Science and Social Studies Are Back — Why Did They Disappear from Elementary Schools?

Science and social studies are back and I could not be more excited for our nation's elementary students in particular.

See, over the last 20 years, No Child Left Behind had the unintended consequence by focusing on reading and math and making those the only tested subjects, had the unintended consequence of pushing science and social studies content out of elementary school.

In a lot of cases, entirely.

out of the curriculum because schools were spending time on what they were going to be held accountable for.

And as a result, kind of predictably, they didn't spend much time on those untested subjects like science and social studies, and maybe in some cases electives too.

And that's even more likely to be the case in a higher needs school where there's higher accountability pressure.

There's this narrowing effect on curriculum to focus only on math and science, or excuse me, only on math and reading, not science.

Big pet peeve of mine as a science teacher, but we squeezed out science and social studies and we started teaching math and reading in about the most boring and content free way possible with a focus on basic skills.

If you saw a lot of worksheet and kind of test prep packets with reading things like, you know, read this passage and identify the author's main idea.

or read this passage and practice making inferences.

Like all these skills that recent research has found to not really be skills, right?

We're testing students on these things that they would be developing, these abilities that they would develop anyway, if they were exposed to lots of interesting content in the form of a good curriculum.

And I have to give a lot of credit to Natalie Wexler, the author of The Knowledge Gap and the host of the Knowledge Matters podcast for bringing this to my awareness and for bringing a lot of public awareness to this issue.

In recent years, we've heard a lot about the science of reading and phonics, but the other side of the science around reading is around reading comprehension, right?

There's this idea that reading comprehension is a skill by itself and that you can just kind of do lots of test prep style exercises and learn lots of strategies and practice those strategies and never learn any actual content, but just practice all these skills and get good at reading.

And it turns out that that's not how it works, that knowledge sticks to knowledge.

And if you want to get good at reading comprehension and understanding new information that's put in front of you, it's crucial to have lots of knowledge about that subject anyway, and to be able to build students' foundation of knowledge is really crucial, especially for students from lower income backgrounds, for students in higher poverty schools, It's really crucial to systematically not only teach phonics, as we've been hearing a lot about, but to systematically build students' background knowledge.

And one of the key places where we can do that is with science and social studies content.

And it's not that we're necessarily getting new curriculum for science and social studies.

What we're getting now is really good literacy curriculum, and Natalie identifies six really good literacy curricula.

Her organization that she works with, the Knowledge Matters Campaign, has identified six curricula that are really good at systematically building students' background knowledge.

And my kids have had some of that curriculum, especially my younger daughter has had a lot of that curriculum and wit and wisdom is the specific curriculum they use.

And it systematically builds their science and social studies knowledge.

And here's the thing that I've noticed as a parent, kids love learning stuff.

They love learning information.

They love learning about the world.

They love learning science and social studies and geography and just all the stuff that we probably found interesting as kids.

But that over the last 20 years, kids have not had the opportunity to learn.

because we've been giving them this drill and kill around math and reading with a focus on reading as a set of abstract skills with almost no content involved.

And I've just finished listening to most of Natalie Wexler's podcast, the Knowledge Matters podcast, which talks about how if we want students to write, it doesn't really work to teach them to write about nothing, right?

Like this is not the Seinfeld School of Writing.

We have to have knowledge to write about and writing about what you're learning is a great way to solidify that learning.

So check out the Knowledge Matters podcast.

Check out my interview with Natalie about her book, The Knowledge Gap, and let me know what you think.