Changing standards should never be taken lightly. New standards always require a deluge of meetings and professional developments downstream, meetings and PDs that are followed by the added time sucks of new lesson plans, new lesson sequences, and often new books and software. Those lessons and materials only sometimes mesh well with previous learning. The careful sequences that curriculum committees put together for student transitions from year to year? Any appreciable change in standards risks blowing up all that previous curricular work, leaving numerous fragments of dead and disconnected lessons all over the field.
But who is counting? That’s the real problem in this scenario. Who is tracking the mandatory costs from government and district demands — let alone the fuzzier, sometimes-optional instructional costs that come with professional development, new materials and rewritten lesson plans? Accountants will track new books and software within the district, along with costs for professional development and related speakers, but not all expenses can be laid out cleanly in a spreadsheet. Opportunity costs end up ignored in particular.
A term from economics, opportunity cost refers to the value of whatever you cannot do because you chose to do something else. It’s the cost of the road not taken, and like that road, its outlines are hazy, offering no more than a glimpse into what-might-have-been. What is the cost of not doing something? If a district commits to using its available time and money to build a new extension onto the lunchroom, it probably cannot add a weight room onto the gym. Our districts have a finite amount of time, money and other resources available. Once the addition to the lunchroom is chosen, the district has implicitly given up the weight room. The opportunity cost is the value the weight room might have provided, a cost that cannot easily be determined.
Choices are often mutually exclusive. Every time we force teachers to dedicate chunks of their daytime hours to new brainstorms, those teachers must reallocate their time, and something has to give to make room for Brainstorm #23,489. Those somethings are our opportunity costs and they cannot be turned into hard data, so they mostly end up ignored by administrators and bureaucrats. If Mrs. Brown and Mr. Black are forced to give up morning or afternoon tutoring time to learn their new books and materials, who notices? Besides Mrs. Brown and Mr. Black, that is, who may be silently cursing as they tweak or entirely redo once functional sets of slides they prepared only the year before.
Rewriting standards and making educators drop everything to learn another set of changes…and then devise matching curricula again! …Aaghhh. Yet some states have changed standards more than once in the last decade. The standards situation resembles a remodeling run amuck, as a too-wealthy, too-bored would-be interior designer keeps changing the floors, walls, fabrics, paints and lighting until nothing works and nobody knows what to expect, even as the bills pile up and cracks appear in overloaded plaster. Teachers just start walking around bits and crumbles of plaster, trying to find the now rickety stairs. (Damn, I’m fascinated at how we keep working sometimes.)
We don’t need perfect standards as much as we need to settle on a good set of robust, adaptable standards that we can and will stick with – allowing for desperately needed continuity of instruction. The Core played hell with that continuity, incidentally. That’s a major part of the reason my students were drowning when it was first introduced.* But this post is not about the Core and it’s not about standards. It’s not exactly about opportunity costs, either.
This post is about LURCHING — lurching from one new program or idea to the next. Any teacher could tell those Secretaries of Education, district administrators and other pundits that routine and continuity are vital components of a successful classroom experience. Yes, sometimes gifted students can leap buildings in a single bound but, for the so-called average kid, staggering from one person’s great idea to the next person’s great idea without any rational bridge connecting those ideas… well, it doesn’t work well. If it works at all. Changed curricula leave holes in the learning ladder, a hole invisible to creators of new systems because they already know the curricula. And it’s harder to see a missing piece when you are already certain that piece is in the puzzle somewhere. Let’s say Sergei was expected to learn zygotes in fourth grade but zygotes just moved to third grade instead, a grade that Sergei just finished without learning anything about zygotes. Sergei’s personal curriculum just dropped zygotes entirely, but how is he to know? His teachers probably know but they are dealing with an avalanche of changes. Zygotes can easily fall through the cracks. There are no zygote emergencies, after all. This topic just becomes one more thing to pick up later. Or not.
What our brainstorms tend to ignore is that changes on a macro level throw micro levels out of whack. And micro levels are where our kids live. These abrupt changes are hard on teachers, but they are often harder on students. I said this post is not about new standards, and it’s not. It’s about the people inhabiting — the people living inside — today’s US educational system. Flexes in school routines are inevitable. New information must be incorporated as learning and technology advance. Changing demographics may require shifts in instruction, such as added English language support. Plus an unexpected coronavirus can create dizzying changes in rules and expectations virtually overnight. .
Eduhonesty: BUT WE NEED TO STOP IMPLEMENTING GRANDIOSE SOLUTIONS TO MURKILY-DEFINED, OVERSIMPLIFIED PROBLEMS.
NEW STANDARDS AND NEW TESTS WITH ADDED TEST PREP LEAD TO INCREASING LURCHING DOWN IN THE CLASSROOM. The zygotes go quietly missing, along with the analog clocks and maybe even some critical, fractional pizza slices meant to be added together. Too much is happening all at once. The fractions receive limited practice due to time constraints, and next year’s teacher may have to start almost at the beginning of again slicing up that pizza pie.
I’ll throw in a personal story: I used to be astounded at the number of middle school students I received who could not read the analog clock in the wall at the front of the classroom. “Ms. T, what time is it?” “Is it almost lunchtime, Ms. T?” “How soon is the next class? Do I have time to go to the bathroom?” Class start-times were posted, but it doesn’t do a student much good to know that social studies starts at 10:59 if he or she can’t read the clock.
A spiffy digital Darth Vader desk clock solved my immediate problem, but I wondered what was going wrong. Then I had a long conversation with an elementary teacher who explained that the “clock standard” was at the end of the year, only new standards kept being inserted into her curriculum, and nobody in her school was ever reaching that clock standard before the end of the school year cut them off. That standard then disappeared into the mists. It wasn’t in the next year’s curriculum. Once it “timed out,” it wasn’t anywhere. Since it pretty much vanished from the standardized tests after its slated “year,” no one had an incentive to tack those missing clocks onto the script a year later, even if there had somehow been time, which there wasn’t.
Lurching, combined with testing, can be a lethal combination for learning.
I miss twenty years ago. Before the tests took over, I believe a kindly elementary school teacher would have stepped off the bus for long enough to teach the missing clocks. But he or she can rarely risk doing that now. Everything is too scripted. Too often, the standards have to be on the board and a teacher found stepping off the common, test-based lesson plan can even be reprimanded for not teaching from a sometimes wholly inappropriate script instead. The impact of this set-up is hardest on the kids already on the wrong side of the achievement gap, of course.
Nuff’ said. Hugs to my readers, Jocelyn Turner
*Going sideways for a minute here: The phrase “my students were drowning” sounds like hyperbole, an overstatement. But that phrase is actually an understatement. Drowning may be awful, but it’s fast. What happened to my students and many other teachers’ students was not fast. It was 180 days of being frequently lost, as they were presented with obligatory new material that did not necessarily relate to any previous year’s instruction — setting the stage for long and tougher years to come.