The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children

by E.D. Hirsch Jr.

important research suggests that children can learn words much faster if we stick to the same topic for several sessions, because word learning occurs much faster—up to four times faster— when the verbal context is familiar.

good way to induce fast vocabulary gain for young children (for whom so much is new and unfamiliar) is to stay on a subject long enough for the general topic to become familiar. This is yet another reason that a coherent, content-oriented curriculum is the most effective way to raise reading achievement.

Experts in the teaching of decoding skills have stated that time spent on decoding and encoding (writing) skills should not exceed thirty to forty-five minutes a day,

What this means to you as a parent or a teacher of children in the earliest grades is that your children should simultaneously be receiving both explicit instruction in decoding and coherent instruction in the most enabling knowledge of language and the world. This double-pronged approach is the best way to advance reading proficiency.

James Coleman, the great sociologist of education, analyzed the school characteristics that had the greatest impact on educational achievement and equity, he found that effective use of time was a chief factor. Most important was “intensity,” a persistent, goal-directed focus on academics that caused classroom time to be used productively.

The most productive way to impart reading proficiency to children is to build up the most enabling linguistic and world knowledge cumulatively in the most time-effective way.

Reading comprehension is emphatically not a universal, repeatable skill like sounding out words or throwing a ball through a hoop. General reading comprehension is a simplified conception for something complex.

The comprehension skills that students are supposed to learn by practicing “comprehension skills” cannot lead to high test performance, because they do not lead to actual comprehension.

The tests favor children who happen to have domain knowledge relevant to the passages in the test.

Speed is slower and scores are lower for unfamiliar topics than for familiar ones. This is true for all readers.

Every highly valid and reliable reading test contains several different passages sampling several knowledge areas and kinds of writing.

But because general reading skill requires broad general knowledge, a valid test must sample several genres and areas of knowledge.

You should prepare for a reading test indirectly, by becoming a good reader of a broad range of texts—an ability that requires broad general knowledge.

John Bishop, of Cornell University, has shown that educational systems which require definite content standards and use curriculum-based content tests to determine whether the curriculum has been learned greatly improve achievement for all students, including those from less advantaged backgrounds.

gains in reading are directly proportional to the completeness with which a school implements a coherent, content-rich curriculum.

Breadth of knowledge is the single factor within human control that contributes most to academic achievement and general cognitive competence. In contradiction to the theory of social determinism, breadth of knowledge is a far greater factor in achievement than socioeconomic status.

imparting broad knowledge to all children is the single most effective way to narrow the competence gap between demographic groups through schooling.

The very fabric of our peaceable and unified democracy is at risk when we do not know how to communicate with each other. Reading comprehension depends on the more primordial understanding of speech that occurs within the common public sphere, on the shared knowledge that enables verbal comprehension in general.

People who cannot communicate well with one another do not trust one another.

Even with other adverse influences factored out, children who changed schools often were much more likely than those who did not to exhibit behavioral problems and to fail a grade.

The finding that our mobile students (who are preponderantly from low-income families) perform worse than stable ones does not mean that their lower performance is a consequence of poverty.

In a summary of research on student mobility, Herbert Walberg states that “common learning goals, curriculum, and assessment within states (or within an entire nation). . . alleviate the grave learning disabilities faced by children, especially poorly achieving children, who move from one district to another with different curricula, assessment, and goals.”

The United States has the highest school mobility rate of all developed countries. The statistics are eloquent, and need to be stated and restated rather than ignored. According to the most recent census, every year 45 percent of Americans change their residence.

In the face of extensive student mobility, we need to reach agreement not only about what subject matter should be taught in school but also about the grade level at which that agreed-upon subject matter should be taught.

If we can reach consensus about a core of topics that should be taught, we are under a powerful moral and patriotic obligation to standardize the sequence and the grade level in which those topics are to be taught.

Poor readers who can decode adequately but cannot comprehend well are usually readers who lack knowledge of a whole array of unspoken information being taken for granted by insiders in the speech community.

Formalism is the ideology that what counts in education is not the learning of things but rather learning how to learn. What counts is not gaining mere facts but gaining formal skills.

It would therefore appear necessary that learning how to learn is a more important educational goal than learning mere facts and subject matter. But we have already alluded to the firm empirical finding that in order to understand a text, the child has to have prior knowledge about its domain. That would argue for the theory that teaching the child a lot of domains is itself a necessary element in learning to learn. This suggests a theoretical middle ground between formalism and antiformalism. The antiformalists are right to stress that general reading ability must necessarily be founded upon general knowledge—on a lot of “mere information.” The formalists are right to insist that the goal of such an education is not primarily to possess this information in itself but to possess it as a means of learning to learn. Externally, therefore, the formalist goal is one that can be accepted. What good empirical theory has to offer is the complicating insight that the only way to achieve the goal of learning to learn is through something that the formalist ideologue disdains—a lot of diverse information.