Curriculum: A Little Help From A Friend

Back in 1906, so the story goes, a contagious disease--one guess is whooping cough--raged through the harbor city, confining to bed children enrolled in the Calvert School, a private primary school founded nine years earlier. It also sidelined other schoolchildren and led to the quick distribution around town of a homeinstruction program developed by Virgil Hillyer, Calvert's headmaster at the time.

Ever since, the Calvert School has sold its K-8 home-instruction curriculum--the very same curriculum used in its day-school classrooms--to families all over the world; approximately 10,500 students internationally now use the highly structured program. Recently it has been winning converts at a public school just across town.

Since 1990, the Barclay School, a predominantly AfricanAmerican elementary school where 70 percent of the 600 students qualify for free lunches, has been using the curriculum and instructional program to teach K4 students. Three years into the four-year, $400,000 experiment funded by the Abell Foundation, a Baltimore-area philanthropy, the results look promising. A Johns Hopkins University evaluation of the program, for example, found that it has pushed up students' standardized test scores significantly. Their writing, attendance, and time on...