I deeply regret having misrepresented the Ed in ‘08 campaign in my recent post. According to Roy Romer, the chair of the organization, the campaign does not call for a “national curriculum” or “merit pay.” The New York Times misreported this in their article and I blindly followed their data. To do justice to the campaign, I investigated more deeply and found out that I agree more with what they are sponsoring. If only the New York Times had dug a little deeper too…
Standards are a description of what ought to be taught, grade by grade, in order to prepare a student for graduation, for college, for the workplace … and for life.
Our aim is not to “nationalize” the curriculum in each grade by having Washington officials dictate a lesson plan for every school in the country.
An important distinction to be made is that the initiative calls for standards, not curricum. I believe that saying what should be learned is a great idea - just not when it needs to be learned. If one class or individual is especially adept, there is no reason to hold them back for a year, learning what they could learn in a month. Meanwhile, if another group of students is significantly slower, then they should not be penalized for learning slower. I feel that a national curriculum is counter-productive to the idea of project-based learning in which students learn about what they want to in the way they want to. National recommendations upon what should be learned throughout a school career would be beneficial - but year by year curriculum is counter productive.
Teachers are the single greatest “natural resource” in education.
We do not offer higher salaries to compete with other professions for adults who have strong math and science backgrounds.
As I have said before, good teachers is the single best investment we can make in our nation’s future. If that is so, why is an expert math teacher paid half as much as an engineer with the same background? If anything, the teacher has the more challenging job. They must transfer knowledge rather than simply use it. If this campaign can somehow increase the average pay of teachers around the nation, I feel that they will have done tremendous good.
We are not simply calling for students to spend more time in school, adding hours and days that just offer more of the same.
Better instruction in the basics
Opportunities for enrichment: Students will have more time for art, music, drama, debate
Personalized attention: Teachers will have more time to work with students one-on-one, and students will have more time to get tutoring and advice from adults when they need it.
This is where I feel that the group may be campaign may be stepping in the wrong direction. Simply calling for extended school hours on a national basis may provide benefits in the best managed schools. However, it would also hurt the worse schools by forcing students to waste even more time on the activities they would like to be engaged in. Instead of simply extending classroom time, I believe the best route is to diversify the extracurricular activities in all schools. This could be financed through combination of school districts and sharing of resources. Additionally, to encourage all students to take part in some extracurricular activity it could be required for graduation. However, simply extending the school day or requiring a specific enrichment activity will disengage students even more from school.
My ideal initiative would move schools more towards a college type system in which students chose what courses they want. If you could care less about roman history, there is no reason that you should be forced to learn in. Often, an argument for required courses is that everyone requires the basics. However, the fact is that people know that. Most students will take the courses they would need to succeed in the adult world. Those who chose not to are the very same students who would not participate in classes anyways. I believe that everyone’s education experience should be optional and personalized.
I do believe there is purpose to a state-wide or national curriculum. However, it should consist only of very basic/simple requirements, and be pretty broad in it’s application methods.
With that said, I also strongly believe in the decentralisation of education. The only reason to tabulate the scores of students is to compare one school versus another. But, in reality, if funding is attached to the student, and all students are given equal funding, then it shouldn’t matter that one school is doing better or worse than another, because you wouldn’t really be able to give the bad schools “more funding”. And as has been pointed out time and time again, more funding does not equal better education. /rant
Indeed, national standards do have their use. As does testing. However, it is how you use that testing that counts. Unfortunately, most testing is simply used to tabulate funding and brag about. Instead, we should be advancing students who score well as well as investigating which teaching approaches led to the best test scores.