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The battle over "cookie-cutter" curriculum in Palm Beach County rages on; the issue affects us all
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Wednesday, October 21, bore witness to the longest Palm Beach County school board meeting ever, beginning at 5:00 PM and continuing until after 11:00.
Concerned and angry parents and teachers lined up in groups of ten to speak before the school board. The great majority of the speakers expressed frustration and outrage with the sweeping curriculum changes introduced in Palm Beach County public schools this academic year, which center around "embedded assessments" given every three weeks in most subjects, "departmentalize" elementary schools so that the children change classes much like middle school or high school students, and have teachers teaching the same lessons from the same lesson plans across the district on the same days. The changes have been imposed in all schools in the county, regardless of the grade the school received or of whether or not the school had been making adequate yearly progress (AYP).
The school board, led by district superintendent Art Johnson and chief academic officer Jeffrey Hernandez, have steadily defended the changes as necessary. They have made a few concessions: on Friday, October 9, school board officials announced that principals would have the discretion to implement the district-provided "embedded assessments" or create their own. And on Friday, October 23, following the incredibly long and intensely emotional school board meeting Wednesday, Johnson announced that gifted students would no longer be subject to the testing and pacing guidelines, and that the administration of individual schools would be allowed to choose which parts of the new academic plan (if any) they wish to utilize.
Despite these concessions, there is still worry being expressed on the Testing is Not Teaching Facebook page created by Lisa Goldman, a Palm Beach County mother and substitute teacher, in an op-ed in yesterday's Palm Beach Post by Jac Wilder VerSteeg, and in posts on those pages and on related articles from teachers who have been told in "emergency faculty meetings" that there will be no changes following the Superintendent's pronouncement.
As Mr. VerSteeg points out quite astutely, there is a large game of CYA going on at all levels of public school administration, mostly in response to No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the legislation enacted under Bush that took the power to evaluate schools, principals, teachers and individual students out of the hands of the usual suspects, and, in essence, handed it over to the multi-million dollar standardized testing industry. The NCLB legislation was, at least purportedly, intended to make sure that low-income and minority students in struggling urban and rural schools all receive the same quality education as better-off white, suburban students; in other words, to close the achievement gap. Its self-proclaimed objective was to "raise the bar" for all American students, teachers and schools, and ensure that students at each grade level along the way were where they should be.
All of the goals of NCLB sound, indeed, like things that very few rational people could disagree with. That is in theory. In practice, the consequences, both intended and unintended, of NCLB have often been more problematic in themselves than the problems they aspire to resolve. For one thing, the money necessary to make meaningful changes in many of these struggling schools simply has not followed the rhetoric.
It is easy to bash incompetent teachers and administrators; it requires a lot more money and work to actually replace them with something better. The proponents of NCLB seem to believe there is a complete stock of well-trained, highly qualified teachers in the stable, ready and rearing to charge forth into the worst schools in the nation for the same low pay the current incompetent teachers receive (or even less), and single-handedly close the achievement gap. And there are such teachers out there; but they are few and far between, and the sad truth is, many such teachers end up not teaching in those needy schools not because they have any opposition to working with poor and/or minority students--many of them would actually like to--but rather because they are intimidated by the restrictions placed upon them and those schools by NCLB. If as a new teacher you know that you will be evaluated based in no small part upon your students' FCAT scores, and that if you fail to bring about the sea change in scores the administrators are looking for (because that is what the district is looking for, because that is what the state is looking for, because that is what the feds are looking for), you risk receiving bad evaluations and possibly even losing your job within those first nontenured years, is it not more tempting to take the position being offered at the A school (or even the C school) where your odds of having students scoring proficient on the FCAT are greater? Furthermore, in chronically struggling schools, there is great turnover within the teaching body and the administration. New teachers often have less support from highly competent, seasoned professional teachers in those schools, and might see their entire school administration change from one year to the next, or within the course of a single year, and with each change in leadership sweeping changes to the curriculum, procedures, policies and culture of the school.
I have had friends who have worked in some of these under-served schools in Miami, and many of the stories I have heard have not been pretty. But more often than not, the horror stories have been not about the students themselves--who do tend to have the problems one would expect in high-poverty, high-crime neighborhoods--but about the administration within the schools. One friend was observed nearly every day, alternately by his department head and his principal; the principal would berate him in front of his students, effectively undermining his authority, and tell him that everything he was doing was wrong; the department head would praise him for his hard work and tell him to keep doing what he was doing. Meanwhile, serious problems in student behavior that were sent before the administration were not dealt with, which caused the problems to continue, affecting the learning of every student in the class. Unfortunately, such stories are very common. NCLB ensures a constant revolving door of teachers and administrators in failing schools, each coming in with his or her own experiences and motivations, and almost invariably, each desperate to (pardon the language) cover his or her own ass when testing time (and shortly thereafter, evaluation time) comes around.
Nor is throwing more money at the problem the ultimate solution, though it is ridiculous and flat-out wrong to mandate certain changes while refusing to fund them. Much of the reason NCLB is ultimately unsuccessful is that it relies on the flimsy idea that the main problem in inner-city schools especially is incompetent, uncaring teachers, and that if only those teachers were held to higher standards (i.e., their students scoring higher on the FCAT) the students in those schools would be performing on the same levels as their peers in wealthier schools. It all but ignores the fact that, while having the best teachers makes a huge difference, many of those students would still be behind, even with better teachers. NCLB seems to view schools as a free-floating, independent, encapsulated parallel universe, where the problems outside the school have no place and no bearing. If only it were so!
Low-income students are disadvantaged from the very start. Their health is often poorer than their wealthier peers. Their readiness for school--their mental development--is very often hampered by their parents' lack of education: they enter school with far smaller vocabularies than the children of educated parents. They are also more likely to confront problems that suburban children rarely, if ever, have to: poor quality food, poor health care, moving around frequently because of problems finding and keeping affordable housing, the problems caused by unemployment or underemployment, or conversely, the problems caused by having parents who work so much to make ends meet that they are not around much for their children. They tend to live in less-safe neighborhoods and have fewer positive role models in their lives.
Even with the best teacher in the world, when children have these very adult issues weighing on their minds, school can seem to be of secondary importance.
Since these children, with all their grown-up problems, are not performing as well as their well-to-do peers whose parents are there to watch them and help them with their homework every night, who get good medical treatment when they are sick and always have good, healthy food to eat, and who are generally not expected to be the primary caretakers of younger siblings, legislators assume that it must be because of the teachers and that therefore, putting in more tests will make everyone involved work harder.
Wrong.
Accountability is certainly not a bad thing, and as a teacher, I have no problem being held accountable for what my students do in my classroom and for what they learn in my class throughout the year. I am more than happy to show anyone who walks in my classroom the homework, classwork, quizzes and tests my students have completed, the projects they have done or are scheduled to do soon, my lesson plans and my syllabus. I am certainly not the best teacher in the world, and I am still early in my career and learning valuable lessons every day. I have made some mistakes in my teaching and I strive to learn from those mistakes to improve my own strategies and the attention I give to certain issues as soon as they arise, rather than waiting for them to get worse before addressing them. That said, I am proud of the job that I do, and I feel that I do it to the best of my ability; more importantly, I feel that my students are learning and are making progress, and while they may complain about the amount of work they have to do in my class and the homework I give, ultimately they do thank me for it because, as they often say themselves, at least they're learning.
I resent the fact that our government seems to believe that somehow computers and scorers hired as temps for low hourly wages and expected to score hundreds of tests each hour are more qualified to evaluate my students' progress than I am; or more qualified to evaluate my work as a teacher than the administrators of my school.
The administration at my school does, in my opinion, a remarkable job at running an extremely large school (3,300 students) from a low-income urban area (60% of our students are on free or reduced lunch) with large special education and ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) populations. Despite the many challenges my school faces, we had enough points to earn a C for the 2008-2009 school year; however, because improvement among the lowest 25% in reading fell two percentage points short of target, we were knocked down a letter grade. If we fail to rise by a letter grade this year, there is a good chance that our administration will be involuntarily transferred, as well as some teachers deemed not to be making enough improvement. We could, in turn, go from being a relatively stable school with some fantastic outcomes (18 graduating seniors going to Ivy League schools last year, more than any other school in Miami) to being like so many other urban schools with ever-shifting bodies of teachers and administrators, new rules and policies coming and going, increasing confusion and lowering morale among the faculty and the students.
I have said it before and I will say it again. There are a great many problems that need to be solved within America's public school systems, and particularly within the state of Florida. Are there incompetent teachers? Yes. Should they be moved out of the classroom? Yes. But we have to focus on identifying them (and not solely based on the outcome of a deeply flawed standardized test basis--see my last article for more about that) and, perhaps more importantly, on motivating and training highly qualified and dedicated teachers to replace them, and on retaining those teachers who are dedicated (which will be the subject of my next article; stay tuned). There is little logic in blaming teachers alone for the achievement gap, or in reasoning that, since there do exist incompetent teachers, the solution to the problem is to turn evaluation of the students' progress over to the for-profit standardized testing industry.
Nor is a "cookie-cutter" curriculum approach the answer. Education is not an assembly line. Students are motivated to learn when they feel that the information or skills they are learning will be useful to them in their own lives. It is the teacher's job to make them perceive the information and skills they need as relevant to their lives. Someone sitting in an office in Tallahassee, or in Washington, D.C., for that matter, cannot decide the best way for reading to be made relevant to a seven-year-old growing up in Miami's Overtown. But a good teacher, given the flexibility to shape her own teaching strategies, just might. And those strategies may just have to be different than the strategies that work for, say, a second-grade teacher in Boca Raton. Their scores will undoubtedly continue to show disparities until we start addressing the real inequalities in our society--the true reasons why so many children have been left behind, and continue to be left behind despite, or even because of, NCLB.
But when we need good teachers more than ever, we can't afford to be driving them away by turning them into assembly-line factory workers and removing from their work the reasons they went into the teaching profession in the first place.
And I have yet to meet a child who truly believed the FCAT was relevant to his or her life for anything other than graduating from high school or not having to take Intensive Reading or Intensive Math, or who felt that his/her score on the FCAT really proved something about his/her abilities.
Even our kids understand that life is not just a series of multiple-choice questions or five-paragraph essays with such clever transition words as "first," "finally," and "in conclusion." When kids are given good reasons to learn, and the environment they need to learn, and their basic needs outside the classroom are being met in such a way that their minds are free to learn--that is when the real learning takes place.
Not all kids are alike. Not all teachers are alike. Not all situations in life are alike. Children need to be encouraged to think creatively about situations, problems and solutions, and demonstrate their knowledge and skills in more creative ways than bubbling in A, B or C.
Yes, improvements do need to be made. But as long as NCLB is left intact, functioning the way it currently does, it seems unlikely that those in charge will focus on the right problems. After all, it's far easier to scan tests, crunch numbers and say that public schools are doing a lousy job than it is to address the very real and growing problem of social inequality--the biggest culprit causing so many of our children to be left behind.
The battle the parents and teachers of Palm Beach County are fighting is an important one, not just for them in their A school district, but for the rest of us in Florida and in the U.S. at large. Miami-Dade is not an A school district. My school is not an A school, either--it is a D school. Yet as a teacher and a student of the way education works in this country, I can honestly say that implementing the changes here that have been made in Palm Beach County would be a recipe for disaster. We are already on our own perilous path that winds in much the same direction; we are just ambling down it at a slightly slower pace.
I hope we can learn enough from the struggles in Palm Beach County to change our course. But until the people at the top decide to scratch the surface and examine the problems for what they really are, I must admit I am not overly optimistic.
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