by Natalie Wexler
Reviewed on December 16, 2023
When I first checked out this audiobook from my library app, I was standing in the hall of my high school during passing period, chatting with the teachers from the classrooms next door. This book had just popped up in a search on my app, and I had just clicked “Check Out.”
“The Knowledge Gap,” I announced to my co-workers and friends. They glanced my direction and saw me reading from my phone. I continued with just the title. “The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System – and How to Fix It.”
I actually found the title intriguing! In my twelfth year in public education, I was ready to learn how to do some fixing. According to my library app, when I searched for an audio book on education, this was the first book to come up, so part of me was curious what it had to say that made it #1 on my search.
My husband has observed that one of my greatest strengths could also be a weakness in situations. I call myself optimistic. He would call me naive. In this particular conversation with my colleagues, I walked away feeling more like the latter.
“Oh, great,” a fellow teacher replied. “Another book by somebody who’s never been the classroom, telling us how we’re doing it all wrong.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle along. I felt slightly abashed. She was right! We’ve all had so much “advice” from “experts,” often those of us in education who have been here for any amount of time start to not only tune it out, but detest the mere suggestion of those suggestions.
Nevertheless, I started listening to the book that afternoon. And what Wexler has to say has got me completely rethinking how I look at our public education system and teaching in my classroom.
Wexler starts with in-person observations in primary school classrooms featuring different styles of teaching. She reports the dialogue and nonverbal communications between the teachers and their students. She doesn’t fault the teachers for any of their actions, but is merely an observer – both of how the current educational theories play out in that classroom, and, more importantly, the students’ reactions. This opener sucked me in because, even though I teach high school, I could COMPLETELY RELATE to the conversations, frustrations, and successes conveyed in these anecdotes.
From there, Wexler gives a historical overview of American education: where we started in the 1800’s, the “reading revolution” and high-stakes testing in the 1960’s, the subsequent Reading Wars, the introduction and adoption of Lucy Calkins’ reading and writing workshop models, to where we are presently. Against that social and cultural backdrop, Wexler compares quantitative and qualitative data demonstrating the literacy skills of American students and adults.
This is how I see it and explain it to others:
Teachers today focus on building SKILLS. Skills are kind of like spiderwebs in a person’s brain. They string from one place to another. However, these webs of skills need “anchors.” Content knowledge is those anchors. Students need those solid little rocks in their heads, anchored into their brain matter, so that the skills we practice and strengthen during a unit stay active, strong, and taut – even long after we’ve moved on to another unit and skill set. By removing direct content knowledge and instruction from primary grades, kids aren’t building these “anchors.”
Personally, I’ve seen the effects of this. I’ve seen how students don’t retain skills they honed and perfected just a couple of months ago. They claim they’ve “never done this before” when I know it’s being taught, or I’ve just taught it previously in the year! (…forgive me… this is just one of a teacher’s common frustrations…) Is it possible Wexler is on to something here?
Ultimately, she leads her readers to understand that by removing direct instruction of reading (specifically, decoding) and historical studies from K-5 classrooms in order to make room for reading workshop (where students learn to read “organically” or by immersion), we are graduating students who have neither understanding of the world around them nor the literacy skills to navigate that world.
“The more knowledge a child starts with, the more likely she is to acquire yet more knowledge. She’ll read more and understand and retain information better, because knowledge, like Velcro, sticks best to other related knowledge.”
― Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System–and How to Fix it
My personal takeaways are these:
In a Larger Context
This problem is directly related to our “book banning” movement and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. To start, if we are to bring education back to learning history and building those “anchors” in students’ brains, I can hear the questions coming already: “Who’s version of history are you going to teach???”
In My Classroom:
I must must MUST find a way to make my instruction more cross-curricular. I must find ways to bring science, math, history, and ELA all together in my classroom.
So, how does this affect you?
Well, I think this is coming, whether you like it or not. Wexler’s research is strong and hard to dispute. Also, what we’re doing isn’t working the way we want it to. If we want to make it better – help our most precious resource live the fullest and best lives possible – we have to keep trying.
Many school districts are moving away from the Calkins reading and writing workshop curriculum toward more knowledge-based curriculum, among other things. I, for one, am excited to see how this plays out.
If we change nothing, nothing will change.
Rating:
5/5 stars
Strengths:
Thought-provoking, researched, can be interpreted as a call to action in many settings
Weaknesses:
The title. It can be a turn-off for the exact crowd that needs to read this.