The Case Against a “Standardized Curriculum”
Mike Mathieson
October 23, 2022
I think it’s a fair to ask the question: is it too late to right the ship? In the aftermath of the worst indictment of our Decatur Public School system ever, we haven’t heard anything substantive from the administration regarding a plan to move us forward. The DPS administration plan is presumably still to:
continue to use a standardized curriculum,
use data, and
enforce accountability measures to hold staff responsible.
I mentioned in my last article that the bottom line is that this all comes down to hoping a standardized curriculum is the savior of the district, because the other items simply have no teeth. And if we’re going to expect a standardized curriculum to be the main component of our strategy to increase test scores in Decatur, then we - teachers, building administrators, District Leadership, and even the School Board - better understand the consequences, both intended and unintended, that this teaching methodology implies.
The state of Illinois adopted the Common Core Initiative to implement a set of standards all children in the state should know by the completion of each grade. Following “standards” is not new and DPS has utilized Illinois State Standards even before Common Core was selected in 2011 by the state. We’ve had Superintendents in the past focus heavily on those standards - asking teachers to post in the classroom what standards they were working on every single week. We don’t have a problem with any of this so far. It’s all good - because the problem doesn’t come until you not only tell teachers what to teach, but when you tell them exactly what week (or even day!) a topic is taught and exactly how to teach. Anyone that has not spent time in a classroom may not appreciate this, but students learn at different rates. I can’t stress this enough. Duane mentioned a quote from Freddie DeBoer in his book The Cult of Smart, how we are so quick to recognize differences between students from the neck down, but for some crazy reason, we don’t want to recognize differences from the neck up. Every student in every classroom in every school will not have the ability to keep up with the mandated daily lesson. We’re creating an environment where, given the constraints of a standardized curriculum, it’s impossible for teachers to have the high expectations Roland Fryer so passionately claims are the most important thing we can give to the students of District 61. The lower students will be left behind. How can we expect, and have expectations for, what is impossible to achieve?
Which brings me to the new academic grouping research from the University of Rochester I mentioned in my last article, which makes the case that a liked-skilled tiered grouping strategy is preferable to a cross-sectional grouping strategy when the goal is to facilitate the learning of all students. If you have 20 kids that want to participate in a fifth-grade basketball program, the researchers attempt to determine if the children should be divided by skill level or should you divide them into two teams equal in talent. If you want all the kids to improve, this seems obvious to anyone that has coached youth sports, but in education this topic is a flashpoint for disagreement. According to one of the researchers:
We showed that, mathematically speaking, grouping individuals with similar skill levels maximizes the total learning of all individuals collectively. If one puts like-skilled students together, instructors can teach at a level that is not too advanced or trivial for the students and optimize the overall learning of all students collectively regardless of the group.
We used academic grouping for years in Decatur Public Schools but with the implementation of our standardized curriculum, grouping is not allowed. Several years ago, we had reading and math groups, but now every sixth grader in the district is supposed to receive the exact same math lesson during the same week. How could anyone think this would even be possible?
Clearly, the top students will be bored, and the bottom students will not be able to keep up, but what about the unintended consequences of a standardized curriculum? Is it possible to accept that the families of the top students will pull their kids from DPS and go elsewhere? Is it possible that this is the real reason why our scores are so bad, and perhaps continuing a standardized curriculum will only exacerbate the problem. I would be interested to see economic research on this, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume that it’s far easier for Decatur families of better students to move the 4 miles from the West End to the West Mound apartments to allow their kids to attend Warrensburg, then it is for a Chicago Public Schools family to move 30 miles from the Calumet Park area to Downers Grove. Perhaps someone should explore the real reason one district may have a sharper decline than another is the simple fact that it’s easier economically and socially to leave. And what happens to test scores after the brightest kids leave is obvious. This is not a low SES, or a black/white issue; it is a mobility reality. Is this the real reason that DPS performs so much worse than Chicago? And are we going to continue this trend by not recognizing that some students will perform better than others, continually pushing the families of the top students away?
Look, I get it that the past School Board wanted to make an impact (destination district!) and implemented what they believed was a scheme that would bring success to a largely low SES school district by following a strategy – a philosophical sea change – that many Charter Schools have used to raise test scores. But, and we’ve explored this before, the major difference is that Charter Schools don’t accept children – they accept parents that want to be deeply involved in their child’s education. The homogeneous approach some Charter Schools take simply can’t be implemented across a large district like DPS. The leaving that occurs in our district is not the departure of families that don’t buy-in to the system, it’s from the families that want more but are ignored and neglected by the system.
So, perhaps a step toward leveling our test scores with the rest of the state is easier to implement and won’t cause the pain felt by teachers and administrators over the last three years while we have mandated a standardized curriculum. Maybe the solution is to let teachers teach at the pace they feel their students can handle and group kids in reading and math at an early age to allow success to flourish at every level of the academic spectrum. We are not advocating a move away from Common Core (we couldn’t, even if we wanted to). Teachers should still be held accountable - to make sure their lessons are moving the students toward an understanding of what the experts in the curriculum field believe a child should know at each grade level. We are simply saying that every student does not learn the same things at the same rate! Through teacher autonomy to balance a child’s ability with the common core lesson plan, and by grouping children by ability we will create an environment where teachers can have high expectations for all their students. This is a philosophical change back to where we were just a few years ago and should be a major topic of conversation between our Superintendent and our School Board.