Field notes: Curriculum in the trenches

Peter Meyer / March 18, 2011

I emerged from our Board of Ed Curriculum Committee meeting yesterday smiling.? Despite agreement by Karl Wheatley and John Thompson, regular commenters on Flypaper, about the need to define curriculum before we start talking about it (see Curriculum Confusions), I was heartened by the fact that the dozen teachers and administrators sitting around?our conference table?didn't discuss the definition ? though I'm sure each had a different idea about what it was.? A few years ago, I would have been discouraged by that fact -- but?a few years ago the discussion would have gone like this: We don't have a curriculum. Yes we do. No we don't.? Then again,?a few years ago, we didn't even?have a Curriculum Committee!? As a friend of mine told me recently, you don't have to talk about Hirsch anymore.?

In fact, at the local level, in New York state and many other places, thanks to the tireless efforts of a generation of reformers ? I am lucky enough to have gotten to rub intellectual elbows with some of the best, at Fordham and Education Next and Core Knowledge ? the curricular train is finally on the tracks and pulling into a district near you. And guess what?? The teachers are so relieved!

For the first time in my district, teachers are talking about aligning content, vertically and horizontally. Okay, so it's just a reading textbook (Journeys), but it is the first time that K?6 teachers have ever

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Field notes: Curriculum in the trenches

Curricular confusions

Peter Meyer / March 17, 2011

You shouldn't need 3-D glasses to see the need for a good curriculum. So why, then, does Neal McClaskey at Cato think that a national curriculum is ?not possible in this dimension?? ?Or why does former Gates Foundation education honcho Tom Vander Ark say, ?A ?common curriculum' (whatever that means) is the wrong idea when we're about ready to develop ?school of one'"?? Which sounds a lot like Sarah Engel's recent New York Times op-ed Let Kids Rule School? (see Liam's brilliant From the Department of Bad Ideas on that one.) ?Or even Fordham's ?Kathleen Porter-Magee's Stop Seeking Curricular solutions to instructional problems.

Curriculum is the newest old question of the hour (see Liam's The Same Thing, Over and Over), brought on by a ?a bipartisan group of [250] educators and business and labor leaders,? according to the NYT, signed on to a Shanker Institute statement in support of a national curriculum. Unfortunately, it shook some old trees, which brought a flutter of dead ideas back to clutter the education sky.?

Could someone explain why educators ? and Cato -- are so afraid of curriculum? I thought we were beginning to overcome our fear of knowledge. I recall the first time I showed my school district's Curriculum Director ? a former psychologist ? a copy of the Core Knowledge K-8 Sequence and her remark was, ?No, we don't do that. Our job is to

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Curricular confusions

Our obsession with tests

Peter Meyer / February 24, 2011

Just when I thought we were making progress in devising a national core curriculum, everyone is already talking about tests based on the Common Core, which is still in its infancy.?

In New York State, the Regents recently entertained a proposal to replace their Regents Exams with tests developed by the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC).? Those are the folks representing 26 states which educate 60 percent of our K--12 students.?

Rick Hess weighed in last week with an essay wondering whether the common core was ?running off the rails already.?? Hess's worries derive from a recent symposium on ?through-course assessment? that was attended by ?a slew of heavy-hitters from the world of assessment and test development,??including PARCC.

What surprised Hess, as he writes, was ?a seeming disregard for the policy or practical impact of this whole enterprise.?? One problem is that there are laws prohibiting?the use of?federal funds to develop curricula.? Then there's the money problem: who's going to pay for the new assessments?? As mentioned before (here), Rick also has questions about how a national curriculum will impact the experimentation values of the charter school movement.

All of this suggests?a larger problem:? while we? inch toward a common curriculum, we are getting bogged down?in a distracting?debate on state autonomy while?the standards and testing industry is zooming ahead, already writing tests based on standards -- and no curriculum. ???????

As Catherine Gewertz at Education