The education i was on the board of the Charter School became fascinated by what was going on partly because i think education is so important i think it is our best hope for addressing and equity inside it society and breaking that society a multi generational poverty. There was a mystery that i wanted to solve essentially which was what happen when kids got to high School Everything seemed to fall apart scores seem to be improving at the elementary level and i would go into classrooms and the kids either looked engaged but when you went into High School Classrooms it was a different picture and the scores were not improving. Nobody seems to understand why although there has been a lot of attention on the high school problem. When i stumbled upon really, i cant say i solve this mystery myself but i stumbled upon the fact that the real problems in the problems of the parents in high school. Its different than the Elementary School. Once i realized that and i realize that despite all of the research i had done in the panel discussions, i had never heard this mentioned as a problem. Somebody had to try to get that issue into the public conversation about education because it really gets to the root of the problems we are talking about and were not going to be able to fix up unless we address the problem. Sumac can you describe the people who are not usually in classrooms. What is the content rich curriculum look like. Natalie wexler first of all it focuses on content rather than comprehension reading comprehension skills. This is really almost a universal approach and concentrates on elementary and a lot of time in reading. About 20 years ago now. The reading that kids are doing is not designed to build their knowledge about anything in particular. The idea is to get them to master skills like finding a main idea for making an entrance. And how you will be able to apply that in a textbook put in front of you. The problem is its cognitive way of learning process have known for decades that the most important factor in what you can understand what youre reading is not generally applicable skills like finding the main idea, is how much background you have of the topic. So really we want to be comprehension, we should be doing the opposite of what weve been doing. We should be increasing the amount of time they are spending on social studies and science and things they expand our knowledge of the world rather than shunting those to the site. Some cases eliminating them as many hours every day on these other skills. There are really different ways of gaining kids knowledge and different kinds of curriculum that can do that. The thing we all have in common is they focus on topics rather than on skills. They have teachers reading aloud to children while those children are learning to read, because kids can take in so much more information through listening to and through their own writing, really through middle school on average. The concepts in the vocabulary and syntax in written language are more complex and that in spoken language. They need to be exposed to that so that that when they are able to read individually, they will understand what they are reading. Tell me a little bit more how a teachers job is different when they are teaching a content rich curriculum versus when they are teaching skills. Natalie wexler it could look more challenging to teachers because the teaching skills is all you really need to do is a mini lesson. Ten or 15 minutes modeling the skill. Then you read a book that you choose not for its content, not for what its about before how well it might lend itself to demonstrate and modeling. The skill of say comparing and contrasting or determining the authors purpose or whatever. You just have to read that book and say, this phrase is coming up a lot so i think maybe thats the main idea or im thinking that this character is planning to do x. Then you just, provide the kids with books that are determined to be at their own individual reading level and they theoretically go off and practice that skill. It doesnt require a lot of content knowledge on the teachers part or really a lot of effort involved, it is hard work to building kids knowledge but any contents of this classroom that is using content focus knowledge curriculum, the teacher is going to focus on whatever topic the curriculum covers and i have to say at that in this country a lot of Elementary Teachers are expected to basically design their own curriculum. That is a tremendous burn into place on teachers who are already juggling so many things. Their attention should be focused on how best to deliver the content of a curriculum not to come up with that content from scratch. Theyre not trying to do that, in the content focus classroom, ideally, the teacher would be provided with curriculum organized by topic so there are books or for reading, maybe spend a couple of weeks or more on the topic than in a series of books youre reading organizer on that topic. You read aloud to kids, sometimes on their own depending on their ability. I think from having been in both kinds of classrooms for both teachers and students find the experience of the content focused classroom much more engaging and much more satisfying. It gives chance. It gives kids a chance to really explore things they are interested in. This is when you discover that your kid is really into birds or dinosaurs or whatever they discover things that they didnt know they were interested in. Natalie wexler i think there is a prevailing thought that we should let kids choose what they want to study. Its really kind of cultivated in teacher training its good to give kids a lot of choice and let them pursue their own interest. Especially for kids coming into the School Without a lot of knowledge of the world come. They dont know yet the date what they are interested in. They get fascinated by greek mythology and they work this at home. Is not necessarily something and they encounter in their daily lives but they love it because his stories and theyre really interested in them. Its so interested. I completely buy it should be exposed to content rich curriculum. That was my experience, in the fourth grade i fell in love with greek mythology and we were not talking about that in my home. But im curious about how you would grapple with the question of who determines what content should be taught. Kaya henderson i think there are a lot of challenges around understanding who decides what kids should learn. So i want to pick your brain a little bit on that. Who gets to decide the curriculum. Natalie wexler that is a question that comes up a lot. Its a very good question. I would say several things, one is we already make this decision is when it comes to the high school curriculum. Kids are somehow we manage to decide what kids should learn. The problem is if we wait until high school to implement those decisions, many kids dont have the background knowledge when they get to House High School to understand what we want them to learn there. If we can make those decisions for high school kids, why cant we make them for Elementary School kids. Then we can ensure that they are actually able to learn what we want them to in high school. There are different ways to build knowledge. There are different tests of knowledge. Different groups might want kids to learn Different Things. 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 are we blunting the kids to know so that they can understand the newspaper or understand the news. Make informed decisions as voters and to sit decisionmakers. There may be cultural references and Historical Information that we really need them to know about American History and other countries. Without the knowledge, theres a serious disadvantage in high school and college and beyond. Kaya henderson i think one of the challenges is that i think parents have some ideas about what they want their children to be taught. Especially when it comes to at least four young people of color, representation and seeing themselves in history. A lot of times content rich curriculum that we see doesnt include marginalized groups. Their story is kind of western civilization. I wonder, is there a role for parents and for folks who are worried about their kids seeing themselves in the curriculum. What role do they have to play. Natalie wexler i think that parents do have a role to play. I also think the parents want their children to be successful in society. So i think that if they understand that there are or a certain body of knowledge that kids are going to need to acquire and to understand in the newspapers in the world around them, they will probably want both, a mirror and a window. The phrase the winter know in the mirror. You want information to both reflect your own life. All groups of students. A window into other cultures and other the wider world that your mate your people may not look exactly like you but you want to know whats going on with them. I think that the good news about what i am talking about is if we dont spend the time that precious time we are currently spending on them. We have a lot of time left in the school day to provide move that mirror in that window. Kaya henderson i think youre absolutely right. I think we have to be able to walk in and to come at the same time. And we can. But i am convinced that it takes a larger group of people to decide what kids are learning that have previously been case. It was fascinating to work with apparent cabinet when i was at the public schools. They had very clear ideas about what they wanted their young people to learn. They wanted both windows and mirrors 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 inc. About moving in this direction as schools and School Leaders think that this that they actually see parents as real partners. There are huge unexploited potential. Natalie wexler parents can have more influence on what goes on in school. Im talking about urging schools or encouraging them to move away from the skilled focus approach to some kind of knowledge building and then we can talk about which knowledge building approach. I see many parents and is included when my children were younger, they just trust schools. They trust teachers to know what to do, to prepare kids academically and so i didnt look too closely at what my own children were learning when they were in Elementary School. He seemed happy and thriving when i look back now, they did have great Elementary School experiences but i realize that one thing they were getting was history. That is because of a widespread view that history is a developmentally inappropriate topic for Young Children which there is no evidence to that. It can be presented very engagingly as stories and kids love that. I also have a background as a historian and my kids got asked plenty of exposure to history at home. I didnt even question that they werent getting it at school. I didnt really notice it. I think a lot of parents are in the position where they dont really know what is going on in the classroom. I think of more parents really is and was going on the vestment geordie of our elementary classrooms and how little that corresponds to what scientists have figured out about how kids actually learn, that they would be up in arms. Kaya henderson you took a lot about reading and writing. In the argue that our content rich curriculum would make a significant difference in both subjects. Our National Math scores are not so much better. So i wonder if you diagnose the challenge with math differently and propose different solutions. Natalie wexler im not an expert on whats going on in math. I feel that is quite different from literacy, i would say a couple of things. I have been told that the math test dont always correspond to what is being taught in particular the levels. That may be one problem. Another problem that ive seen for myself is that literacy can interfere with kids ability to understand math word problems and tests. That kids will do much better when a math problem is read aloud to them than they have to read it to themselves. One classroom did skill focused, and other doing a knowledge building approach in both of these classrooms were from kids from low income. I was hoping to do a literacy blessing and the kids were doing math. I thought well, i drove here, im going to do this. I will stick around and see what i can learn. Im really glad you did because as i wandered the room, where kids were independently trying to work on math problems, i found that there literacy issues there were not just reading but just vocabulary issues were interfering with their ability to do these math problems. One child was or didnt understand the word combine and he was just staring at a problem because he was trying to combine even three. Hearing it, he did not understand it. Another child, was having real trouble with a number line just what number comes before 84. In series and number between 80 and 90. I eventually realized he didnt understand the word before. These literacy problems effect things beyond literacy strictly speaking. Kaya henderson how did we get here. [laughter]. Natalie wexler that is the reason i wrote them up. I do have background as a historian. I wanted to figure out where this all came from. Frankly if somebody outside the education world, this way of teaching is not intuitive, it doesnt make sense on a commonsense level that you read a book and you dont talk about what the book is about. You talk about with the author was doing or what a sequence of events or in an informational text or whatever. I kind of had to piece this together. I would say the deep roots maybe go back 100 years to the beginnings of whats known as the progressive education movement. Now called constructive education but essentially in one of the central tenets of that movement is it is better for children to discover or construct their own knowledge for themselves. Then to have things told to them or explained to them by a teacher. There is some truth to that. We definitely have to be participate and constructing on a knowledge that theres a difference between that and saying children should discover facts for themselves. About history and science especially if theyre coming into School Without a lot of knowledge of the world. To expected to discover things for themselves is a tremendously inefficient process. But its the way it feeds into the skill focused approach illiteracy instruction that i think teachers feel they are giving their and they are providing children with the tools and skills that will enable them down the road to acquire that construct their own knowledge. Theyre not dumping information on them in a way thats not really going to be observed. I think that mindset sort of made Fertile Ground for the skill focused approach to comprehension to take hold. There have been a number of our recent developments that really intensify that. That beginning with event of highstakes testing. Those tests, which have become the yardstick by which we measure progress, we look at them and seem to be measuring comprehension skills. They are asking kids to read this passage and find an idea as the teachers naturally and administrators they think thats whats being tested are those skills that we need to double down on drilling kids on the skills. We are looking at the fact that one reason kids often score low on the senses because they dont have the background knowledge to understand the reading passages in the first place. Is that they cant make an inference, they make inferences and the like all of the time. Toddlers will make an inference. So thats not the problem as the lack the background knowledge and vocabulary to understand the passage. That has been a big problem th that. Kaya henderson you spent a lot of time talking about teachers. Non colleges colleges of education how teachers are trained. You just said teachers feel like you have to teach the tool that, right, but theres a fact that what are the teachers learning. They were particularly absent from your book. I want understand what role you think that teacher programs in colleges play. Natalie wexler i do address that to some extent. I think its hugely important. I dont know that its going to change that quickly, but basically, yes, teachers training is at the root of a lot of these problems. Id dont want to cast blame on anyone. It is partly the result of the diversions that goes back a long way. Between schools of education on the one hand and the rest of academia on the other. You get schools of education to change concepting developmental psychology that across campus in the department of psychology that are kind of outdated. They have been superseded by a lot of other things. They need, is partly a lack of communication. A different mindset, we talk about research and what Research Means and the suspicion it may be some of the scientific message that the psychologist might use. A preference for observations in the classroom. They may be somewhat dismissive. Theres been a lot of research in the past years of the reading process and the background knowledge and note about a lot of other things that could really help teachers. So that they could teach more efficiently, the students could learn more efficiently. The schools of education faculty are either unaware of this developments or maybe somewhat wary of them because they think of them scientists is being in an ivory tower and not really understanding what goes on in a classroom. I do think you need both, you need the perspective of what goes on in the classroom but you also need to really potentially this very helpful evidence from psychology about how children learn. Kaya henderson that lack of communication has shifted the entire burden on the employer. The employer then has to what we call professional development right, induction of professional development. We have to teach people. I say we as a former School District leader, bf teach people what they are not being taught in schools of education and so, one question is how to get the psychologist and the educator and the university so that they can take some of the burden off of the districts which already have 900 things to do. Natalie wexler i will address that but i want to just say it is not impossible for teachers to learn on the job. Professional development has not been very effective but it seems and it is really suffered to a large respect is that we have disconnected skills and content. How do you develop Critical Thinking when it really should be, youre teaching greek mythology or the civil war or whatever. How do you think critically about the civil war that is going to be much more helpful. A note another problem is that teachers often because of the way schools of education curricula are oriented, they themselves lack background knowledge. About history and science particularly if they have gotten in undergraduate duty rate in education. They really havent gotten those basic things to make sure they know the facts about history or whenever. But a good curriculum and with a good curriculum a teacher can learn a lot from his or her students. Ive talked to teachers who have said they learned so much about whatever the curriculum is from the students. Ideally, teachers would be getting trained before they enter the classroom in the content knowledge they need, and they would be trained in techniques that would help them deliver that really effective way. I think theres some hopeful signs on the horizon, theres a group called names for impact as a group of leaders as schools and teachers programs. One of their objectives, to bring teacher Training Programs into line with the findings of cognitive science. Kaya henderson it is difficult when teachers arent taught content to end two expected to be able to teach content well. There is a lot of research out there that shows that are teachers who have a subject area expertise, are usually more effective than people who dont. Because it got deep content knowledge in some area or another. You dont see that manifest until high school because youre actually taking content specific courses, this led to for us, Department Listing or having content courses in Elementary School and people told us that we were crazy. We were giving kids and not having one teacher responsible for everything. By having one teacher who was in math and science and another who is in social studies and english or in cases where we could separating out this for areas. Natalie wexler i dont think you are crazy. I think it does make sense. Its kind of a chicken and an egg. If we have Elementary School curriculum as we do in having this place is they dont teach much content particularly below fourth grade. Then why bother providing teachers with a content knowledge if theyre not going to be expected to teach it. I think we should be expecting them to teach it. I think the other advantage departmentalization is when you have even when you have one teacher who is responsible for both english and social studies, because of the pressure the teachers feel to raise the rating scores and the way than to do that is to really double down on those comprehension skills, often they either get short drifted of social studies are supposed to be teaching and even if they cover it, they still put skills in the foreground. They wont really focus on the social studies content either. So. Kaya henderson what is it going to take for us to move to the way we are moving currently teaching to this new or not new actually, to a more content rich Knowledge Based way of teaching as a norm. Natalie wexler i think its going to take a multi find effort. Not just from the top down and not just from the grassroots up, but a sort of offensive movements on both ends. Classroom teachers are not in a position to adopt curriculum for an entire school or an entire district they can only do so much but if its just imposed from above without teachers really understanding why, what is the. Its probably not going to get implemented into the classroom because theres a long history of teachers closing a classroom door and doing whatever they want. It does have to start with the adoption of a content rich elementary curriculum. Focus on building knowledge. I think that the teachers need to understand the whys and the force of that. They also need to get professional development embedded in the content that curriculum. Coaching. Its an adjustment to move from that skill focused way of teaching to to this content focused way of teaching and there are numerous obstacles intellectual up schools emotional obstacles, habitual obstacles, obstacles and habits. Even if you want to switch to a different way of teaching, teaching is im sure you know a very complex activity. I am in awe of teachers. A teacher has so many things to deal with. It could be a two falls out or very easy to revert. It will take time. Those teachers have not been able to hear that. They are still looking at, the skills is what will enable the kids to do well on those tests. I agree its a multipronged approach. But there are so many Different Things that contribute to why this doesnt happen. From teacher buying in to Effective Professional Development to which curriculum folks have, to whatever else. And i want to spend a little time talking about teacher buyin. But you sort of say if we just go to a content rich curriculum, this is the answer. Right . This is the thing that will move us. You arent really challenging when we tried, when we moved to a content rich curriculum. At pc public schools, we had to change everything. From how the day was structured to how teachers were being professionally developed to who was professionally developing teachers. To how we figured out teacher content. To pushing back against the unions for people to decide what they wanted to do. A state Education System for federal Education Systems. Sometimes followed what we were trying to do and sometimes didnt. You rightly say, need to understand that i will never have forget having a conversation with our teachers cabinet thing youve done x and y and z and these random things. I said, they are not actually random. You said you needed to first understand what teaching expectations were. So we lay those out and told you where you were against them. They said now you know how we want you to teach, you wanted to talk about the what because it wasnt consistent. So we work with you to develop curriculum. Literally i just told the story. That all makes sense. The communication around this is huge. But you largely talk about. You dont talk about moving any other structures in the education galaxy. Well, i wasnt allowed to write 600 pages. I had to cut 3000 words from my original. Theres a lot i dont go into. And this is for the general reader. And i know this is more complicated than just adopting a content rich curriculum. There is no one thing that will fix education. Can you say that one more time . I was all good and then i was like, wait a minute. But this is what people want. People want to read this book and know how to fix it. That if i just do this one thing. And that hasnt ever worked. But i will say, there are the things we need to do, other than the ones we were talking about. We have to make sure kids have a place to even have a stable place to live. But i will say, that we dont address this curriculum issue, none of those other things will move the needle when it comes to the cycle of multi generational poverty. And youre right, its complicated. To bring teachers along to get that message communicated clearly and effectively. And i havent spent a lot of time there. But the state of louisiana has been studied and looked at as possibly a model of getting teachers on board. Really just at the district level. As i said, i havent done a close study of it but ive been down there and talk to teachers. Read a lot about it. I think it has to do with engaging teachers, doing the work. Kids of louisiana, one of the things they bring their teachers leaders into rate different curricula out there. Training them to understand. Those teachers go back to their districts and their schools and spread the word. It becomes less of a topdown thing to do. There are so many initiatives, especially in urban schools. Now we are doing this and now we are doing this and teachers develop a resistance to anything new. But if they hear it from a colleague rather than administrator, they may be more receptive to that message. It seems to be working. We found the exact same thing in dc. I think the first thing people wanted to do was buy of content rich curriculum, which you can do and is absolutely fine. But we felt like our teachers wanted to be involved in the creation of content rich curriculum. They want it to reflect both what was conventional wisdom about what kids needed to learn and also the intricacy of our particular context here in dc. So we pay teachers over the summer to develop this curriculum. And so we saw tremendous uptake. And then got into a sort of philosophical battle with some of our Union Colleagues around the who gets to decide question. We think we are going out of our way to partner with teachers. I think one of the things ive learned is, whatever you do in School District . It has to be cocreated. No one set of folks. Administrators, educators, parents. Nobody has all the answers. But when you partner with parents and teachers or when the district partners with parents, you get to better results. So we got into this whole thing around whether teachers should design their own curriculum. Whether it should be mandatory. And part of the challenge was that we wanted to support teachers and you cant support teachers when there are 900 different curricula. So our teachers work with us to say, these are the 23 and heres how we want to do this for ourselves. But politics then gets in the way, right . I want our listeners to understand that each one of these things is an issue in and of itself and these issues kind of pile on top of each other. You talk about the politics of this in your book. Tell me about how politics affects this work. I think theres a long history of politics interfering with the effort to get content into the classroom. And its common both from the left and the right. Id say maybe more from the right, historically. That has led to a lack of specificity. Certainly, at the national level. We have the common core standard. Which are voluntary. States can choose whether to adopt them and 46 states at one point had adopted them and some of them now has Something Else but they are very similar. A lot of people think that a curriculum. And that they have content. And i think that some of the opposition is premised on that. But they dont. They mention a few foundational things in history that High School Students should read but in the literacy standard, theres no specification of content. They list skills. If you want students to be able to meet the standards, if the build their knowledge to a coherent content focus curriculum that exposes them to topics in history. Many people are not aware of that language being there. Even those that are, may have difficulties sort of responding to it because they may be caught in a system that is not up to respond to it. But weve got that set of standard that lacks content because of previous battles which i talk about in the book. Over content. Some of which got to be a media circus about the National History standard, for example. Everyone has shied away from specifying content. But if you dont specify content, you get this real vagueness and this focus on skills. I do think there are ways to avoid these political battles. There are districts across the country that are adopting fairly newly developed content rich curriculum. 67 of them out there now. Some of them have a more social justice orientation. Some have a more western culture orientation. I havent heard a lot of political battles over these elementary curricula. I think its to some extent, a red herring. The controversies i have heard about have been raised about novels that are already being taught in Elementary Schools and may touch on things that some parents arent wild about i think the bottom line here is, we cannot let our fear of political battles prevent us from giving the kids who need access to knowledge the most. They cannot prevent us from giving kids that access. I agree with you wholeheartedly, as you can imagine. But this goes back to the who gets to decide question point when a particular set of parents have a perspective that they dont actually want their kids exposed to other thoughts. Or you know, in a particular state where the political bend or what have you. I think the who gets to decide question is the thing that makes the politics a little crazy, right . Return to what i said earlier that we do decide at the High School Level so, why cant we decide at the elementary level . Im not think there should be one list of topics for everybody in this country. I think thats not only publicly untenable, its unrealistic. But, so louisiana has also developed its own curriculum. One reason they did that was they looked at the curricula being developed in a thought, culturally, thats not where most people in louisiana are going to be. So thats fine. You can have different varieties. Different curricula for different localities and even some schools. As long as the focus is on some sort of content. I think there also needs to be a core of content that gets kids to understand the history of this country and the particular society they are living in. One thing thats located is the common core. Take agreed to come to some agreement on something. Most other countries in the world that have seen radical transformations in education and have been a topdown nationalistic approach from the federal government. Or the federal administrative education. And 14,000 School Districts. You illuminate a character in the book. Not a character, but a person, who many people who average parents may not have ever heard his name. But he played a huge role as far as the common core standards are concerned and hes now playing a huge role in terms of the sat. Which many parents rely on for college admissions. David coleman. Do you want to talk a little bit about davids role . Well, yes. Im very grateful to david for making time for me to go interview him and get his perspective. Really i think on a very important history that isnt wellknown of how the common core standards came about. David, he was motivated to get an interest in education because of his expense as an undergraduate at yale, tutoring High School Students not far from the yale campus. That they came from a high Poverty Community that hadnt provided to them with the background knowledge they needed to grapple with complex text. One experience david told me tell that he found really meaningful and profound was he gave these kids the Langston Hughes poem. And he said, he wanted to ask them a question that would put them on equal footing with him, despite the fact he had more knowledge of the world and he said, why do you think he chose a raven rather than Something Else . aa reason, rather than aplomb. One of the kids said, one a plum dries out, theres still a seed there. Theres still hope. One of reason dries up, there is nothing. I think david was struck by that. Combined with other experiences. He wanted, through the common core to bring that kind of experience to many kids. Also that they needed to build their access to knowledge. Because of that orientation, he put a lot of emphasis on folks reading of complex text. He felt that was a way to build knowledge. And it level the Playing Field between teacher and student. Because students could have these perceptions if they really focused on the text. A widespread disregard. Kids talking about their personal experiences rather than what they were supposed to be learning. He did also talk about building knowledge as i mentioned, there is language in the Supplementary Material about building knowledge. But frankly, that language was kind of an afterthought. Although david did talk about building knowledge to teachers. The message that came across much more clearly is that we need to have kids to close reading of complex text. And, you know, through the game of telephone that the Education System often seems to be, that somehow got translated into, just put complex text in front of kids. Teach them about nonfiction text features like captions and that will help them understand complex text in front of them if they lack the background knowledge. And so, that is certainly not what david or any of the authors intended. But, unfortunately, in a lot of places, that is what it has led to. I would say on the other hand, there are quite a few places and maybe their number is growing, where people did get the message that you need to build knowledge in order to equip kids to those common core standards. And louisiana is among them. Baltimore, detroit. These are places that spurred by the common core standards are adopting content from knowledge risk curricula, beginning in Elementary School. One of the things you note in your epilogue is that nobody really has results to show for this work yet. Why do you think that is. Whats standing in the way . There are some results. Theres a curriculum called bookworm which is focused largely on having teachers read aloud complex text and then have the kids sort of follow along. That can be very powerful. So one study found even after only one year of implement in that particular curriculum, children did better than those in a Comparison School in a test of comprehension. What to do, ideally, you would like a controlled trial. The Gold Standard where you had some kids who were in a knowledge building curriculum for years and some kids who were in standard curriculum for years and then you would test their comprehension at the end of that and you would see a huge difference. Thats really hard. Because the one thing is kids move around a lot in the society. Especially at the lower end of the echo socioeconomic system. [indiscernible] there are so many schools doing that. What we would call the controlled group. Thats the standard approach. But i know there have been studies that are ongoing and sometimes its difficult. There are a lot of variables you cant control over a period of years. So it does make it a bit messy or noisy. But there is the example of france were to talk about in the book. Which i wrote to ed hirsch. Which talked about in his book, why knowledge matters. France had a very national curriculum. It still does to a large extent. But in 1989, just in Elementary School. They departed from that encouraged him entry schools to adopt a more american approach. Different focus for different schools. So they moved away from that knowledge building curriculum just at the Elementary School level. They have preschools that are still doing that in secondary schools. And what happened after that switch in 1989 was the overall level of achievement of students in france fell on international testbed and the gap between lower and higher income students widened. So, maybe thats not definitive but it certainly suggestive of the content focused elementary system. Yeah. I think the challenge that you raise in your book is that we have classroom proof points. Sometimes even school proof points. But its elusive. What do you expect to see, if your book has people thinking differently about this, what kind of results would you expect to see in the coming year . Well, i would hope there would be more states following the lead of louisiana. Not necessarily mandating content focused curriculum, but educating educators about the different ones out there. Allowing them some freedom of choice. And i really think the key for a lot of this is for teachers to see that this works. To see this approach. In the way i did when i was in this second grade classroom for a year. Kids were half of them from nonenglish speaking families. All of them children of color. None of them from educated families. They had been using this particular curriculum since kindergarten. And discussions they were having in that classroom about the battle strategy of monopoly. All sorts of things. In their level and engagement and the vocabulary they were using revenge, opponent. In their conversation. I think the teachers, if they see that. They will be inspired to replicate that in their own classrooms. You talked about wanting teachers to see this works as a way to help them engage. What role do Union Partners have to play in helping teachers to see that. I think teachers genuinely want their students to succeed. I think its a matter largely of education. Educating the educators because this is not something theyve necessarily been exposed to in training or on the job. I think that, i know that unions havent always made it easy to engineer reform. But i would hope that there are Union Leaders and members of teachers unions. I would expect that if this was presented that shows not only will this help your students succeed but it will make your job easier. I would hope they would be on board. And i would say the American Federation of teachers, their magazine at least has been one of the leading publications putting forward this point of view. Its not clear how many have been reading it. But, they certainly understand the truth of their leadership. They have an Important Role to play. They advocate for teachers. They in many districts, actually deliver professional development. I think this is our opportunity where the unions can help actually help folks understand why this is important and get teacher buying in. Effectively im trying to draw out that it will take all of us. If we are going to move forward in this direction on math to see transformation. Its going to take a lot of different people. You pointed out in a number of places where the district may have mandated extra. Or where a state may have required x and it still wasnt happening. Its going to take different people working on this together. But perhaps the most important constituency to win in part because they spend more time with young people than anybody else. And because they are the best advocates for young people are parents. And community members. So what would you say to parents as they think about how to tackle this issue. First thing i would do is Pay Attention to what the curriculum looks like and whether it is building their knowledge. And whether its focus primarily on these illusory skills. I have focused on parents who did that. And went to the administration to get change and were rebuffed. So i think parents may need to band together. And i dont want this to be an adversarial relationship, but i think if parents are armed with science that supports what they are advocating for, i would hope a group of parents, if it turns out that a school is resistant to the change they want. That there might be strength in numbers. Then theres also choice. If it were clearer which schools out there, either within a traditional School District. Which schools were using and effectively, knowledge building curricula. I want to say thank you so much for sharing this Important Information with us. The knowledge gap the knowledge gap the hidden cause of americas broken Education Systemand how to fix it. Good luck to you. Thank you very much. Pleasure speaking with you about it. This program is available as a podcast. All after words programs can be viewed on our website at booktv. Org. Today, at 7 45 p. M. Eastern, Princeton University professor perry on race, gender and class in america. Her most recent book is brief, a letter to my sons. The reality is i have to arm them, not simply with a set of skills and intellectual tools that allow them to flourish and school and ethics and values. But also a way to make sense of the hostility they encounter every day. From people at times whose responsibility is to treat them as community members. And on after words, [indiscernible] all decency has been cast aside. The nerve to atheyve called him far worse things. They are attempting far worse to him that what hes doing to them. They have no right, none. Watch booktv every weekend on cspan2. Your finding