But a new book argues that the current approach remains deeply flawed. Though phonics instruction has emerged as a key component of reading lessons, stagnant NAEP scores, among other measures, suggest that something is missing — a focus on substantive knowledge, including detail-rich lessons in science and history. 

Author Natalie Wexler, whose 2019 book advocated a greater emphasis on these topics paired with explicit instruction, has said these principles are supported by cognitive science. A content-rich curriculum, she maintains, allows students to go deeper, helping information stick and building an academic foundation that allows them to write more easily, creating a kind of virtuous circle of reinforcement: The more they know, the better they can write; the better they can write, the more they can learn.

Six years later, Wexler is back with a new warning. In her book, , out Feb. 3. (pre-orders open today, Jan. 21), she says the benefits of improved reading instruction will go to waste if we don’t offer students a more vibrant, content-rich set of lessons to go along with it. 

She spoke recently with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ’s Greg Toppo. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ: Your book The Knowledge Gap came out in 2019. A lot has happened since then, including a pandemic and an explosion of interest in the science of reading, thanks in part, to the work of folks like . Would you say we’re in a better place in the knowledge discussion than we were in 2019?

Natalie Wexler: Yes, definitely. For one thing, there are now a number of knowledge-building curricula available that were not around when I was researching the book. There are more choices than there used to be. And although we don’t have really reliable data on what curricula are really being used, all indications are that more and more districts and schools are using those knowledge-building curricula. That’s been a very promising development. It’s still a minority, but certainly more than in 2019. Emily Hanford and other science of reading advocates have done a great service to the public and to the nation’s children by shining this spotlight on things that are problematic about typical phonics instruction. The risk is that it can lead, and has led in some places, to the assumption that if we just fix the phonics part of reading instruction, everything else is going to be fine. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. 

A lot of people see the science of reading as just “more phonics.” How do you describe this more comprehensive approach?

People outside the education world assume that schools are teaching social studies and science and all of those things. I have to do a lot of explaining when I talk about how we’re not building knowledge in school effectively. With The Knowledge Gap, the publishers expected that the audience would be primarily the general public and parents. But where it’s really taken off is among educators. And it’s because it’s a lot easier, certainly for elementary level and maybe some middle school level educators, to understand the argument, because they’re living what I’m describing: There isn’t much content in the elementary curriculum, and there is a lot of emphasis on teaching reading comprehension skills, making inferences as though they were abstract skills you can teach directly and apply generally. Many of them have seen that that doesn’t really work very well. 

As I was reading your book, it reminded me of some of the conversations I’ve had with Joy Hakim, who wrote the great series, A History of US and . Her books are favorites among people who are enlightened about this topic. One of the things she says is that we’re underestimating how much our kids can understand if they’re exposed to difficult material. Is that the right word, underestimating? 

“Underestimating” is the right word, and I use that a lot myself. But you have to be careful about what we’re underestimating. It is often assumed among educators that young children won’t be interested in history or can’t handle history because it’s just too abstract, too remote from their own experience. There’s no evidence to support that. And in fact, there’s anecdotal evidence that kids can get very interested in history.

I’ve seen this myself: second graders getting fascinated by the War of 1812. But at the same time, we’ve overestimated kids’ abilities sometimes to handle certain abstractions. I open The Knowledge Gap with a teacher who’s trying to teach kids the difference between a subtitle and a caption, which is abstract but not particularly interesting to them. They don’t get it. They want to know what’s going on in the picture. What is that shark eating? But the teacher feels that it’s more important. This is what her training in the curriculum has led her to do, to focus on the abstract difference between a caption and a subtitle.

You and I have both interviewed teacher in Baltimore, and I love what he tells you: He was initially skeptical that his students would like a Dust Bowl novel, , but as the drama unfolds, they’re hooked. I wonder what that tells you, not only about the topic, but about how he was able to approach it and make it come alive.

said that you can teach almost anything to a child of any age if you do it in a way that makes sense. Those weren’t his exact words, but if you engage kids, they will get interested in all sorts of things that have nothing to do with their own experience. If you basically tell them a good story, that’s the way you can teach history, science. This is what Joy Hakim does so beautifully in her work, both in history and science: telling stories that really hook kids, and then they learn a lot, almost effortlessly, along the way. 

There’s a lot of emphasis on having kids “see themselves” in what they’re reading, which is important. But it is at least as important to expand their horizons to other realms of experience. Fiction, novels especially, are a great way to do that. As Kyair said, when they learn that the main character’s little brothers died, they care. They care about this story and these characters. There’s also some evidence to show that this is the way empathy develops, through reading fiction about lives that are very different from our own.

In Chapter 3 of the new book, you talk about teachers colleges, and note that today’s teacher educators — that is, the people working in the colleges — have been shaped by “a system that devalues knowledge and prioritizes engagement.” In a way, you can’t blame teachers for this crisis.

Absolutely. It is no individual’s fault that we are where we are. It’s a systemic problem, so it’s not going to change overnight. It’s difficult, not just for teacher educators to step out of this system, but also the teachers themselves. If you’ve been teaching in a certain way for years in the sincere belief that you are doing a great job, and someone casts doubt on that, it’s a very difficult message to take in.

What really amazes me is how many teachers, despite the painfulness of the message, are nevertheless embracing it because they really care about the success of their kids. With teacher training, it’s going to be hard to change that overnight. We’re really trying to fix a broken system with the products of that system, which is very difficult. I don’t think we can rely on teacher training to change the system. Once teachers are on the job, we also need to continue communicating this message, doing training to undo some of the training they’ve gotten pre-service. 

Historically, teachers also haven’t learned much about cognitive science. Do you get a sense that’s improving?

As I say in the book, there are efforts. is an organization that is doing great work with some institutions of teacher training, but it’s going to be very slow. There are hundreds of programs that train teachers, and just a handful are signing up to bring their curricula in line with principles of cognitive science. Even within those programs, not every teacher is on the bandwagon. You can’t really, at the university level, control what goes on in the classroom. Professors are used to having a lot of autonomy. 

Let’s talk about writing. You’re the co-author of as well. Reading your new book, it seems that writing brings together a lot of your ideas. Can you talk a bit about the importance of writing?

Since I finished writing both of those books years ago, I have continued to think more about the relationship between reading and writing and learning in general. I’ve become more and more convinced that the combination of a content-rich curriculum and explicit, manageable writing instruction embedded in that curriculum can provide all the benefits of cognitive science-informed instruction, and possibly more. Without going into a lot of detail, we have evidence that when you write about what you’re reading or what you’re learning about, it enhances your learning. It enables you to retain the information better, it enables you to understand it better, and it enables you to think about it analytically.

The problem is that writing is really difficult. We have studies, like write-to-learn studies, where they have kids write about the content that they’re learning. Overall there’s a positive effect from that. But in one meta analysis, in 18% of these studies there was . In other words, kids writing about what they were learning actually retained less of it. It’s impossible to know why. But the reason is we sometimes ask kids to just write without giving them enough support, and that is cognitively overwhelming, so they don’t get the potential learning benefits. 

So what’s the key?

The key is to make writing manageable, not cognitively overwhelming, but still requiring some effort. The best way to do that is to start at the sentence level — because if writing is hard, then writing at length is only making it harder — and explicitly teach students how to construct sentences and eventually clear linear outlines for paragraphs and essays that are embedded in the content they’re learning about. If you do that, you’re having them engage in , which we know is a very powerful boost to retention of information. You’re also having them engage in elaboration, explaining what they’re learning about, giving examples, all of that. That has been shown to really help with comprehension. You’re familiarizing them in a powerful way with the complex syntax of written language, which can be a real barrier to reading comprehension.  

You say that content-rich curricula are under fire from both sides, the left and right. I love the anecdote where you visit a small town in Ohio where this group of parents objected to the use of the words “God” and “Goddess” in a second-grade unit on Greek mythology. You note, “It’s hard to imagine how children could truly understand Greek myths or ancient Greek culture without hearing those words.” I have two questions. Number one, how do we get out from underneath this? And number two, is there a way in which this is kind of a red herring? 

This is coming not just from the right and not just from the left. The same curriculum has been attacked, sometimes, from both sides for different reasons. What we need to fundamentally do is realize that compromise is essential, and it’s got to be compromise that doesn’t interfere with kids’ ability to learn. There’s been a lot of opposition from the right to teaching about Greek myths in a curriculum called . Sometimes it’s perceived as trying to proselytize about Greek myths or other religions, Buddhism, Hinduism. When school leaders have explained to the community, “No, this isn’t an attempt to convert kids to these other religions. It’s a part of teaching them about history and other cultures,” sometimes those controversies have been defused — not in every instance.

Another thing to bear in mind, though, is that sometimes the people who are protesting are not representative. They’re maybe a small but very vocal group of parents. You have to ask: Does it really make sense to deprive all students of exposure to some valuable information because a small group is protesting? Maybe there’s another way to handle it, some alternative texts or something for those kids. But fundamentally, everybody needs to realize that the curriculum is not going to align with your individual preferences about what you would like your kids to learn. And we have to find consensus. There’s more consensus than there appears to be, which kind of gets to your second question: The media have kind of elevated these conflicts. In many instances, there isn’t that much conflict.

Is there anything you see in the landscape that gives you hope that we are moving in the right direction?

For one thing, I have gotten many invitations to speak recently. The interest in this, at least from my limited personal perspective, is not dying down. It’s only growing. And that’s encouraging. There are other people taking up this message. I’m seeing the beginnings of a recognition that phonics instruction is important, but we may be overdoing it with all of the focus on it in some places — the one generalization you can make about American education is you can’t generalize, because who knows what’s really going on?

But in some places, schools are spending an hour a day on phonics and giving short shrift to some of these other important components of reading, like building knowledge. That really relates to reading comprehension. Even some of the people who have been in the forefront of the science of reading movement, like , have been saying this: Let’s not overdo it, because there’s an opportunity cost, and one of those opportunities that’s being lost is the chance to build a kind of knowledge that kids will need to read and understand the texts they’ll be expected to read in years to come.

As a small illustration of her long, idiosyncratic writing career, Joy Hakim likes to tell the story of a chance encounter in an Oakland elevator.

On the way down after a speaking engagement, a woman handed her a slip of paper — it contained the phone number of her son’s private school. He and his classmates, she said, could really benefit from their school swapping out its traditional history textbooks for a set of Hakim’s.

Asked who she was, the woman admitted that she was a representative of one of the big publishing houses.

“I was appalled,” Hakim remembered. “But this is an industry where almost no one believes the books educate well — and scores prove that.” 

Hakim doesn’t know if the school ever switched over. But the episode underscores her uncomfortable place in an industry that has never quite embraced her. By turns raw, thrilling and eye-opening, her writing offers young people a look at history that they rarely get between the covers of mass-produced textbooks.

Her most well-known work, a 10-volume history of the United States that began appearing in the early 1990s, remains in print. And at age 93, she’s still in the fight: Her newest series on biology debuted in September, continuing her tradition of wrestling with complicated ideas and difficult historical and scientific questions. 

But even after three decades, she remains unsure that she’s made much of an impact as textbooks with bigger promotional budgets enjoy much wider readerships. 

That view is belied by her legions of admirers. Praised by leading historians like David McCullough and James McPherson, she also may be the only textbook author to reliably receive fan mail. At one of her kids’ houses sit cases of letters, testament to the gratitude of two generations of readers. 

, podcaster and author of , who has championed deep subject matter knowledge in all areas of study, called Hakim “a force of nature.”

“Most textbooks are either extremely dry or so encyclopedic in their attempts to cover the universe of topics that they’re highly superficial and therefore boring,” Wexler said. “Joy Hakim understands how to use the power of narrative to bring topics in history and science to life.”

Wexler predicted that if more schools adopted Hakim’s titles, reading scores would jump because her work offers both the knowledge and vocabulary kids need to succeed on tests. 

And as the nation grows increasingly polarized about history, Hakim’s work eschews easy categorization. It is championed by liberals for not glossing over our dark past — and by conservatives for offering rigorous, challenging texts and sophisticated arguments.

, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute and a former New York City teacher, said Hakim’s history series “had a place of honor in my fifth-grade classroom and deserves a place of privilege in every school. It’s beyond her power to reverse the long-running and in American education, but she’s done her part to make real history accessible and interesting to those who seek it out, or who are engaged by it.”

Hakim’s books, he said, offer an important antidote to those that aim to trick kids into learning a little history via historical fiction or lightweight, fantasy-driven fare. “Hakim is winningly anachronistic by comparison: She takes history — and more pertinently her young readers — seriously.”

But she has often had to fight simply to be heard by school districts under adoption systems she sees as backwards. Teachers and students are hungering for good books, Hakim said, yet the adopted titles often stem from publishers’ long-standing relationships with state education bureaucrats, whom they lobby furiously. 

“I don’t think that they sell whether they’re good or crappy,” she said. “They sell because of this massive promotional effort that goes into them.”

‘I sat down and I started writing’ 

Hakim’s career as a writer for young people began simply, on a long car drive.

A one-time teacher and journalist — she taught in Baltimore for a spell and was both a business and editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk’s daily newspaper — by the 1980s, she was freelancing in Virginia Beach and raising three kids with her husband, a grain importer. She happened upon a notice for a hearing in Richmond, the capital, by a board looking for ways to improve school textbooks. At that pre-Internet time, it was a topic that aroused national attention. Hakim (pronounced HAKE-im) decided to check it out.

She expected to hear testimony from writers and editors. Instead, the publishers sent salespeople, who in her view stonewalled the proceedings by rhapsodizing about how beautifully designed and illustrated the books were.

“The whole thing was just a hoax,” she recalled. “The publishing industry was not serious about doing anything.”

Steaming, Hakim climbed back into her car and began the two-hour drive home. At some point, she thought to herself: Why not write her own history book?

“I sat down and I started writing,” she said.

Hakim didn’t stop for seven years, telling vivid personal stories of America’s founders, pioneers and others.

As she conceived it, the book aimed for a fifth-grade audience. To get direct feedback, she tapped a small group of 10-year-olds in her neighborhood, offering five dollars apiece to critique her manuscript. Hakim instructed the readers — mostly boys — to scrawl one of three reactions in the margins: G for Good, B for Boring and NC for Not Clear. 

Next, she invited classroom teachers to use the manuscripts in exchange for feedback. 

That one book ultimately became a 10-volume manuscript called . 

The books covered much of what she’d decided was important in American history — as she told one interviewer, from “people coming over the Bering Strait” to Bill Clinton’s inauguration.

And they offered children a thrilling narrative. In a chapter on Columbus’ voyages, she wrote that after surviving the treacherous waters of the Sargasso Sea, the explorer’s men wanted to turn back: “The sea seems endless. On October 9 they say they will go no farther. Columbus pleads for three more days of sailing. Then, he says, if they don’t see land they may cut off his head and sail home in peace.”

But for all the books’ originality, Hakim lacked a publisher. Eventually she met a literary agent who successfully garnered the attention of Oxford University Press.

, in a review titled, “Showing Children the Dark Side,” said Hakim “frees children from the grasp of hoary American myth nurtured by novelists and historians; without sermonizing, she allows them to glimpse the horrific underside of the once magical word ‘frontier.'” 

Hakim, for instance, was among the first writers for young people to address the 1839 Amistad rebellion, devoting an entire chapter to the slave uprising four years before the incident rose to prominence with the .

Historian David McCullough called the series “a big breath of fresh air and the best possible news for the youngsters who get to read these books.” 

Princeton University historian James McPherson said he was “impressed by the accuracy and the depth of her research,” telling one reviewer that Hakim’s books represented women and minorities in ways others hadn’t.

‘I have done something that’s quite different’

Like many authors, Hakim felt Oxford did little to publicize the series, leaving her to do much of the promotion herself. But in 1993, a family friend opened a key door: The composer BJ Leiderman, a long-ago classmate of one of her children, was by then writing for National Public Radio. He suggested to colleagues that they feature her, and soon Hakim found herself in front of a microphone at the network’s Norfolk affiliate. The result was a lengthy “Morning Edition” segment that helped introduce her to the world.

In the interview, she told host Bob Edwards, “The history books that are out there, most of them are committee-written, and committees can’t write. Committees have to be bland. So, I am doing something … that’s quite different.”

Looking back on the reception she got in 1993, Leiderman said Hakim was “progressive in the best sense of the word, searching out all different areas” to study.

All the same, he recalled, selling the books — sometimes on her own — struck him as a long, tough slog reminiscent of veteran rock stars playing small clubs to keep their music alive.

Despite the struggle — or perhaps because of it — “A History of US” soon became one of Oxford’s rock-solid titles, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, said Damon Zucca, the publisher’s director of content development and reference. The series has also received “the most fan mail from kids, parents, and teachers, who have been sending ardent missives about these books to Joy and to us for nearly thirty years now.”

But keeping them in classrooms has been a battle. Hakim recalled visiting Oakland schools a year after the district adopted her books, curious how they were being used. She couldn’t find them anywhere. “They’d all been replaced,” she said. A few teachers told her they’d saved their copies and were literally hiding them in closets to keep administrators in the dark. 

At one point, Hakim even sued after textbook giant Houghton Mifflin purchased the books’ distributor, D.C. Heath. Fearing it was a bid to bury the titles, she pursued an antitrust violation. Civics-geek alert: The case eventually landed before the federal bench of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who 14 years later would rise to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Hakim eventually got the books out from under the big publisher’s purview. Now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, it didn’t respond to a request for comment. 

Eventually, “A History of US” gave rise to a companion with all-star voice talent including Morgan Freeman, Julia Roberts and Robert Redford. But by then Hakim was on to something new: a three-book series about the history of science, from Aristotle to Einstein.

Then as now, Hakim’s most fervent buyers are often private school teachers and homeschooling parents who are free to use materials that appeal to them. She also holds a kind of magnetic appeal to cultural conservatives like Lynne Cheney who have derided public school readings they view as mushy and politically correct.

Yet conservatives have also protested Hakim’s books. In one case, Texas parents organized a letter-writing campaign, telling state officials that the books were unpatriotic.

They’ve been banned at least twice, as far as Hakim knows — once quite recently after a parent complained that they were too liberal. She jokes that the honor puts her in good company. 

Asked how she’d categorize herself, Hakim doesn’t hesitate. “I’m just a teacher,“ she said. “My books talk. I’m in a conversation with these kids and I respect their intelligence — and they understand that.”

‘This is a tough chapter’

Ask about her workflow and Hakim will tell you that she is blessed with — or cursed by — a journalist’s penchant for accuracy, which often prolongs her creative process. In the case of the science books, she finished the last one — on Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and the origins of quantum mechanics — and her new publisher had submitted it for peer review, when she received an unsolicited email from an unfamiliar name with an mit.edu address.

It was from renowned physics professor , also editor of the American Journal of Physics. He’d read a piece in TIME magazine about her plan to write about Einstein and offered to read the manuscript.

Hakim sent him the first four chapters. A few days later, Taylor wrote back asking if someone had actually reviewed them.

He and Hakim met a few times and, in Taylor’s words, “got to know — and respect — each other.” In all, they spent the next year-and-a-half revising the book, to the chagrin of Smithsonian Books. “They were not happy with me,” Hakim recalled. “But I’m so happy that I did it.”

In the book’s introduction, Hakim wrote of the “private tutorial with one of the greatest physics teachers this country has produced,” adding, “Sometimes my head hurt with all the stretching.”

The book won several best-of-the-year awards, which she credits largely to Taylor’s influence. For his part, Taylor told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ that Hakim “made great contributions to high school science teaching” and deserves wider recognition. 

As with the history series, the science books found a devoted audience as Hakim challenged young readers to grasp hard topics and complex ideas. In a chapter explaining Galileo’s writings on relativity, Hakim urged them to “catch your breath, relax and be prepared to stretch your mind.” 

In the chapter, she described how an observer on shore, watching a ball fall from the mast of a moving ship, sees it move in an arc, while an observer on deck sees it travel in a straight line. Acknowledging that the idea seemed outlandish, she warned: “This is a tough chapter; stick with it; the ideas here are important.”

Indeed, when journalist and scholar Alexander Stille set out to capture the essence of Hakim’s history books in 1998, he concluded, “Instead of talking down to children in simplified language, her books invite children to make an effort.” He that “a grandmother from Virginia” could produce books superior to those of most publishing houses.

‘The world has changed’

Now, nearly 20 years after the science texts first appeared, Hakim is out with a new series for teens about the history of biology.

gave the first volume a coveted starred review, calling it “thoroughly engrossing and highly recommended.” 

The second book is due out in April, part of a planned four-volume series. Published by MITeen Press, the last two books won’t appear until 2025 and 2026 respectively, but Hakim jokes that at her age she may not live to see it in readers’ hands.

She has asked her publisher to pick up the pace.

At the same time, she remains unsatisfied about her previous work: Three decades after “A History of US” began appearing on shelves, Hakim says the series could use a refresh. 

“I wrote it 30 years ago, so some of it is really dated,” she said with a self-conscious laugh. For one thing, she wants to recast the role of women, a topic she didn’t adequately address in the 1990s, mostly due to her own blind spot. An avowed feminist, she now sees she didn’t step back enough and appreciate the importance of the women’s movement. 

“Thirty years ago, we were different people than we are today,” she said. “The world has changed.” 

Yet, oddly, little has changed in Hakim’s career. Her husband is gone and the “grandmother from Virginia” is now a great-grandmother, but she still feels like a disruptor and an outsider, angry that we don’t have “better books” in schools. After millions of words on the page and cases of fan mail, she admits that she has barely struck a blow in the nation’s larger battle with historical illiteracy.

The textbook industry that she set out to disrupt in the 1980s is still dominated by a handful of publishers — actually, consolidation has , not more, choices. Together, they still produce what she considers bland, formulaic books that are making the nation’s reading crisis worse, not better.

“I’ve worked all these years and I’m not sure what I’ve achieved,” she concluded. “I’ve sold some books, but I haven’t changed the field.”