Ok, so I'm inventing a term here. The term is the title: the "grade band paradox." It refers to an inherent problem in K-12 curricula that no one seems to acknowledge when they're doing research, making policy, or framing standards and tests. In reality, I'm sure I'm not the first to notice this, but it was particularly striking to me as I watched a presentation about ongoing work the National Research Council is doing along with achieve.org on new standards. One of the chief goals of these new standards is "grade bands." In short, the science education pooh-bahs think that there should be logical, rational, cohesive progress from grade to grade, with students from all over the place mirroring each other.
The problem is this*: we are always trying to create a cohesive, comprehensive K-12 curriculum. We want second grade to build on first, first to build on kindergarten, and the same up the chain. High school science classes should be able to rely - in theory - on the work done in the middle school.
*We're going to ignore, for now,** that different places - like Hawaii and New York - might have vastly different cultural and environmental needs in their curricula. A simple example is how much more vital it is to instill an understanding of coral life cycles at a young age in Hawaii, whereas the Hawaiian student will struggle to understand the equally important concepts of continental drift (for example) and the creation and erosion of mountains (like the Appalachians) and how that lends itself to mining.
**We're also going to ignore that individual students might differ from each other.
Wait, that's not the problem yet. That's just good curriculum design. After all, wouldn't we rather have a cohesive experience for our students? No, the problem comes from the continuous reinventing and tweaking that necessarily goes along with these efforts. Rarely does a given set of standards really last all that long. Or, even if the standards stay the same, the state-adopted standard-aligned curriculum changes. Or, even if that stays the same, schools change, teachers are hired and fired, students move around...
The result is that, despite good intentions and sound principles, no student actually receives a coherent K-12 experience. We decide so quickly that there are flaws and policy problems and teacher problems and learner problems and so on that we never actually give our comprehensive K-12 plans the thirteen years they need to run (not to mention the X years after that for the lessons to really take hold).
An example will serve to elucidate the problem:
Johnny is five years old, and will enter kindergarten this fall, in September of 2011. As he begins at his local public school, he'll be operating under the standards and procedures of No Child Left Behind.
Come 2013, the NRC framework and new standards have been published, and the Federal Government moves to adopt them. States slowly follow suit, meaning Johnny's elementary school makes the switch as he enters the fourth grade at the end of 2015.
After a couple of years, Johnny's home state is starting to recognize flaws in the current program, and so they do an internal revision and change testing procedures state wide. As a result, Johnny's state (and school district) adopt a new text book and new curriculum in 2018. Johnny enters seventh grade already having faced NCLB, the new standards, and a revision and curriculum change.
Of course, in 2018 a new President enters office with a new plan for education. He appoints a revolutionary new Secretary of Ed who makes sweeping changes to science curricula in particular, integrating more even more technology and engineering studies than were in the NRC standards of 2013. This process takes three years to come to fruition, and so as Johnny enters his junior year of high school in 2021, he confronts his fourth new integrated, cohesive K-12 system.
And so on. The point being, you can't really have a grade-by-grade curricular arc when the arc changes every three to five years. Kids in America are in school for 13 years, and radical education policy changes - or even small tweaks - lead to a disjointed pathway through the education system.
Of course, policy people don't see past the next election, nor do they see past theory and into reality. To them, the K-12 system they approve in 2013 means that all kids in school in 2013 are receiving a cohesive curricular experience when, in fact, they are not. Most of them will be facing, instead, yet another variation on the standards theme, a variation that throws out much - or at least some - of what they have learned heretofore.
It's hardly surprising, then, when a new system is put in place, but high school students don't seem to perform any better within a year or two, or even four, or even seven. If the new system really works - or if it doesn't - you won't really know for at least 13 years, and there's no getting around it.
A better approach, then, would be to institute new educational policies starting at the kindergarten level, and then working up through the high school. Unless there is a broad consensus that the current system is obviously and demonstrably messed up so badly that it ought to be thrown out (and NCLB might just be such a case), it's probably better to give students an older, but more cohesive experience than a newer, but fragmented and confusing one.
Actually, I should phrase that as a question. I don't know which is better, and I don't know if anyone does, because generally new policy is implemented across the grades, all at once, without any regard for the experiences of students who have been in the current system, operating under its rules and its expectations and its standards for as much as a decade. I would submit that, at some point, it might behoove us to remember the Grade Band Paradox, to remember that your shiny new K-12 framework will never be experienced by a student all the way from K to 12.
Showing posts with label standards. Show all posts
Showing posts with label standards. Show all posts
Friday, March 11, 2011
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Hard Education in Hard Times
One of the benefits of reading works written in previous centuries is that we might find informative patterns. I do not say that "those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it," because that is a tired phrase. Rather, there are dynamics which are so much repeated that they might easily be mistaken as eternal components of the human condition. Social, political, and economic structures change with time and technology, to be sure, but do they change so much as we think they do? Is it really the case that the year 2010 is a marvelous and impossible dream to the people of 1850? There's not really a meaningful answer to that question, except the remembrance that people remain people, in every time.
Much changes in cultures, and across cultures, with geography and technology and so on, despite some essential similarities, and so it is with a combination of surprise and expectation that Dickens, in his Hard Times, captures so perfectly some of the very issues which are fundamental to us today.
"Utilitarian economists, skeletons of schoolmasters, Commissioners of Fact, genteel and used-up infidels, gabblers of many little dog's-eared creeds, the poor you will have always with you. Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies and affections, to adorn their lives so much in need of ornament; or, in the day of your triumph, when romance is utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face to face, Reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you!" - Charles Dickens, Hard Times, Book II, Chapter VI
Replace "fact" with standards, replace "the poor" with students (or don't, it still reads; but that's a weightier discussion), and you have very much a picture of school. Dickens speaks, in the 1850s, to a commodified education, wherein the learning is bought and paid-for, the purpose being to elevate economically (the purpose of life itself being the same). "Now, what I want is, Facts," begins the book, in the classroom. If education is a commodity, we have to treat it as such, and we can and should only measure that which is measurable about it.
It is a remarkable fact - I say with irony - that economic trouble often is met with a stiffening, rather than a loosening, of the grip of industry on education. As with food, where the most abundant and cheapest of things - namely fruits - are the least prevalent in restaurants and grocery stores exactly because they occur without being manufactured by mechanical intervention, in education we have manufactured long strings of standards and facts to memorize, and accompanied those with an economy of learning disability, fancy hardware, and unstoppable grading programs, all when we might just have easily lived off the land with discussion. A classroom discussion is cheaper, easier to prepare for, and more rewarding than a highly contrived lesson, and yet we use it not, because no one manufactures it.
Dickens does not speak to discussion, per se, in Hard Times, but he may as well. Instead his opposition to fact is fancy, much engendered by the flightful dialogues that take place between children, especially the younger and, therefore, less beaten-down by their acquired identities as "cool kids" or "special needs" or "jocks" or "goths" or what-have-you. Hard are the times, indeed, when learning in school is more about learning how to play your apportioned role than it is about learning how to think.
When has it been otherwise? That's the rub, of course. Never and nowhere, except perhaps in those elite schools for the elite and wealthy members of societies who have, generally, had no interest in promoting the fancies - and, along with imagination, critical thought - of the sordid students of the world. We get locked into cultural morays more easily than we perceive. When was the last time any of us did something that did not correspond with our selected and ascribed identities? Even the rebel is rebel by dint of his society's culture.
I do not incite to action, here, because what action to take is a question far too complicated to begin to answer. That is not to say we ought to ignore the mysteries of how political economy drives education, for good or ill, but rather to say that we ought not allow ourselves to be easily fooled by the statements of "experts" that "studies show" or that "America is falling behind" or that, heaven forbid, we are leaving children behind despite our federal mandate to the contrary. A skeptical eye, I ask, in these deceptively credulous times, wherein we are inclined to believe any evidence that supports our inclinations. A skeptical eye goes a long way not just in education, but in politics broadly, and in philosophy and science and, indeed, life.
Life, indeed. Perhaps it is naive to ask - O me! O Life! - but when did we stop asking such important questions? What, after all, is the meaning of life? Why, after all, are we here? Surely it is not to produce and consume widgets? Surely not to memorize facts? Surely, enough of us stand face to face with a bare existence each day that we ought to demand better.
Much changes in cultures, and across cultures, with geography and technology and so on, despite some essential similarities, and so it is with a combination of surprise and expectation that Dickens, in his Hard Times, captures so perfectly some of the very issues which are fundamental to us today.
"Utilitarian economists, skeletons of schoolmasters, Commissioners of Fact, genteel and used-up infidels, gabblers of many little dog's-eared creeds, the poor you will have always with you. Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies and affections, to adorn their lives so much in need of ornament; or, in the day of your triumph, when romance is utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face to face, Reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you!" - Charles Dickens, Hard Times, Book II, Chapter VI
Replace "fact" with standards, replace "the poor" with students (or don't, it still reads; but that's a weightier discussion), and you have very much a picture of school. Dickens speaks, in the 1850s, to a commodified education, wherein the learning is bought and paid-for, the purpose being to elevate economically (the purpose of life itself being the same). "Now, what I want is, Facts," begins the book, in the classroom. If education is a commodity, we have to treat it as such, and we can and should only measure that which is measurable about it.
It is a remarkable fact - I say with irony - that economic trouble often is met with a stiffening, rather than a loosening, of the grip of industry on education. As with food, where the most abundant and cheapest of things - namely fruits - are the least prevalent in restaurants and grocery stores exactly because they occur without being manufactured by mechanical intervention, in education we have manufactured long strings of standards and facts to memorize, and accompanied those with an economy of learning disability, fancy hardware, and unstoppable grading programs, all when we might just have easily lived off the land with discussion. A classroom discussion is cheaper, easier to prepare for, and more rewarding than a highly contrived lesson, and yet we use it not, because no one manufactures it.
Dickens does not speak to discussion, per se, in Hard Times, but he may as well. Instead his opposition to fact is fancy, much engendered by the flightful dialogues that take place between children, especially the younger and, therefore, less beaten-down by their acquired identities as "cool kids" or "special needs" or "jocks" or "goths" or what-have-you. Hard are the times, indeed, when learning in school is more about learning how to play your apportioned role than it is about learning how to think.
When has it been otherwise? That's the rub, of course. Never and nowhere, except perhaps in those elite schools for the elite and wealthy members of societies who have, generally, had no interest in promoting the fancies - and, along with imagination, critical thought - of the sordid students of the world. We get locked into cultural morays more easily than we perceive. When was the last time any of us did something that did not correspond with our selected and ascribed identities? Even the rebel is rebel by dint of his society's culture.
I do not incite to action, here, because what action to take is a question far too complicated to begin to answer. That is not to say we ought to ignore the mysteries of how political economy drives education, for good or ill, but rather to say that we ought not allow ourselves to be easily fooled by the statements of "experts" that "studies show" or that "America is falling behind" or that, heaven forbid, we are leaving children behind despite our federal mandate to the contrary. A skeptical eye, I ask, in these deceptively credulous times, wherein we are inclined to believe any evidence that supports our inclinations. A skeptical eye goes a long way not just in education, but in politics broadly, and in philosophy and science and, indeed, life.
Life, indeed. Perhaps it is naive to ask - O me! O Life! - but when did we stop asking such important questions? What, after all, is the meaning of life? Why, after all, are we here? Surely it is not to produce and consume widgets? Surely not to memorize facts? Surely, enough of us stand face to face with a bare existence each day that we ought to demand better.
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