Standards and Skills part 1
Recently I finished the book “Beyond Standards — The Fragmentation of Education Governance and the Promise of Curriculum reform” by Morgan Polikoff. I admit I’d never seen myself as wanting to be in politics, but that book got me thinking about it!
As a math teacher who ‘came of age’ after five years of teaching to help usher in the Common Core standards in California’s third-largest school district (Fresno Unified!), I was so gung-ho about the new standards and the potential for them to revolutionize math education I felt being an administrator wouldn’t be ‘enough’ and left to join a startup that was focused on standards and open educational resources.
6 years later, I’ve become pessimistic about the potential for change, and this book perfectly explained why. Basically, standards as adopted at the federal/state levels are useless because by the time the standards get to the classroom, the research and meaning behind them has been obfuscated by the adopted curriculum which in itself is often not aligned to standards, and teachers generally suck at knowing what content is aligned to standards or not. A choice quote about district curriculum adoption committees (of which I was a part of once) — “interestingly, though the review committees undoubtedly learn quite a lot about the quality of the materials they eventually do and do not adopt, this information is typically not made available to school districts.”
My questions are as follows:
- How to best disseminate information about the curriculum to classroom teachers?
- How best to help teachers understand the curriculum ‘chosen’ by the school district may not be the absolute best thing for instruction?
