completed a new book that expands upon the thesis presented in The Knowledge Deficit; the book will be published by Yale Press.

5) In your mind, how does knowledge and information assist in reading comprehension?

The research is very thorough and consistent on this point. Vocabulary, background knowledge, relevant information, and what reading researchers sometimes called "schemata" (or structures of knowledge about specific topics) are crucial for making sense of written material, just as they are crucial for making sense of spoken language. That is not just a claim of E. D. Hirsch;  it's a finding that has been replicated many times in the research literature in the past forty years.  I'd be happy to send you a long, annotated research bibliography. (It's more interesting than it sounds!)

As accomplished readers, we generally don't realize just how much we are relying on background knowledge to make sense of the ambiguities and unstated parts of a written document.  I have a little activity I've adapted from a published piece of research that shows how important it is to have the necessary background knowledge, and how having it cam make the difference between comprehension and failure. Try reading the following passage and see if you can make sense of it.

With hocked gems financing him, our hero bravely defied all scornful laughter that tried to prevent his scheme. "Your eyes deceive," he had said. "An egg, not a table, correctly typifies this unexplored planet." Now three sturdy sisters sought proof, forging along, sometimes through calm vastness, yet more often over turbulent peaks and valleys. Days became weeks, as many doubters spread fearful rumors about the edge. At last, from nowhere, welcome winged creatures appeared, signifying momentous success.

If you find this passage confusing, you're not alone. Most of the college students in the study I borrowed this from could not make heads or tails of the passage. But if someone supplies you with the schema, or key, you can apply that schema and make sense of the obscure parts.

This passage is about the voyage of Christopher Columbus. Now that you know that, re-read the passage, and see if it makes more sense. It should.  Once you have the schema, you can puzzle it out. But, of course, this only works if you have some knowledge about Columbus. What Core Knowledge does is give students a set of schemata that will allow them to understand what they read.

6) Is there any research that shows that Core Knowledge assists in promoting reading and writing in general?

We have some research that shows that schools implementing the general Core Knowledge curriculum tend to do better on state tests and other measures of achievement. Here is a website that summarizes the research:

http://coreknowledge.org/CK/about/research/index.htm

The effect of implementing the Core Knowledge curriculum is often relatively small in the first year or so, but it tends to be larger after the students have been in a CK school for several years. One study showed large effects in the later elementary grades, but not before.  This is exactly what one would expect. It takes a while for background knowledge to build up to the point where it shows up on tests of reading comprehension, but there's no getting around the connection between background knowledge and reading comprehension.There are no quick fixes.

To be honest with you, we don't have as much data on the positive impact of the Core Knowledge curriculum as we'd like to have.  We have some exceptionally strong anecdotal evidence from schools that have fully adopted the general Core Knowledge curriculum, and we have some studies that show promising results, but we don't yet have what I would call the "definitive" study, the one meets the highest standards for research design, that uses random assignment, features experimental and control groups, includes a large sample, follows students for several years, and is published in a refereed journal so as to erase all doubt about the effectiveness of the curriculum. 

The Core Knowledge leadership and Board are all very research minded and would like to have more research done on Core Knowledge, but it takes money and time to do the research properly, and we are often working with a shortage of both. Furthermore, we wouldactually prefer that researchers independent of the Core Knowledge Foundation initiate and conduct such studies to provide even greater credibility to any findings. The Foundation is very willing to work with researchers to attempt to secure federal and/or private funding for such evaluations.

I am hoping the Core Knowledge Reading Program and the pilot programs in NYC and elsewhere will provide some strong evidence of the effectiveness of Core Knowledge. The previous research on Core Knowledge was mostly research on schools that had adopted the concept of Core Knowledge and pledged to teach the topics listed in the Core Knowledge Sequence but were free to use any set of books and instructional materials to teach the content in the Sequence.  With the reading program we are developing a specific set of curriculum materials that can be tested.

In fact, testing has already begun.  We actually started piloting the kindergarten materials last year in a handful of Core Knowledge schools around the country. (This is a separate pilot from the NYC program.) We did Woodcock-Johnson reading testing on these kindergarteners this spring and the data is being analyzed as we speak. We hope to have it soon. These same schools are now using the Core Knowledge Reading first-grade materials with this initial group of students, and we will continue to follow and evaluate these students as they move through subsequent grades. Also, as I indicated, the NYC pilot will include a rigorous evaluation component.

7) With the current ipod and blog generation, how does the Core Knowledge program engage students? Or is this not a concern?

Engaging students in whatever they are learning is always important.  Our focus instructionally, however, is on the content of instruction. We are creating interesting, well written materials that capture the attention of young children. The kindergarten read-alouds on Columbus, for example, read like a set of serial, cliff-hanger adventures that leave young children asking for the next installment.We are fortunate to be working with a number of very talented writers; the Columbus selections were written by Jim Weiss, a nationally renowned storyteller.

With regards to technology, we are using online resources to help create a support culture for teachers field testing the program.

8) How involved is Chancellor Klein in the entire process and what is he attempting to accomplish?

Chancellor Klein was critical to bringing the Core Knowledge Reading pilot to NYC. He understands the theory that underpins the materials and has shown himself to be an articulate advocate for the pilot. He has tasked the fundraising entity of the NYC DOE with raising the money needed to conduct a longitudinal pilot with a strong evaluation component. He has publicly championed the need for this pilot in light of the continuing disappointing performance of 8^th and 12^th graders on reading tests, despite gains in the early grades, both nationally and in NYC. And he has voiced his commitment to expanding the initial pilot program if early results are promising. In short, he appears to be genuinely committed to improving education for all children in the NYC public school system and, in particular, to eliminating the existing inequity that manifests itself as the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged children.

9) New York City has some very good schools and some, shall we say, underachieving schools. Will your focus be any different in terms of the underachieving schools?

Some of the best Core Knowledge schools in the country are in New York City.Over 90% of students at the Carl Icahn Charter School in the South Bronx are reading on or abover grade level.P.S. 124 in Queens won a national award from the Education Trust last year for its ability to close the achievement gap.These schools help prove what Dr. Hirsch has been saying about Core Knowledge from its inception: it's a program dedicated to achieving equity in educational outcomes. Although people have been slow to see this, it is a curriculum designed for social justice.  The well-off kids, the ones whose parents read to them, teach them about numbers and letters, take them to New York and Washington, DC in the summer, visit museums, listen to public radio, and so on – those kids are going to tend to soak up a lot of cultural literacy in the home environment, and they will be able to make sense of a lot of what they read. But other kids are not as fortunate.  These children need to get their cultural literacy in the schools. These are the children the Core Knowledge Foundation is looking to help, and they are also the children we are hoping to help with the reading program..

We will have the same focus in underachieving schools as we would have anywhere else. Our view is that a coherent, specific curriculum that builds background knowledge and includes explicit teaching of decoding will be beneficial for all children.  The gifted students may be able to run farther with the information that is taught, but everybody benefits from learning about Native Americans and the Pilgrims, the civil rights movement, the three branches of government, electrons, protons, neutrons, biology, art and music. And everybody benefits from clear systematic teaching about how the English writing system works.

The reverse is true as well. A curriculum that is agnostic about content, that says "it doesn't matter what you read so long as you read something," tends to hurt all students, but it tends to hurt the disadvantaged the most. 

Similarly, my research has convinced me that the whole language philosophy of reading instruction, which dominated reading instruction in this country for the last twenty years or so, has harmed many children from disadvantaged backgrounds. That was not the intention – many of the early whole language advocates were very concerned that schools promote fairness and social justice – but I believe it has been the outcome. The whole language philosophy claims that students will learn to read spontaneously, without much explicit instruction, if they get exposure to print in "natural" or "authentic" contexts. Well, a goodly percentage of children do learn to read in whole language classrooms, but others do not. And that is not really so surprising, because the English writing and spelling system is actually fairly complicated and depends on being able to hear phonemes in spoken words, which is not something we have to do when we are speaking and listening. If a kid from a middle class household fails to crack the code in a whole language classroom, his parents will offer support and maybe even seek outside tutoring. But those options are not always available to disadvantaged parents. We believe that the very explicit teaching of the alphabet code we do in the Skills Strand of our program is going to help all students and ensure that many fewer students are left behind.

10) Now, let's talk assessment. What specific test or tests are you going to use and who is going to analyze the data. AND, let this me be the first to volunteer my services to look at the data and draw my own conclusions based on the data. What say you?(and I can handle large data sets!)

The specific standardized assessment tools that will be used are the Woodcock-Johnson Diagnostic Reading Battery, the DIBELS, which measures phonemic awareness and early decoding skills, and the Terra Nova, a standardized assessment of children's knowledge and achievement in specific content areas, such as science or social studies. The evaluation component and analysis of data will be conducted by the research division of the NYC DOE, so if you want to volunteer your services, contact them!

11) What question have I neglected to ask?

Lots, probably. Contact me again if you'd like, later in the year!

Published September 9, 2008