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About six years ago, the superintendent of the Gainesville City School System (GA) told elementary educators to start dreaming: he wanted them to create their ideal learning and teaching environments. Each of the district's elementary schools would open with a unique focus, to be determined by the people who would work in them.

After extensive research, Principal Jill Goforth and other Gainesville educators decided to embrace the Core Knowledge Foundation's approach to education-an approach that emphasizes a rigorous, content-focused curriculum to help all students establish a strong foundation of knowledge that they can build on later in school and life.

Together Goforth and her staff founded the New Holland Core Knowledge Academy. Here, at a school where 95% of students are minorities and 90% receive free or reduced-price lunch, rich content is key in helping students master the basic skills outlined in Georgia's state academic standards. Kindergarteners look at the use of color in Picasso and Gauguin's work. Second graders read Dickens' A Christmas Carol. And cross-curricular units at all levels help build and reinforce students' content knowledge. While students study the westward expansion of the United States in social studies, for example, they read stories about it in literature. While they learn about cells in science they write about them in English/language arts.

This coordinated curriculum has paid off in test scores that easily top scores at other schools serving similar students. New Holland's oldest students perform on par with their wealthier peers statewide. And anecdotal evidence suggests that students are mastering higher-order thinking skills while gaining content knowledge. (Think third-graders comparing and contrasting democracy in the United States and ancient Greece).

Public School Insights recently spoke with Goforth about her school and its success. Highlighting the school's curriculum and assessment system as major factors in student achievement, Goforth stresses the importance of content knowledge in developing critical and higher-order thinking skills, particularly for disadvantaged children who lack the background knowledge more affluent students receive as a matter of course.

Listen to about five minutes of highlights from our conversation (or read through the transcript of those highlights below):

Or hear the entire interview here. (approximately 17 minutes)

You can also link below to a particular section:

• New Holland and its recipe for success (1:45)
• Maintaining a broad curriculum (2:14)
• A multicultural focus (1:30)
• Forming New Holland (3:35)
• Parent support (51sec)
• Connecting with one hard-to-reach family (2:59)
• Final thoughts: Leveling the playing field (3:27)

Side-note: Soon after our conversation with Goforth, New York City Public Schools Chancellor Joel Klein introduced a pilot program featuring the Core Knowledge Foundation's new specialized reading program for grades K-2. You can read about it here.

Stay tuned to Public School Insights next week for an interview with Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch!

Transcript of the Highlights:
PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: What would you credit for New Holland's success?

GOFORTH: Certainly [we feel like] our Core Knowledge curriculum plays an important part in that. It gives us a very rich, rigorous curriculum for our children. It's very thorough. It includes all of the different subject areas at every grade level, and we feel like it gives [our students] a very good base to build on when they go on to middle school and high school.

We also have, in our system, a very structured plan for assessment. We assess our students in first through fifth grade [using] a pre- and post-test system for our Georgia Performance Standards, our state standards that our children are tested on at the end of the year. And we're very fortunate to have some really good software that helps us disaggregate the data. Then our school, I think, does a good job of using that data to tailor our instruction. So we're following the Georgia state standards-the Georgia Performance Standards-sort of as our umbrella, and then our Core Knowledge curriculum is what we teach to accomplish the Georgia standards.

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: Have you ever felt any kind of pressure, given the kind of school New Holland is, to narrow your curriculum and focus more exclusively on reading and mathematics?

GOFORTH: I have not, but we also know that content is important too. When our children are reading and writing, they're going to be reading and writing about something. So instead of reading a good story that's just an interesting story, we try and read about Thomas Edison, if that's what they're studying, or about westward expansion, if that's what they're studying in history.

The same goes for our students when they're writing. Everything they write is going to have a topic. So instead of writing the perennial "What I did over the weekend," or "What I did over summer vacation" paragraph, they're writing about cells. Or they're writing about Egypt...whatever it is that they're studying in their classes.

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: This focus, then, on content, which gives [students] greater content knowledge...Do you think that is one of the reasons why [your students have] been more successful in reading and mathematics than other students that have the same demographics?

GOFORTH: I think it is. I think that you have several pieces of the puzzle that have to come together for any student or any school to be successful, but we feel like Core Knowledge is a very important piece of ours. It does give us that content for writing and for reading and for critical thinking.

You hear so much about critical thinking and higher-order thinking skills, but you have to have something to think about to apply those skills. For example, you may see children comparing and contrasting apples and oranges. Our students in second and third grade are able to compare and contrast democracy in ancient Greece with democracy in the United States today, because they've studied ancient Greece and their government and how it was developed, and they've studied the American government. So they're able to apply those [higher-order thinking] skills at, I think, a more meaningful level.

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: Given the kind of population you serve at Core Knowledge, mostly students of color and mostly students who are living in poverty, do you ever face the criticism that the Core Knowledge sequence you've adopted doesn't really address the backgrounds of the students who are actually in the school?

GOFORTH: It really has not been a concern here, and we do have a very diverse population. We have found really that [the Core Knowledge sequence has] a multicultural focus, and it really focuses on the people and their contributions of all the cultures of the students that are in our school.

For example, in world history [students study] civilizations and countries of the world and how they've interacted across the years. In art and music, there are different units that are focused on composers and artists from different areas. [Students read the] folk tales and the literature of different countries. In fourth grade, for example, [our students read] Ethiopian folk tales and Chinese folk tales. They have some tales from Japan and Plains Indians legends. We focus on the people and contributions for their own merit-what they've meant in history or what they've meant in science or literature, for example, not just because of a holiday.

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: Are there any major but brief lessons you would want to share with other people who are interested in this approach?

GOFORTH: I would encourage people when they begin the Core Knowledge curriculum to go ahead and implement as much of it as they can, from the very beginning. There's so much of a cross-curricular connection. When our children are studying ancient Rome, for example, in third grade in history, then they also are studying some of the art and the architecture of Rome in art; they're studying some of the sculpture. If there's music that goes along with a unit, then they're doing that, and the literature...it all ties together. It is so easy to build units across the curriculum and make those connections.

[This approach] levels the playing field, so to speak, for children who probably won't go with their family on vacation in Washington and see all the monuments. They probably don't go to museums on the weekends. But this gives them that exposure, that base, that some more advantaged children may have simply through the travels and interactions that their families have. It really gives them a better chance at success.