There may be no more familiar question in education than, “Why can’t we put politics aside and do what’s best for kids?” The answer, which is obvious to anyone who’s ever sat through a school board meeting, is because we don’t agree on “what’s best for kids.” It’s not even clear what it would mean to “put politics aside,” given that politics is how we resolve public disagreements—and that public education entails the use of public funds to hire public employees to educate the public’s kids.

Today, politics have taken on new urgency for education leaders navigating polarized debates about CRT, SEL, DEI, gender identity, and more. Especially in red and purple communities, a lot of frustrated conservative parents are squaring off against equally frustrated educators. We suspect that’s the reason, since the publication of our recent book Getting Education Right, why we’ve heard from so many school and system leaders asking some version of, “Any advice on how I can better get through to those conservatives?”

Unfortunately, few school and system leaders get much preparation or support when it comes to building trust on the right. Education leaders are immersed in a world of conferences, associations, degree programs, and trainings with a pronounced leftward tilt on hot-button issues such as race, gender, and parenthood. Indeed, they can grow so used to certain assumptions and phrases that it’s easy for them to get blindsided by conservative pushback. This is bad for schools and students alike.

Education leaders can fall into a reflexive disdain for conservative perspectives, even those that are otherwise innocuous and broadly popular. For instance, a wealth of evidence points to the obvious benefits of following the “success sequence”—finish high school, get a job, and get married before having kids. Seventy-seven percent of Americans, whether they’ve practiced it or not, say schools should teach it to kids. Yet, in education circles, those who promote the success sequence have become accustomed to being attacked as racists. Heck, we’ve repeatedly watched an accomplished Black educator get derided as a bigot for insisting his school teach his mostly Black students about the success sequence, as we note in the book.

In talking to leaders (whatever their own views) who are seeking to engage better with right-leaning parents, teachers, politicians, and community members, we’ve found ourselves repeatedly hitting on a few themes that seem to be helpful and thought it worth sharing those here. We aren’t communication pros or politicos, so this isn’t about PR or pandering. Rather, it’s about engaging with parents and other stakeholders in principled, productive ways.

Respect the whole community. Including those on the right.

Sitting through a professional development session as a conservative teacher or a community workshop as a conservative parent often means feeling like an interloper. Trainings and workshops routinely feature speakers who go on at great length about the virtues of DEI, restorative justice, and other “equitable” initiatives while casually deriding “right-wing book banners.”

Leaders can become inured to all this. At the institutions that prepare them for their roles, at district-sponsored events, and at the professional conferences they attend, such rhetoric is commonplace. As a result, they can make the mistake of assuming that everyone regards it as forward-thinking, even inclusive. Well, for those on the right, such talking points feel less like accepted truth than disingenuous barbs. They see divisive practices that have nothing to do with diversity or inclusion, “restorative” practices that fuel chaotic classrooms, and “equity” wielded to eliminate advanced math (as in California) or basic graduation requirements (as in Oregon). Conservatives find those denunciations of “book banning” to be politicized misrepresentations of attempts to remove genuinely pornographic texts from the shelves of middle-school libraries.

Heck, at the National Book Awards, beloved children’s entertainer LeVar Burton threatened to “throw hands” if there were any members of Moms for Liberty in the crowd. The room’s response? Laughter. So, in this bastion of progressive inclusiveness, it’s apparently cool to winkingly joke about violence against women . . . as long as they’re right-wing. If you’re seen as tolerating or accepting that kind of double standard, understand that conservatives will inevitably regard you with distrust, no matter how unfair you may think they’re being.

Here’s a simple standard for school and district leaders: presume that all of your parents deserve respect, no matter their politics. Do your homework on the speakers you hire to address students, teachers, and families. Are they going to engage constructively or peddle ideological agendas that denounce whole swaths of your community as rubes and racists? Are they going to allow for respectful discussion and disagreement or spew lazy stereotypes? When it’s a question of race, ethnicity, or immigration status, today’s school leaders intuitively accept that schools can’t appear to dismiss whole swaths of their community. That same moral compass ought to apply here. The ranks of teacher trainers and DEI consultants include too many incompetents and ideologues. Don’t invite those outrage artists into your school or system.

Engage with parents, even when you disagree with them

Conservatives tend to agree with Russell Kirk that, “The family always has been the source and center of community.” This primacy can seem discomfiting to some educators, counselors, and administrators (especially the ones with the “I’m your mom now” posters in their classrooms). After all, if an educator contends that first graders should learn about gender identity or middle schoolers about their “white privilege,” they think they’re just doing what’s right and that parental objections must be evidence of troubling personal agendas. We get it. Leaders who choose to hide a child’s in-school gender identity from parents are convinced they have the child’s best interests at heart.

But parents, in good faith and without any agenda other than their child’s well-being, may see things very differently. There already exist protocols for when teachers suspect that parents or guardians are abusing their charges. If such concerns exist, teachers should act on them. Where they don’t, schools should not be in the business of keeping things from parents. Given that parents rightly expect to be notified when the school gives their child an aspirin, it’s ludicrous to imagine that schools would hide the fact that their child is adopting an entirely new identity at school. You personally disagree? Okay. But understand that the thousands of schools that have adopted a policy of hiding a student’s in-school gender from their parents have taken an aggressive, ideological stance—and that it will be interpreted as such.

School leaders do well to appreciate that conservatives tend to think they’ve very temporarily entrusted their children to the care of their schools and have learned to be skeptical about what that entails. There are, of course, practical limits on how much influence parents should have on discipline or curriculum. And we’re all acquainted with problem parents who may be inclined to create conflict just because it’s in their nature, or because they can’t conceive that their child would ever misbehave. But a commitment to communication and transparency strikes us as a nonnegotiable baseline. A leader who can’t (or won’t) agree to that is unlikely to win the trust of conservative parents.

Take “true history” seriously

Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs, has observed, “Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it.” These competing dispositions emerge when it comes to teaching American history. In their most extreme iterations, such perspectives can, on the one hand, lead to teachers turning a blind eye to the mistakes and shortcomings of our nation—or, on the other hand, becoming entirely consumed by them.

Conveniently, the vast majority of Americans occupy a reasonable position on the teaching of American history. In fact, 90 percent of Americans agree with some version of the statement, “Schools should teach American history, warts and all.” Contra the social-media rhetoric, conservatives know that America has a checkered history and agree that students need to learn about the Three-fifths Compromise, Jim Crow, Korematsu, and the Trail of Tears.

We fear, though, that far too many classrooms tilt toward vilifying America rather than teach a balanced and accurate history. The enthusiasm for the New York Times’s factually-challenged 1619 Project-based curriculum, the architect of which describes America as a “slavocracy,” is illustrative. There’s little pedagogical or public purpose in approaching history as a series of overwrought, oft-dubious tales of American villainy.  Educators need to tune out the noise from the extremes—both from the parents offended by books depicting Ruby Bridge’s harassers as white (they were!) and from the activists seemingly intent on convincing children that America is irredeemably evil. There was a time when schools leaned too far to the right on all this. Today, many lean too far to the left—and educators shouldn’t be surprised by the backlash that can result.

There are, however, sensible remedies. The teacher unions and ed school activists urge schools to teach “true history.” We think that’s a terrific idea. Teach about America’s shortcomings but also its successes at expanding the franchise, incorporating wave after wave of immigration, fending off genocidal fascists during World War II and murderous totalitarians during the half-century-long Cold War, creating shared prosperity, cleaning up the environment, combating the scourge of ethnic and racial hatred, erecting stable governing institutions, and pioneering deep and enduring protections for civil liberties. Teach it all, the good and the bad. If your educators haven’t been exposed to the good in their teacher training or fear being labeled naïve for discussing it . . . well, that’s when an unabashed commitment to “true history” will be especially useful.

Effective public stewards forge relationships with their whole community. There have been laudable efforts to make sure that educators reach out across racial, ethnic, linguistic, and sexual identity differences. Making every child and every family feel welcome and respected is important. Given intense polarization and roiling tensions between conservatives and their schools, leaders who haven’t gotten much useful counsel when it comes to engaging the right will find it an especially propitious time to apply this advice to a relationship that’s on the ropes.

Frederick M. Hess is an executive editor of Education Next. Michael Q. McShane is director of research for EdChoice. They are the authors of Getting Education Right: A Conservative Vision for Improving Early Childhood, K–12, and College (Teachers College Press).

In the ever-shifting world of school choice, what began as a homegrown charter-school network’s small experiment in microschooling stands out as unique—and as a uniquely promising model for replication.

Gem Prep, a network of seven brick-and-mortar K–12 charter schools in Idaho, anchored by a longstanding and high-performing online school, launched an experiment called Learning Societies at the start of the 2022–23 school year. Two publicly funded Learning Societies opened in August 2022, one in the hamlet of Emmett, 30 miles northwest of Boise, with 22 students in grades 1–5, and the other in Lewiston in northern Idaho, with seven students in grades 1–5.

The basic idea is this: Some parents who, for a variety of reasons, hesitate to send their children to a traditional brick-and-mortar school have neither the time, inclination, or temperament to homeschool or to monitor a full-time online program. Learning Societies provide an intimate environment where kids, supervised by professional educators, learn online and in small, in-person groups for six hours a day. Gem Prep leaders describe it as a sweet spot between traditional schooling and at-home online learning. It is particularly well suited to rural areas.

While the inaugural year in both Learning Society locations was filled with challenges, those challenges produced valuable lessons that Gem Prep leaders are confident will strengthen the program going forward, as it expands to new locations and more grade levels.

I spent the Learning Societies’ inaugural year tracking their progress for Bluum, a Boise-based nonprofit that acts as a funding intermediary and local champion of entrepreneurial education ventures. I visited each center twice, once early in the school year and once toward the end, and checked in frequently with teachers, parents, and Gem Prep administrators.

It’s a testament to the underlying strength of the academic program that, even as the Learning Societies struggled with operational and procedural snafus, especially in the first few months, parents stuck with the initiative, with very little attrition.

Though online schools in general have been justifiably criticized for poor academic results, Gem Prep Online stands out as an exception. Thirty-five percent of its students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, more than in the state as a whole (27 percent). Yet Gem Prep Online, with a homegrown curriculum refined over more than a decade, regularly outperforms state averages in student achievement. In fact, in 2021–22, the online school boasted the state’s highest performance on the Idaho Reading Indicator, which is administered to students in grades K–3.

Most Learning Society students came either from schools in a low-performing rural district (Emmett) or had been homeschooling. In both Emmett and Lewiston, most students entering the program had been working significantly below grade level, with only 18 percent of incoming students scoring at the proficient level on the fall state-mandated reading assessments.

Learning Societies have the potential to achieve a happy medium that combines the strengths of both homeschooling (or online learning from home) and a traditional brick-and-mortar school. The idea for the program developed among Gem Prep staff and leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic, when everyone was forced for a time into remote learning.

For some families, where parents had no choice but to leave home for work, this posed an almost insurmountable problem. Their children were home, learning remotely, but the younger ones needed adult supervision to navigate online systems.

In some places across the country, including Idaho, families formed informal “pandemic pods”—essentially parent-run learning cooperatives. But, Gem Prep leaders wondered, what if a school staffed by professional educators could provide a similar service across the state, even after the pandemic ended?

Thus were Learning Societies born.

“By several measures, Gem Prep Online is a top school in the state,” said Jason Bransford, Gem Prep’s CEO. “The ability to access that for families who don’t have a full-time adult in the home I think is really a powerful and compelling part of the Learning Societies story.”

The Origins

What would later become Gem Prep Online launched as a statewide virtual charter school in 2004 as the Idaho Distance Education Academy. Gem Innovation Schools, as the organization is officially known, opened its first brick-and-mortar school in 2014 in the city of Pocatello.

Today, Gem Prep operates Gem Prep Online as well as six physical schools in Pocatello, Meridian, Meridian North, Meridian South, Twin Falls, and Nampa. All of them currently or will soon serve students in grades K–12. A campus is scheduled to open in Ammon in 2025. The early success of both Gem Prep Online and the first brick-and-mortar school attracted major investments from Bluum, the J. A. and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of the Charter School Programs. At full enrollment, the Gem Prep Network of Schools will serve 4,600 students statewide.

Gem Prep schools are known for their academic rigor, their high performance, and their philosophy of earned student autonomy. As students progress through the grade levels, they are encouraged to take increased ownership of their learning.

By the time they are in the final two years of high school, many Gem Prep brick-and-mortar students rarely appear on campus. Often, they work independently online, and some attend in-person college classes. Many students take advantage of their scheduling flexibility to participate in internships, jobs, or other activities.

When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, Gem Prep Online’s enrollment swelled by 40 percent, as parents sought options that would keep their students learning at grade level, or at least from not falling too far behind. The pandemic-era shift to online learning gave public-school parents across Idaho an opportunity to see inside their children’s classrooms for the first time. A significant number did not like what they saw. Either they felt the pace of learning was too slow, or that the values being espoused by educators did not align with those of their families, or some combination of the two.

In some communities, groups of parents began forming their own learning co-ops, and some reached out to Gem Prep to see if the charter network, with its long track record of rigorous online learning, might help.

This led Bransford and his team to hatch the idea of Learning Societies. “We realized that we had large Gem Prep schools in some of the biggest cities in Idaho, and then we had Gem Prep Online that you could do from your home. But we didn’t have anything in the middle, and we decided Learning Societies filled a need in society,” he said.

Gem Prep Online only works for families who have a supervising adult at home. Learning Societies, as originally conceived, would provide that supervision for families where parents had to work outside the home.

For the concept to succeed, Gem Prep would have to ensure that these microschools, offering a mix of online and in-person instruction, hewed to the same rigorous education provided at both Gem Prep Online and the network’s brick-and-mortar schools.

Homeschoolers were a group that was likely to be attracted to Learning Societies, especially because many such families might value the assistance of education professionals who could help their children learn without pushing values that are antithetical to the family’s own.

While this proved true from the outset, there was also some potential misalignment, which Bransford and his team moved early to correct.

“Former homeschoolers saw this early on as halfway between traditional schooling and homeschooling, and I don’t see it that way,” Bransford said. “They wanted maximum flexibility, but many of their students had severe academic gaps. And that’s not how we operate. We believe in excellence, then flexibility.”

Gem Prep adheres to the same philosophy of earned autonomy as its brick-and-mortar counterparts. As students move through the grades and demonstrate their ability to take ownership of their learning, they are granted more freedom to direct it themselves, using the Gem Prep Online curriculum.

While Learning Societies welcome all students whose families chose to enroll them, the program particularly suits students motivated to become self-directed learners, said Adam Bruno, a Gem Prep administrator who manages the program.

“Our scholars need to have the innate drive to complete their assignments in a high-quality manner or at least the desire to develop this skill,” Bruno said. “One of our early lessons is that those ‘running from something’—they only chose Gem because they didn’t like the local district—struggled more than those ‘running to’ our model of rigorous self-directed learning. The model can work for any scholar, but there has to be total family buy-in to become a self-directed learner and achieve college readiness.”

Beginning with the 2023–24 academic year, Learning Societies have expanded into the upper grades, where the earned-autonomy concept should increasingly come into play. This should relieve some of the pressure on Learning Society leaders and staff, who have found simultaneously supporting and overseeing the daily work of students in multiple grade levels to be one of the program’s biggest challenges.

Learning Societies in the Microschooling Ecosystem

What makes Gem Prep’s Learning Societies unique is that the microschooling movement largely consists of private enterprises with varying levels of formal structure, which means, among other things, that parents must pay tuition. “The public sector is rarely involved in microschooling, so it is fascinating to see the government sector respond,” said Don Soifer, co-founder and CEO of the Las Vegas–based National Microschooling Center.

Soifer described the Learning Society model as “a novelty in this space.” As microschools have evolved, they have generally fallen into three categories, none of which fits what Gem Prep is attempting. The first category comprises independent schools that Soifer described as similar to pandemic pods. Parents intend to keep them small—the average size is about a dozen students—and have no desire to scale them up.

The second category, which is rarer, consists of “partnership” microschools, generally organized by an employer. Soifer cited a series of microschools he helped run for the city of North Las Vegas during the pandemic. The initiative was funded entirely by city dollars, and the schools were set up in recreation centers, libraries, and other city-owned facilities. To qualify, families had to withdraw from the local school district and become homeschoolers.

The third category is what Soifer calls provider networks. These are companies established to open microschools in school-choice-friendly states that have authorized Education Savings Accounts or other voucher-like programs. He cited Acton Academy, Prenda, and KaiPod as leading examples of microschooling provider networks.

“The provider will do everything you need to get up and running using their model,” Soifer explained. “It becomes easier for somebody who doesn’t want to wrestle with the regulatory stuff, and the business stuff, and the licensing, and designing the teaching and learning.”

Soifer said Great Hearts Academies, a charter network that operates classical academies in Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, has moved into the online space and could soon consider a model similar to Learning Societies. For the moment though, Gem Prep’s Learning Societies stand alone.

Lessons Learned in Year One

Gem Prep’s experiment therefore merits close scrutiny. Several key lessons have emerged from the Learning Societies’ first year in Emmett and Lewiston. These ideas should prove useful going forward, particularly with two initiatives launched in 2023–24, a new Learning Society in Payette and the expansion of grades in Lewiston and Emmett through high school.

Communicate clearly to families from the outset exactly what a Learning Society is and how it operates. Families interviewed for this article in Emmett and Lewiston throughout the 2022–23 school year were universally happy with the academic progress their students made. “They were just so far behind, and they have made so much progress. It’s amazing,” said one Emmett mother, who moved her children to the Learning Society from a local public school. “I want to cry when I see how far they’ve come.”

Not all families, however, started with a clear understanding of how the program was intended to function. For example, some parents didn’t realize that the Learning Societies were primarily an extension of Gem Prep Online, rather than a small school with mostly in-person instruction.

Others initially thought of the Learning Society as a kind of drop-in center to be used at their convenience rather than a structured day that required regular attendance. Bransford said Gem Prep will be clearer about the network’s philosophy going forward.

“If a student is performing really well, we want to provide maximum flexibility and freedom. But if the student is struggling, we double down and provide more interventions and support,” he said.

Hire experienced educators who feel comfortable with significant autonomy. Initially, Gem Prep leadership envisaged staffing Learning Societies with a leader who had at least the equivalent experience working with children as a public-school paraprofessional, along with a second adult, most likely a parent, to help out as needed. For the program to work financially, there couldn’t be more than one paid adult for every 20 children. Parent volunteers would have to supplement the paid staff where needed.

Experience proved, though, that a successful Learning Society requires an experienced teacher, not just a paraprofessional. In Lewiston, with an enrollment of seven students in grades 1–5, leader Lois Bly was a veteran Gem Prep teacher. One parent volunteer also had a teaching license and helped out at least one day each week. Bly proved to be the model of a Learning Society leader. Not only did she have both a teaching background and Gem Prep experience, but she also had the temperament to navigate the rocky road of a start-up.

Such was not the case in Emmett, where the leader for the first few months was a parent who, before taking on the role shortly before school started for the year, had been a stay-at-home mom for 15 years. Because Emmett had more students than Lewiston, she had a full-time assistant, a young man with very limited teaching experience. By October the leader had stepped into a part-time role, and by the holiday break she had resigned and withdrawn her children from the Learning Society.

Her replacement, a young woman with a modest amount of teaching experience in public schools in another state, lasted through the school year, but she became disenchanted after just a few weeks and notified Gem Prep she would not be returning for the following school year. She felt that the systems and structures in place were insufficient for the task at hand and that students were being short-changed as a result.

In many ways, the program in Emmett was held together by the close-knit parent community, who, despite the Society’s leadership issues, saw their children making strong academic progress.

While some of the challenges in Emmett were caused by insufficient preparation on Gem Prep’s part, the bigger issue was expecting too much from the people initially hired to do the job, educators who lacked the experience and attributes required to succeed as a Learning Society leader.

Gem Prep’s Adam Bruno described what he has learned about the kind of person who can flourish as a leader. In addition to classroom experience, he said, the individual needs “adaptability, flexibility, and chillness; that ability to go with the flow, step in where they’re needed, take coaching, and generally be able to roll with things, because there’s just so many things that come at you out there that you maybe can’t anticipate.”

Equally important, he said, “if it’s somebody who knows Gem Prep, that is really helpful.”

In 2023–24, all three Learning Societies are being led by experienced Gem Prep teachers who also, Bruno believes, have the attributes needed for success.

Ensure that there are enough supervising adults that students don’t fall through the cracks. If parents had one consistent concern throughout the first year, especially in Lewiston, it was that the adult workload in the Learning Societies was overwhelming, bordering on impossible, for the number of paid staffers. A particular challenge for staff was having to fill multiple roles simultaneously: instructor, facilitator, tech trouble-shooter, and coordinator between online teachers and students.

Equally if not more vexing was having to help students across many different grade levels. The youngest students needed constant handholding to use the technology properly and stay focused, which parents believed sometimes left the older students without adequate support.

The need for sufficient staff will undoubtedly pose one of the biggest challenges in creating successful Learning Societies going forward. Because Gem Prep now recognizes that the program requires experienced professional teachers, personnel expenses will be higher than originally anticipated. Those increased costs will make it tough to decrease the student-to-adult ratio below the current 20 to 1. But, Bransford said, an experienced, confident Gem Prep teacher can handle high ratios—assuming the program is dialed in and that leaders are well trained for the role.

Be quick to adapt as circumstances warrant (for example, by extending the school day). When the two Learning Societies launched, they operated with a five-hour day, from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Parents felt that this was insufficient and left students with a burdensome amount of work to complete at home. Gem Prep listened to the feedback and offered a “highly encouraged but optional” sixth hour, from 1 to 2 p.m., at the start of the second semester. Virtually everyone took advantage of that opportunity.

This kind of flexibility was a hallmark of Gem Prep’s approach during the inaugural year of Learning Societies, and that trait will serve the program well as it moves forward. Expansion and growth will bring new, unanticipated challenges, and the program’s ability to pivot and adapt will be critical to its continued success.

Find the right mix of online learning, live work with the leader, and independent study. As the year progressed Gem Prep made several changes to how Learning Societies used their time. Initially, the bulk of a student’s day was spent either in live remote lessons with a Gem Prep Online teacher, or working independently on their computers. Little time was spent in small groups working with an adult in the room.

“A parent called it an Internet café, and that was a fair description,” Bruno said.

Parents, educators, and students all found this frustrating at the outset. “Our kids need that in-person time, and that’s something our teachers just don’t have time to do,” one mother said in October. But by November, she said she was seeing more of an effort by staff to pull out small groups and work with them on lessons.

Bruno said that as currently conceived, elementary students will spend about 45 minutes of the day in a live, online lesson with a teacher. Up to 90 minutes will be spent working in the classroom with the leader or an aide. The rest of the day will be spent working independently or in small groups on lessons or projects, with time also built in for meals and recess.

“What I probably didn’t frame as well as I could at the outset, even for myself, was how do we keep the best parts of Gem Prep Online and bring it into a hybrid concept?” Bruno said. “And then, on the other hand, how do we bring the best parts of our brick-and-mortar schools into that mix? When we get that locked in, we will be really strong.”

Student Progress

Parents I interviewed were satisfied with the progress their children made in 2022–23. Students entered the Learning Societies with significant deficiencies in reading ability. By spring, 58 percent of students were reading at a proficient level, up from 18 percent the previous fall. In just the first year, these students had shown strong academic growth across all demographics.

Across the two campuses, on the normed ISIP reading assessment, part of the Istation online reading program, nearly half (48 percent) of all Learning Society students scored at least 20 percentage points higher in May than they did on their initial test in September. And 43 percent of students exhibited similar growth on the math assessment over the same time span.

By the end of the school year, 84 percent of 3rd through 5th graders were proficient in English language arts as measured by the state’s standardized test, and 66 percent were proficient in math. Those levels are significantly above statewide averages.

It’s not surprising, then, that two of the three Learning Societies operating in 2023–24—Emmett and Payette—began the year with close to full enrollment of 40 students at each site, while Lewiston has doubled its enrollment from the first year and is just under its capacity of 20 students.

Looking to the Future

Gem Prep administrators have entered the second year of Learning Societies confident that they have hit on a potentially transformative concept. They are eager to expand the program to other parts of the state at a deliberate, cautious pace. Ideally, they would like to add one to two new Learning Societies each year in areas of the state that lack access to a brick-and-mortar Gem Prep School or to other choices.

A few factors will determine whether this growth is feasible. First, there needs to be a critical mass of parents committed to placing their children in a Learning Society, which is a new and unfamiliar structure for most people.

Second, Gem Prep has to locate affordable space to rent or buy that fits the needs of a small school and meets the required building and safety codes. Inadequacies in the Emmett space in 2022–23 caused some challenges that continued throughout the year.

Third, every Learning Society needs a leader who has the attributes described earlier in this article. Ideally, a leader should be an experienced educator who either has worked in the Gem Prep ecosystem or is familiar with the network and its operating principles and philosophies.

“We’re really excited about the future of Learning Societies and what they can provide for Idaho families,” CEO Jason Bransford said. “We’ve learned a lot, and we still have a lot to learn, but the potential is clear.”

Alan Gottlieb is a Denver-based education writer and co-founder of Chalkbeat. 

This article appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Gottlieb, A. (2024). The Rise of Learning Societies: A small experiment in rural Idaho holds big promise for student success. Education Next, 24(2), 14-21.

California’s proposed math curriculum framework has ignited a ferocious debate, touching off a revival of the 1990s math wars and attracting national media attention. Early drafts of the new framework faced a firestorm of criticism, with opponents charging that the guidelines sacrificed accelerated learning for high achievers in a misconceived attempt to promote equity.

The new framework, first released for public comment in 2021, called for all students to take the same math courses through 10th grade, a “detracking” policy that would effectively end the option of 8th graders taking algebra. A petition signed by nearly 6,000 STEM leaders argued that the framework “will have a significant adverse effect on gifted and advanced learners.” Rejecting the framework’s notions of social justice, an open letter with over 1,200 signatories, organized by the Independent Institute, accused the framework of “politicizing K–12 math in a potentially disastrous way” by trying “to build a mathless Brave New World on a foundation of unsound ideology.”

About once every eight years, the state of California convenes a group of math educators to revisit the framework that recommends how math will be taught in the public schools. The current proposal calls for a more conceptual approach toward math instruction, deemphasizing memorization and stressing problem solving and collaboration. After several delays, the framework is undergoing additional edits by the state department of education and is scheduled for consideration by the state board of education for approval sometime in 2023.

Why should anyone outside of California care? With almost six million public school students, the state constitutes the largest textbook market in the United States. Publishers are likely to cater to that market by producing instructional materials in accord with the state’s preferences. California was ground zero in the debate over K–12 math curriculum in the 1990s, a conflict that eventually spread coast to coast and around the world. A brief history will help set the stage.

Historical Context

Standards define what students are expected to learn—the knowledge, skills, and concepts that every student should master at a given grade level. Frameworks provide guidance for meeting the standards—including advice on curriculum, instruction, and assessments. The battle over the 1992 California state framework, a document admired by math reformers nationwide, started slowly, smoldered for a few years, and then burst into a full-scale, media-enthralling conflict by the end of the decade. That battle ended in 1997 when the math reformers’ opponents, often called math traditionalists, convinced state officials to adopt math standards that rejected the inquiry-based, constructivist philosophy of existing state math policy.

The traditionalists featured a unique coalition of parents and professional mathematicians—scholars in university mathematics departments, not education schools—who were organized via a new tool of political advocacy: the Internet.

The traditionalist standards lasted about a decade. By the end of the aughts, the standards were tarnished by their association with the unpopular No Child Left Behind Act, which mandated that schools show all students scoring at the “proficient” level on state tests by 2014 or face consequences. It was clear that virtually every school in the country would be deemed a failure, No Child Left Behind had plummeted in the public’s favor, and policymakers needed something new. Enter the Common Core State Standards.

The Common Core authors wanted to avoid a repeat of the 1990s math wars, and that meant compromise. Math reformers were satisfied by the standards’ recommendation that procedures (computation), conceptual understanding, and problem solving receive “equal emphasis.” Traditionalists were satisfied with the Common Core requirement that students had to master basic math facts for addition and multiplication and the standard algorithms (step-by-step computational procedures) for all four operations—addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

California is a Common Core state and, for the most part, has avoided the political backlash that many states experienced a few years after the standards’ widespread adoption. The first Common Core–oriented framework, published in 2013, was noncontroversial; however, compromises reflected in the careful wording of some learning objectives led to an unraveling when the framework was revised and presented for public comment in 2021.

Unlike most of the existing commentary on the revised framework, my analysis here focuses on the elementary grades and how the framework addresses two aspects of math: basic facts and standard algorithms. The two topics are longstanding sources of disagreement between math reformers and traditionalists. They were flashpoints in the 1990s math wars, and they are familiar to most parents from the kitchen-table math that comes home from school. In the case of the California framework, these two topics illustrate how reformers have diverged from the state’s content standards, ignored the best research on teaching and learning, and relied on questionable research to justify the framework’s approach.

Addition and Multiplication Facts

Fluency in mathematics usually refers to students’ ability to perform calculations quickly and accurately. The Common Core mathematics standards call for students to know addition and multiplication facts “from memory,” and the California math standards expect the same. The task of knowing basic facts in subtraction and division is made easier by those operations being the inverse, respectively, of addition and multiplication. If one knows that 5 + 6 = 11, then it logically follows that 11 – 6 = 5; and if 8 × 9 = 72, then surely 72 ÷ 9 = 8.

Cognitive psychologists have long pointed out the value of automaticity with number facts—the ability to retrieve facts immediately from long-term memory without even thinking about them. Working memory is limited; long-term memory is vast. In that way, math facts are to math as phonics is to reading. If these facts are learned and stored in long-term memory, they can be retrieved effortlessly when the student is tackling more-complex cognitive tasks. In a recent interview, Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, observed, “I visited a school in the Bronx a few months ago, and they were working on exponent properties like: two cubed, to the seventh power. So, you multiply the exponents, and it would be two to [the] 21st power. But the kids would get out the calculator to find out three times seven.” Even though they knew how to solve the exponent exercise itself, “the fluency gap was adding to the cognitive load, taking more time, and making things much more complex.”

California’s proposed framework mentions the words “memorize” and “memorization” 27 times, but all in a negative or downplaying way. For example, the framework states: “In the past, fluency has sometimes been equated with speed, which may account for the common, but counterproductive, use of timed tests for practicing facts. . . . Fluency is more than the memorization of facts or procedures, and more than understanding and having the ability to use one procedure for a given situation.” (All framework quotations here are from the most recent public version, a draft presented for the second field review, a 60-day public-comment period in 2022.)

One can find the intellectual origins of the framework on the website of Youcubed, a Stanford University math research center led by Jo Boaler, who is a math education professor at Stanford and member of the framework writing committee. Youcubed is cited 28 times in the framework, including Boaler’s essay on that site, “Fluency without Fear: Research Evidence on the Best Ways to Learn Math Facts.” The framework cites Boaler an additional 48 times.

The framework’s attempt to divorce fluency from speed (and from memory retrieval) leads it to distort the state’s math standards. “The acquisition of fluency with multiplication facts begins in third grade and development continues in grades four and five,” the framework states. Later it says, “Reaching fluency with multiplication and division within 100 represents a major portion of upper elementary grade students’ work.”

Both statements are inaccurate. The state’s 3rd-grade standard is that students will know multiplication facts “from memory,” not that they will begin fluency work and continue development in later grades. After 3rd grade, the standards do not mention multiplication facts again. In 4th grade, for example, the standards call for fluency with multidigit multiplication, a stipulation embedded within “understanding of place value to 1,000,000.” Students lacking automaticity with basic multiplication facts will be stopped cold. Parents who are concerned that their 4th graders don’t know the times tables, let alone how to multiply multidigit numbers, will be directed to the framework to justify children falling behind the standards’ expectations.

After the release of Common Core, the authors of the math standards published “Progressions” documents that fleshed out the standards in greater detail. The proposed framework notes approvingly, “The Progressions for the Common Core State Standards documents are a rich resource; they (McCallum, Daro, and Zimba, 2013) describe how students develop mathematical understanding from kindergarten through grade twelve.” But the Progressions contradict the framework on fluency. They state: “The word fluent is used in the Standards to mean ‘fast and accurate.’ Fluency in each grade involves a mixture of just knowing some answers, knowing some answers from patterns (e.g., ‘adding 0 yields the same number’), and knowing some answers from the use of strategies.”

Students progress toward fluency in a three-stage process: use strategies, apply patterns, and know from memory. Students who have attained automaticity with basic facts have reached the top step and just know them, but some students may take longer to commit facts to memory. As retrieval takes over, the possibility of error declines. Students who know 7 × 7 = 49 but must “count on” by 7 to confirm that 8 × 7 = 56 are vulnerable to errors to which students who “just know” that 7 × 8 = 56 are impervious. In terms of speed, the analogous process in reading is decoding text. Students who “just know” certain words because they have read them frequently are more fluent readers than students who must pause to sound out those words phonetically. This echoes the point Sal Khan made about students who know how to work with exponents raised to another power but still need a calculator for simple multiplication facts.

Standard Algorithms

Algorithms are methods for solving multi-digit calculations. Standard algorithms are simply those used conventionally. Learning the standard algorithms of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division allows students to extend single-digit knowledge to multi-digit computation, while being mindful of place value and the possible need for regrouping.

Barry Garelick, a math teacher and critic of Common Core, posted a series of blog posts about the standards and asked, “Can one teach only the standard algorithm and meet the Common Core State Standards?” Jason Zimba, who is one of three authors of the Common Core math standards, responded:

Provided the standards as a whole are being met, I would say that the answer to this question is yes. The basic reason for this is that the standard algorithm is “based on place value [and] properties of operations.” That means it qualifies. In short, the Common Core requires the standard algorithm; additional algorithms aren’t named, and they aren’t required.

Zimba provides a table showing how exclusively teaching the standard algorithms of addition and subtraction could be accomplished, presented not as a recommendation, but as “one way it could be done.” Zimba’s approach begins in 1st grade, with students—after receiving instruction in place value—learning the proper way to line up numbers vertically. “Whatever one thinks of the details in the table, I would think that if the culminating standard in grade 4 is realistically to be met, then one likely wants to introduce the standard algorithm pretty early in the addition and subtraction progression.”

Note the term “culminating standard.” That implies the endpoint of development. The framework, however, interprets 4th grade as the grade of first exposure, not the culmination—and extends that misinterpretation to all four operations with whole numbers. “The progression of instruction in standard algorithms begins with the standard algorithm for addition and subtraction in grade four; multiplication is addressed in grade five; the introduction of the standard algorithm for whole number division occurs in grade six,” the framework reads.

This advice would place California 6th graders years behind the rest of the world in learning algorithms. In Singapore, for example, division of whole numbers up to 10,000 is taught in 3rd grade. The justification for delay stated in the framework is: “Students who use invented strategies before learning standard algorithms understand base-ten concepts more fully and are better able to apply their understanding in new situations than students who learn standard algorithms first (Carpenter et al., 1997).”

The 1997 Carpenter study, however, is a poor reference for the framework’s assertion. That study’s authors declare, “Instruction was not a focus of this study, and the study says very little about how students actually learned to use invented strategies.” In addition, the study sample was not scientifically selected to be representative, and the authors warn, “The characterization of patterns of development observed in this study cannot be generalized to all students.”

As for the Progressions documents mentioned above, they do not prohibit learning standard algorithms before the grade level of the “culminating expectation.” Consistent with Jason Zimba’s approach, forms of the standard addition and subtraction algorithms are presented as 2nd grade topics, two years before students are required to demonstrate fluency.

The selective use of evidence extends beyond the examples above, as is clear from the research that is cited—and not cited—by the framework.

Research Cited by the Framework

On June 1, 2021, Jo Boaler issued a tweet asserting, “This 4 week camp increases student achievement by the equivalent of 2.8 years.” The tweet included information on a two-day workshop at Stanford for educators interested in holding a Youcubed-inspired summer camp. The Youcubed website promotes the summer camp with the same claim of additional years of learning.

Where did the 2.8 years come from? The first Youcubed math camp was held on the Stanford campus in 2015 with 83 6th and 7th graders. For 18 days, students spent mornings working on math problems and afternoons touring the campus in small groups, going on scavenger hunts, and taking photographs. The students also received instruction targeting their mathematical mindsets, learning that there is no such thing as “math people” and “nonmath people,” that being fast at math is not important, and that making mistakes and struggling, along with thinking visually and making connections between mathematical representations, promote brain growth. Big ideas, open-ended tasks, collaborative problem solving, lessons on mindset, and inquiry-based teaching—these are foundational to the framework. The camp offers a test run of the proposed framework, the document asserting that the camps “significantly increase achievement in a short period of time.”

The claim of growth is based on an assessment the researchers administered on the first and last days of the camp. The test consisted of four open-ended problems, called “tasks,” scored by a rubric, with both the problems and the rubric created by the Mathematical Assessment Research Service, or MARS. Students were given four tasks on the first day and the same four tasks on the final day of camp. An effect size of 0.91 was calculated by dividing the difference between the group’s pre- and post-test average scores by the pre-test standard deviation. How this effect size was converted into years of learning is not explained, but researchers usually do this based on typical rates of achievement growth among students taking standardized math tests in consecutive years.

In 2019, the Youcubed summer-camp program went national. An in-house study was conducted involving 10 school districts in five states where the camps served about 900 students in total and ranged from 10 to 28 days. The study concluded, “The average gain score for participating students across all sites was 0.52 standard deviation units (SD), equivalent to 1.6 years of growth in math.”

Let’s consider these reported gains in the context of recent NAEP math scores. The 2022 scores triggered nationwide concern as 4th graders’ scores fell to 236 scale score points from 241 in 2019, a decline of 0.16 standard deviations. Eighth graders’ scores declined to 274 from 282, equivalent to 0.21 standard deviations. Headlines proclaimed that two decades of learning had been wiped out by two years of pandemic. A McKinsey report estimated that NAEP scores might not return to 2019 levels until 2036.

If the Youcubed gains are to be believed, all pandemic learning losses can be restored, and additional gains achieved, by two to four weeks of summer school.

There are several reasons to doubt the study’s conclusions, the most notable of which is the lack of a comparison group to gauge the program’s effects as measured by the MARS outcome. School districts recruited students for the camps. No data are provided on the number of students approached, the number who refused, and the number who accepted but didn’t show up. The final group of participating students comprises the study’s treatment group. The claim that these students experienced 1.6 years of growth in math is based solely on the change in students’ scores on the MARS tasks between the first and last day of the program.

This is especially problematic because the researchers gave students the same four MARS tasks before and after the program. Using the exact same instrument to test and re-test students within four weeks could inflate post-treatment scores, especially if the students worked on similar problems during the camp. No data are provided confirming that the MARS tasks are suitable, in terms of technical quality, for use in estimating the summer camp’s effect. Nor do the authors demonstrate that the tasks are representative of the full range of math content that students are expected to master, which is essential to justify reporting students’ progress in terms of years of learning. Even the grade level of the tasks is unknown, although camp attendees spanned grades 5 to 7, and MARS offers three levels of tasks (novice, apprentice, and expert).

The study’s problems extend to its treatment of attrition from the treatment sample. For one of the participating school districts (#2), 47 students are reported enrolled, but the camp produces 234 test scores—a mystery that goes unexplained. When this district is omitted, the remaining nine districts are lacking pre- and post-test scores for about one-third of enrolled students, who presumably were absent on either the first or last day. The study reports attendance rates in each district as the percentage of students who attended 75 percent of the days or more, with the median district registering 84 percent. Four districts reported less than 70 percent of students meeting that attendance threshold. A conventional metric for attendance during a school year is that students who miss 10 percent of days are “chronically absent.” By that standard, attendance at the camps appears spotty at best, and in four of the 10 camps, quite poor.

These are serious weaknesses. Just as the camps serve as prototypes of the framework’s ideas about good curriculum and instruction, the studies of Youcubed summer camps are illustrative of what the framework considers compelling research. The studies do not meet minimal standards of causal evidence.

Research Omitted by the Framework

It is also informative to look at research that is not included in the California framework.

The What Works Clearinghouse, housed within the federal Institute of Education Sciences, publishes practice guides for educators. The guides aim to provide concise summaries of high-quality research on various topics. A panel of experts conducts a search of the research literature and screens studies for quality, following strict protocols. Experimental and quasi-experimental studies are favored because of their ability to estimate causal effects. The panel summarizes the results, linking each recommendation to supporting studies. The practice guides present the best scientifically sound evidence on causal relationships in teaching and learning.

How many of the studies cited in the practice guides are also cited in the framework? To find out, I searched the framework for citations to the studies cited by the four practice guides most relevant to K–12 math instruction. Here are the results:

Assisting Students Struggling with Mathematics: Intervention in the Elementary Grades
(2021) 0 out of 43 studies

Teaching Strategies for Improving Algebra Knowledge in Middle and High School Students
(2015, revised 2019) 0 out of 12 studies

Improving Mathematical Problem Solving in Grades 4 Through 8
(2012) 0 out of 37 studies

Developing Effective Fractions Instruction for Kindergarten Through 8th Grade
(2010) 1 out of 22 studies

Except for one study, involving teaching the number line to young children using games, the framework ignores the best research on K–12 mathematics. How could this happen?

One powerful clue: key recommendations in the practice guides directly refute the framework. Timed activities with basic facts, for example, are recommended to increase fluency, with the “Struggling Students” guide declaring “the expert panel assigned a strong level [emphasis original] of evidence to this recommendation based on 27 studies of the effectiveness of activities to support automatic retrieval of basic facts and fluid performance of other tasks involved in solving complex problems.” Calls for explicit or systematic instruction in the guides fly in the face of the inquiry methods endorsed in the framework. Worked examples, in which teachers guide students step by step from problem to solution, are encouraged in the guides but viewed skeptically by the framework for not allowing productive struggle.

Bumpy Road Ahead

The proposed California Math Framework not only ignores key expectations of the state’s math standards, but it also distorts or redefines them to serve a reform agenda. The standards call for students to know “from memory” basic addition facts by the end of 2nd grade and multiplication facts by the end of 3rd grade. But the framework refers to developing fluency with basic facts as a major topic of 4th through 6th grades. Fluency is redefined to disregard speed. Instruction on standard algorithms is delayed by interpreting the grades for culminating standards as the grades in which standard algorithms are first encountered. California’s students will be taught the standard algorithm for division years after the rest of the world.

The framework’s authors claim to base their recommendations on research, but it is unclear how—or even if—they conducted a literature search or what criteria they used to identify high-quality studies. The document serves as a manifesto for K–12 math reform, citing sources that support its arguments and ignoring those that do not, even if the omitted research includes the best scholarship on teaching and learning mathematics. Brian Conrad, professor of mathematics at Stanford University, has analyzed the framework’s citations and documented many instances where the original findings of studies were distorted. In some cases, the papers’ conclusions were the opposite of those presented in the framework.

The pandemic took a toll on math learning. To return to a path of achievement will require the effort of teachers, parents, and students. Unfortunately, if the state adopts the proposed framework in its current form, the document will offer little assistance in tackling the hard work ahead.

Tom Loveless, a former 6th-grade teacher and Harvard public policy professor, is an expert on student achievement, education policy, and reform in K–12 schools. He also was a member of the National Math Advisory Panel and U.S. representative to the General Assembly, International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, 2004–2012.

This article appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Loveless, T. (2023). California’s New Math Framework Doesn’t Add Up: It would place Golden State 6th graders years behind the rest of the world —and could eventually skew education in the rest of the U.S., too. Education Next, 23(4), 36-42.

For more, please see “The Top 20 Education Next Articles of 2023.”

In 2021, California set off a national debate on the future of K–12 math education when the state unveiled new guidelines for teaching the subject. The proposed curriculum framework, though non-binding, calls for schools to: offer data-science courses in addition to algebra, pre-calculus, and calculus; have students take algebra in 9th grade rather than 8th; and ask teachers to infuse social-justice concepts into math lessons.

Should U.S. K–12 math curriculum change—and if so, how? Should schools emphasize “deeper understanding” or drilling and memorization? Should they shift their emphasis toward data science and away from calculus? What are the tradeoffs and risks of these different approaches, and which path will best prepare students to thrive as citizens and as workers in our ever-changing economy? In this forum, University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and his colleague Jeffrey Severts advance one perspective, while Boaz Barak, computer science professor at Harvard, and Adrian Mims of The Calculus Project offer another.

 

Every Student Needs 21st-Century Data-Literacy Skills
By Steven Levitt and Jeffrey Severts

 

 

 

Data Science Is No Panacea for High-School Math Education
By Boaz Barak and Adrian Mims

 

This article appeared in the Fall 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Levitt, S., Severts, J., Barak, B., and Mims, A. (2022). Rethinking Math Education: Educators differ on curriculum and methods. Education Next, 22(4), 66-71.

Both race in the classroom and the New York Times’s 1619 Project have been the subject of recent state legislative efforts, heated debate, and extensive press coverage, both at Education Next (see, for example, “Critical Race Theory Collides with the Law,” legal beat, Fall 2021, and “The 1619 Project Enters American Classrooms,” features, Fall 2020) and elsewhere. The post-George Floyd racial reckoning and the new Juneteenth federal holiday have roused attention toward teaching the history of slavery in America. As part of our continuing coverage of these issues, we asked some of the nation’s foremost scholars and practitioners to respond to the prompt, “How should K–12 schools teach about slavery in America? What pitfalls should teachers and textbooks avoid? What facts and concepts should they stress? Are schools generally doing a good or bad job of this now?”

The forum contributors are:

• Allen C. Guelzo, who is director of the James Madison Program Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship and senior research scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University.
• Daina Ramey Berry, who is Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor of History and chairperson of the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin.
• David W. Blight, who is Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University and who wrote the introductory essay for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2019 report Teaching Hard History: Slavery, which he draws upon here.
• Ian V. Rowe, who is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior visiting fellow at the Woodson Center.
• Adrienne Stang, who is director of social studies for the Cambridge, Massachusetts, public schools, and Danielle Allen, who is James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and a candidate for governor of Massachusetts.
• Robert Maranto, who is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and who from 2015–20 served on the Fayetteville School Board.

Their answers in some cases reached past the prompt to even higher-level questions about the purpose, or purposes, of history or social-studies education: To explode complacency among students and to “introduce them to the human condition, the drama, the travail of love and hate, and of exploitation and survival in history,” as David W. Blight puts it? To offer students “empowering narratives of personal and collective agency,” as Adrienne Stang and Danielle Allen put it? Or to “inspire a reverence for liberty and the American experiment,” as Ian Rowe says? The contentiousness around the questions about “how” and “what” in slavery education may well be related in part to the horrors of the underlying story and to the remnants of Civil War rifts. Perhaps too, though, the debates point to unresolved questions, or at least multiple answers, about the “why.”

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Teaching “the Antislavery Project”

By Allen C. Guelzo, Princeton University

In 2018, Harvard’s Donald Yacovone published in the Chronicle of Higher Education a review of 3,000 American-history textbooks stretching back into the 19th century. He was looking particularly for how these textbooks handled the subject of slavery—and was appalled (though not entirely surprised) that they depicted slavery as a benign institution where “untutored” blacks could “enjoy picnics, barbecues, singing, and dancing.” My own schooling, in the 1960s, mainly ignored the topic; the innovative American studies program I enjoyed at my public high school in Pennsylvania began with the Articles of Confederation and the Constitutional Convention and got to the Civil War in four weeks without a sideways glance at slavery.

We have preferred to diminish slavery because of the uneasiness with which it sits beside our founding propositions about equality and liberty, and for the price we fear we might have to pay for exhuming it for full pedagogical display. But I would suggest that neither anxiety is really justified, and we can best begin to understand that by looking at the early decades of the Confederation and the Constitution.

We should begin by helping students understand that the American economy of the 18th century—and the work people did in it—was barely emerging from the Middle Ages. As Robert J. Gordon documents in The Rise and Fall of American Growth, this was a world where 50 pounds of wood or coal had to be split or toted every day for every household, where 50 gallons of water had to be hauled every day from pumps or springs for washing or cooking, and where forced labor of varying kinds was the general solution. Servitude—in the form of redemptioners, inmates, convicts, slaves—pervaded societies; in colonial America, as many as 60 percent of people between the ages of 15 and 24 were servants, and even independent skilled artisans worked for patrons rather than customers. Legally, servants were “free,” unlike slaves, but only under very restrictive circumstances. Practically, the line between servants and slaves was thin, almost to the point of invisibility, except for the factor of race. Forced labor, in short, was the “normal” condition of most people in the Atlantic world on the eve of the American Revolution.

All this, however, was undergoing a major shift in the decades of the Confederation and the new Constitution. Between 1750 and 1850, service in America yielded to independence, patronage evaporated, and (as Alexis de Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America) “everyone works to live” and assumed that “work is a necessary, natural and honest condition of humanity.” And with these changes, slavery likewise lost the sense of being a normal or inevitable condition; hence, the rise for the first time of an abolition movement. The Constitution is a silent reflection of this change, simply because the Constitution contains no provisions for the regulation of labor apart from a single ambiguous direction that “No person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due” (article 4, section 2) and the delegation of authority to Congress to terminate the “importation” of “persons” beginning in 1808 (article 1, section 9).

Although it is possible to view other provisions of the Constitution as implying a legitimatization of slavery, the document sedulously refuses to use the terms slave or slavery. As Roger Sherman, who sat in the Constitutional Convention for Connecticut, insisted, the Constitution must make no concession “acknowledging men to be property.” And this refusal to grant legal countenance to slavery was how subsequent generations understood the Constitution’s intent. It gave substance to what James Oakes has called “the Antislavery Project” and inspired abolitionist leaders, from Frederick Douglass to William Henry Seward, who insisted that the Constitution established freedom as the national norm. Abraham Lincoln believed, in 1860, that “this mode of alluding to slaves and slavery, instead of speaking of them, was employed on purpose to exclude from the Constitution the idea that there could be property in man.” Even Southern slaveholders squirmed to admit that, as one of them wrote in 1857, “without the need of infringing the letter of a single article of the Constitution . . . Negro slavery may be thus abolished, either directly or indirectly, gradually or immediately.”

We ignore slavery, and its catalog of horrors, only when we are careless or deceitful. At the same time, we should not lose sight of how the American founding coincided with a vast reconception of the meaning of work and labor, a reconception that signaled the beginning of the end of the varied forms of forced labor, from service to slavery, and that the Founders’ generation had already glimpsed, however distantly. It will be the task of today’s students not only to grasp the significance of that revolution but also to remain vigilant against the various modern forms in which forced labor seeks to regain a position in our world.

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“Wake Up the Sleeper”

By David W. Blight, Yale University

In his longform masterpiece of an autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Frederick Douglass, the former slave turned internationally famed orator and writer, draws his reader in with a remembrance of a child’s question: “Why am I a slave? Why are some people slaves, and others masters?”

“Why am I a slave?” is an existential question that anticipates many others in human history. Why am I poor? Why is he so rich, and she only his servant or chattel? Why am I feared or hated for my religion, my race, my sexuality, the accident of my birth in this valley or on that side of the river or this side of the railroad tracks? Why am I a refugee with no home? Why does my neighborhood seem to determine my life chances? Or, indeed, why did those people write a constitution in the 1780s, or forge such a model higher-education system, or a reform movement for women’s equality? Douglass’s immortal story of his slave youth represents so many others, universally, over the ages. And don’t we want youth to ask this question why, and then provide them with knowledge out of which to forge answers?

Asking how to teach about slavery is a little like asking why we teach at all. We teach this subject because it is there, and it is so important. How can we not teach about this deeply human and American story and so many others like it? We do so not to forge a negative cast of mind in young people, but to introduce them to the human condition, the drama, the travail of love and hate, and of exploitation and survival in history. We teach them about American slavery because we have learned that this story helped shape the United States in fundamental ways, as personal experience and in the formation of the American nation, as well as its reformation in the wake of the Civil War and emancipation. Listening to Douglass ask, “Why am I a slave?” is similar to how we, nationally, are now asking, “Why is it that Reconstruction seems never to be over?” Out of conflict—“divisive issues” as some have branded it—comes great historical change, as we have learned over and again.

Slavery is not an aberration in the American past; it is at the heart of our history, a main event, a central foundational story. Slavery is also ancient; it has existed in all cultures and in all times. Slavery has always tended to evolve in circumstances of an abundance of land or resources along with a scarcity and demand for labor. It still exists today in myriad forms the world struggles to fight. The difference in the 21st century is that, in most countries, virtually all forms of trafficking and enslavement are illegal. For the two and a half centuries in which American slavery evolved, slavery operated largely as a thoroughly legal practice, buttressed by local law and in degrees by the U.S. Constitution.

In America, our preferred, deep national narratives tend to teach our young that, despite our problems in the past, we have been a nation of freedom-loving, inclusive people, accepting the immigrant into a land of multiethnic diversity. Our diversity has made us strong; that cannot be denied. But that “composite nation,” as Frederick Douglass called it in the 1870s—a dream and sometimes a reality—emerged from generations of what can best be called tyranny. When one studies slavery long enough, in the words of the great scholar David Brion Davis, “we come to realize that tyranny is a central theme of American history, that racial exploitation and racial conflict have been part of the DNA of American culture.” Freedom and tyranny, wrapped in the same historical bundle, feeding upon and making one another, had by the late 18th century created a remarkably original nation dedicated to Thomas Jefferson’s idea of the “truths” of natural rights, popular sovereignty, the right of revolution, and human equality, but also built as an edifice designed to protect and expand chattel slavery. Americans do not always like to face the contradictions in their past, but in so many ways, we are our contradictions, and we have to face them.

The biggest obstacle to teaching slavery effectively in America is the abiding American need to conceive of and understand our history as “progress,” as the story of a people and a nation that always sought the improvement of mankind, the advancement of liberty and justice, the broadening of pursuits of happiness for all. While there are many real threads to this story—about immigration, about our creeds and ideologies, and about race and emancipation and civil rights, there is also the broad, untidy underside.

The point is not to teach American history as a chronicle of shame and oppression. Far from it. The point is to tell American history as a story of real human beings, of power, of vast economic and geographical expansion, of great achievements as well as great dispossession, of human brutality and human reform. That goal can never be achieved without understanding the meanings and legacies of slavery.

The American writer James Baldwin was determined in season and out to make Americans face the pasts they preferred to ignore. In a 1962 essay, he said that the problem with the way Americans generally approach their past is that “words are mostly used to cover the sleeper, not to wake him up.” Exploding such complacency and teaching a real and informed history is the essential function of education. And we are always interested in keeping our students awake.

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Understanding the “Many Degrees” of American Slavery

By Daina Ramey Berry, University of Texas at Austin

“I would rather die the death of the righteous than be a slave.”
—Stephen Pembroke

Stephen Pembroke attempted to liberate himself from a Maryland plantation in the 1850s with his teenaged sons, Robert and Jacob. Unfortunately, they were captured, chained, starved, separated, and sold. Stephen Pembroke eventually made it to freedom with the help of his brother. Speaking about his experiences, he said that slavery had “many degrees.” He spent 50 years enslaved, witnessing and experiencing “rigid and wicked,” “moderate,” and benevolent forms of captivity. Once freed, Pembroke had one request: “I would now like to have my sons out.” Unfortunately, his sons never attained their freedom.

Understanding the history of slavery through “many degrees” is an important lesson for those of us who teach this history today. By relying on the testimonies of the enslaved and the records of enslavers, we have an opportunity to learn about the degrees of slavery and freedom. Pembroke and countless others who lived through this institution have much to offer us. “The slave never knows when he is to be seized and scourged,” he continued, noting that his father was sold five times.

The best way to learn and teach this history with young people is to begin by studying the historical record from a variety of perspectives. However, with the latest political attacks on teaching accurate history in the United States—many launched through incorrect definitions of critical race theory—it’s important to take stock of how we are teaching students about slavery and identify areas that need improvement.

Contemporary Debates

Recent debates and proposed legislation confirm that our understanding of American slavery varies. Some educators did not learn about the institution in their academic training and may find it hard to imagine teaching it to their own elementary and high school students. Some may present misguided and insensitive classroom activities and exercises, such as one lesson at a Wisconsin middle school that asked students how they would punish an insubordinate slave. The politicization of history further complicates this knowledge gap, particularly pertaining to the importance of specific dates. For most trained historians, dates are important, but debates about their significance move us further away from the history that we ought to know. One example is the recent dispute over the dates marking America’s beginnings. Some, like Nikole Hannah-Jones, argue for the significance of 1619, the year the first Africans arrived in the colonies. Others claim 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, as the most important starting point for American history. Both dates overlook the early arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 16th century and limit our opportunity to learn deeper and more inclusive histories. How can we teach a history that encompasses the experiences of enslaved people like Pembroke, who preferred death to slavery? The answer is simple: through an exploration of multiple perspectives, regions, work settings, and experiences using primary-source documents.

Slavery has been an integral part of global and American history. It was primarily an economic institution that had a hefty political and social impact on American society, particularly the lives and families of the enslaved as well as enslavers. In teaching this history, we must avoid objectifying enslaved people and reducing them to passive victims. They were human beings with incredibly strong wills who survived 12- to 18-hour workdays, yet still created and maintained family connections despite the constant threat of separation and sale. It is important to see enslaved people as individuals who rebelled and resisted at every stage of their experience—from the moment they were kidnapped and enslaved to their trans-Atlantic voyages to organized rebellions and individual acts of suicide, infanticide, or escape. Enslaved people also found strength in their families and communities and found moments of joy to cope with their pain. Their enslavers were also human and not a monolithic group. Some struggled with their enslaving practices, while others thrived and prospered. They had large plantations in rural areas as well as small- to middle-sized holdings in industrial or domestic settings. We must be prepared to teach the diversity of experiences during slavery.

Myths of Slavery

The vacuum created by our public-school teaching has been filled by many myths about slavery. Much of what we know has been taught exclusively from the perspective of enslavers and with the view that it was a Southern, plantation-based, cotton-producing enterprise. But slavery existed in all 13 colonies (the partial exception was the colony of Georgia, which had a ban on slavery for the first 20 years of its existence). As the system matured, enslaved people labored in a variety of settings large and small; urban and rural; industrial and agricultural; as well as at universities and in city municipalities. They produced cotton, of course, but they also produced sugar, rice, indigo, and wheat. Slave labor was used to build our U.S. Capitol and many state capitols around the country. An accurate study of slavery would emphasize the differences between the experiences of those enslaved on a farm in Mississippi and those forced to work in a shipyard in New York City.

Debunking the myths of slavery is a starting point. Understanding that slavery was a billion-dollar industry that impacted every aspect of the global economy and was not limited to the South is yet another place to begin our lessons. Many financial repercussions reverberate today through corporations and industries that were built on the wealth generated during slavery. In private settings, families have created intergenerational wealth from money earned during the era of slavery. The political impact of slavery is usually reduced to its role in the Civil War, but students also must learn that the framing of the U.S. Constitution included debates about slavery, and one of the legacies of slavery involves the creation of our modern criminal (in)justice system.

Educational Resources

Developers of traditional resources such as textbooks are making strides in incorporating the history of slavery into their new editions. However, there are few textbooks approved by school boards that present the subject in a well-rounded, thoughtful way. In fact, one middle-school textbook does not mention African Americans until it gets beyond the American Revolution and then discusses only the enslaved. This kind of treatment of the subject does not fully reflect the lived experience. Many teachers, correctly, rely on original documents. The best documents available are right under our noses on websites and in libraries. For example, first-person narratives are easily accessible via the Library of Congress website, as are the historical laws governing the institution of slavery, including slave codes and compromises.

We can learn more about slavery by looking to those who experienced and enforced it. Narratives such as Pembroke’s and countless others paint an accurate and vivid picture for students, as do plantation records that offer details about the exploitation and management of the enslaved. Until standardized testing, state standards, school boards, and curriculum fully incorporate the complex history of slavery, we will miss the history of “righteous slaves” and their “many degrees” of slavery that Pembroke shared and so many others tried to teach us.

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Truth and Empowerment

A framework for teaching about enslavement

By Adrienne Stang, Cambridge Public Schools, and Danielle Allen, Harvard University

Teachers of U.S. history should aspire to engage students in history and civic learning that honestly represents the wrongs of our national past, without pulling us into cynicism—and that is equally truthful about our country’s accomplishments, without pivoting to adulation. In the case of the history of enslavement, this requires teachers and learners to make meaning together. Students enter discussions about enslavement from a wide range of starting points in terms of both historical content (or lack thereof) and emotional responses. Our hope for learners is that they will come to understand the past, including the whys and hows of people who did wrong to others, and how those who were wronged and their allies resisted oppressive structures. We recommend instruction that focuses on the agency and voices of those who were enslaved as fundamental to achieving that understanding and to ensuring that even hard histories can become sources of hope in the present.

To support 5th-grade teachers in this critical work, we developed lessons on enslavement built on the pedagogical tool of “co-processing.”  Co-processing captures the experience of children learning and making meaning of new information with the support of a caring classroom teacher or other empathic adult. When learning about enslavement and other difficult histories, the teacher begins by providing learners the opportunity to share what they know and how they feel. The educator validates students’ feelings and provides opportunities for students to question their ideas, when appropriate, and to deepen their knowledge through historical inquiry. Throughout the unit, teachers support students in building on prior knowledge and clarifying misconceptions. Ultimately, the teacher supports students in converting a variety of starting points into usable narratives that are truthful and empowering.

From the start of this process, teachers and learners understand that they will be learning, thinking, feeling, and evaluating together. Teachers explain that they will be doing this in relation to troubling historical material that may raise complicated emotions. Several lessons are structured around Glenn Singleton’s Courageous Conversations Compass for conversations about race. Singleton’s compass has four points—emotional, intellectual, moral, and relational—and reminds us that people process information about racism in different ways. Students will gravitate toward different compass points, and skillful teachers will help students explore all four elements as they learn about the history of enslavement.

In teaching about the realities of enslavement, we emphasize primary sources written by people who were enslaved themselves, including Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass. This approach underscores the humanity and individuality of enslaved African Americans and offers students empowering narratives of personal and collective agency.

After students learn the history of enslavement, they study the antebellum abolition movement by comparing and contrasting the life experiences of different abolitionists. This investigation helps students understand that abolitionists included men and women from different races and social classes. Some were born into enslavement; others were born free. They included politicians, public speakers, writers, and conductors on the Underground Railroad. Many worked for other causes, such as women’s rights. Many risked their lives to end enslavement. Abolitionists of varying backgrounds formed alliances to help bring an end to enslavement in the United States.

In teaching these lessons, the pitfalls are many. We seek to avoid victim-centered narratives of African American history without exculpating enslavers or sugarcoating the horrors of enslavement. Teachers must balance the brutality of enslavement with the developmental needs of their students; too much exposure to violence for younger learners is problematic, and we recommend avoiding images of the violence of enslavement prior to 8th grade. Also, the relation of past to present is an ever-present area of inquiry. Students learning about enslavement will typically make connections to anti-Black racism today. Teachers can support students in analyzing these connections when teaching about current events. Teachers will need to be attentive to the dynamics of their classroom community, including the racial dynamics. By sharing their own feelings about learning about the histories of enslavement, teachers can create a space where all students feel safe enough to share their experiences and feelings. Teachers will often need substantial professional development to become comfortable and competent in modeling this sensitive engagement with our hard histories of race and racism.

The story of racism in the United States did not end when the 13th Amendment abolished enslavement. It continued through the Jim Crow era and the terrorism of lynching. It is critical that the study of enslavement connects to our present-day realities, including the violent murder of George Floyd and too many others, as well as racial disparities in incarceration and health care. Singleton’s “relational” compass point asks us to reflect on what we will do with our knowledge. Exploring this question allows students not only to understand our shared history, but also to wrestle with what we should do now. By co-processing the difficult histories of enslavement and racism, classmates can build trust, civic friendship, and agency. Truthful and empowering history and civic learning should go hand in hand.

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Inspire a Reverence for Liberty by Teaching the Full Story of American Slavery

By Ian V. Rowe, American Enterprise Institute, the Woodson Center

On September 12, 1962, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the request of the New York Civil War Commission at the Centennial Celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation. In his remarks in New York City, King emphasized that the document that started the long process of ridding America of slavery was actually inspired by the core principle of equality embedded in the country’s founding document: “The Declaration of Independence proclaimed to a world, organized politically and spiritually around the concept of the inequality of man, that the dignity of human personality was inherent in man as a living being,” King said. “The Emancipation Proclamation was the offspring of the Declaration of Independence. It was a constructive use of the force of law to uproot a social order which sought to separate liberty from a segment of humanity.”

What King so eloquently revealed was that slavery, far from being a particular American atrocity, was an accepted, grotesque feature at the center of a world ordered around the normalcy of human bondage. Yet it was America’s Enlightenment principles that allowed it to “uproot a social order” and liberate millions of enslaved people in recognition of their inherent and individual human dignity.

As educators debate how best to teach K–12 students about slavery today, it is important to see its barbaric adoption in the United States as a dispiriting but common “oppressor versus oppressed” element of the human condition worldwide and to emphasize as uncommon America’s post-abolition march toward becoming a multiethnic society with an unprecedented combination of size, peacefulness, and prosperity. It is now accepted that America’s founders laid out inspiring ideals around life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but also committed the original sin of not allowing all human beings the right to fully live up to those same ideals.

Yet despite that inherent contradiction, America has made steady progress dismantling laws that imposed a racial hierarchy. Educators today are trying to figure out how to portray slavery in America as an example of state-sanctioned oppression and one that is central to our history. Their challenge is to do that effectively while also celebrating how our nation’s enduring principles have provided the world an indispensable model of how formerly enslaved people came to regularly produce some of the country’s most influential leaders in virtually every facet of American life.

In 2020, I was proud to help found 1776 Unites, a project of the Woodson Center. Led by primarily Black activists, educators, and scholars, 1776 Unites acknowledges that “racial discrimination exists—and works towards diminishing it. But we dissent from contemporary groupthink and rhetoric about race, class, and American history that defames our national heritage, divides our people, and instills helplessness among those who already hold within themselves the grit and resilience to better their lot in life.”

1776 Unites has developed free K–12 lesson plans based on the 10 “Woodson Principles” of competence, integrity, transparency, resilience, witness, innovation, inspiration, agency, access, and grace. The curriculum offers lessons on Black excellence in the face of unimaginable adversity. Among such examples were the nearly 5,000 Rosenwald Schools built during the Jim Crow era that educated more than 700,000 Black children throughout 14 southern states. These 1776 Unites lessons are now used by educators in all 50 states in private, charter, district, and parochial schools, after-school programs, home schools, and prison ministries.

A hopeful and upwardly mobile future for Americans of all races must be built on a shared understanding of our past that is accurate and expansive, not falsely embellished and narrowly selective (a serious flaw of the New York Times’s 1619 Project). Educators must be encouraged to impart a more complete telling of the Black American experience, one that offers an empowering alternative to curricula that emphasize racial subjugation almost to the exclusion of Black resilience.

As King said on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation: “If our nation had done nothing more in its whole history than to create just two documents, its contribution to civilization would be imperishable. The first of these documents is the Declaration of Independence and the other is that which we are here to honor tonight, the Emancipation Proclamation. All tyrants, past, present, and future, are powerless to bury the truths in these declarations, no matter how extensive their legions, how vast their power, and how malignant their evil.”

Those who seek to teach a sanitized version of history to achieve some false sense of patriotic education do our country and students a disservice, and, ironically, so do those who cherry-pick the most egregiously cruel acts to weave together a narrative of a permanent American malignancy of racism. It is through exposing “all the truths in these declarations” that we can best teach about U.S. slavery in K–12 schools, and, as a dividend, perhaps we will also inspire a reverence for liberty and the American experiment.

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Confronting the New Lost Cause by Teaching Slavery in Context

By Robert Maranto, University of Arkansas

We cannot take the politics out of public schools, because decisions about what to teach and what to leave out are inherently political. Social-studies curricula seem the most political of all, since they lack the precision of math and combine history with heritage.

Though often wedded together, history and heritage differ. Like all tribes, the people of the United States have a shared heritage, the legends inspiring us to continue our nation. In contrast, the field of history is a Western invention seeking to portray what happened, warts and all. Heritage is Mason Weems’s myth that young George Washington confessed to chopping down the cherry tree because he couldn’t tell a lie. Arguably, history with a bit of heritage is Washington’s evolving discomfort with and eventual rejection of slavery.

These definitions matter, because the United States is a multicultural democracy where heritage influences the histories schools teach. As Jonathan Zimmerman observes in his classic Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools, in the 1920s, Italians and Norwegians fought over whether Christopher Columbus or Leif Eriksson discovered America. Germans burnished their American credentials by inserting the historically unimportant but identifiably German Molly Pitcher into school textbooks; African Americans added Crispus Attucks. Marginalized groups thus married into the American heritage taught in schools.

In contrast, the early-20th-century Southern white activists promulgating the Lost Cause myths undermined both history and American heritage, creating a new Southern heritage through Southern schoolbooks whitewashing the Confederate cause. As Zimmerman details, the United Daughters of the Confederacy held student-essay contests defending slavery. One award winner portrayed slavery as “the happiest time of the negroes’ existence.” Zimmerman writes that “Confederate groups often challenged the entire concept of objectivity in history” by insisting that their lived experience offered unique insights that Northern scholars with their so-called objective historical methods could never uncover.

This should all sound familiar today. After suffering their own Appomattox with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Marxists became the new Confederates, supplanting scholarship with lived experience, stories, and now tweets. As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay detail in Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody, in recent decades academic (and now journalistic) leftists replaced class politics with identity politics, retreating into postmodern rejection of universal truths. Accordingly, it would be a mistake in teaching about slavery to rely too much on tendentious sources such as the New York Times’s 1619 Project.

Some assert that American schools ignore slavery. This statement was probably accurate—in 1970. My children, one a high school senior and the other a recent graduate, agreed that our Arkansas public schools covered slavery and Jim Crow between six and eight times in 12 grades—far more than they covered the founding of the United States, the Constitution, or World War II; indeed, the latter made an appearance only once, or twice, counting a Holocaust unit. My kids also observed, however, that their schools’ treatment of slavery, like their coverage of history overall, was superficial. As one of my children put it, “They teach you slavery is bad, but not much else.” (This may characterize Arkansas standards generally. A recent Fordham Institute report rated them as “mediocre,” observing that, “strangely,” the topic of secession is not addressed in the state’s Arkansas history standard and that “the lack of direct references to slavery” in that standard was “notable.”) To the degree that our local teachers covered slavery, it was primarily through political history, as a key cause of the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the Civil War, suggesting that state standards may bear little relation to what happens in class. Relatedly, Jim Crow is taught primarily through a matter of local interest, the integration of Little Rock Central. In fairness, as the Fordham Institute report makes clear, coverage of slavery and of history generally lacks depth in most states, not just in the South.

So what is to be done? You can’t beat something with nothing, so on the elementary level, schools might adopt the relatively specific Core Knowledge curricula, developed by E. D. Hirsch, in which knowledge builds on knowledge. To a far greater degree than is true of typical curricular approaches from education consultants, Core Knowledge focuses less on amorphous “skills” and more on facts, which provides the foundation for more knowledge and for interpretations. As Hirsch writes in The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them, psychological research shows that “the ability to learn something new depends on an ability to accommodate the new thing to the already known.” The more we already know, the easier it is to learn new information; hence better curricula can help. Teacher quality also matters. On the secondary level, where I do fieldwork, educators joke that every social-studies teacher has the same first name—“Coach”—suggesting the need to hire knowledgeable teachers, not those for whom teaching is a secondary priority and whose main expertise is athletics. Meanwhile, when educators teach about the owning of human beings, as indeed they should, they should teach within the context that slavery was not uniquely American but has existed in countries with every major religious tradition and on every inhabited continent. (Core Knowledge does this.) When teachers cover slavery, they should include discussions of which countries ended slavery, when, and why, perhaps using visual aids such as maps to help convey the information.

Educators could also make the broader point that nearly every country once had (and that some still have) slavery, but only America can claim the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the reconstruction of Europe and Japan after World War II, and an indispensable role in defeating the twin evils of fascism and communism. It is these uniquely American contributions that should define our nation for today’s schoolchildren and tomorrow’s citizens.

For more, please see “The Top 20 Education Next Articles of 2023.”

This article appeared in the Winter 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Guelzo, A., Ramey Berry, D., Blight, D.W., Rowe, I.A., Stang, A., Allen, Maranto, R. (2022). Teaching about Slavery: “Asking how to teach about slavery is a little like asking why we teach at all” Education Next, 22(1), 64-74.

A few years ago, we started to re-imagine reading instruction, but the thought of writing a curriculum never entered our minds. There were things we thought reading teachers could do differently (some of which Doug described in his 2016 book written with Colleen Driggs and Erica Woolway, Reading Reconsidered), but we thought it would work to simply make the case to teachers directly. If we explained useful ideas and our case was convincing, teachers would apply the ideas, each in their own unique way, and better teaching would spread and evolve.

It turned out it wasn’t that simple.

Being knowledge-driven was a good example of “something we thought teachers could do differently.” Let’s say a class was reading Number the Stars, Lois Lowry’s novel set during the Nazi occupation of Copenhagen in 1943. A teacher who provided background knowledge on topics like the rationing of goods such as sugar and butter would help students to better comprehend key passages, like the one where the protagonist, Annemarie, scoffs dismissively at her little sister’s desire for a pink frosted cupcake. Understanding how rationing affected characters they had come to care about would cause students to comprehend the book more deeply and glean more knowledge for next time through their reading. They would come to understand both the psychology of rationing – the childish fixations of a younger sibling; the snappish responses of an older one – as much as the logistics – long-lines; distribution schedules; black market goods. They could apply this knowledge to other contexts in their future studies. Students would understand the text more deeply, in other words; but with the right reflections in the course of reading, they would also increase their knowledge far more quickly for next time. Add a dozen short articles on, say, resistance movements, how small children understand complex realities or how occupying armies interact with civilians, and suddenly not only would the book be a richer read, it could become a knowledge-generating machine. The knowledge might seem at first unique to the book’s setting but facts, understood deeply, don’t stay disconnected for long.

There were other things we believed about improving the teaching of English. For example:

• Students should be comfortable with challenging texts and the idea of struggle. This would be one of the fundamental experiences of their lives at university and as professionals. They should have tools they use to attend to and unpack the written word when it proves complex. Proficiency with such tools can be improved through steady exposure and deliberate practice.
• Reading a book should be a writing-intensive experience, and that writing should be a tool students use not just to express and justify existing opinions, but to discover what they think in the first And students should be taught to expand their syntactic control — their mastery of tools to help them write sentences that capture nuanced and sophisticated ideas — in a methodical way.

• Reading a book is a social phenomenon. Reading a book together as a class means everyone laughing or gasping, together in a room, hearing and coming to understand both shared experience and how others may have viewed it differently. The power of this shared experience was a primary reason for the rise of written language as a source of enjoyment and wisdom rather than the mere transfer of technical information. Good classrooms could recreate that feeling of deeply shared experience. Perhaps if books are to survive in the age of the smartphone, they must.

• Vocabulary is the single most important form of background knowledge and teaching it well requires constant opportunities to use and play with words in different settings, so good vocabulary instruction should start with, rather than end at, the definition.

Useful ideas, we hope, but even when teachers agreed with them, they struggled to implement them into their teaching. They weren’t able to go home and source short non-fiction passages about resistance movements in wartime, for example. Who knew where to find such an article; and once you found it, it needed editing – there were long digressions about less relevant topics, or part of the key information was in one article and part of it was in another. It took time teachers didn’t have, especially when preparing lessons after making dinner and just possibly putting their own children to bed.

Developing just the right writing prompts or the text-dependent questions that would allow for successful close reading of challenging books took time as well – more time than people teaching four preps and grading 150 papers had available on their lunch break when they were – whoops! – also supposed to be covering the lunch room. And it took expertise. Your 150th close-reading question is better than your 3rd, we have since discovered, especially when a team of colleagues gives you regular feedback on them.

Teachers rarely take courses in instructional design, Robert Pondiscio pointed out in a recent commentary. It’s a completely different skill from teaching a lesson, but one we assume teachers will naturally be able to do well. “It’s like expecting the waiter at your favorite restaurant to serve your meal attentively while simultaneously cooking for twenty-five other people – and doing all the shopping and prepping the night before. You’d be exhausted too,” Pondiscio writes.

It took us a long time to discover the wisdom in what Pondiscio was saying. Just because teachers believed in an idea didn’t make it feasible for them to do it. And just doing it didn’t guarantee anything about succeeding at it. We spent a lot of time talking about what kept teachers from having the lessons they wanted. Finally there was a meeting where someone said, “I’m just not sure there’s any way to do this without writing an actual curriculum with daily lesson plans and the like.”

After that, the room went absolutely silent.

One of the reasons the room went silent was that we’d seen a lot of the curriculums English teachers were being given – even in schools we loved and respected. Curriculum was done to teachers; it told them what to say and discouraged their own decision-making and precluded their own interests. Plans were unwieldy, dense documents, precisely scripted to make sure the teacher didn’t say the wrong thing. Emily had a colleague who burst into her room one morning, marked-up lesson plan in her hand. Twenty-two years old and desperate to do right by her students, she had spent hours memorizing the detailed lesson plan provided by the network. Like an actor’s script, her lesson plan was highlighted, annotated, dogeared. But her copy of the novel was blank. She was so busy trying to remember what she was supposed to say, she hadn’t had time to finish (or think much about) the book yet. How would she react when a student asked her something unexpected about a character or idea?

We wanted a curriculum that loved books and teachers, that supported them and could respond to where they were in their own teaching journey: question by question for a new teacher, with suitable autonomy and flexibility for a master. There had to be a way to help teachers without giving them a straitjacket. We were imagining something that gave teachers great lessons to use and that respected their knowledge even while supplementing it. If we wanted to help teachers approach teaching English differently, we’d have to make it so they were happy with the trade.

One of the ways we tried to do that was to rely on teachers like Emily as designers – people who had experienced a variety of approaches and would always see the lesson through the eyes of someone who had to stand up in front of 30 young people and bring it to life.

When Emily first started teaching, she remembers, her students often did everything she asked of them, but her classes still felt all wrong. Her pupils diligently annotated the texts they read and crafted written responses, memorizing five types of character inferences and eight steps to find the main idea. Anchor charts papered the walls; chants echoed down the hallway. Each of her lessons was organized around one transferable skill. The class would master it, and then (she hoped) they’d forever be able to infer a character’s motivation from their actions, dialogue, and thoughts. Over and over, text after text, they’d find a handy character and chart the relevant evidence, then dutifully slot the evidence into the rigid format of a paragraph response.

In discussion, Emily was taught to use a prompting guide, a spiral-bound document of questions aligned to each reading skill. The ideal discussion was one in which teachers asked no “text-specific” questions, the thinking being that universal prompts would be more broadly applicable to future texts. As student discussion veered off course, Emily would find herself flipping through the prompting guide, trying to diagnose the skill gap and find the perfect question to bring students back on track without asking about specific characters or plot points. In the midst of this process, the novel seemed to die. She and her students talked about the prompt and the evidence needed to answer it, but less often the book itself.

Their writing was just as troubling. It was painful to read. Tortured syntax, ideas crammed into strict frames supplemented by carefully copied but completely irrelevant evidence from the text.

The moments in class that felt electric were often accidental. One day, Emily and her students were reading the novel Chains, a beautifully written but challenging work of historical fiction set in 18th-century colonial America. In one scene, a servant attempts to explain the dynamics of the household to the protagonist, a young enslaved girl. About the master’s widowed aunt, the servant explains:

She’s old and rich, and owns land in three countries. The master hopes to inherit the lot when she dies, so they treat her like the Queen herself. To her face at least.

In their written responses, students had been struggling to make inferences about character motivation; asking, ‘What does the character want or need?’ led to blank stares. Out of ideas, Emily remembers closing the prompting guide and rereading the scene as a group, pausing to define the word ‘inherit’ and explaining whom the phrase “the Queen” alluded to. The resulting discussion was enthusiastic, accurate, and even fun. Students were able to live in the text in a different, richer way when they weren’t trying to force each scene into a tidy formula of Motivation + Obstacle = Conflict.

Curious about other approaches to teaching reading, Emily switched schools and, ironically, went from one flawed model to its opposite.

She began teaching at an arts-based, progressive charter school in Manhattan with a less structured approach to reading that she hoped would be more effective for students (and more sustainable for herself). The model was student- led and self-directed. The ideal lesson started on the carpet with Emily in the middle, occasionally reading aloud to students, who then created projects in groups based on the stories. While this model preserved the joy of reading and freed teachers and students from the pressure to support every argument with three pieces of evidence from the text, the emphasis on group work and self- directed learning had other costs.

The model valorized choice reading. Every week ended with “Library Friday,” an entire class period in which students read books of their choice, snuggled into bean bag chairs in the corner of the classroom. The thinking was that each child knows best what interests them, so students should be most motivated to read if they pursue their passions and select their own books. But it was hard to tell how much and how well each of 25 children was reading. And the model was strangely isolating. No one ever changed their opinion about a book because a classmate pushed them to see it differently. Kids rarely read something that they didn’t think they’d like at first but that moved and inspired them. It was a bit of an echo chamber; a monument to the idea that as long as kids were reading something, all was well. The students who already loved reading adored this time, devouring book after book. But for the students who didn’t love to read, or were easily distracted, or who struggled to read attentively, or who did not read on grade level but were embarrassed to choose easier texts, it was 60 minutes of idly flipping pages.

And project-based learning was fun, but was it teaching students to read deeply? Had a student really grappled with Island of the Blue Dolphins, for example, if their major project was to make their own version of Karana’s skirt out of paper feathers? Without a grounding in historical context to help them understand early contacts between native peoples and traders, without independent writing that caused them to think about loneliness and isolation, without a closer look at Karana’s decisions at the end of the book – the two marks she makes on her face, her acceptance of the western dress her rescuers make for her to wear – it was hard to say that students had fully read it.

The truth was, students had to write frequently to understand a text – and to be able to feel its full emotional resonance. They had to be able to unpack a thorny patch of resistant text instead of skipping over it. They got more things, unexpected things, out of shared reading but they had to learn to listen carefully during discussions. And hands-on experiences like role-playing or debating what a character should have done in a crucial scene were a lot more beneficial when they were grounded in knowledge (and therefore reality), so students weren’t guessing, often erroneously, about life in the 19th century. “I’d tell them to go away,” wasn’t an especially useful response to the arrival of the Russian traders in the opening scenes of Island of the Blue Dolphins, no matter how heartfelt. In other words, a funny thing happened when Emily started to design more rigorous and demanding activities for her students while also giving them knowledge to support their understanding: they liked reading more. A lot of the activities designed to motivate and engage students had the perverse effect of replacing the core act of reading. But there were moments that proved that reading, done differently, could be just as engaging and motivating as making posters or acting out key scenes.

Our first step was to build a model – a unit that tested all of the elements we wanted to include. For this, we used the book Esperanza Rising, a novel set equally in Mexico and California describing the journey of the daughter of a once wealthy rancher killed and dispossessed in the aftermath of the Mexican revolution as she migrates to the United States. It took us six tries to get our “knowledge organizer” – a summary of key background knowledge students would need to get the most out of the book – right. We included historical readings about the Mexican caste system. We included a study of Dorothea Lange’s photographs to understand the plight of the Okies who arrive later in the book but refined and tweaked the questions to create a wider range of writing experiences (e.g. “Write a page from Lange’s journal from the day she took this photo”). In asking students to unlock the symbolism of the produce for which chapters were named – figs, onions, roses – we provided background on how each was often used: people often referred to the layers of an onion, or to the fact that they made one cry in chopping them, or to the fact that onions were simple and cheap, often peasant fare. Did one of these meanings apply? Or something different.

Once our unit was built, we tried it out in the classrooms of four or five willing teachers. We observed and solicited feedback. They loved the vocabulary; the pacing was challenging. We guest-taught some lessons ourselves and then made changes, especially changes that teachers said would make the lessons easier to use. We developed support materials: an overview and a unit plan for each book; a curriculum guide to explain all the parts of the lessons; and we shot videos of quality implementation to show what ten minutes of vocabulary or close reading should look like so teachers could see and study models.

Our curriculum was always designed to be built around books – exploring and unpacking their layers, hearing the increasingly familiar mannerisms of an author’s voice and persistent echoes of a time period, getting the jokes and perceiving the subtle hints. These experiences form a relationship between students and books that shorter forms of text cannot replicate. It makes books an irreplaceable part of one’s schooling. Books get inside us and stay there. What’s more, the books themselves matter. Books like Animal Farm and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass matter, not just because people will allude to them at university, but because of the way deeply reading a book can change who you are. To “pass over” into the mind of another person, to understand their perspective intellectually and emotionally, is to live part of their experience and to “return enlarged,” the scientist and philosopher of reading Maryanne Wolf writes.

With that in mind, we set out to choose the books. (Our curriculum has poetry and short story units, but these are designed to be “book length,” i.e. about six weeks in duration.) We thought a typical teacher could teach five or six books really well in a year – in a way that modeled what it meant to become immersed in a text, that is. That meant that a book was a scarce and precious resource. Each choice had to be of immensely high quality. But what were the right six books, the ones that let students read books of historical significance but that also represented a diversity of perspectives? Were the right six books for 30 seventh graders in Dallas the same as those for seventh graders in New York or Fresno – or Liverpool for that matter? Or for two teachers right down the hall from one another in Dallas but with different interests and passions? How could we balance the benefits of choice with the benefits of shared knowledge — the idea that if you wanted to make connections across texts, you couldn’t get — very far unless there were books you could reliably assume all of your students had read. We called this an “internal canon”: each school needed a balanced selection of shared books that everyone had read and could talk about. We looked for books that were diverse, challenging, important, and inspiring. Books that gave rise to rich conversations about knowledge and that were challenging enough that students could take on the best the English language had to offer without fear. And books that, brought to life in the classroom, would be unforgettable. We decided early on to make the curriculum “modular” to give schools and teachers an array of books to choose from and let them each choose their ideal six. The right decision in one school need not be the right decision in another.

Our design process is simple but, some might say, backwards. We start each lesson as an adult reader, rereading the day’s section of the book. What’s happening on the page? What moments in the text make us sit up a little straighter, reach for that highlighter, raise our eyebrows? Where is the language doing something interesting? Then, we interrogate those responses — what tiny choices, what turns of phrase, what buildups of tension made that moment happen? Why this word and not another? How can we break down the layers of nuance and connection that created our experience as adult readers, and, through a series of questions, guide a room of 12-year-olds to a similar insight?

This process might sound obvious but the core idea – that the objective for each lesson starts with and is driven by the book – is the opposite of what many curricula do. They start with a learning standard and attempt to make the book support that goal. Over time, we felt, this risks losing touch with the reason one is reading the book in the first place. We wanted to let the book guide us, to write a curriculum by and for people who love books, meant to create more people who love books.

In our curriculum, we draw on technical literary vocabulary: passive voice, alliteration, intrusive narration. We dive deeply into historical context: what would a student need to know about the life of a Victorian-era London cab driver to understand this scene in The Magician’s Nephew? What makes a boarding school uniform so significant in Lord of the Flies? (And for that matter, what is a boarding school uniform? Or even a boarding school?) We track down obscure allusions and references, looking for that grain of context that snaps meaning into place: a text on spiritual chanting to help students understand the power of the community’s chant in The Giver, an article on dissociation and trauma to make sense of fragmented narration in Freak the Mighty.

It isn’t easy, and we’re still figuring it out, but we believe in planning this way because this process – notice, wonder, dig deeper, step back – brings a text to life. We strive for balance: open to an emotional experience but grounded in knowledge. Digging into the granular, word-by-word choices an author makes, while remaining connected to other moments within and across books. Sharing a text with the class but grappling in writing on our own.

This planning process takes time, but it saves time for teachers – an observation that highlights the difference between lessons planning (the process described above) and lesson preparation (the process of getting ready to teach a lesson no matter who has written it). We believe that time spent in preparation is the most valuable a teacher can spend. Great close-reading questions only truly work with a teacher who has considered which students she’ll ask which questions of, who will read each section, and what additional questions she’ll ask when students struggle. We’re happy to research and write an article on the role of the planet Venus in science fiction if that means a teacher has more time to read student writing about Ray Bradbury.

We imagine that the accumulation of units taught in this way will create the bank of knowledge students need in high school and beyond. And then an allusion in Lord of the Flies reminds you of an allusion you read in The Magician’s Nephew years earlier. The feeling of reading a dense, thorny text that resists you, that makes no sense, and then gradually peeling back the layers to find a truth or nuance you would have missed – that doesn’t leave you. Even being able to recognize and name: this is an allusion to something I don’t understand yet. The author is using a metaphor here but I’m not sure why. Imagine how approaching reading in this way can change the narrative for students. What power in being able to shift from “I’m not a good reader” to “I don’t know about this yet.” From “I can’t make inferences” to “What do I need to learn more about?” The mental process of establishing meaning first, then shifting to analysis is replicable across units and years. Normalizing rereading, valorizing research, but above all, putting the book back at the center of class.

Because in our curriculum, the book is the thing – not the objectives and standards and skills and terms surrounding it. If you’re reading with a teacher who breathes life into the text, if you take the time to read closely and someone helps you build knowledge of the parts that are unfamiliar, we believe you will end the unit a stronger reader than when you began it, more attuned to the subtle choices authors make, and better able to live in the next book you open.

Emily Badillo received a bachelor’s degree in English from Stanford University and a master’s degree in education from Hunter College. She has eight years of experience teaching middle and elementary schools students in New York City, and joined the Teach Like a Champion team in 2018. She is currently one of the writers working on TLAC’s reading curriculum.

Doug Lemov is the author of Teach Like a Champion (now in its 2.0 version), Practice Perfect and Reading Reconsidered. He’s a former English teacher and school leader and is now the managing director of a team at Uncommon Schools that provides professional development and curriculum tools for schools.

This article is based on a chapter from The ResearchEd Guide to the Curriculum: An Evidence-Informed Guide for Teachers (John Catt Educational, 2020, $19.95 160 pages).

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