The History Matters Campaign is a project of the Knowledge Matters Campaign. While every U.S. state has adopted academic standards for social studies, they connect loosely—or not at all—to what happens in the classroom. The missing element: strong, aligned curriculum. In one survey, just half of elementary principals said their schools even had a social studies curriculum in place. Instead, teachers tend to cobble together instructional materials and experiences that highlight select standards. These lessons might interest or enrich students, but they rarely connect to one another or help shape a coherent story of history.
Kentucky is taking a different approach. Last month, it announced a new statewide, K–8 social studies curriculum, “Our Commonwealth, Our Nation, Our World,” which is being developed in partnership with the Core Knowledge Foundation. The curriculum will be designed to cumulatively build knowledge over time, reflecting local contexts and the state’s design principles for social studies: “that content knowledge and inquiry are inseparable, and that deep knowledge in civics, economics, geography and history strengthens students’ reading comprehension, vocabulary and academic language,” state leaders said.
“This will be a high-quality instructional resource built from Kentucky, not adapted to Kentucky,” said Commissioner of Education Robbie Fletcher.
It’s a big move in a state that has recently taken big steps to advance literacy instruction—and one I think merits broad attention. Kentucky is invested in building literate students, but it isn’t stopping there. It is also invested in fostering civically engaged citizens. State education leaders are invested in supporting a frequently overlooked content area that desperately needs recognition—and in capitalizing on the deep connection between literacy and history content.
While it remains rare, we’ve seen positive change like this before. Both Louisiana and Massachusetts have created strong, statewide curricula that focus on academic content and develop literacy outside the English language arts block—freeing teachers from adhoc curriculum design and providing students with rich and coherent learning experiences.
Looking Past Common Constraints
That social studies has been pushed to the margins in classrooms and by publishers is not up for debate. Even before our current focus on improving students’ sagging reading scores, teacher surveys revealed just how little time young students spend on social studies every day, on average: 16 minutes, compared to 89 minutes on English language arts. The common reasons aren’t really debatable, either: time and again, we hear that teaching social studies is risky and that teachers lack aligned materials. Meanwhile, federal law mandates regular statewide testing in reading, math, and science—but not social studies.
These explanations do reflect real constraints. But they also have become excuses for all-but-eliminating social studies instruction or looking past the poor quality of the materials already in use.
Not Kentucky. Rather than accepting those constraints as the final word, the state has shifted the conversation toward the real issue: the role that cumulative history, civics, economic, and geographic knowledge plays in building stronger readers. And it’s taken action. The new curriculum will be open source and free for all districts to use, with grades 3, 5, and 8 planned to be available in 2027-28. The rest will be published in 2028-29.
Knowledge, Inquiry, and Literacy
The claim that content knowledge and inquiry are inseparable may sound obvious. Yet in social studies instruction and materials, the two are routinely treated as separate tracks. Explicitly teaching content knowledge often gets confused with old-school memorization. Replacing explicit knowledge building with an emphasis on inquiry skills like questioning and weighing evidence too often assumes the skills can function without a knowledge base underneath them.
The Kentucky approach doesn’t shy away from building content knowledge. Naming that you have to know something before you can meaningfully inquire into it is a small sentence carrying a lot of learning science. Students activate and build on prior knowledge when they encounter new information and ideas. They read more fluently and remember more of what they read when a text connects to knowledge stored in long-term memory. Content knowledge helps students build schemas, or structures of memory, that help them recognize and organize new information.
Coherence is key: content knowledge must be connected and taught as part of a rich narrative. Teaching history content knowledge through explicit vocabulary-building exercises and by reading stories and texts that relate to one another is the opposite of rote memorization. It’s knowledge building.
Such knowledge powers inquiry and builds over time. The cumulative impacts of this approach can be hard to quickly measure—as Kristen McQuillan recently wrote, “Done well, each lesson leaves behind another strand in the web of knowledge students will carry into future learning. Individually, those strands can feel almost invisible, but collectively, they begin to change what students are capable of seeing. . . It accumulates quietly—lesson after lesson, year after year—until one day, almost without warning, its effects become visible.” Sequential, coherent, cumulative social studies knowledge has to be a core tenet of any state’s, district’s, or publisher’s approach to curriculum.
Education leaders in Kentucky also see this work as part of its literacy efforts. On the History Matters Podcast, Chief Academic Officer Micki Marinelli noted, “it’s so easy for us to feel like it’s the ELA teachers that have ownership over literacy strategies and instruction. But I think that we’re seeing more and more—and that what’s so important for us to acknowledge—is that we are all teachers of literacy.”
That statement captures the learning science from a different angle. It reframes social studies not as a subject competing with literacy for classroom time, but as one of the places literacy actually gets built.
It’s the sum of these parts that makes Kentucky’s investment so important.
A Signal Worth Watching
My hope is that this new curriculum is more than a Kentucky story (or a Louisiana or Massachusetts story). I hope it’s a sign of momentum. Every state has standards, but these states are paving a realistic path toward translating those standards into strong classroom practice. Strong curriculum is the necessary tool and current missing piece that can result in coherent learning for kids in every grade, ensuring they actually gain the knowledge and skills those standards spell out. Let these states inspire more decision-makers to understand that history knowledge in the elementary grades feeds literacy development all the way through 12th grade, and that the current market isn’t equipped to hand states an “off-the-shelf” curriculum that is both high-quality and genuinely aligned to their standards.
This is next-level work. It’s an investment in raising a generation of genuinely literate people—people who can understand and engage with a constantly changing world by drawing on knowledge, schemas, vocabulary, and strong reading fluency and comprehension. Excellent history instruction in K–8 doesn’t just prepare students for high school. It prepares them for life.
Amy Holbrook is a former American History teacher and district instructional coach. She champions literacy-forward social studies materials that make K–8 classrooms knowledge-rich. As a consultant and advisor to Knowledge Matters, she leads the organization’s work on history and social studies, including the History Matters Campaign.