Narrowing Curriculum: Are We Inadvertently Narrowing Students’ Minds?
Dec 3rd, 2007 by Carmen Andrews
It’s time to pause and take a clear-eyed look at an evolving and powerful determinant of what students are being taught in American public schools. This time, instead of filtering curricula through a lens of high stakes state exams, NAEP and other testing barometers, we need to look at societal norms and realities, and examine whether they wield enough influence in U.S. public education. First some background: Public education is presently in the midst of “The Standards Movement”. The latest trend in curriculum design incorporates techniques that reduce curriculum breadth and content. In order to hone in on essential questions, big ideas and their attendant skills and concepts, a limited list of pared down statements or “power” standards are agreed to by grade or subject area groups of educators. This comes after they’ve analyzed the content and skills most likely to be encountered by students on standardized tests. These same teams then create a lean, mean curriculum with a tight and limited focus on the agreed-to content.
States and individual school districts will frequently hire gurus with a dossier of “research-based” approaches with impressive titles like “Making Standards Work” and “Understanding by Design”. Two high-flying gurus of the moment are Douglas Reeves and Grant Wiggins. They haunt the pages of educational journals, as well as the national and international educators’ conference circuit. Their strategies have been incorporated to varying degrees by priority school districts nationwide. More often then not, these are the same districts where students’ failure to reach AYP continues to be the primary driving force behind such methods of curriculum design and implementation, as well as subsequent professional development for teachers.
Testing outcomes in urban districts, where large percentages of students score at basic or below basic in various reading, writing and math goals, have administrators sifting data in a number of ways. They use test scores as an additional factor to bear down harder on a few of the already narrowed standards that get taught in their schools. Often students who have shown mastery in standards that their peers didn’t get have those same standards taught to them all over again. These students constitute a minority and they get lumped into the whole group, because teachers don’t have the time or inclination to let them move on to more complex topics. They wind up in a standards-dictated drill-and-test purgatory that often causes them to lose interest in school. It seems that current systems of standards-driven curriculum design and implementation are compressing the top and the bottom of student testing populations into a conspicuously large and mediocre hump called “proficient”.
So what do students actually get in their lessons as a result of standards fervor and content whittling? In reading and language arts students endure several years of power standards that might include “Making reader-text connections” and “Taking a critical stance”. Year after year, they spend hour after hour, week after week in their classrooms being told by teachers, who are simply following district edicts, that this is what they must master in order to succeed as students and ostensibly, in their lives. As both a concerned educator and as an equally concerned citizen I know of no job skill that requires an ordinary worker to “Make a reader-text connection” or “Take a critical stance” — but this is what students are being drilled and tested on from elementary through high school.
Many students who are interviewed after they’ve left their drop-out factory high schools complain that school was boring and irrelevant in their lives. In their own sad way, these students are smart educational consumers because they are so right. Anyone paying attention to the information coming at today’s kids from the media – primarily television and internet — can see immediately that there is minimal overlap between school information and societal information. What kids see, hear, experience and think about away from their schools is a rapid-fire, complicated world that makes their schools seem alien, dowdy and quaint by comparison. They are quick to judge their time spent in school as time wasted and adequate only in preparing them for a world that ended with the last century.
One telling example is in trying to find what part of their public school education has prepared high school graduates to understand the current state of the US economy – the falling dollar, the spike in energy costs, the health care crisis and the debacle in housing loans. A person shouldn’t need a college degree in economics to understand these issues. Ordinary Americans encounter them daily, yet there is nothing in most public school curricula that mandates a course in basic economics. And this is only one area where an educated citizenry is necessary to assume its self-determining role in our democracy.
Another indicator of a public education shortfall is in the complaints that college and university educators have made for years about incoming freshmen who are weak critical thinkers. To add to the negative perception, post-secondary schools enroll many students who need developmental classes to fill gaps in their basic literacy and math skills.
Teachers habitually attend workshops sponsored by universities, government agencies or other organizations – mostly on their own time. Here they receive training and information that doesn’t fit the narrowed curriculum. Teachers have limits to instructional time with students. If they cover the unsanctioned material they will be teaching something different from their colleagues because it’s not part of the narrowed curriculum. As a result, they are often not permitted to create lessons in these areas, even though the knowledge and skills they’ve acquired may be state-of-the-art, exciting and inspirational to students. These are learning opportunities that are lost.
There are few positive stories in the news about the U.S. educational system. Most Americans are clueless about The Standards Movement and how it has shaped state and district strategies to raise AYP among students. Non-educators may have some awareness that daily life in America’s classrooms has become increasingly bleak, even for kindergartners; but few parents or even professional educators, for that matter, realize that current thinking and practices in public education are becoming less and less relevant to modern life.
