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“Academic rigor” is whose responsibility?
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Video clips of DISD Superintendent Dr. Michael Hinojosa appeared Friday on the Dallas Morning News’ Dallas ISD blog. The subject of his six-minute talk, taking place at a school board meeting, was the incredibly vague and soundbite-induced “academic rigor.”
According to Hinojosa, academic rigor for students is “commitment to the knowledge core.” Rigor for teachers is three-part, including “expertise on how to teach content,” planning high-level assignments, and then helping the students interpret the data they just learned.
After watching the video, I am still unsure what academic rigor actually is, and what Hinojosa was actually saying. Is rigor something DISD needs more of in quantifiable amounts? Or is it something teachers already have in their possession, and need to show students how to use it?
To be sure I understood completely, I looked up rigor in the dictionary. Webster says, “scrupulous or inflexible accuracy or adherence.” So I take “commitment to the knowledge core” to mean that each student has a responsibility to learn – to master, with inflexible accuracy – the basics.
After watching the video and reading the post, I read all the comments posted under by readers, many of them DISD teachers. What I found surprising is how they feel about Hinojosa and the so-called “academic rigor”: teachers described classrooms where students can’t have the rigorous, in-depth discussions Hinojosa mentions, because they barely speak the language (even the most advanced, hardworking students). Another commenter named Andrea mentioned a creative, high-level poetry lesson she attempted to teach involving song lyrics and collages, one where more than half her students didn’t even bother participating. She indicated that "Most of our kids don't get to the rigorous part due to their undeveloped ability to accomplish the preliminaries that allow rigor."
Hinojosa’s speech infers that it is the teachers’ job to inspire, entertain, and educate the students, to bring them to realize that academic rigor is their goal. But what the teachers are saying, at least the ones irritated enough to comment on this blog post, is many students are unmotivated, lazy, and generally uninformed.
Can we really blame all teachers for students’ lack of academic rigor? Whose responsibility is this? Hinojosa, the board, teachers, or the students themselves? I feel like my eyes have been opened to a new and disturbing problem infecting our public schools, which might be a lack of motivated students.
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