Core Knowledge

Excellence and Equity in Education

The mission of the Core Knowledge Foundation is to advance excellence and equity in education for all children.

To achieve this mission, we offer detailed curricular guidance and materials to schools, teachers, parents, and policy makers—to anyone who believes, as we do, that every child in a diverse democracy deserves access to enabling knowledge.

By providing open access to an exemplary curriculum for preschool through eighth grade, we endeavor to:

create literate citizens able to contribute to a democratic society
empower each child to achieve his or her greatest academic potential
shrink the excellence gap between the academic achievement of American students and that of their international peers from high-performing countries
shrink the fairness gap between the academic achievement of American students living in poverty and that of their economically advantaged peers.
Knowledge-Based Schooling

Knowledge-based schooling opens doors to enabling knowledge, which in turn opens doors to productive and responsible citizenship.

To support knowledge-based schooling, the Core Knowledge Foundation has since its founding worked to identify and make available the knowledge and skills essential to the development of literacy and responsible citizenship. The results of this ongoing effort are presented in the Core Knowledge Sequence, the blueprint for a coherent, cumulative, and content-specific curriculum in preschool through eighth grade.

Sharing the Knowledge

The Core Knowledge Foundation, a 501©3 not-for-profit organization, has published a wide variety of educational books and materials, from curricular guidelines to comprehensive instructional programs. We offer many of these materials as open educational resources (OER), available at no cost for non-commercial use. While we need to pay our bills, our greatest motivation is to share the knowledge.

As Core Knowledge founder E. D. Hirsch, Jr., explains in Why Knowledge Matters, “Only a well-rounded, knowledge-specific curriculum can impart needed knowledge to all children and overcome inequality of opportunity.”