November Newsflash
Teachers raise concerns about curriculum, call for flexibility
Teachers raise concerns about curriculum, call
for flexibility
The School District of Philadelphia has rolled out a new standardized
literacy and math curriculum this fall.
The Core Curriculum, which brought with it millions of dollars worth of new textbooks and materials for grades K-9, has introduced a host of new instructional mandates that teachers must implement in their classrooms.
Teachers are required to cover a set sequence of topics and administer a series of standardized tests, including benchmarks every six weeks to track student progress. Instruction and grading are expected to be geared to grade level standards.
Teachers are also expected to participate in two-hour professional development sessions about the Core Curriculum every other Friday afternoon.
While many teachers acknowledge that bringing this standardized curriculum and new materials to the entire District is a step forward, some teachers are expressing concerns about the way it is being implemented.
In late October the Notebook brought together four teachers to discuss the effects of the Core Curriculum on their classrooms and schools. While this small group is in no way a representative sample of Philadelphia teachers, their comments echoed points raised by other teachers interviewed by the Notebook. An edited version of the conversation appears below. They were interviewed by Notebook staff writer, Beandrea Davis.
Christine MacArthur teaches ninth grade English at Frankford High School.
Lisa Hantman teaches fourth and fifth grades at H.R. Edmunds Elementary.
Leslie Morris, a former ESL teacher, is a reading coach at Cramp Elementary.
Kelley Collings, a member of the Notebook advisory board, teaches fifth grade math and science at Central East Middle School.
Notebook: What do you like most
about the Core Curriculum?
Christine MacArthur: I like the materials themselves. They give you wonderful overheads and transparencies. The materials themselves are pretty comprehensive. The actual lessons that are planned and the materials that go along with them, the fact that that's all planned out is very nice.
Lisa Hantman: I think the curriculum guide is actually well written, fairly clear, and concise. I like that it goes into very good depth about what each standard really means. I appreciate having set down what a fifth grader should have by the end of fifth grade, what a fourth grader should have by the end of fourth grade, etc.
Leslie Morris: It is multicultural in its perspective in the sense that there's a level playing field in terms of materials, standards, and how that material is going to be delivered. The Core is based on a philosophy of rigor and teaching to proficiency, so the expectation is that all students in the city will work towards proficient and advanced.
Kelley Collings: I've heard that a lot of new teachers kiss the book and say 'I love this thing,' especially folks who are brand new. It's extremely comprehensive. The fact that it standardizes learning across schools is a good thing. It helps address the student mobility.
Notebook: How is teaching to grade level standards working in your classrooms?
KC: Not very well. I teach fifth grade math and science. It's been a relatively painless transition for me this year because we're using the same math program. The difference is the extremely accelerated pace. The first unit test that I gave, 28 percent of the kids in both my sections passed. The second unit, 19 percent passed. And I had the highest scores of all the fifth grade math teachers at my school.
CM: We gave reading tests to the ninth graders because we wanted to find out what their reading levels were. Most of the students, to be truthful, were averaging around fifth grade. I had quite a few that were third and fourth. Out of my three classes, I had about 20 students that were seventh or above. You cannot teach kids that many levels below with the grade-level material. If I was going to a lecture on Chinese, and it was very much over my head, I wouldn't comprehend it either, and I'd sit there and do what they do, which is daydream, send notes, talk, disrupt the class, or just zone out.
LH: Part of the problem is we expect change to happen very quickly in Philadelphia, almost overnight. If we take this program, and we really hold onto it for a long time, and then we see where our kindergartners now are in five years, I think then we'll start to see those improvements, if we really stick with it.
Notebook: What are some of your main concerns about the Core Curriculum?
LH: The curriculum was made with the guise that we all work with 20 children who will do exactly as you tell them to do the moment you tell them to do it; that they all have independent work level skills. The program doesn't take into consideration the real life of a classroom that has people in it, human beings.
KC: The benchmark tests are not aligning with what's being taught, so that there are questions that the kids were asked on the first benchmark test that simply weren't covered yet. We didn't get the benchmark data until the end of week six. Also, there are many errors in the pacing guide. From the math perspective, the unit tests, along with the review that go with the unit tests, aren't even in the pacing guide.
CM: A lot of the teachers at our school are not new teachers, and they are really frustrated with the lack of autonomy they get, the lack of the ability to use their own skills. A lot of us feel that we're being treated like machines, that our expertise as teachers is being ignored. Our intuitions are all being thrown out, and we're being given a script to go by. It's very limiting to your creativity.
LH: It's a pacing curriculum, and it started on day one, ignoring the need to bind a class that first week of school. And now the new teachers are all struggling because their classes are not communities, which is not their fault. They did what they were told. They did not have time to start a community.
KC: We feel like we work in a factory. We're on an assembly line and, "Oh, you've got a question? Too bad. I don't have a minute for that. We're moving on." I know this is not just about the Core Curriculum. It's also about No Child Left Behind and how it gets filtered down. The culture of those two forces is the same, and they intersect to completely sap the creative fiber out of not just teaching but learning. I look at the kids' faces, and this is just not what I signed up for.
LM: My question is that if teachers don't feel that they can back up, even a little bit, morale will be affected because although the curriculum, in theory, is recursive, no teacher wants to feel that they're leaving more than half of their students in a state of confusion.
LH: The children are constantly being tested. They're being pushed and pushed to do things that are very hard for them to do. They're given very little free time. The principals are being pressured. Everybody feels a lot of pressure. A watched pot doesn't boil. We're constantly taking the lid off the pot of our children to check to see if they're boiling, but you've got to keep that lid on. This doesn't really allow us to grow together as people and to teach and to learn and to experience learning.
Notebook: Who is monitoring the implementation of the Core Curriculum in your schools?
CM: We haven't had very much at all in ninth grade. Each coach has about 12 schools to go to. We probably won't see them hardly at all, unless we have a lot of problems. So, there isn't really much support that way. We have no ability to communicate in my school. There are no meetings scheduled. When we have these half-day professional development days, we're scheduled with other business. We don't get to talk as an English faculty. And we never get to talk as a faculty in the ninth grade. We don't have common periods at all. It's overwhelming. The bottom line is going to be if those kids don't show improvement, they're going to say we're lousy teachers. And everybody's afraid. It's horrible to teach in that kind of situation.
KC: I've seen more administrators in my room this year than I have last year. I think that's great. But the monitoring is limited to the quantification of where you are rather than the quality of your teaching. And the observation process is not a collaboratively reflective one between teachers and principals. It doesn't facilitate growth.
LM: As reading coach, I have the freedom to approach a teacher in a very positive way, to say, "Yes, this is all new, the road is bumpy." My message to teachers is, "Yes, the expectations are high, but on the other hand, please give yourself the freedom to ride that train from a little bit of a lower gear because we all are people and we're learners." My major concern is that teachers are very hard on themselves right now. They need more positive support from within their own community and also from administration.
LH: One of the new teachers in my school came crying into my room a couple of weeks ago. She said, "Do you think they're going to fire me if my test scores are not good?" What a terrible thing to spend your year thinking, that you're going to get fired at the end because scores didn't go up. It broke my heart.
Notebook: Do you think this is the most multicultural curriculum the District has seen thus far?
LH: The multicultural piece is the same to me as ever. There's no depth. If you have a classroom based on diversity, based on the idea that you really want to try to be inclusive, that happens all the time in everything you do and present. But they're not learning diversity. They're learning that there's a bunch of different people in the world, here and there. For me, that's not really inclusiveness.
KC: Say you're teaching problems in math, and the multicultural connection is to point out that algorithm is an Arabic word. But that's not a connection. It's just a factoid. That's not a multicultural perspective.
CM: In ninth grade, we've got a whole collection of African American textbooks. Some of my students said, "Hey, I'm from Puerto Rico. When am I going to start reading something about somebody from Puerto Rico?" I think kids like to read through stories that are coming from their culture. I think that's a really important thing to have in the curriculum.
Notebook: Have you been able to cover all the literature in the curriculum guide for each week?
CM: My ninth graders said to me, "When are we going to read novels?" I think it is tied to their self-esteem. When you actually read a novel, you feel like you've accomplished something when you finish. You feel like you've gone someplace. Reading these little, short snippets of things, they don't feel like they're really learning anything.
LH: For 20 years, I have taught an integrated curriculum using novels as my base. I have always found that it's that depth that those children are learning from. It's the connections they're making. Those connections can't happen when you're doing this piecemeal thing. It's an enormous amount of pieces being thrown at them and not within any real context. Novels are like magic. I still teach with novels. I have not given that up.
Notebook: Do you see connections between student discipline and the curriculum in your schools?
CM: We're having a lot of discipline problems right now, which to some degree I can understand because the kids see things changing all the time. The kids must feel like school's not really started yet.
LH: I definitely think there's lack of community in the classroom, which makes it hard for the teacher to do management, even if they're good at management. If they weren't given that chance to build community in the classroom, they're going to have a hard time.
KC: Last year, we did classroom meetings at least twice a week. This year we had our first classroom meeting last week. And that's finally because I said, "I'm going to steal this 45 minutes. I don't care. I'm taking it." It's a completely different culture that has bubbled up because of the lack of time that's been dedicated to community-building.
LH: I used to do a classroom meeting every single day. Now I do one once a week. I don't have time to do it every day. We really care about each other, but we're not connecting the same way.
Notebook: How can the District stick with the Core Curriculum and make it work long-term?
LM: We need to put some reading coaches into the upper elementary, middle, and high schools, so that we can get to those kids who are struggling readers. I think that staff development has to be lifted so that teachers really understand what it means to build community and have students writing for real reasons. That level of staff development will cost money and take planning.
LH: I would take out this high-stakes testing immediately. They're not speaking to a real human being. I would try to add more individuality, especially with the writing piece. More literature that was not just excerpts but whole pieces of literature into our studies. I would slow Everyday Math down some. It actually gives me a stomach ache every morning because it's so much in such a short amount of time.
CM: I like the idea of having a curriculum because we haven't had one for many years. But there has to be an awful lot more flexibility in the way the teachers teach it. The way we used to teach it wasn't so bad. We had a core set of textbooks in the room, but we used novels that students were reading. We had outside reading of novels too. That could still be done. If teachers want to do something else, they should be allowed to do it as long as they stick with the skills that students are supposed to learn in that year.
KC: I agree that it's great to have a curriculum, and one that reaches across school boundaries. That addresses a real need in the city. There has to be flexibility built in around student-driven learning and interests and around community building, but that can't then compromise the rigor.