By Beverlee Jobrack
'It's hard to improve public education—that's clear. As Warren Buffett would say, if you're picking stocks, you wouldn't pick this one." Ten years into his record-breaking philanthropic push for school reform, Bill Gates is sober—and willing to admit some missteps.—as reported in the Wall Street Journal on July 23, 2011.
With all due respect to the Gates Foundation and its good intentions. There are two critical ingredients that lay the foundation to any school reform: quality teachers and quality curriculum. Without these, it won’t matter what the standards are, how much technology is in the school, how small the class size or school is, whether the teachers receive merit pay, or whether the students are attending a charter school. Both of these ingredients seem familiar because we’ve all been to school, but the nature of the qualities that make a good teacher and an effective curriculum elude everyone.
Teacher expertise is not one thing. It really involves five major arts: deep content knowledge, ability to plan effective lessons, use of appropriate and effective teaching methods, understanding how children learn, and classroom management, which includes discipline. Many teachers are experts in one or two of these arts. Very few are proficient in all five.
A quality curriculum can provide support for all of these arts. Curriculum includes the print or electronic textbooks, workbooks, hands-on, teaching strategies and support activities developed for the day after day instruction that goes on in the classroom. A quality curriculum can provide deep content knowledge for students and background knowledge for teachers. In a quality curriculum plans provide materials and strategies for introducing concepts, checking for understanding, providing appropriate practice activities, including targeted teacher questioning strategies for building critical thinking, and assessment. Quality curriculum incorporates use of research proven effective teaching methods as part of the daily lessons. Quality curriculum provides carefully sequenced lessons with incremental concept development to support how children learn. Quality curriculum can even support classroom management with information about materials preparation, grouping of students, and responding to students.
Unfortunately, so many reform efforts are missing the targets. Trying to incentivize teachers with merit pay without providing strategies to develop the arts of teaching will not promote student achievement and lead to anger and frustration. Teachers are not as effective as they could be because they are waiting for extra money. You wouldn’t want teachers who were holding out.
Virtually no one talks about how curriculum effects student achievement. Teachers are not educated in curriculum development, so they undervalue curriculum and pick and choose lessons, creating curriculum chaos even when a district has adopted a curriculum.
Because consumers are uninformed about the value of curriculum, they select new curriculum based on superficial features: design, number of pages, or extra components. In the end publishers are incentivized to create educational materials with flashy covers and features, rather than create materials that the most effective. That’s why we have gigantic books with lots of components and technology. In the end even when a school purchases a new curriculum, teachers rarely change their practices. Without change, however, student achievement will stagnate.
A national curriculum is not the answer. There is such a diversity of students in the United States that we need a variety of effective materials to meet the different needs. Struggling readers, for example, need explicit step-by-step rich instruction and meaningful reading. Advanced readers need to be challenged with advanced vocabulary and text structures.
If teachers build their expertise in each of the five arts through observations and discussions with teacher experts in each area, they will not only improve their classroom performance, they will be more informed about these arts and will recognize curricular materials that are better than others. Learning to use the selected materials with integrity will create the environment of continual improvement. Recently the Gates foundation has partnered with a major textbook company to begin to create new materials. Unfortunately too often major textbook companies start with materials they have created in the past and do an intensive competition analysis and then fill in content to meet any missing standards. What results is based on what will sell to uninformed consumers, rather than what will be effective.
Publishers of quality curriculum begin with the standards and outline the lessons needed to meet the standards based on children’s learning trajectories, instead of tradition or competitive curriculum. Quality publishers would research the most effective, not the most popular, teaching methods to present the lessons. Most likely these materials would not look or act like familiar practices and would cause teachers to change and change is what we need to rise above the plateau of student achievement. The free market would work to improve the quality of curriculum if consumers knew how to evaluate materials for effectiveness and then use them with fidelity. What might be better is for the Gates Foundation to award grants to curriculum developers to design, develop, and field test the most effective materials and then provide schools with the funds to purchase the winning curricula along with meaningful and intensive training and follow-up to ensure the curriculum is implemented with fidelity. If the current system of developing, selecting, and using curriculum does not change, there’s no chance that student achievement will be advanced, no matter how many billions you invest in it.
Beverlee Jobrack spent more than 25 years weathering the ups and downs, mergers and acquisitions of educational publishing. Before starting her career in publishing, she was a middle school English/Literature teacher and was named a teacher-of-the-year for her Massachusetts district. She is also author of Tyranny of the Textbook: An Insider Exposes Why Curriculum Adoptions Undermine Education Reforms
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