The Common Core and Core Knowledge

(Originally titled “Why Content Is King”)

“Text complexity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder,” say E.D. Hirsch Jr. and Lisa Hansel (Core Knowledge Foundation) in this Educational Leadership article. “Simple or dense, fictional or informational, what matters most for comprehension of a particular text is whether the reader has knowledge relevant to the text.” Which student will have better comprehension of a newspaper account of a major-league baseball game, ask Hirsch and Hansel – a strong reader who knows nothing about baseball or a weak reader who knows a lot? Literacy experts wielding readability formulas would say the former but cognitive scientists would say the latter – and the cognitive scientists would be right. “Astonishingly, high-IQ and low-IQ students perform at about the same level when both groups have equal subject-matter knowledge,” say Hirsch and Hansel. “Given enough familiarity with a topic to grasp the gist of a text, students are able to disentangle complex syntax.” 

They go on to cite research saying that reading levels give a false sense of precision about what people can read with good comprehension. “If we are talking about decoding skill, we can sensibly discuss whether a student is on grade level,” say Hirsch and Hansel. “But when talking about reading comprehension, the grade-level notion is misleading.” 

The Common Core ELA standards did the right thing, they believe, in shifting the conversation to text complexity, which takes into account text structure, style, and prior knowledge. Hirsch and Hansel also approve of Common Core’s emphasis on students reading a wide variety of high-quality, increasingly challenging texts and gathering a storehouse of knowledge as they move through the grades. To support this, the Core Knowledge Foundation has just released a free preschool-to-third grade program, Core Knowledge Language Arts (www.coreknowledge.org/ckla-overview) designed to build knowledge in conjunction with reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills. 

“Why Content Is King” by E.D. Hirsch Jr. and Lisa Hansel in Educational Leadership, November 2013 (Vol. 71, #3, p. 28-33), www.ascd.org; Hansel can be reached at lhansel@coreknowledge.org.