The Knowledge Gap

"Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults" w/Dr. Lyell Asher

The Knowledge Gap. Anyone truly interested in educational equity and social justice has to deal with a serious problem: by age three, children from economically advantaged families will have had about 45 million words spoken to them in their first three years of life, whereas children from low-income families will have had only about 13 million words spoken to them.

Professors of Psychology and Human Development Betty Hart and Todd Risley, whose research led to this finding, called this gap of 30 million words by age three "The Early Catastrophe." It's a catastrophe that keeps growing if schools don't supply a remedy because those 30 million extra words begin to form a kind of net—not of just words, but of meaning and knowledge about the world. And the more knowledge you have--the more strands you have in your net, the tighter the mesh—the more knowledge you can catch, the more connections you can make to all the new things coming at you.

The knowledge-rich, in other words, get knowledge-richer. If public schools aren't closing that knowledge deficit by means of an organized, content-based curriculum that gives low-income students what other kids pick up in their home environments, then all their talk about educational equity is just that—it's talk.

In 1987, an English professor at the University of Virginia by the name of E.D. Hirsch called the possession of this knowledge “cultural literacy,” in a book by that name, and he connected it directly to “social justice.” Where schools are concerned, he said, and I quote, "Our aim should be to attain universal literacy at a very high level, to achieve not only greater economic prosperity, but also greater social justice and more effective democracy." His nonprofit foundation, called Core Knowledge, has been offering its K-8 curriculum free of charge in order to make sure that all children can get what advantaged children already have.

But what we have now in our public schools is a situation in which there is no organized curriculum at all, which means that, according to a 2016 study by the Rand Corporation, the vast majority—upwards of 95%—of language and literature teachers in elementary and secondary schools develop their own curriculum by just doing Google searches online. As education writer and researcher Robert Pondiscio puts it in his book, “How the Other Half Learns,” quote, "The default curriculum in American education, at least in elementary and middle school, is simply stuff teachers find on the Internet."

So who would oppose a carefully organized and sequenced, knowledge-rich curriculum? Well, ed schools. In the mid-90s, when Professor Hirsch offered a course at the University of Virginia's ed school on the knowledge gap and how to remedy it, the faculty there secretly warned students against taking his course, deliberately decreasing his course enrollments for several years running. Notice what I said: they didn't enter into a discussion or debate him—they just tried to shut him down. That should sound familiar by now.

Fortunately, there are public schools where real equity and social justice are matters of record, not rhetoric—where low-income and minority students not only match but often surpass the performance of advantaged students in wealthier districts. Their teachers and principals manage this feat, however, not because of their ed school training, but often in spite of it.

In 2007, education writer Karen Chenoweth profiled 16 such "unexpected" schools in her book, “It's Being Done.” Though the schools vary in size, quality of facilities and geographical location, one thing the teachers and principals in these schools share is a recognition that new teachers will have to be trained more or less from scratch.

As Chenoweth writes,

"They know that new teachers often don't know the first thing about classroom management, standards, curriculum assessment, reading instruction, or even how to physically set up a classroom. To non-educators, this might seem remarkable because most teachers enter the profession with degrees in education. But teachers and principals in the ‘It's Being Done’ schools widely agree that for the most part, university education programs do not even begin to prepare teachers for teaching."

Another thing the successful schools share is a commitment to an organized, content-rich curriculum—and that's something central to New York City's highest-achieving charter schools as well.

The educator Jeffrey Litt, has been focusing on carefully structured curricular content for nearly 30 years—beginning in 1992 with Mohegan Elementary in the Bronx, which is a traditional public school that as principal he transformed. In 2001, he was made the founding principle of the Icahn Schools, whose seven public charter schools in the south Bronx he superintends. Mr. Litt's rejection of the anti-curriculum ed school orthodoxy has made it possible for him to not only narrow but often close the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students.

Parents in the south Bronx, which is the poorest area in New York City, have been voting with their feet for two decades: there's always a waiting list of thousands of students—more than 90% of whom are black and Hispanic—trying to get out of New York's traditional public schools and into the Icahn chartered public schools.

So have ed school deans and faculty been flocking to these successful schools to see how they've accomplished what ed schools talk so much about? I probably don't need to answer that question. What about principals and superintendents? Well, one of the most economically and racially diverse schools in the nation, the Lyles-Crouch school in Northern Virginia, adopted a carefully sequenced, content-rich curriculum starting in 2004 and has been racking up awards left and right since 2007. The principal of that school, Dr. Patricia Zissios, who broke with her ed school training in order to implement this curriculum, reports that despite the awards and despite having outperformed the 12 other elementary schools in her district for three years running, no other school has followed her lead or even taken her up on an offer to help them.

But if you think ed schools are bad when it comes to curricula, wait until you hear what they've been doing with reading instruction. I talk about that next.

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Video shot and edited by Travis Brown | The Signal Productions (Locals, Twitter, YouTube); Motion graphics by Gav Patel (Twitter, Instagram)