Curriculum As Foundation

I've had a tab open since July, an interview of Robert Pondiscio by Chris Herhalt looking at one particular chapter of the Hoover Institute's retrospective on the modern reform movement, which dates that movement to A Nation at Risk. That's one of the many bad signs about the tome, and there's plenty to disagree with, but I think curriculum is worth discussing.

Part of Pondiscio's shtick has always been one particular point: 

As I like to say, you go to school with the teachers you have, not the teachers you wish you had. It’s just math, right? If you need four million of anybody doing anything, a number that large means a normal distribution of human talent.

I think you still have to take great care in how you say that. I was a teacher. I don’t want to suggest for a second that I think teachers are less than capable or cannot be trusted to make curricular decisions. If I said that, no one would listen, and rightfully so. The point is, we’ve made this job too damn hard for the teachers we have.

I'll admit that this point often raised plenty hackles for me, particularly back in the days when the modern reform message included "All educational problems are caused by the many, many terrible teachers in schools, so let's find them and fire our way to excellence." The terrible teacher theory was embraced by many sub-species of reformsters for a variety of reasons. For those who wanted to see teachers unions disempowered, firing a whole lot of teachers seemed like a good way to further that cause. For those who wanted to push school choice, it was one more way to sow distrust in public schools. For textbook manufacturers, it was good hook for selling a "teacher proof" program in a box. For technocrats, it dovetailed nicely with their belief that the whole system needed to be standardized, with all those messy individual human teacher variations smoothed out. Put all those together, and you got reformster ideas like hiring anyone with pulse to implement teacher proof programs as efficiently as a MacDonalds' fry cook. Or the undying idea that we can just find the super teachers and stick them in a classroom with a couple hundred students.

So when Pondiscio says you have take care in how you make the "teachers are only human" point, he's on the mark. 

I can quibble a bit. I do think the talent distribution for teachers skews toward the top of the bell curve because it is really hard to go into a classroom and suck day after day. The students will make your life miserable and drive you out the door well before any administrator ever gets around to putting you on an improvement plan. (On the other hand, given the huge number of underqualified teachers in class room these days-- roughly 7% of the teaching force-- maybe he's right).

The reformster theory of action for years was to use a big stick and threaten teachers into excellence, as if teachers all along knew how to be better but were just holding back until someone put the fear of God into them.

TLDR: A Nation at Risk ushered in an atmosphere in which teachers felt so besieged that it became hard to have a conversation about how they could be better.

But on this point I agree with him:

Any reasonable chance at improving outcomes for kids requires taking a good hard look at the demands that we make of the four million men and women that we have in our classrooms.

That list of demands is huger and getting steadily huger. Has been for years. Is there a problem in society that we want to see solved? Let's give it to the schools to fix it! Some of this makes practical sense-- schools might as well handle lunch programs because school is where students are at lunch time. Dealing with students issues stemming from trauma and difficult homes and societal problems etc etc etc-- we can say that shouldn't be the school's problem and teachers should "just teach," but when a student comes into the classroom, she brings all her baggage with her into the school and it will be hard to "just teach" her until we somehow find a way to help her set that baggage aside.

The thing Pondiscio believes can be lifted off teachers' backs is curriculum. However "the sun will go out," he says, "before we have a national curriculum in this country." So never mind that idea. 

I wish more folks would give up that dream. Waves of reform-- No Child Left Behind, Common Core, Race to the Top, and decades of the Big Standardized Test can be understood as attempts to influence/control local curricula from DC, while circumventing the Constitutional prohibition against federal curricular meddling. But that's like trying to trim a bonsai shrub with a dull scalpel toed to the end of a forty-foot pole. Worse, so many of these attempts were steered by people who knew far too little about teaching. And yet in too many places, the Big Standardized Test became the de facto curriculum.

There is no doubt that being a teacher set adrift in a classroom with no scope or sequence or coherent materials just sucks, increasing the mental load of teaching by a hundredfold (I speak from experience). I'll also argue till my eyeballs dry up that a scripted, detailed curriculum (on Tuesday, at 9:15 a.m., the teacher will say "Today we will study the prepositions that begin with the letter b") is a straightjacket that kills any hope of excellent teaching. 

But I agree that all roads lead to curriculum. It's an important piece of teacher support as well as coherence across the system. It improves instruction, gives teachers room to breathe, and even helps with classroom management (step one in classroom management is to know what you're doing and do it with purpose). 

So what features does a curriculum need to make a good foundation for a system?

Content matters.

Here's a point on which Pondiscio and I have always largely agreed-- you can't teach reading as a set of discrete and transferable skills that exist in a vacuum, somehow apart from the actual content being read. Content and the background knowledge it fosters are critical for reading. But the standards movement and its Big Standardized Test have moved us in exactly the opposite direction, to the point that tests often feature topics about which students are unlikely to have any background knowledge (ancient Turkish political systems for elementary students) in an attempt to rule out background knowledge as a factor when testing for "skills." 

Pondiscio argues that a coherent and consistent body of knowledge can be part of the glue that holds us together as a society. That's a valid point. But it also helps build a ladder for learning. When I taught 11th graders Heart of Darkness, we could open up all sorts of new ideas by looking back at one of their 10th grade novels, Lord of the Flies. 

Flexibility.

This summer Auguste Meyrat wrote a piece for Real Clear Education entitled "How to fix the problem of rogue teachers" (in which Pondiscio is quoted on some adjacent issues). Part of the solution for "rogue teachers" is not to create a system that requires them to go rogue to use any of their own professional judgment. 

This is yet another education issue that requires a delicate balance that has to be checked and adjusted every day for the rest of forever. There is no set it and forget it. For an English class, that means the list of works needs to be revisited every year or two. It may mean a curriculum that leaves a spot for the teacher to fill as they best judge.

Two stories. One of my teaching colleagues regularly finished the year with her 12th grade honors class by studying Paradise Lost, culminating in a trial in which they had to argue whether or not Milton had successfully justified the ways of God to man in the work. The trial was run by one of the county judges, and the jury was a combination of teachers, former students, and local attorneys. Only someone with her love of Paradise Lost and with connections to local legal establishment could have pulled it off. Her seniors came back after their official school days were over just to work on this, and underclassmen begged to go watch. It was hugely successful on a variety of levels. Should it have been dropped so that we could adopt a different curriculum "with fidelity." Should her successor in the job have been forced to do the unit, despite not having the tools?

One unusual year, I had a group of fifteen-ish 11th graders, of whom nearly a dozen were either pregnant or parents. My reading and writing units ran on a great deal of discussion, and while every year the concerns and interests of the students are a little different, for that class, they were really different, and it affected the work that I assigned. These were not college-bound students, but they were not the kind of students for whom their life was some vague thing waiting off in the future. They were focused and interested in the things that mattered to them. Should I have been chained to a static curriculum that required me to say, "Sorry, I know you care about that, but we don't have time for it." 

Pondicsio says that it's universal for teachers to dismiss "boxed curriculum" as something that "won't work for my kids." I don't know about that. I expect more of us say something along the lines of "that won't work for all my students all the time." A district hires a teacher for her professional skills and judgement and her own body of knowledge. It seems like a waste not to give her room to use it, just as it seems a waste for her to just wander off into the Land of Do As You Please. Like I said, an endless job of balancing.

The flexibility is doubly important if we're talking about a state-level curriculum. A curriculum that is going to fit urban schools in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia as well as rural schools in my county cannot be too narrow and inflexible to fit both.

Weather the Storms.

There are no new debates in education. The phonics debate has raged for almost as long as there has been print; "reading wars" is plural because there are so many of them. I was in my forties before I learned that the math world has a couple of camps, including the pure math camp (students need to understand the theories and principles behind the math) and the practical camp (just get the right damn answer). Think theoretical physicists versus engineers. 

Is Shakespeare in or out? And if he's in, should he have the dirty parts removed, because we also argue infinitely about keeping Naughty Books out of school. Who else should be in or out of the canon? Pondiscio is a fan of E. D. Hirsch, but not everyone digs Hirsch's particular canon.  Should special needs students be mainstreamed or have dedicated classrooms? There are business-based educationists who think schools should be strictly focused on preparing meat widgets to be useful to them. And all this is before we get to all the folks whose idea of curriculum is loosely based on What I Learned When I Was In School. I am regularly told, once folks discover I'm a teacher, that it's just awful that schools don't teach Latin or cursive any more (two subjects I am perfectly happy to see fade into obscurity). And I'm an English teacher who sees no value in teaching grammar as anything but a very specific tool for reading and writing. And when it comes to writing, I cringe at curriculum like Philadelphia's new sentences then paragraphs then essays program, a step back to decades past.

I could go on, but you get, I hope, the point--education includes a few hundred pendulums all swinging back and forth, goosed into action every time someone announces, "I know what's wrong and I know what we have to do to fix it!"

A solid curriculum must be able to weather all of these storms, surviving the wrenching back and forth. Way, way, way too many educational ideas are based on the premise, "Once X is implemented, all students will learn Y. X is right, so this debate is decided and will never be opened again." That trick never works. And it's a huge pain when a pendulum swings and leadership decides, "Well, we need to scrap the whole thing. Again. So we can pursue the next Big Education Miracle." 

This is part of why flexibility matters-- if the curriculum is too static and unbending, it will eventually break. 

Teachers in the loop.

If a curriculum is simply done to the people who have to implement it, it is doomed. 

My district, like many, went through regular cycles of "curriculum development," in which teachers were (sometimes) invited into a conference room, where our job was to come up with the correct answers for building a curriculum (aka the answers that someone else had already decided on). It's kind of amazing how rarely the product was not even finished, less amazing how rarely they were actually used.

Most teachers are also familiar with the program adoption in which someone comes in to explain that if you just change everything about how you do your job, this New Thing will be great. I have noted often how over the course of my career, the state's program presentations shifted from earnest attempts to get us to buy in over to "Shut up and do as you're told." 

The most useful curriculum I've had was developed by my department, on our own, because we wanted the kind of help that a structured scope and sequence would provide (I suppose we were what Rick Hess would later call "cage busters"). But we were a seasoned group with plenty of tools and a willingness to devote the time up front that would make our lives easier down the road. One advantage was that it was really easy to tweak and alter the curriculum as needed.

My experience is not possible in all situations, but teachers have to be part of the process somehow. That includes regularly asking them questions such as "Is this working?" and "What do you need to support using this?" on top of the usual supports for training and materials.

Bottom line

The ultimate measure of a curriculum is not its ideological purity or its alignment with the education fad du jour or, God forbid, raises test scores. The measure is "Does it help the teacher do a good job?" I freely admit that "good job" is doing planet-scale lifting here. Nevertheless, it's the measure that matters because it points us back at the flexibility--the beginning ordinary mortal teacher needs different supports than the seasoned veteran teacher.

When it comes to teaching materials, programs, policies, etc I was always a pragmatist-- things that help me do the job are good, and things that get in my way are not. A curriculum that is solid enough to provide a foundation for work and a framework for daily instructional decisions, but loose enough to allow me some freedom to adapt to the students in front of me and adaptable enough to change with reflection and shifting time-- that's a curriculum worth having.