How Can You Tell If a Curriculum Truly Builds Knowledge?

It's not always easy--and a lot of districts are being misled.

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When I speak to groups of educators around the country, teachers sometimes tell me their district is using a knowledge-building elementary literacy curriculum. I usually ask which one, because I know that not everything that’s labeled “knowledge-building” these days actually deserves that label. Lately, more than one teacher has responded, “Benchmark Advance.”

The last time that happened, I said I didn’t know much about it. But a few days later, I came across two Substack posts by Olivia Mullins, an elementary science teacher. (See here and here.) She’s developing a K-3 curriculum that combines science content and literacy instruction. She also has a PhD in neuroscience.

Mullins’ children attend a school that uses Benchmark Advance, so she has access to some—but not all—of its materials. With that caveat, she makes a convincing argument that the curriculum lacks both the depth and the coherence to do an effective job of building knowledge.

Benchmark Advanced is one of the most widely used English language arts curricula in the country—and it’s far from the only popular curriculum that suffers from these problems and is nevertheless labeled “knowledge-building.”

Understanding the difference between a faux knowledge-building curriculum and a real one requires a dive into details. I invite you to join me on that dive, because the distinction has huge consequences for educators and students—and ultimately, for all of us. Kids who get a true knowledge-building curriculum are far more likely to acquire the knowledge that will equip them for later academic success and for assuming their responsibilities as citizens of a democratic society. My hope is that a fairly detailed analysis will help others to recognize what distinguishes a real knowledge-building curriculum from one that only claims that label.

Faux Cohesion

Mullins’ posts focused on two units, one from first grade and one from second. The first-grade unit, called “Observing the Sky,” is an example of what she called “faux cohesion.” The brief articles all relate to the sky in some way, but they don’t refer to each other or build on one another. They don’t, for example, repeat key vocabulary words in a way that would enable children to retain them in long-term memory. Some texts have too little content, while others introduce too many concepts without adequate explanation.

Another problem is that the texts are all intended to be “decodable” for first-graders—meaning that they use simple words that mostly conform to the phonics patterns students have been taught, so that kids can read the texts themselves. But when children are still learning to decode—and really, until they become proficient readers—it’s far more efficient to build knowledge of a new topic by having teachers read aloud from texts that are more complex than those students can read on their own.¹

There’s also the fact that, as Mullins noted, “Observing the Sky” isn’t a coherent topic. The unit is mostly about things relating to space, but it also includes an article about clouds—which, yes, you can observe in the sky, but which relate to the topic of weather, not space. And the unit has nothing about the planet Earth, which does relate to space but which you can’t “observe” in the sky—at least, not from Earth itself.

The second-grade unit Mullins analyzed, called “Investigating the Past,” is even less coherent. It includes, among many other articles on a wide variety of topics, a six-sentence text on Alexander Graham Bell and the invention of the telephone; a poem about the disappearance of buffaloes; a fictional diary entry by a child on the Oregon Trail; and a three-paragraph article on Helen Keller that is mostly about tadpoles. None of these articles supply any explanatory context. (Mullins’ posts include images of parts of the articles in the unit.)

No Significant Changes

Mullins did caution that her comments might not apply to more recent versions of Benchmark Advance. But I reviewed information posted on the publisher’s website about what is presumably the current version, and—with the caveat that I didn’t have access to the entire curriculum—I didn’t see many significant differences. The units Mullins critiqued were still there, although there does appear to have been an effort to make them more coherent. “Investigating the Past,” for example, now seems to focus on dinosaurs. But the unit titles still describe broad themes rather than specific topics, and the “essential questions” attached to the units are still vague—for example, “Why is the past important?”

A senior administrator in a large school district, who I’ll call Mary Jones, told me that the district had used a 2019 version of Benchmark Advance and later piloted the 2023 version. Teachers found the two versions “very much the same.” The new version was still, Jones said, “very thematic. It didn’t go into any depth to build knowledge.” (This administrator, like everyone else I spoke with for this post, requested anonymity in order to speak candidly.)²

Some texts in the current version that I was able to review displayed the same problems Mullins highlighted in her posts: lack of depth and coherence. A second-grade unit on “Plants and Animals in their Habitats” includes brief texts on worms, ladybugs, and “urban birds,” along with a poem written from a mouse’s point of view. The text on worms is pretty clear, but it’s only four paragraphs, and there’s little overlap in concepts or vocabulary between it and the other texts.

And, like Mullins, I saw some articles that didn’t provide enough information for kids to make sense of the text. For example, the text on ladybugs mentions that they “eat juicy aphids” in the summer but never explains that aphids are bugs that eat plants—so when the next paragraph states that gardeners buy ladybugs in the spring, students probably have no idea why.³

It sounds like a nice idea to include a poem—apparently every unit has one—but as far as I can tell, there’s no effort to explain that poetry can take license with the facts in a way that the surrounding nonfiction texts don’t. The poem portrays the mouse jumping into a swimming pool, for example, and “roaring” back at a thunderstorm. Will kids understand that these events are fictional?

The teacher’s guide that accompanies the curriculum is silent on that point. Instead, the teacher is instructed to do a “think-aloud” about a reference to the mouse “thumbing its nose” at an owl, explaining that this indicates “a teasing action.” But nowhere is the teacher directed to explain that mice don’t actually roar—or tease owls, for that matter, or even have thumbs. (Mullins made a similar point about a poem in the “Observing the Sky” unit that she had access to: it implies that the moon changes its size because the wind “eats” it.)

Why Is This Seen as “Knowledge-Building”?

I could go on, but it’s important to address another question: Why do so many educators and policymakers apparently believe that Benchmark Advance is a knowledge-building curriculum?

One reason might be Benchmark’s own marketing materials, in which practically every other word is “knowledge.” One of its videos, for example, claims that each of its units is “focused on a single knowledge-building strand or concept,” and that the curriculum builds “a depth of knowledge that you won’t find in other programs.” The video concludes, “Every unit, students demonstrate the knowledge they’ve built … Knowledge matters.”⁴

Of course, educators and policymakers can go through the curriculum and try to evaluate it themselves, but curricula are extremely dense documents—and many educators and administrators aren’t equipped by their training to distinguish accurately between curricula that build knowledge effectively and those that don’t.

Jones, the administrator in the large district that used to use Benchmark Advance, told me that teachers there were able to recognize that the curriculum wasn’t actually knowledge-building only because the district had invested in building teachers’ knowledge about the science related to reading comprehension. They understood that the curriculum not only needed to provide exposure to information about the world but also needed to do it coherently, in a way that enabled students to retain and analyze that information.

As a result, when the district piloted the 2023 version of Benchmark Advance, “we knew right away it was not knowledge-building, it didn’t align with the research,” Jones said. In many other districts, teachers aren’t equipped to come to that recognition.

“If kids are learning about a topic,” Jones said, “that’s ‘knowledge-building’ to some people.”

One former high state-level education official told me that several districts in the state were so disappointed in Benchmark Advance that they used pandemic-related federal funds to switch to a curriculum that actually does build knowledge. But I was told by a senior administrator in a district in that same state—in a small city located within a rural county—that teachers there “love” Benchmark Advance.

Making It Work

This administrator, who I’ll call Jane Smith, said that she herself saw the difference between Benchmark Advance and a true knowledge-building curriculum when the district was choosing between options in 2020. Benchmark Advance seemed to her to be “more of a basal,” with excerpts rather than full articles or novels. (A “basal,” or basal reader, is a term used to describe typical reading curricula, which focus on teaching reading comprehension skills more than on text content. The use of excerpts is a frequent problem with basal readers.) But, she said, teachers chose Benchmark Advance, and “they’ve been able to make it work.”

Smith said teachers feel it aligns with their state academic standards in science, social studies, and literacy. They also believe that, while the curriculum lacks depth, it’s “deep enough that we’re building the background knowledge [students] need.” Teachers told her the excerpts “are great because kids can check the whole book out of the library if it piques their interest.” Scores on the state reading test have also been rising, with over 56% of students in grades three to five scoring proficient, as compared to only 47% in 2019, before the pandemic.

Of course, as Smith noted, teachers in her district “don’t have anything to compare it to,” because they’ve been using Benchmark Advance for so long. It might be doing a better job than whatever they were using before—and there are almost certainly worse curricula than Benchmark Advance out there. But it’s not clear how it would stack up against a true knowledge-building curriculum.

It’s also not clear Benchmark Advance is solely responsible for the district’s apparent success. Teachers supplement it with other programs for grammar, phonics, and writing, Smith said. And they only use it for grades three through five. For K-2, they use CKLA. That could well be partly responsible for students’ performance at higher grade levels, since the positive effects of a knowledge-building curriculum have been found to continue even after kids are no longer getting it.

Misleading Curriculum Ratings

Given how dense curricula are, and how difficult it can be to determine their quality, many educators and decision-makers feel the need to rely on third-party sources that rate curriculum. Unfortunately, most of those sources often provide unreliable guidance. Benchmark Advance has received top ratings from the most influential of these sources, EdReports. That’s all it takes for a curriculum to get on many state adoption lists, which guide district decisions.⁵

Another organization that rates literacy curricula, The Reading League, has also given Benchmark Advance an extremely positive review. While TRL is known primarily for its efforts to promote evidence-aligned instruction in foundational reading skills, it also reviews curricula for their ability to promote comprehension.

Significantly, however, Benchmark Advance does not appear on a list of curricula identified by the Knowledge Matters Campaign as effective in building knowledge. I consider KMC’s list to be the most reliable guide to finding a truly knowledge-building curriculum, but it isn’t a comprehensive source like those of the other two organizations. It doesn’t attempt to evaluate whatever curricula are available and assign them specific ratings, a fact that may limit its influence. (I serve on the board of the KMC’s parent organization but have no role in its reviews of curriculum.)

The Reading League’s review of Benchmark Advance includes an example that illustrates the confusion about what makes for true coherence. The review notes with approval that the theme of “Government” runs across grade levels: “Rules at Home and School” in kindergarten, “Being a Good Community Member” in first grade, “Government at Work” in second, “Government for the People” in third, and so on.

That might remind people of a similar “knowledge strand map” you can find on the website of Amplify, the publisher of a curriculum called CKLA—which, unlike Benchmark Advance, does appear on KMC’s list of knowledge-building curricula. But the topics in CKLA are far more clearly defined than the broad themes in Benchmark Advance. To build knowledge of American history, for example, it covers Native American cultures in kindergarten, “American Independence” in first grade, the Civil War in second, and a deeper dive into Native Americans in third.

Easy to Use, But at What Cost?

A curriculum consultant I spoke with told me that one attractive feature of Benchmark Advance is that it’s relatively easy for teachers to use, especially as compared to most knowledge-building curricula. EL Education, for example, is particularly difficult to implement well, and unfortunately it’s often chosen by districts that don’t have the resources needed to make it work.⁶ Without the right kind of support, many teachers who use a knowledge-building curriculum end up changing the lessons to focus on comprehension skills, diluting their value.

What teachers truly need, if they want their students to succeed academically in years to come, is an effective-knowledge-building curriculum plus the support and guidance to implement it in the way that its creators intended. But the first step is a reliable source of information about which curricula truly build knowledge and which do not. As education writer Holly Korbey has observed, our current system of rating curriculum is “frankly bananas.”

As I mentioned, Benchmark Advance is not the only curriculum misleadingly “certified” as knowledge-building. EdReports has also given undeserved top ratings to other widely used programs, including Wonders (McGraw-Hill), Into Reading (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), and myView (Savvas, formerly Pearson). Districts spend millions of dollars on these programs, locking themselves into using them for as long as a decade. Meanwhile, many students are deprived of the opportunity to acquire the knowledge that could enable them to reach their full academic potential.

A further risk of this mislabeling is that some educators, like those in Smith’s district, will believe they are using a knowledge-building curriculum and want to stick with it even when the next opportunity to switch to another curriculum arises.

Then there’s the risk that teachers will see the “knowledge-building” label attached to a curriculum like Benchmark Advance and also recognize its shortcomings. Understandably, that could lead them to conclude that all knowledge-building curricula are similarly flawed, putting them off the whole idea of “knowledge” altogether.

If we don’t somehow get a more reliable curriculum rating system—along with better support for teachers using true knowledge-building curricula—I fear the growing movement towards knowledge-building curricula, which holds so much promise for all children but especially for the most vulnerable, could be significantly slowed or even derailed.

1. It’s been found that children’s listening comprehension exceeds their reading comprehension through age 13, on average. It’s possible to reinforce knowledge through decodable texts that are on the same topic as texts that have been read aloud, but it’s hard to create decodables like that. I know of only one effort along those lines that appears to be successful—the knowledge-building Wit & Wisdom curriculum and the aligned Geodes decodable series.

2. I was only looking at materials related to reading comprehension and “knowledge-building,” not foundational reading skills like phonics. I was told by a curriculum consultant—who, like everyone I spoke with for this piece, wanted to remain anonymous—that Benchmark Advance has significantly improved its foundational skills component, which had also been sharply criticized. The consultant added, however, that efforts to improve the knowledge-building component have been undercut by Benchmark’s choice of inferior texts, at least some of which it publishes itself, and by Benchmark’s concern that comprehension instruction needs to put state literacy standards front and center. Those standards focus on supposedly abstract comprehension skills rather than any specific content.

3. The vocabulary word the teacher is supposed to focus on in that text is “huddled.” That’s a fine word to highlight, but the meaning of “aphid” is important to understanding the article.

4. Benchmark does list many studies on its website attesting to Benchmark Advance’s efficacy as compared to other unnamed curricula or approaches. But it appears that only one of those studies was done by independent researchers, as opposed to Benchmark itself. That study took place in one small district. In addition, the district didn’t provide any data about students’ socioeconomic status, which is a significant limitation. It’s possible that students who got Benchmark Advance came from a higher socioeconomic group than the students they were being compared to, and higher socioeconomic status is closely linked to higher reading scores.

5. The curriculum consultant I communicated with said that the publisher of Benchmark Advance was concerned about basing questions in literacy standards—in other words, in comprehension skills rather than the content of the text—because in the first round of its review, EdReports had told them that the lack of such questions was a problem. At the same time, two key architects of the Common Core literacy standards have said that the standards were not intended to be the goal of daily instruction; rather, the goal should be enabling students to understand and articulate the meaning of the text. EdReports is supposed to be evaluating curricula against the standards, but its reviewers appear to have misunderstood how the standards were intended to be used.)

6. Detroit and Oakland have chosen EL and, from what I’ve been told, confronted serious implementation problems. Philadelphia is also now using the curriculum, apparently without adequate support for teachers.