Teaching phonics isn't enough to build good readers, say "science of reading" advocates. They need knowledge about the world -- science, history, geography, culture and so on -- to make sense of the words they decode.
Is there solid evidence that teaching a knowledge-rich curriculum improves reading comprehension?, asks Jill Barshay on the Hechinger Report.
A 2025 book by 10 education researchers, Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Revival, makes the case for teaching a core curriculum that's "coordinated across grades," she writes. "It’s not just a random collection of encyclopedia entries or interesting units on, say, Greek myths or the planets in our solar system. The science and social studies topics should be sequenced so that the ideas build upon each other, and paired with vocabulary that will be useful in the future."
The idea runs counter to the push for “culturally responsive teaching” that reflects students' identities, Barshay writes. And some argue students don't need knowledge when they've got Google (or AI).
She questions whether a knowledge-rich, sequenced curriculum, such as the Core Knowledge curriculum, helps struggling readers in high-poverty schools.
“If your great new curriculum reads articles about penguins to the kids and your old stupid curriculum reads articles about walruses to them, one of these is going to look more successful when the kids are evaluated with a penguin test,” explained Tim Shanahan, a literacy expert and a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago. If knowledge building does work, he blogged, it will take many years to show it. That makes it hard to design research studies.
There's "overwhelming" evidence that teaching "coherent, well-sequenced and interconnected knowledge" improves reading comprehension for all students, writes Robert Pondiscio. The students who benefit the most are those who don't have educated parents building their vocabulary and knowledge at home.
Natalie Wexler also writes about the research suggesting that knowledge building leads to better reading comprehension. Here's part two.
In a new Sold a Story episode, The Evidence, APM Reports' Emily Hanford and Christopher Peak explain why Success for All, backed by years of high-quality research showing its effectiveness, lost popularity and funding just as George W. Bush's Reading First was giving states $1 billion for "scientifically based" reading programs.
Reading First officials and consultants promoted their own reading programs, which had little research support, charge Nancy Madden and Robert Slavin, who developed Success for All at Johns Hopkins University. Slavin and others complained to the inspector general, who issued a report criticizing conflicts of interest and mismanagement. That killed Reading First.
In 2015, Congress dropped the requirement that schools use programs backed by evidence of effectiveness to qualify for federal funding, reports Peak. Many schools and districts turned away from coherent, sequenced programs in favor of "a 'choose your own adventure' way of teaching reading."
The quacks who promoted Whole Language methods of Reading instruction never paid a price for their massive educational malpractice.
The protocols for ethical experimentation on humans require informed consent. Ethical experimentation on children requires parents' informed consent.
Compulsory attendance laws and the State-monopoly school system together make consent impossible.
"What works?" is an empirical question to which an experiment will provide more valid and reliable answers than will Divine (bureaucratic) inspiration. In public policy, "experiment" means a competitive market in goods and services and/or a State-monopoly federalism (subsidiarity, many local policy regimes). A State-monopoly provider of goods or services is an experiment with one treatment and no controls, a foolish experimental design.
I know this is severely complicated and takes PhD's in all sorts of things to figure out, but... couldn't you just have the kids read a lot of books? That's where most of my "real world" knowledge came from at that age. We had the "You were there..." history books, Danny Dunn and Tom Swift books for boyish adventure (graduating up to the Heinlein juveniles over time), the Hardy Boys and Nance Drew for mystery and so on. All of these, of course, were gateway drugs to the adult novels of the same kind.
Of course, this sort of reading is free and there's no place for a consultant to make a buck, so perhaps it's a dumb idea.
English is much less a phonetic language than languages like Spanish or French. Do countries that teach reading in those romance languages do much better in teaching reading. And what about languages where each word has its own symbol?
Two words: Core Knowledge.