Randi Weingarten’s keynote address to the AFT convention in Seattle (read it here) identifies three “foundations” for lifting student achievement: good teaching, curriculum, and accountability. Sara Mead, writing at Eduwonk, takes exception to some things Weingarten has to say about education reform, but she agrees with Weingarten’s emphasis on high-quality, coherent curriculum. So let us now praise the AFT for its hard work improving school curricula and promoting the importance of good curricula. (Curriculum, Mead points out, is something reformers tend to ignore.)
Take a close look at Weingarten’s section on curriculum. She begins by actually naming the subjects that make up a comprehensive education: “All students need rich, well-rounded curricula that ground them in areas ranging from foreign languages to phys ed, civics to the sciences, history to health, as well as literature, mathematics and the arts,” but Weingarten also points out that solid, liberal arts curricula “aren’t routinely in place” and that teachers are “forced to [make up curriculum] every single day.”
That doesn’t make sense and it isn’t what high-performing nations do. Weingarten suggests that America take a good look at countries – she names Finland, but there are many others – that outperform us on international assessments. None have narrow, ad-hoc curricula. All have strong, coherent, comprehensive liberal arts curricula. Maybe America should dare to try something that works?
James Elias
James, how are you defining high-performing nations?
I’m not at all standing up for the weak curriculum crowd here, but shouldn’t we be careful? This is the nation that invented the Internet and thrust it forward into solutions for every aspect of life, business, arts, health, humanities, government, innovation. We put a space station in orbit (leading a world-wide team), remake the drug and medical device world yearly, invented and still rule the francise model of delivering goods and services to needful consumers. We deploy the only forces in the world that can direct either humanitarian recovery operations like Haiti and the pacific Tsunami, or military defense operations like the Gulf War. Our movies and entertainment are republished throughout the world, our finance system leads the world, up or down, nations ask our technical help in building systems legal, economic, and infra-structural.
You say, “But”, and you’re right, we can and should do better. Yet, what do the Fins do better? Make high scores on standardized tests? What else?
Going forward is crucial. We can do better than the testing regimes we now have. We can employ interactive systems. We can make learning more individual and sticky. We can create systems that allow richer, deeper curriculum creation, and enhance long term retention of what is learned.
We’re not putting money into any of that. We pay oodles of pundits to argue constantly, to call for us to be more like some Scandanavian countries that lead the world in what again?
Again, NCLB was a necessary evil to recover our worst schools. No argument there, and it was well designed as c 1993 feasable political solutions ran. No issue there.
It’s time to be post-political, post-pundit. Lets use the incredible tools which have fallen into our lap, start crafting American solutions for c2012 American youth.
Start paying Open Source media wranglers and developers!