Common Knowledge^™
The Newsletter of the Core Knowledge Foundation

Over five hundred parents and special guests attended Liberty Common School’s ten-year anniversary celebration on August 17, 2006, in Fort Collins, Colorado. Dr. Barbara Garvin-Kester, President of the Core Knowledge Foundation, presented the school with an award commemorating their tenth anniversary and recognizing Liberty Commons as a pioneering Core Knowledge school.

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During her thirteen-year tenure at Three Oaks Elementary School, in Fort Myers, Florida, Vivian Posey always kept a finger on the pulse of children’s needs and teachers’ professional development as well as school and family concerns. She has a phenomenal ability to know about and recognize the one thousand students in the school and to make them feel as if they are her only concern. Furthermore, she has been devoted to Core Knowledge: she promoted the growth and fine tuning of the Core Knowledge curriculum; she traveled on behalf of the Foundation; and she attended and presented at National Conferences, all the while keeping an open door at her school to any and all visitors who wanted to know about this program called Core Knowledge.

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In late July, twenty new, commission-based sales reps from around the country attended the first ever Core Knowledge National Sales Conference at the Boar’s Head Inn in Charlottesville, VA. I could not have been more pleased to greet this group, which we had long dreamed for — a full-fledged sales force bringing the Core Knowledge message and materials to schools nationwide.

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“It’s the most wonderful convention I have attended in my 40 years of school work.” With its 200+ sessions, 14,000 square foot exhibit hall, and keynote luncheon, the 2007 Core Knowledge National Conference is guaranteed to motivate you.

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We are very happy to announce the publication of Grace Abounding: The Core Knowledge Anthology of African-American Literature, Art, and Music. Released in August, this groundbreaking textbook has already sparked enormous interest around the country, including major markets in New York, Illinois, and Texas.

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I was probably alerted to the need for a common core of knowledge when I was about 6 years old. That would have been about 1954. To be more exact, it was the lazy summer of 1954. These were the days when all the neighborhood children would gather in the street to play our favorite games. One of the most popular games was “London Bridge.”

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Reading is a complicated operation, and yet one of the most widely supported models of reading is surprisingly simple. It is known as “the simple view of reading.” This view holds that there are two chief elements that are equally important to reading comprehension: decoding skills and language comprehension ability.

To achieve reading comprehension, a person needs to be able to decode the words on the page and then make sense of those words. If the person can’t decode the words on the page, she won’t be able to achieve reading comprehension. But even if the person can decode the words on the page, that in and of itself is still no guarantee of reading comprehension.

Researchers who hold to the simple view say, “Tell me a person’s decoding ability, as ascertained by a word-reading task, and tell me that person’s language comprehension ability, as ascertained by a listening comprehension task, and I can make a very accurate prediction of that person’s reading comprehension ability.”

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