This spring, the Texas Education Agency unveiled its long-anticipated new school curriculum. Ever since, the Left has been raising Cain about it.
If you’re reasonably literate, you get what that means. Literacy requires more than just phonics, it takes familiarity with shared cultural reference points. Even if you haven’t come across the idiom “raising Cain,” you should know from the Bible that Cain means trouble — and you can figure it out from there.
The Left would prefer that you don’t, though. Judging by the reaction from activist groups and journalists, they believe that Biblical stories should be forbidden fruit in public schools.
See what I did there?
As my AEI colleague Robert Pondiscio has pointed out, the English language is so utterly suffused with Biblical references that it’s impossible to be truly literate without a substantial familiarity with that good book. It’s not a matter of God or religion but of basic communication. Yet education progressives are acting as though incorporating the story of Esther in reading class is akin to mandating prayer in homeroom.
But you can forgive them for their trespasses, for they know not what they do.
The incorporation of Biblical reference points is the least interesting part of this story. Texas’s initiative is the first full incarnation of knowledge-rich curriculum in modern public education.
Most parents, sadly, assume that their children’s curriculum must be “knowledge-rich.” What else, after all, could it be? It’s only when you start studying education that you realize how intellectually bankrupt and factually vacuous school curriculum has become. As Diane Ravitch documented in The Language Police, political correctness has rendered modern textbooks dry, unreadable, and profoundly boring. So boring that teachers decided to just wing it with what they can find on Pinterest or from Google. According to the RAND Corporation, 99% of elementary school teachers and 96% of secondary school teachers rely on material they create or select to teach English language arts.
They aren’t trained to be expert curricula writers. Indeed, they’re trained on the theory that content matters less than “skills.” Spend enough time in education circles, and you’ll frequently hear, “Kids can Google for facts, so we just need to teach skills.” That this is a fallacy — you can’t critically reason without facts to inform your reason — hasn’t and won’t stop professors in schools of education from teaching it.
University of Virginia professor E.D. Hirsch had another theory, which parents should be shocked isn’t a universally accepted premise: students need to know things. They need to know things in order to know more things. Skilled reading and reasoning requires fluency in factual and cultural references. Proactive parents might not necessarily be familiar with Hirsch’s landmark book Cultural Literacy, but they might be familiar with his series: “What Your [blank]-Grader Needs to Know.” Because, the funny thing is, parents want their children to know things.
Hirsch didn’t simply pioneer a theory and write popular books, he also engineered the Core Knowledge Curriculum. Last year, researchers published a landmark randomized control trial showing that Core Knowledge improved student achievement from grades K-6 by approximately 16 percentile points. That’s huge. In one low-income school, the gains were large enough to utterly eliminate the socio-economic achievement gap.
Unfortunately, Core Knowledge hasn’t been much adopted by public schools. It not only runs counter to the reigning pedagogical theory taught in schools, it also runs counter to the spirit of the Left, which views any insistence that students ought to be taught certain cultural touchpoints to be hegemonic and oppressive.
Core Knowledge should have gotten a better reception in conservative school districts and states. But conservatives are reflexively pro-local control and against curriculum mandates. And local school districts are – in practice – run by teachers’ unions rather than local voters.
Texas Commissioner Mike Morath figured out a solution to this dilemma so simple that it’s astonishing it hasn’t been tried yet. He’s not mandating that schools adopt this new curriculum. But he will provide a financial bonus for schools that do. So, they will.
Aside from the fact that it’s knowledge-rich, the Texas curriculum has another big thing going for it: it’s cool. The graphics and illustrations are stylish. The writing is catchy. And, quite unlike its expensive and DEI-infused competitors, it doesn’t drip with baseless hatred for boys. Indeed, there are excellent passages on subjects from Rome to the Middle Ages that are clearly written to capture young boys’ imaginations.
The Texas Board of Education will vote on whether to adopt this curriculum in November. If and when they do, you can expect progressives to continue their wailing and gnashing of teeth. This will, hopefully, only help encourage other states to adapt and adopt Texas’s curriculum.
Within the decade, we could see a knowledge-rich system of public education, for at least the Republican half of the country. And that’s the real good news here.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICA
Max Eden is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
