I’ve signed in at many front offices in my 30-plus years of visiting schools, but never one where the school secretary had to (politely) ask me to hold on a second while a child finished reading her a story. Nothing was more important at that moment, to that member of the dedicated Bryant School of Arts & Innovation team in Riverside, California, than to give this little girl her undivided attention as she displayed her newfound knowledge.

While not by design, it was perhaps appropriate that the first stop on our Knowledge Matters School Tour was at a relatively mature Core Knowledge school. The Core Knowledge Language Arts program is the most established, most tested of the knowledge-building English language arts curricula in use today. Taught in thousands of district and charter schools around the country, CKLA — as it’s more commonly called — is both a curriculum program and a cause.

Read the full story at the74million.org.