Study Group Details

For decades, we’ve been trying to improve overall education outcomes and narrow gaps between students from wealthy and poor families, without success. There’s one basic problem that’s been overlooked: elementary schools focus on supposed reading comprehension skills like “finding the main idea” rather than trying to teach kids anything substantive. At the same time, scientific studies show that the key factor in comprehension isn’t skill, it’s knowledge. Children from more educated families pick up academic knowledge at home, but others rely on school for that. And in our system, they’re the least likely to get it there—which largely explains what we call the achievement gap. Using the book The Knowledge Gap as the basis for discussion, this study group will explore how the standard American approach to literacy instruction currently works, where it came from, and how to change it so that education can at last fulfill its promise of being an engine of social mobility.