Standards & Curriculum

Commenter Molnar posted the following:

The problem of incoherent curricula and standards is not restricted to mathematics and science, of course. Roger Shattuck wrote a frightening account (first published in the New York Review of Books, I believe) of his experience in a Vermont school district that is probably better than most: The-Shame-of-the-Schools

I finally got around to reading it, and next checked my own State's standards. I regret to say that all the bad things Roger Shattuck had to say about Vermont's standards seem to be equally true of New Mexico. Let me excerpt bits of Shattuck:

The state Framework of Standards and the lengthy district Curriculum Guidelines (themselves based scrupulously on the state Framework) presumably lay out a course of study for all students. As they stand, these two documents do not and cannot serve this function. They mention no authors' names and no titles of books to be read. Only the science and mathematics documents specify topics for a particular grade. Elsewhere entry after entry stipulates that students shall examine, investigate, analyze, understand, and interpret immense intellectual topics such as "fiction" and "nature and nurture." The verbs teach, learn, and study do not appear. Because they clump four grades together, these documents cannot, for example, provide an answer to the question: "In what grade are the following materials taught: the solar system, Athenian democracy, dangling modifiers, the Founding Fathers." Such items do not even appear.

The nearly impenetrable pages of the state of Vermont's Framework of Standards plus the Addison Northeast Curriculum Guidelines add up to an elaborate professional camouflage of the fact that at no level—state, district, or school—is there a coherent, sequenced, and specific curriculum. The teachers on the curriculum committee for accreditation had good reason to ignore the district Curriculum Guidelines. They propose no course of study, no coordinated sequence of subjects within the core fields. I'm not saying that our district curriculum is watered down or lopsided or old-fashioned or newfangled. I'm saying that those six hundred pages contain no useful curriculum at all.

I note that New Mexico is no less successful in couching its standards in impenetrable prose.

There is more, much of it on the history and development American educational philosophy, but his major point is that standards are hopeless without reference to a sequenced curriculum.

New Mexico's phonics standards for Kindergateners make a fair amount of sense:

D. Acquire reading strategies
Kindergarten
1. Demonstrate phonemic awareness and knowledge of alphabetic principles by:
Demonstrating understanding that spoken language is a sequence of identifiable speech sounds.

Demonstrating understanding that the sequence of letters in the written word represents the sequence of sounds in the spoken word.

Demonstrating understanding the sounds of letters and the understanding that words contain similar sounds.

2. Demonstrate decoding and word recognition strategies and skills by:
Recognizing and name upper and lower case letters of the alphabet.

Recognizing common words and signs by sight.

Recognizing beginning consonant letter-sound associations in one-syllable words.

All reasonable goals, all maddeningly vague, completely without sequence, method, or plan. What might an actual curriculum look like?

How about:

Week 1. Teach the names of the letters of the alphabet. (the curriculum should provide detailed guidance, including pronunciations for the names of the letters, on the steps in this process based on observations of the teaching experience in many classrooms).

Week 2. Review alphabet, practice recognizing letters, start learning to recognize letters in words. Teach children how to spell their first names.

Week 3. Teach the short vowel sounds, learn to reconize them in some simple words (cat, hat, bad, big, let)

And so on. Needless to say, successful Kindergarten teachers do something very like this, either finding it in textbooks, remembering how they were taught, or inventing it for themselves.

The "constructivist" philosophy in education (see Shattuck above) has been interpreted to imply that every teacher and every student has to invent their own educational system. Needless to say, this rarely works even when attempted.

So how did we wind up in this mess? Were we just lucky, or what? My theory is that things are this way because that's the way textbook publishers like it. With no curriculum, they can lock you into their proprietary "learning systems," and sell, sell, sell you ever more specialized crap to fix the things their primary materials screw up.