Lets start by talking about what was your inspiration for writing this book. Guest i had been writing about education Reform Efforts which there were many and i was also somewhat involved in the Reform Movement i was on the board of the Charter School when i became fascinated by what was going on partly because i think education is so important, i think it is our best hope for addressing inequity in society and breaking the cycle of poverty and also intellectually what is interesting to me there was a mystery i wanted to solve essentially which is what happens when kids got to high School Everything seemed to fall apart, school seemed to be improving at the middle school level and i would go into classrooms and the kids looked eager and engaged but when you went to high school classrooms, it was a different picture and the scores were not including. Nobody seemed to understand why. Although theralthough there havt of attention over the years on the high school problem. So, but i stumbled upon really i cant say i thought this myself, but i stumbled upon the fact that the real problems become so apparent to end once i realized that i have neve had never hears mentioned as a problem that somebody had to try to get that issue into the public conversation about education because it is at the root of a lot of the problems we are talking about and we are not going to be able to fix them unless we address the problem. Host can you describe most people that are not usually in classrooms what is the content rich curriculum . Guest it focuses on content rather than comprehension, reading comprehension skills which is an almost universal approach in this country to the education. Spent a lot of s time on reading especially since the introduction of highstakes reading and math tests about 20 years 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 or making an inference and the fear he is that you will be able to apply that to any text put in front of you. The problem is that it is cognitive scientists who studied at the mourning procesthe mourne known for decades the most important factor in what you understand in what you are reading is not generally applicable skills like finding the main idea. Its how much background knowledge you have on the topic so really if we want all of the kids reading comprehension we should be doing the opposite of what weve been having. We should increase the amount of time they spend on social studies and rather than eliminating them and spending hours every day on these elusive a skills so there are different waysif of knowledge into differt kinds of curriculum that canhe o that but the thing they all have in common is they focus on topics rather than skills and they give teachers reading out loud to children while they are still learning to read because kids can take in so much more information for listening than through their own reading through middle school on average and the context and vocabulary in thee written language are moe complex than the spoken language and they ili need to be exposedo that so when they are able to read independently, they would understand what they are readi reading. A little bit more about how a teachers job looks different when they are teaching a content and which is curriculum versus when they are teaching them skills. It could look more challenging to teachers because with teaching skills the theory is all you need to do is they lessen, ten or 15 minutes modeling the scale. Then a book you choose not for content but how it might lend itself to the demonstrating come. Contracting then you just have to read that book and say this is coming up a lot so that is maybe the main idea or im thinking this character is planning to do this and then you just provide the kids with books that are determined to be at their own individual reading level and they go off and practice that skill so it doesnt require a lot of content knowledge on the teachers part or a lot of effort involved in hard work of building the knowledge. But in the content focused classroom if you think content focused curriculum, the teacher is going to focus on whatever topic the curriculum covers and i have to say in this countr cof of a parliamentary teachers are expected to basically design their own curriculum and that is a tremendous burden to face in a good face on teachers that are already juggling so many things. Their attention should be focused on how best to deliver the content of the curriculum and not to come up with it from scratch. They are not trained to do that. So in that content focused classroom i feel they would be advised by topics or reading more on a topi topic and there e periods of books organized around a topic that yo that topd aloud to kids or they sometimesu read on their ownwn depending on the reading ability. I think having been from both kinds of classrooms to both teachers and students find the experience of the content focused classroom much more engaging and satisfying. It gives kids a chance to explore the things they are interested in. This is when you discover that you shoot as to birds or whatever. Host and its things they n. Didnt know they were interesd in. I think that there is this the thought that we should let inculcated in the teachers training but its good to give choice and pursue their own interest. There is a place for that especially for 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 ofer topics we n get them interested in. I have seen kids get a fascinatd by greek mythology who believe me they were not picking this up at home. They knew nothing about greek it isnt and necessarily something they encounter in their daily lives. [laughter] what they love it because they are stories and theyre interested. I can play live by the argument that it should be exposed with curriculum content. That was my experience in the Public School where in the fourth grade i fell in love with greek mythology. We were not just talking about that at the dinner table in my home, but im curious about how you would grapple with the question of who determines what content should be taught . 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. Guest that is a question that comes up a lot and its a very good question, but i would say a couple things. One,e, we already make those decisions when it comes to the high school curriculum. Kids are somehow we manage to mo decide what kidse should learn. The problem is that we wait until high school to implement the decisions many dont have the background knowledge when they get to high school, to understand what we want themst o learn. If we can make those decisions for high school kids, why cant we make them for elementary and ensure they are able to learn what we want them to learn. There are different ways to build knowledge and different tests of knowledge that different groups might want kids to learn. I dont think we have toav make value judgments of one being better than another but i do think we need to look out what do we want kids w to know so thy can understand a newspaper or understand the news and make informed decisions as voters and citizens so there may be cultural references and Historical Information we need them to know aboutut American History and other countries. Without the knowledge they willd be at a serious disadvantage in high school, college and beyond. Host i think one of the challenges is that parents have some ideas of what they want their children to be taught especially when it comes to at least for young people of color representation and seeing themselves in history. A lot of times some of the content rich curriculum that we seelu doesnt include marginalid groups. Its kind of a western civilization piece so i wonder is there a rule for parents and folks that arent worried about their kids seeing themselves in the curriculum. What role do they have to play in this . Guest parents do have a role to play but i think parents also want their children to be successful in society and so i think that if they understand that theref is a certain body of knowledge kids are not going to neeneed to acquire in order to understand the newspaper and the world around them, they will want probably both the curriculum that gives you the information that reflects your own ethnicity and heritage this is true for all groups of students and other cultures but you ought toou know whats going on with them. If we dont spend precious time that we are spending on the comprehension skills we have a lot of time left to provide that window. Host 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 than has previously been the case. It was fascinating to work withn a parent they had ideas i and fr too oftenen we discount the abilities parents have to partner with us so as the districts think about moving in this direction in schools and School Leaders and about this we see parents as real partners. Guest there is potential with both parents to have more influence over what h goes on in schools, and im talking just urging schools or encouraging schools and teachers to move away from this approach to something of knowledge and then we can talk a about which knowledge building approach but i think that many parents and myself included when my children were younger they just trust schools and teachers to know what to do to prepare kids academically. I didnt look too closely at what we own children were learning in Elementary School. They seemed happy and thriving and when i look back now i mean, they did have Great Elementary School experiences, but i realize one thing they were not getting was history and that is because of the widespread view that it is an inappropriate topic for Young Children which there is no evidence for that. Kids love history. It can be presented veryy engagingly. My kids got plenty of exposure. If more p peasants and the genel public understood whats going on in the vast majority of our Elementary School classrooms and how little that corresponds to what the scientists figured out about how kids actually learn that they would be up in arms. You talk about reading and writing and argue that the content which curriculum when they make a significant difference in both subjects. Our National Math scores are not so much better. So i wonder if you would diagnose the challenge differently and propose different solutions. Im not an expert on whats going on in math. I feel like it is quite different from literacy tha buti would say a couple of things. I have been told the math test doesnt always correspond to what is being taught at a particular grade levels. Another problem ive seen for myself is that literacy itself can interfere with the ability to understands problems on tests kids will do much better when a math problem is read out loud to them than when they have to read ithe themselves and i followed o classrooms come it turned out to be three through the score year one doing the approach to literacy and the other doing the knowledge approach and both of these classrooms were serving kids from lowincome communities in all of the students of color. One day i showed up at the skills focused classroom hoping to observe a literacy lesson and i got there when the kids were getting math and i thought i drove here. I will stick around and see what i can learn and im glad i did because kids were independently trying to work on math problems and i found that the literacy issues is interesting reading but vocabulary issues were interfering with the ability to do math problems. One child didnt understand the word combine. He was hearing it so it wasnt that he couldnt read it but he didnt understand that word, ad another child was having trouble with a number line. What number comes before 84. It was a series of numbers and he kept clicking 85, 86, 87 and i realized he didnt understand a word before. So these literacy problems affect things beyond just literacy strictly speaking. Host hell did we get here . Guest thats one reason i wrote the book. I do have a background as a historian 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 but you read a book and then you dont talk about what its about th but tak about the authors purpose was for the sequence othe sequence d informational text or whatever. I kind of had to piece this together but i would say the deep roots go back maybe a hundred years to the beginning of what is known as the Progressive Education Movement now called constructive education. One of the central tenant tenetf that movement is it is better for children to discover or construct their own knowledge for themselves than to have things told to them were explained to them by a teacher and there is some truthe to tha. We definitely have to be participants in constructing our own knowledge but ther that thea difference between that and saying children should discover their own facts for themselves about history and science especially if they are coming into School Without a lot of knowledge of the world come to expect them to discover things for themselves is a tremendously inefficient process. But f the way that it feeds into this skills focused approach to literacy instruction i think teachers feel they are providing children with the tools and skills that will enable them down the road to construct their own knowledge. They are not dumping information on the them in a way that isnt going to be absorbed. I think that mindset sort of way but the Fertile Ground for this ill focused approach to comprehension to take hold, but thereve been a number of more recent developments that really intensified that beginning with the advent of the highstakes testing. Those tests which have become the yardstick by which we measure progress you look at them and they seem to be measuring their reading comprehension skills asking you to read the passage, find the idea and make inferences so the teachers and administratorss naturally think thats what is being tested are those skills so we need to just double down on drilling kids on those schools. Overlooking the fact one reasons the score low on the tests as they t dont have the background knowledge to understand the reading passages in the first place. Its not that they cant make an entrance, they make inferences in their lives all the time. Toddlers can make an imprint imt comes with ientrance,so that iso much as they lack the background knowledge and vocabulary to understand the passage and that has been a big problem that is overlooked. Host you spend a lot of time talking about teachers, but not on colleges and education in how teachers are trained. Du in fact you just said teachers feel like they have to teach the tools. But there is in fact a set of people making decisions about what the teachers are learning and they were conspicuously absent from your book so i want to understand what role you think the colleges of education and teacher Training Programs play. Guest i think i addressed that to some extent and i thik its hugely important. I dont know that its going to change that quickly, but its basically yes, teacher training is at the root of a lot of these problems. And i dont want to i am not casting blame on anyone. I think that its partly the result of a divergent that goes back a long way between schools of educationat on the one hand d the rest of academia on the other. So youou would get an education that teaching concepts of cdevelopmental psychology in Te Department of psychology they may be taught as gospel in schools of education so it is a lack of communication and partly a different mindset about research into what Research Means and its ambition and the scientific methods that they might use and a preference for trusting your own observations in the classroom so they may be somewhat dismissive and theres been a lot of research in the last 30 years about the reading process and the importance of background knowledge but also about a lot of other things that could help teachers to teach more efficiently and students learn more efficiently, but the schools of education, faculty are either unaware of those developments or may be somewhat weary of them because they think of them as being in an ivory tower not really understanding what goes on in a classroom. And i do think you need both. He you need the perspective of what goes on in the classroom but you also need this really potentially very helpful evidence from psychology about how children learn. Guest the lack of communication shifted the burden ontot the employer. The employer then has to be called professional development, induction and professional development. We have to teach people, and i say we as a former School District leader we have to teach people what they are not being chtaught in schools of educatio. So how do they get the psychologistwe get thepsychologs talking so that the universities and Training Programs can take some of the burden off of this. Its not impossible to learn on the job. Professional development hasnt itsvery effective, but been a large extent the problem Elementary Education suffered from which i is the disconnected skills from content so how do you develop Critical Thinking when it really should be okay youlo are teaching greek mytholy or the civil war, whatever. Thinking critically about the greek mythology into the civil war is good to be much more helpful. And another problem is teachers often because of the way schools of education and curricula are oriented about history and science particularly if they have gotten an undergraduate degree in education. So they really havent gotten those h basic courses and they know their facts of history. But a good curriculum and a teacher can learn a lot with his or her students and i talked to students that said i learned so much from whatever the curriculum is. But youre right, ideally teachers would be getting trained before they enter the cla