In Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1990, at the end of a conference of some one hundred people, hope was high. The conference had been called to improve and then ratify a content sequence for the elementary grades. Scholars, teachers, administrators, heads of associations, and subject-matter experts from all over the nation had come together to put the finishing touches on a provisional sequence for grades K–6 that had been sent out as a draft in advance. The draft had been previously reviewed by three separate groups of teachers across the country. The plan was to divide the attendees into working groups of ten, each with the job of putting the final touches on a grade level or a subject area.
How had we reached that point? Some initial preparatory work had been done over the prior three years, when professors Joseph Kett and James Trefil and I worked out a master list of topics and words that should be known to literate Americans. That had formed the basis of the cultural
literacy list of 1987, and then of the more topically organized list for the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy of 1988. It made sense that this
nonspecialist knowledge base of educated Americans could serve as a start.
Then it could be broken down into topics that might belong exclusively to high school and college.
What remained was a version that focused on what children needed to know by the end of grade six. We asked experienced teachers from all over the nation to break down that list by grade, kindergarten through sixth.
Now, over three days at the Boar’s Head Inn, we worked with participants of different political and pedagogical persuasions who had started out highly suspicious of one another but now had become persuaded of their mutual goodwill and patriotism.
There were ten working groups and five sessions. The groups worked on committees whose membership shifted in each of three sessions per day.
Each working group had been given full power to add or delete topics with regard to a particular grade level. The only rule was to take into account the teachers and students who would be using the programs. If you put a topic in, you had to remove an equally time-consuming topic. At the end of each working day, the changes were discussed and ratified by the conference as a whole. We had just unanimously ratified the last changes and were ready to close shop.
At the final session of the conference, a very sympathetic-looking gentleman came up to the podium and asked the chair (me) if he could address a few words to the conference. Of course! He introduced himself to the group as Paul Bell, superintendent of schools for Miami-Dade County, a huge and highly diverse school district, and the fourth-most-populous
district in the nation.
He began by complimenting the group for what we had accomplished.
He said that this sequence was going to be put into full effect in the schools of Miami-Dade within two years, with the initial implementation to begin the very next school year; that the parents and teachers in his district were hungry for this kind of coherent approach to substance; that they were tired of empty, skill-centered preparation for tests. He said he did not care what the initial tests results would say, because he knew, and he would make it clear to his teachers and parents, that this approach would ultimately make the key difference for all students.
Bell got an immediate standing ovation. I still get teary, though, when I think about Dade and Paul Bell. He went at it too hard, and three months later he was dead of a heart attack at age fifty-seven. And I still think of that unique pioneering effort by someone in high authority as a lost chance for our public schooling, and as the most tragic disappointment of my long journey in educational reform.
Paul would have prevailed. He was a powerfully magnetic person who knew the ropes. He had come up through the ranks as a teacher in Miami- Dade County. The results in the county would have shown up in the high school results and the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The United States would have taken notice, and perhaps we would have become unstuck much earlier from our failing schools.
The topic list that Paul was working to implement became the Core Knowledge Sequence, a grade-by-grade curriculum guide for some two thousand schools all over the country, including some whose successes I have described in this book. A part of the sequence is in use in some four thousand schools that follow the Core Knowledge English Language Arts program.2
If a state now decided to put similar coherence and specificity into the Common Core and create a “content rich” curriculum that the Common Core demands, it would probably do a more authoritative and politically acceptable job than we managed at the Boar’s Head Inn in 1990. But the theoretical premises wouldn’t be any better. There is a necessary logic to making the content of a society’s early schooling coincide with the already- shared knowledge and values of competent people in that society. And just as the completely open process at the Boar’s Head Inn turned a very diverse and initially skeptical group into colleagues at the end, so would a similar process initiated by one or more states ultimately be received favorably.
The resulting curriculum should offer a topic sequence for the whole of the elementary curriculum, not just language arts or some other subject.
Canada, which is tied for second place in the PISA rankings in reading, makes it clear that language arts is not a separate skill. To think of literature in that way is not far from what Horace Mann was getting at in his reports about forming our early public schools in Massachusetts. Our hypothetical forward-looking state would be wise to follow suit, and to abandon the now-known-to-be-incorrect premise that language proficiency is a natural,
inborn skill. It is a knowledge-drenched skill. Each utterance, to be understood, requires specific, unstated background information.