The kids all looked eager and engage that when we went to High School Classrooms it was a different picture. No one seems to understand why but there has been a lot of attention on this high School Problem so i stumbled upon and i cant say i solve this mystery myself i stumbled upon the fact that the problems that become so apparent in high school is the way we teach in Elementary School. Can you describe for people who were not usually knowing what is a content rich curriculum look like . Guest first of all it focuses on content rather than comprehension, reading comp should mention comp ranch and skills which really is a universal approach in this country to Elementary Education. He spent a lot of time on reading especially in highstakes math test 20 years ago now and reading that kids are doing is not designed to build their knowledge of that or anything in particular. The ideas idea is to get them to master skills like finding a main idea or making an inference and the theory is he will be able to apply that and tested in front of you. The problem is that scientists can study the learning process and they have known for decades the most important fact year in what you can understand what youre reading is not generally affable skills how much back around knowledge you have of the topic. We should be doing the opposite of what we have been doing. We should be increasing the amount of time they are spending on social studies and science and expand their knowledge of the world rather than in some cases eliminating them from the curriculum and spending hours every day on usury skills. There are many different ways of building kids knowledge in their are different kinds of curriculum that can do that. The thing they all have in common is they focus on process rather than on skills and they have teachers reading aloud to children while the children are still learning to read because kids can take in so much more information through listening really really through middle school on average in the concept and the vocabulary and the syntax in and written language are more complex than in spoken line glitch. They need to expose them to do so when they are able to read independently they understand that they are reading. Host talk a little bit more about how it looks different when they are teaching content which is curriculum versus when they are teaching skills. Guest well, it can look more challenging to teachers because you know teaching skills the theory is all you really need to do is a minilesson 10 or 15 minutes of modeling skills. He read a lock that you choose not for its content and not for what its about for how well it might lend itself to demonstrate modeling comparing and contrasting or determining the authors purpose or whatever and then you just have to read that look and say this phrase is coming up a lot so maybe thats the main idea or im thinking that this or is planning to do x and make an inference and then you just provide the kids with books. They are determined to be at their own individual reading level they theoretically go off a practice that skill. So it doesnt require a lot of contact knowledge on the teachers part or really a lot of effort involved and sometimes the hard work of building kids knowledge but in a content focused class using a content focused knowledge building curriculum for teachers going to focus on whatever youre topic the curriculum covers and i have to say a lot of Elementary Teachers basically designed their own curriculum. That is a tremendous burden to place on teachers who are juggling so many things. Their attention should be focused on how that can deliver a content not how they can come up with it from scratch. They are not trained to do that so it context open classroom ideally the teacher would be provided with topic so there books and reading and maybe in a couple of weeks or more in the topic and there theories organized around that topic that you read aloud to kids or sometimes on their own depending on their reading ability. And i think from having been on both sides of the classroom that teachers and students find experience of a content book in the class are much more engaging and much more satisfying. Host that gives kids a chance to really explore the things that they are interested in. This is when you discover birds are dinosaurs or whatever. Guest and they discover things that they didnt know they were interested in. I think there is a prevailing thought that we should let kids choose what they want to study. Its kind of inculcated in future training that kids should get a lot of try some let them pursue their own interest and yes theres a place for that but especially kids coming to School Without a lot of knowledge of the world, they dont know yet what they are interested in. There are a lot of topics they can get interested and ive seen kids get fascinated by it greek mythology and believe me they werent picking this up at home. They knew nothing about rick mythology and is not necessarily something being counter in their daily lives but they love it and they are really interested. Host its so interesting. I completely buy the argument the kitchen exposed to content rich curriculum. That was my experience in the Public Schools were in the fourth grade i fell in love with greek mythology. Kids were not talking about that in my home. Im curious about how you would grapple with the question of who did term and what content should be taught. I think there are a lot of challenges around understanding who decides what kids should learn and so i want to pick your brain a little bit on that. Who gets to decide the curriculum . Guest that is the question that comes up a lot and its a very good question but i would say several things. One is we are to make those decisions when it comes to curriculum. Kids are somehow we managed to decide what kids should learn and the problem is if we wait until High School Students implement those decisions many kids dont have the background knowledge when they get to high school to understand what we want them to learn. So if we can make decision for High School Kids why cant we make them for Elementary School kids and ensure that they are able to learn what we want them to learn in high school. I also think you know as i said there are different ways to build knowledge and there are different sets of knowledge that different groups might want use. I dont think we have to make value judgments about one set of knowledge being better than another. I do think we need to look at what do we want kids to know so they can understand a newspaper or understand the news and fake informed decisions as voters and citizens. There may be cultural references and Historical Information that we really need them to know about American History and other countries. Without that knowledge they will have the advantage in high school and beyond. Host one of the challenges is parents have some ideas about what they want their children to be taught, especially when it comes to young people of color, representation in seeing themselves in history. A lot of times some of the content rich curriculum that we see doesnt include marginalized groups. They look at their story is so western civilization. I wonder is there a role for parents and folks who are worried about seeing themselves in the curriculum would rule to they have . Guest well i think the parents do have a role to play and i also think that parents want their children to be successful in society. So i think if they understand there is a certain body of knowledge that kids need to acquire in order to understand the world around them they will want and this is not original to me but to create a mirror and a window. Host say it for our audience. Guest so i curriculum that gives you information that reflects your own life, your ethnicity and your heritage, and mirror and a window and this is true for all groups, a window into others cultures and the wider world that people may not look exactly like you but you ought to know whats going on with them. I think the good news about what im talking about is if we dont spend that time, the precious time we are currently spending on these illusory comprehension skills we have a lot of time left in the school day to provide that mirror and that window. Host i think youre absolutely right. I think we have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time and we can but im convinced that it takes a larger group of people deciding what kids are learning. It was fascinating to work with apparent cabinet when i was in the d. C. Public schools and they had very clear ideas about what they wanted their young people to learn. They wanted those windows and mirrors and i think far too often we discount the abilities that parents have to partner with us on this work. My hope is that as districts think about moving this direction and schools and School Leaders think about this that they think of the parent is a real partner. Guest bears unexploited potential for parents to have more influence over what goes on in schools and im talking urging, encouraging schools and teachers to move away from the skills focused approach to knowledge building approach and then we can talk about which approach but many parents myself included when my children were younger they trust teachers to know what to do to prepare kids academically. I didnt look too closely at what my own children were learning when they were in Elementary School. They seem happy and they were thriving and when i look back now they did have great Elementary School experiences but i realized history had a wives review the history wasnt developmentally inappropriate topic for young children. Theres just no evidence of that history can be presented engagingly and kids love that but i also have a background as a historian and my kids got 20 of exposure to history at home. I didnt even question that they werent getting it at school. I think a lot of parents are in the position where they dont really know whats going on in the classroom and i think if more parents in and the general public really understood whats going on in the vast majority of our elementary School Classrooms and how little that corresponds to what scientist to figure out about what kids actually learn they would be up in arms. Host you talk a lot about reading and writing and argue that a content rich curriculum would make a difference in both subjects. Our National Math scores are not so much better and so i wonder if you look at the challenge of math differently and repose different guest im not an expert in math. I feel like its different but i will say a couple of things. I have been told that the math test dont always correspond to what is been taught a particular grade levels. Another problem that ive seen myself and teachers have told me about is that interferes with kids ability to understand math word problems on tests. Kids will do much better with a math problem when its read aloud to them than when they have to read it themselves. As you recall from the book i followed to classrooms and it turned out to be three through the school year, when doing a skills focused literacy and the other doing the knowledge building approach. Both of these classrooms were serving kids from low income communities. We set up a skills focused class hoping that it would be a literacy lesson. I thought well i drove here so since i drove carol stick around see what i can learn and im really glad that i did. As i wandered the room where kids were definitely trying to work on math problems i found there were a literacy issues and not just reading but just vocabulary issues interfering with their ability to do math problems. One child didnt understand the word combined and he was just staring at a problem. He did not understand that word and another child was having real trouble with the number line. What number comes before 84 and it kept clicking on 85 come 86 of the seven i realized the problem was he didnt understand a word before. These literacy problems affect things beyond just literacy. Host how did we get here . Guess that thats a good question and thats one reason i wrote the book. I do have the background in history and i wanted to figure out where this all came from and frankly as somebody outside of the Education World this way of teaching is not intuitive. It doesnt make sense on a commonsense level. You read a book and you dont talk about what the book is about. You talk about what the purpose was or the sequence of events and informational text or whatever. I kind of had to piece this together but i would say the deep roots go back maybe 100 years to the beginning of the Progressive Education Movement now called an obstructionist education. Essentially one of the tenants of that movement as it is better for children better construct their own knowledge for themselves and have things told to them or explain to them by teacher. There is some truth to that. You definitely have to have participants in constructing our knowledge but theres a difference between added saying children should discover their own facts for themselves about science especially if they are coming to School Without a knowledge of the world. Expect them to discover things for themselves is at tremendously inefficient process but its the way it feeds into this skill focus to broach to literary letter of instruction. Teachers feel they are providing children with the skills that will enable them down the road to acquire and construct their own knowledge. They are not dumping information on them in that way that is not going to be absorbed. So i think that lays the Fertile Ground for this skill focused approach for comprehension to take whole but there have been a number of more recent developments that really have intensified that beginning with the advent of highstakes testi. Those tests which have become the yardstick of which we measure progress you look at them and they seem to be measuring reading comprehension skills. Fine the main idea so teachers naturally think while that is what is being tested are those skills that we need to double down on drilling kids on their skills. One reason kids score low on those tests as they dont have the background knowledge to understand the reading passages in the first place. Its not that they can make the inference. They have been making frances in their lives all the time. Toddlers can make an inference so thats not the problem so much as they lack the background knowledge and vocabulary to understand the passage. That has been a big problem. Host you have spent a lot of time talking about teachers but not colleges of education and how teachers are trained. In fact you said teachers feel like they have to teach the tools but they are so scared of set of skills and they were absent from your book so i once understand what role you think colleges of education place. Guest i do address that to some extent that i think its hugely important. I dont know that its going to change that quickly but basically yes teacher training is at the root of a lot of these problems. And im not casting blame on anyone. I think its partly the result of a divergence that goes back a long way between schools of education on the one hand and the rest of academia on the other. So you get schools of Education Teaching concepts in developmental psychology and in the department of psychology. Psychologists now are kind of outdated and they are superceded by a lot of other things. Its partly a lack of medication i think and partly a different mindset about research and what Research Means and the issue of some of the scientific methods that a psychologist might use and a preference for trusting your own observations in the classroom. They may be somewhat dismissive and there has been a lot of research in the last 30 years the about the importance of background knowledge but also a lot of other things that could really help teachers teach more efficiently. Schools of education and faculty at schools of education are either unaware of the developments are somewhat wary of them because they think of them, they think of those scientists being in an ivory tower not really understanding what goes on in the classroom. I think you need both. You need the perspective on the classroom but you also need this potentially very helpful evidence on cognitive intelligence about how children learn. Host that has shifted the entire burden thats on the employer. The employer then has to recall professional development. We have to teach people and as a former School District leader we have to teach people what they are not being taught in the school of education. I guess one question is how do you get the psychologist and the educator in that University Training program to take some of the burden off of districts which are to have 900 things to do . Guest right, i will get to that but i just wanted to say its not impossible for teachers to learn on the job. Its been comments really suffered to a larger extent Elementary Education is suffered because it gets disconnected from content but how do you develop Critical Thinking when you are teaching greek mythology or the civil war or whatever . How these specifically teach about the civil war. Thats going to be much more helpful and another problem teachers often because of the way schools of education and curriculum are oriented they themselves lack background knowledge about history and about science particularly if they have got an undergraduate degree in education. They really havent gotten those basic course is to make sure they know about history or whatever. By the third curriculum and a good curriculum and teacher can learn a lot along with her students and ive talked to teachers and ive learned so much history from Language Arts or whatever it is. Ideally teachers would be giving trained before they enter the classroom and the content knowledge they need and they would be trained in pedagogical techniques that would help them deliver that really effectively. I think there are some hopeful signs on the horizon. Theres a group called themes for impact that is a group of leaders in teacher Training Programs. One of the objectives is in such a revolutionary idea but to bring teacher Training Programs in line with cognitive science. Host it is difficult when teachers arent taught content to then expect them to be able to teach content while theres a lot of research out there that shows teachers who have an area of expertise are usually more effective than people who dont because youve got deep content knowledge in some area or another. You dont see that manifest until high school because when you are taking content specific courses but this led to force it was about departmental innovation for having content courses in Elementary School and people told us that we were crazy for giving kids, for not having one teacher responsible for everything but having one teacher and science in the other social studies and the other english or in cases where we could separate those areas out. Guest i dont think you are crazy. Its kind of a chicken and egg problem because if we have Elementary School curricula and dont expect teachers to teach much content particularly below fourthgrade then why bother providing teachers with that content knowledge if they are not going to in effect teach it but i think we should expect them to teach it. The other advantage of departmental station is when you have one teacher who was responsible for social studies because of the pressure to teachers feel to raise reading scores and because the way they feel to do that is to really double down on those comprehensive skills. Often they either give short shrift to the social studies they are supposed to be teaching or even if they cover it they put the skills in the foreground. They dont focus on the social studies content. Host once going to take for us to move from the way we are currently teaching to this not new actually, to a more content rich knowledgebase to play of teaching as the norm . Guest well i think its going to take a multipronged effort so not just from the top down and not just from the grassroots up by the movement on both ends. Classroom teachers are not in a position to adopt curriculum for entire schools are entire districts. They can only do so much but its just imposed from above without teachers really understanding why, what is the point. Its probably not going to get implemented in the classroom because theres a long history of teachers posing the classroom door and doing whatever they want. It starts with the adoption of a content rich elementary curriculum focused on building knowledge and i think teachers need to understand the whys and wherefores of that and they also need to get professional development embedded in the content of that curriculum. Its an adjustment to move from that skills focused way of teaching to this content focused way of teaching and there are numerous obstacles, emotional obstacles and habitual obstacles even if you really want to switch to a different way of teaching teaching is as im sure you know very complex. I am in awe of teachers. They are a joke lang a million things. Discovering one little girl has lice and having to deal with that. In that situation its very easy to revert to its familiar to your habits. They give ministers need to be and they need to give teachers an opportunity to collaborate their experiences and i will say one more thing which is we havent really talked about this, we talked about it a little but testing. Its very hard for teachers to get this message that they focus on content when they feel their performance in their school and student performance will be evaluated on a test of skills. And ive talked to teachers here in d. C. Who i know they have given them the message that the way to raise test scores actually are to build knowledge is not to focus on skills. Teachers have not been able to hear that. They are still looking at what will enable their kids to do well on tests. I agree that its a multipronged approach. There are so many Different Things that contribute to why this doesnt happen from professional development to whatever else. I want to spend a little bit of time talking about the buyins but you sort of say we just go to a content rich curriculum like this is the answer like this is the thing thats going to move us. You arent really challenging, i mean wouldnt be moved to a content rich curriculum at d. C. Public schools we had to change everything from how the day was structured, how teachers were being professionally developed and who was professionally developing teachers and how we figured out the content knowledge at the same time we were helping them to teach skills because we need to do both the pushing back against the unit who said teachers should be able to decide what they want to do, to a state Education System or a federal Education System. There are all of these as you rightly say and lay on your buck and we just need to understand. Ill never forget having the conversation do we just had. Youve done x and youve done y and all these different kinds of things. You said you need to first understand so we laid those out for you and you said now that you know how we want you to teach you wanted to talk about the what and it wasnt equitable and it wasnt rigorous. Literally i just told the story and they are like oh yeah like that all makes sense. But you largely talk about, you dont talk about moving any other structures in the education galaxy. Guest well i mean i wasnt allowed to write one that large. Theres a lot that i dont go into and this is really just a general reader. I know this is more complicated than just adopting a content rich curriculum. I want to say there is no one thing. Host can you say that one more time . Guest i was like wait a minute. This is what people want. People want to read this book. People want to read this book and this one thing and that hasnt ever worked but i will say there are other things that we need to do other than the ones we have been talking about. We have to make sure kids have enough to e. I will say that if we dont address curriculum issues none of those other things are going to move the needle when it comes to multigenerational poverty. We have to focus on this and yes you are right its complicated. Its complicated to bring teachers along to get that message communicated clearly and effectively. I will say and i havent spent a lot of time there but the state of louisiana has been studied and looked at is possibly a model for getting teachers on board. At the state level not just the district level and as i said i havent done a close study of the diet talk to teachers down there and talked with administrators down there and read a lot about it and i think it has to do with engaging teachers and the work with the kids in louisiana. One of the things we bring teachers and to do is to wait the different curricula that are out there and training them to understand what makes one curriculum better than another . Those teachers go back to their districts or their schools and spread the word. It becomes less of a topdown or teachers are often resistant because there are so many especially in urban schools, now we are doing this and now we are doing this and teachers develop a resistance. But they hear coming from a colleague rather than an administrator and they are more due to that. It doesnt happen overnight. Host we found that same thing in d. C. The first thing that people want to do is buy a content rich curriculum which you can do but we felt like our teachers wanted to be involved in the creation of content rich curriculum. They wanted to reflect what was conventional wisdom about what kids can learn in the jacuzzis of our project other context. We pay teachers over the summer to develop this curriculum. They won out and they got the training with their colleagues. So we saw a tremendous uptick and manga into a sort of philosophical battle with some of our Union Colleagues around who gets to decide questions and we think we are going out of her way to partner with teachers. One of the things that i have learned is whatever you do in the School District has to be cocreated. One said no one said that administrators, no one person has all the answers but when you partner to get to better results , we got into this whole thing around whether we should design their own curriculum and whether this curriculum should be mandatory. Part of the challenge was that we wanted to support teachers and you cant support teachers when they there are 900 different curricula. These are the two or three and we want to do this for ourselves i want our listeners to kind of understand that if this is an issue in and of itself an issue piles on top of each other. Talk about the politics of the book. Tell me how politics affects the work. Well i think there is a long history of the public interfering with the effort to get contents into the classroom. It comes both from the left and the right. I think maybe more from the right historic he. That has led to a lack of specificity certainly at the national level. We have a common core standard which are voluntary. 46 states at one point had adopted them and some of them are called Something Else but they are very similar in a lot of people think thats the curriculum and that they have content. That is some of the opposition is premised on that. They imagine a few foundational that High School Students should have that there are letters he lists of skills. Tucked into the Supplementary Material standard is a statement saying if you want students to you have to build their knowledge with the coherent content focused curriculum the covers topics of history. Many people are not aware that language being there and even those that are may have difficulty responding to it because they are in caught in the system thats not set up to. We have a standard that lacks content because of previous battles which i talk about in the book over content some of which got to be like a media circus about the National History standards from the 90s. They shied away from specifying content but if you dont specify content to get this vagueness in this focus on skills because people look at the standards and they say well thats all i need to do. I do think that there are ways to avoid these political battles. I mean there are an increasing number of different classrooms throughout the country that are about doing newly developed content rich curricula. There are six or seven of them out there now. Some of them have a social justice orientation and some of them have a western culture orientation. I havent heard of all a lot of battles for these elementary curricula. I think it is to some extent a red herring and the controversies i have heard about have been raised about novels that are already being taught in a lot of Elementary Schools and they touch on some things that some parents arent wild about. I think the bottom line here is we cannot let our fear of political battles prevent those are giving the kids who need access to knowledge the most and they cannot prevent us from giving access. Host i agree with you wholeheartedly as you can imagine the disc goes back to the question when a particular set of parents have a perspective they dont actually want their kids exposed to independent thought and in a particular state visit political band or what have you and who gets to decide questions is the thing that makes the politics all crazy. Guest i would return to what i said early or earlier. Why cant we decided Elementary School level and im not saying there should be one list of topics for everybody in this country. Thats not only politically untenable but louisiana has developed its own curriculum and one reason they did that was the curricula werent being developed and they thought curt surely thats not the way people in the wheezy learn. Thats fine. You can have different fridays, different curricula for different localities and even different schools to some extent as long as the focus is on some kind of content. I think there needs to be a core of content for kids to understand the history of this particular country in a particular society that they are living in. Hosted this is complicated the common corporate they would need to come to some remand on something. Most other countries in the world that have seen radical transformations have been a topdown nationalistic approached by the federal government or whatever and we have 50 states because of federalism get side how they want to do it. And 14,000 School Districts. You eliminate the character in the book, not a character but a person who people of average appearance made out of her their name that played a huge huge role is for us common core standards are concerned that hes now playing a huge role in terms of the s. A. T. S which many parents rely on. David comus. You want to talk about davids role . Guest well yes and im very grateful to david for making time to interview him and get his perspective on really a very important history of how the common core standards came about. David was motivated in the interest because of his undergraduate that yell tutoring a high school not far from the campus but that they came from the hyperbole community. The School Provided them with a bat or knowledge that they needed to grapple with complex. One thing that david told me he found was he gave these kids a poem about a raisin in the sun and he said asked him a question that with them on an equal footing with him despite the fact that he had a lot more knowledge of the world. He said why do you think they chose a raisin rather than Something Else like a plum . One of the kids said well when a plum dries up so theres hope and when a raisin dries up theres nothing. I think david was really struck by that. Combined with some other experiences he wanted to the common core to bring that kind of experience to many, many kids and they also recognized kids need access to knowledge but because of that orientation he put a lot of emphasis on complex text and he felt that was also way to build knowledge and that the kind of level playing the Playing Field between the teacher and the student because students have these perfect perceptions if they really focus on the text and he was frustrated by the widespread disregard for the text itself and the connections with kids talking about their personal experiences rather than what they were actually learning. He did often talk about building knowledge and as i mentioned there is language in the supplementary standard about delving knowledge but frank did that language was kind of an afterthought. Although david did talk about building knowledge to teachers the message that came across much more early was we need to have kids reading complex text. And you know it was the game of telephone at the education seems to be that sometimes that translated into put complex text in front of kids, teach them about nonfiction text features and that will help them understand what other nonfiction text of put in front of him even though they lack the background knowledge to understand it. Thats not what the common core of literacy standards intended but unfortunately a lot of places that is what it has led to. I would say on the other hand maybe their number is growing for people to get the message that youd need to build knowledge to me, and core standards and louisiana is among them and alta more in detroit. The common core standards are adopting content focused knowledge which curricula begin in elementary. Host one of the things you note in your apple log is that nobody really has result to show for this work yet. Why do you think that is . There are some results. There is curriculum called bookworms for example that his focus cards and having teachers read aloud complex text to kids and then at the kids follow along. That can be very powerful. After one year of implementing that crypto and children get better than those in a the comparison tests for copper and chin but ideally you used a randomized controlled trial and the Gold Standard or you have some kids who are in a knowledge building curriculum for years and some kids who are in the standard curriculum for years and then he tests their comprehension at the end of that and you would see things. Thats really hard has the one thing kids move around a lot in this society especially at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum. Host there something ethically yucky about holding back something that we know works so we have a control group guest except that there are so many schools that are doing what we would call the control group that Standard Approach and there are a lot of people that believe thats the way to go. I know thereve been some studies that are ongoing and sometimes its difficult. There are a lot of variables you cant control over it. Mcafee or so it does kind of make it a bit messy, bit noisy but there is the example of france which i talk about in the book which i owe to ed hirsch. France is to have a national curriculum. Still does to a large extent by the 1989 Elementary School departed from that and they encourage Elementary Schools to adopt an elementary approach. They still focused on Critical Thinking and they moved away from that knowledge building curriculum just at the Elementary School level. They had preschool they were still doing that and secondary schools and what happened after that switch in 1989 with the overall level of achievement in france fell on International Tests and the gap between low where it income and higher income widened. Certainly suggestive of the importance of the content focused elementary in grade school. Host i think the challenge in the race it in your book is that we have classrooms proof point in time is sometimes we have school proof point but it is elusive. If your book does everything you wanted to do and has people thinking very differently about this what kind of results would you expect to see in the coming years . He. Guest well i would hope they would be more states following the lead of louisiana and not necessarily mandating the content focused curriculum but educating educators about the importance of the different ones that are out there allowing them some freedom of choice but also enabling them to make good choices with the support they need to do that. I really think the key to a lot of this is for teachers to see that this works. The way i did it when i was in the second grade classroom for a year is half of them from nonenglish speaking families and none of them from educated families not having core language art since kindergarten in the discussions they were having a restroom about battles tragedies strategies and their level of engagement in the book have been wary that they were using revenge, opponent in their conversations i think if teachers see that they will be inspired to try to replicate that in their own classroom. I think its important to start with particular schools when they are his enthusiasm for change. Let them do it come experiment, get it right and that other teachers come and see what it looks like in action. Host you talk to that about wanting them to see that this works as a way to help them get engaged in focusing on eliminating the knowledge gap in the content rich curriculum. What role do Union Partners have to play . Guest well i think teachers generally want their students to succeed and i think its a matter largely of education, educating the educators because this is not something they wont necessarily go to during training or onthejob and i think unions havent always made it easy to reform but i would hope there are Union Leaders and teachers unions, i would expect if this is presented in a way that tells them not only is this going to help your students succeed but its going to make your job easier i would hope they would be on board thread i would say the American Federation of teachers their magazine has been one of leading publications putting forward this point of view. It goes up to 1 million members. Its not clear to me how many of them are reading it but basically understand the leadership. Host they have an Important Role to play. In many districts they actually deliver professional development so i think its an opportunity where the leaders can help folks understand why this is important to help the teacher by an and effectively am trying to draw out they are going to thank all of us from unions to districts to whoever if we are going to move forward in this direction on math to really see some transformation. Its going to take a lot of time and a lot of times we think if the district is you point out in the number of cases where the district sought wasnt happening or state may have required access to whats happening its going to take a lot of people working on this together. Perhaps the most important in part because they spend more time with young people than anybody else and because they are the best advocate for young people our parents. What would you say to parents as they think about how to tackle this . Guest the first thing i would say is Pay Attention to what the curriculum looks like at your school and whether it is building their knowledge and whether its focused primarily on literacy skills. I have talked to some parents in the course of writing the book who did that and went to the administration of the school to get change to happen. We were told that wouldnt be developmentally appropriate to have the kind of curriculum or whatever so i think parents may need to band together and i dont want it to be an adversarial situation but parents are armed with the knowledge of science that supports what they are advocating for i would hope a group of parents if it turns out of school is resistant to the kind of change they want that there is strength in numbers and then you know there is also a choice. For were clear which goals within a traditional public School District or the charter sector which schools were using effectively knowledge building curricula . Host i want to say thank you so much for sharing the knowledge gap the hidden cause of americas broken Education System and how to fix it. Good luck to you. Guest thank you very much. It was a pleasure speaking with you about it. Next up on booktv host colleges Burton Folsom discusses the rise of the business and american and want to kick off of the mississippi book festival from earlier today. Later tonight craig healy talks about his book the deep state. That all starts now. Check your Program Guide for more information. Welcome everyone in the audience and everyone watching live. My name is dylan and im an intern at the Young America foundation. [applause] Young America foundation trains conservative views from across the country to promote conservative