Really, what has led me to construct this blog is a sincere frustration with canned lessons in public schools, AND administrators who penalize those daring teachers who build original delivery of state curriculum. In a nutshell, many good systems have resorted to lazy delivery of content(meaning how a topic is taught). And the consequence? Students are bored. Teachers who are unable to build original lessons are hired. And the result is that public education is what McDonalds is to fast food. It gets the job done, but it isn’t your first, second, or even third choice in how you want your child taught.
Before we talk about how to fix this, let’s talk about how we got to the point where creativity has been wholly abandoned with the exception of extracurricular programs and related arts such as music, art, media, and PE….
During the 1990s, many states began to move towards the European style of education which is assessment based, and heavily so. This would be a 30 year transformation of rich content classrooms into assessment driven rooms. In Tennessee, we began to see districts create their own curriculum which would be supplanted by state curriculum, and then the federally created Common Core. Yes, many states have removed Common Core, but in name only. For example, the Tennessee Curriculum is basically Common Core with a new name. As this was occurring, we began to see states adopt state wide assessments which were norm referenced(meaning we can compare one student to another). At first, these assessments were to be “only for parents” to help make instructional decisions. Eventually, through Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB), and the destructive polices of Arne Duncan’s(Obama’s Sec of Education) Race to the Top, state and federal assessments became punitive (meaning students, schools, systems, states and teachers) could be penalized for poor performance. Some of it sounded great on paper, but in practice it was a catastrophe for critical thinking. The goal was to help pinpoint failing schools and fix them. The reality is that the consequences were that great schools embraced bad assessments. Those assessments then drove boring, cookie cutter instruction. In Tennessee, we had a bi-partisan embrace of Duncan’s policy. In Kingsport, the current superintendent couldn’t get enough of it. Nobody pushed back. Not school boards. Not system leadership. Nobody. Why? Nobody was allowed to question those “best practices” as they came to be known.
This is where state assessments began to really impact the classroom. Under Duncan’s plan, systems began to prepare for state assessments by benchmarking, i.e. they were testing to get ready for the test. In some cases, we are now testing to get ready for the test which gets us ready for the state test. Weeks upon weeks of classroom time is being spent in preparation for state tests. Our school calendar even began to be changed. TCAP is given April. School systems began to realize that starting earlier would also help them get in more instruction. School start dates crept forward from the third week of August and eventually to early August w/ teachers reporting during the last week of July.
Everything revolves around state testing. And in this arm’s race for better test scores, something was lost. Creativity. At the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy are analysis, evaluation, and creativity(to create something from what one has learned). The best schools operate at those three levels. TCAP assessors will say they cover this in their assessments. They don’t. Since the assessment doesn’t encourage kids to analyze, evaluate, and create…..instruction at the local level quickly mirrored that absence. Book studies, science projects, social studies simulations – diminished in prevalence. Everything became packaged in quick lessons which were canned – meaning systems bought delivery systems which guarantee test results. Those delivery systems, especially in Literacy, were void of complex, quality texts, and quality conversations about what was read. The richness of the literacy experience – lost.
In future posts we will discuss the futility of large group pacing guides and the evils of data conferences. Eventually, we will pivot to discussing what a rich, creative learning environment looks like. Interestingly, I do believe students are flocking to robotics, band, and sports so they can use the top three levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. They WANT to be creative, and they are seeking out those experiences.
But in order to know where we want to go, we first needed to talk about where we are, and how we got there.
