Questions to ask on school tours about humanities curriculum

It’s school tour season! Millions of parents are peering through halls, cafeterias, and classrooms trying to decide whether a given school is a good fit for their child(ren)—including people on the June Writers team.

Most of these parents know how to suss out whether their kid(s) will be welcome and safe at school. We know how to ask about the lunch options, recess, homework, clubs, and perhaps even the STEM curriculum. What math curriculum do you use? Will my kid be able to study X STEM subject by Y grade? Will my kid be learning a second (or third) language? How do you help kids resolve disputes? Have you had any issues with safety at the school in the last few years? Do you support kids with learning disabilities? What happens if my kid needs extra support if they’re not tracking with the rest of the class? Are there field trips? What happens if my kid wants to move ahead of the class in a specific subject? Is there counseling or a nurse? Do you allow treats for birthdays? Etc.

Someone on the tour will likely ask these questions.

What you’ll rarely hear, though, is questions about the humanities curriculum. This phenomenon is due in part to our country’s general move away from valuing the humanities; we can see this in the sharp decline in students majoring in humanities fields in college and the chatter on playgrounds. But it’s also because most of us don’t know what to ask. How can you tell if a reading, writing, and social studies curriculum is good? What should we even expect from schools?

We’re going to share the questions that we ask on school tours and how to parse the answers you might get, in the hope of empowering more parents to ask—it helps all the other parents, too. Realistically, parents have an opportunity to ask maybe one question on official school tours before things get awkward. But keep in mind that you can also ask parents or other contacts that you may have at the school the questions that you don’t get to ask on tours. And we strongly encourage you to ask. The humanities curriculum at your child(ren)’s school will have a profound impact on them, even if they aspire to be a doctor or computer programmer. A great humanities education teaches your child how to think.

Elementary School: Kindergarten

What reading curriculum do you use, and how do you assess kids’ progress?

Possible Answers: Be wary if the school says Lucy Caulkins’ Reading & Writing Workshop, Fountas & Pinnell, or Balanced Literacy. While many kids learn to read and write through those systems, many don’t. You can learn more about the national push to move away from these curricula and toward the Science of Reading here. You can also see how a school’s specific literacy curriculum rates against the research on effectiveness here. If you’re already at a school that uses the curricula we listed above and your young child is struggling with their reading, use this book to teach your child effective reading strategies—and keep reading with them for fun. 

In terms of writing, the early elementary school years are when kids should be using writing to accelerate and deepen the process of learning to read well, the main work of this age group. Your child should be learning to spell using systematic word clusters of phonemic sounds (e.g., words that all have the au sound), writing at the sentence and then paragraph length, and mastering the most basic mechanics of writing, like spacing, ending punctuation, capitalization, etc. The school should have regular assessments of reading and writing that they share with you and that gut check with your assessment of your child(ren)’s progress.

Elementary: Grades 3-5

How much writing do kids do? What are they expected to be able to write at the beginning of the year versus the end?

Possible Answers: Third grade is when kids move from learning to read to reading to learn. So, you want to hear that the school expects their students to move from writing paragraphs to writing long-form essays by the end of the year. This means you should see a marked increase in writing work in your child’s classroom. Grades three, four, and five are when kids should begin to wrestle with expressing and refining their thoughts in addition to mechanics. Ideally, your school is continuing to teach your child how to spell, introducing typing, as well as teaching kids how to write long-form texts. Note that these texts should be based on beginning critical reading and analysis. Unfortunately, endless personal opinion essays don’t challenge our kids to think, however exuberant.

But how? There isn’t one way to teach kids to write, so take a moment to match the school’s curriculum against what quality research supports as effective. If you hear that the school is using the Lucy Caulkins Writing Workshop method, you probably want to make sure that it is only one part of the writing curriculum. The upper elementary grades are also when your child should start learning a systematic social studies curriculum that teaches accurate history.

Middle School

How much long-form writing do kids do? How much text analysis is involved? Do they work with a lot of primary sources?

Possible Answers: Sadly, the reaction to this first question is too often to reassure parents that the kids don’t have to do much writing. Middle school is when the quality of the elementary school curriculum comes home to roost and many teachers have to balance the needs of kids who never learned to write well with kids who are further along. It’s tough. But ideally, the school is reading challenging books and writing about them—at an accelerating pace—because kids are now writing to learn. 

Your child(ren) should already be familiar with how to write long-form texts of a few types. Now, you should expect the school to use that skill to grapple with increasingly complex questions across more of their academic subjects. In addition, the school should begin to expose your kid(s) to complex, and even contradictory, primary sources and ask them to analyze the sources for credibility and substance—in writing and discussion. So, listen to the depth of the questions posed in the curriculum, across subjects. Is there a systematic and comprehensive social studies curriculum? Do kids read, discuss, and analyze challenging books? Do they teach kids to find, analyze, and use evidence to support their claims? Do they teach how to take notes? Do uncurated research? Middle school is not high school, but the school you’re touring should be teaching their students these foundational skills now so that they will be ready to dive into challenging curricula in three years.