Tip #5 — for all teachers: If you get a chance to join the Curriculum Committee, leap on it. Speak up. Speak often. Tell everyone what you think your students will need to learn next year. In the worst-case scenario, the wrong curriculum can hijack your classroom. Fight back!
Eduhonesty: Channeling Eeyore out here. Welcome back to the Blog of Gloom and Doom, where the glass not only may be half-empty, but is sometimes laying in shards all over the classroom floor. I want to get those pieces in the wastebasket before any students get hurt.
The shift to the Common Core is resulting in curricular changes that can cause actual harm in academically-disadvantaged districts, as desperate administrators flail about in attempts to improve scores. As I noted before, more and more often, teachers are given a script to follow, a script that may not match their students. They are told to stay on the group track even when the group track does not seem to benefit some, most or even all of their students.
Why does this happen? Multiple forces are in play, especially the perceived need to review all material expected to be found on the PARCC, Smarter Balanced or other annual, spring state test, the Godzillas among the many tests tearing up America’s classrooms. While schools that are doing well in the test game can afford to relax and schedule museum trips, schools that are failing to hit targets may become almost wholly focused on that Godzilla, bringing all their guns and students to bear on that one target.
“Data” has become another potent force driving academic homogeneity. If all classes take the same test, then all teachers and students can be evaluated using the same yardstick. That sounds perfectly rational on the surface, but can result in special education and bilingual students wasting days of school time taking tests they cannot even read. Students are sometimes fed into the testing system as if they were interchangeable parts – despite the fact that we have year after year of evidence documenting that this assumption has been becoming steadily less true over time.
In a class with student achievement scores that differ by six or more grade-years – such classes are common nowadays — teachers should not be giving all students exactly the same quizzes and tests at the same time. Those identical assessments are likely to bore the kids at the top, while they demolish the confidence of the kids at the bottom. Kids in the middle usually do best, but in worst-case scenarios, where the kids and the Common Core remain years apart, even the kids in the middle may be unable to gain a foothold on the academics coming at them.
A good teacher matches instruction to students; Drew who cannot read must be taught differently than Sadie who reads above grade level. When government leaders and school administrators demand districts prepare all students for identical tests, many students are cheated out of instruction and remediation they need to succeed. Administrators can demand that I teach seventh grade Common Core standards, but when a student has entered my classroom at a second-grade, academic level, that student cannot learn those standards without many, many hours of remediation. The time I spend instructing that student on standards five full years above his or her understanding will not only be wasted but will carry a potent opportunity cost, the time lost for essential instruction in third and fourth grade mathematics.
Please, readers, if you work in that scripted school, if you have the opportunity, stand up for remediation time — real remediation time. Get your students’ remediation requirements out front and center. Help curriculum planners to estimate time realistically. You may be unable to fulfill this mission as your district tries to hit every standard that might be on the state test, but sometimes we get lucky. Sometimes our voices are heard.
They are never heard when we do not speak.