A purely skills-based approach to reading instruction—where kids are introduced to unfamiliar subjects and then drilled on strategies like summarizing and finding the main idea—ignores growing research into “the crucial role of background knowledge in comprehending what you read,” writes Holly Korbey. It also leaves behind many low-income kids, English language learners, and students of color. ⁣📖⁠ ⁣⁠ After a decade of tanking reading scores, Baltimore City Public Schools took a deep dive into the cognitive science of reading comprehension; the district found enough convincing evidence to upend its traditional ELA instruction. Now, students still learn typical ELA skills—such as figurative language and sight reading—but they’re grounded in concepts they’re already familiar with from other classes. So, while studying “the U.S. colonial era in social studies, for example, students may read anchor text about the American Revolution, hold a Socratic seminar on the beginnings of the war, an...