Take out a piece of paper and pen as you take a trip down the timeline of curriculum in the United States over the past few decades. The book “The knowledge GAP” written by Natalie Wexler will capture your attention whether you are an educator, parent, or just enjoy the science behind education, because it covers it all and then some. Names such as Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, and Obama all make their appearance as person who has had an influence on the educational system. Phrases such as phonic awareness and phonics along with curriculums such as basal reader, Common Core Knowledge, and so many more will just draw you into wanting to know more about this “gap” in our education system. The word that you will read repeatedly is “knowledge” and this is the word that it all comes down to. The word that our education system lingers on and needs more attention, the one to that bring this gap closer together.
Wexler grabs your attention from the beginning by talking about her observation of two classrooms which focus on first and second graders. Over the years she observes these classrooms she runs into a few obstacles that end up having her change due rooms due to teachers finding new positions, or at one point not being allow back in the classroom because of difficult behaviors with one student. This part takes up a short amount of the book but relates back to tying different curriculums in low- and upper-income classes, as well as finding out what works effectively.
This was not the part I found most interesting, even though I enjoyed keeping up with the progress in the classrooms, it was the fact of how many curriculums the United States has had over the years and the lack of them being used successfully. As a parent I became disappointed in knowing many teachers were unsure about a curriculum and enjoyed being able to have freedom in the classroom and felt restrained by it. This though is a huge concern in the States and is a place where we are falling behind in compared to other countries. Wexler mentions this difference alongside of these curriculums coincide with their testing. Which consist of using essays instead of multiple choice to show and measure the student’s ability to understand and recite the information they have learned.
The book not only connects you on a teacher level but as someone, as myself from a science background, the information often mentioned relates back to science and data. The problem though with education and science is that teachers are not always open to this data and again feel they know what’s best for students and ignore these facts. Even when the data provided shows how best children learn and can comprehend the information given to them, they are still reluctant to always use it.
The part of the book that I found interesting was the support of taking national testing out of schools. To quote the book on Dana Goldstein “the hope that collecting more scores will raise student achievement is like the hope that buying a scale will result in losing weight” (Wexler 2019). Another quote supports parents boycotting the Common Core-aligned tests which references “some children suffered from test anxiety and feelings of failure, with one mother reporting that her nine-year-old had attempted to hang himself, and some pediatricians saw an uptick in stress-related illness. Educators complained that children were crying during or after tests, while others vomited or lost control of their bowels or bladders” (Wexler 2019). This was another issue that was addressed throughout the book and changes that need to be done in the education system.
As I read through the book, I thought there would be this magical ending that would put everything in place about the gap in education and how we fix it. That though was not true instead I came out even more wanting and feeling to know more about the faults in our system and how can I be a part of fixing it. This book connected me to education on a parent level, science, and as new teacher. This is one of the books that is a must read for many backgrounds and certainly one for a first-time teacher as you navigate your way through what works best for your classroom and you. ( )

Reviewer note: I am not a professional educator, and as such, am not fully qualified to evaluate all the claims Wexler makes. I am a parent of two children in the public schools and have kept abreast of education reform and school curriculum issues. My review reflects how well I feel Wexler has made her argument as well as any preexisting background information I have.

Natalie Wexler believes that she's found the missing piece in our constant efforts to reform education: knowledge. We have focused on skills as an abstraction, rather than the content underlying them. This is why even as lower grade reading scores show signs of improvement, 8th grade scores remain low and high schoolers lack key skills and knowledge.

She begins with reading, which I honestly found the most compelling section of the book. Reading comes in two phases: decoding and comprehension. There is good evidence that decoding is best taught using phonics-based instruction (and here she goes into the "reading wars" between phonics based and whole language instruction). Although the evidence is robust here, I have seen researchers caution that we don't necessarily have a proven curriculum for teaching it. The UK has seen success with its focused synthetic phonics curriculum. She takes particular aim at Balanced Literacy (which she regards as primarily whole-language based despite its name) and its primary author, Lucy Calkins.

The second phase is comprehension. This is where our instruction really goes off the rails. Wexler brings cognitive science and experiments in to show that our background knowledge greatly influences our comprehension of the text: imagine reading a story about cricket (the game) without any knowledge of what a batsman, bowler, or wicket is? The skills based approach jibes with my experience of my kids' elementary school. Since skills are abstractions that can be applied to any piece of text, the content is less important. Kids are encouraged to focus on applying specific skills (making text-to-self connections, following a sequence of events) and less to building up a larger store of knowledge for use with later texts. The emphasis is on self-connection and relating to texts--a skill my autistic child has difficulty with, and which, Wexler points out, can interfere with content if allowed to take over a topic.

Here's where we meet her observational classrooms. Both teachers are young, with only a few years of experience, and teach in DC charter schools. Both are portrayed as having good basic teaching skills. One teaches using a traditional skills based curriculum, the other uses Core Knowledge. Later in the year, the first teacher refuses to continue; she's replaced by another young teacher at another charter school. Teachers #2 and #3 both quit as classroom teachers at the end of the year (#2 moves to a private school; #3 changes positions). While these stories were interesting, too often I felt I was reading anecdotes used as data. I had similar qualms about the visit to Michaela Community School in London, which firstly was a poor comparison as a secondary school (an age when American schools are moving to a more knowledge based model) and two, I know from regular UK news-reading that Michaela is extremely controversial for its opinionated (to say the least) headteacher and incredibly rigid discipline policies (which said head believes should be done everywhere). That was glossed over in the book. The problem here, of course, is that much educational research is poor quality and politicians aren't much interested in investing in it.

Wexler doesn't blame classroom teachers. In her view, many are doing a good job--with what they are taught to do. They are not effective because they are "bad teachers" but because they are tasked with delivering an ineffective curriculum. Further they are taught that reading is an independent skill--that students must learn to read before they can read to learn, and that the two cannot be done in tandem. Teachers are also taught that most science and social studies are inappropriate before grade 3, which turns K-2 into a solid slog of reading and math blocks. (Math, where content and skills cannot be separated cleanly, is generally omitted from this book.)

Curriculum, moreover, is a political third rail. Even when educators want to emphasize content more, deciding what to include incites a political storm. E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy raised outcries from the left, but today, the right is more active, objecting to Common Core and the AP US History revisions. It's easier to define neutral, politically uncontroversial skills. Wexler places some blame on teachers here, who are afraid of losing autonomy--but overly scripted lessons have been an issue, and longtime teachers have seen many trends come and go, all claiming to be evidence based.

One difficulty here is that the largest body of evidence Wexler gets is on Core Knowledge, E.D. Hirsch's curriculum. While she's largely enthusiastic about it, she does herself some intellectual credit and admits it's imperfect--its science is less inspiring to the kids than the English/social studies focused units. There can be many ways to implement a knowledge based curriculum, or even to tie skills to content based units. In first grade, my son's class spent six weeks learning about the rainforest and finished by each writing a report about a rainforest animal that they presented to the parents. The kids loved it, and they clearly had managed to use all their skills while focusing on a coherent, planned set of materials and topic rather than the typical reader.

There's a lot more to this book, and I do recommend it, though with some reservations. ( )