I have been watching the renewed hostilities between Eduwonk and Eduwonkette this week over the issue of No Child Left Behind’s impact on curriculum. I feel honor-bound to weigh in, since I inadvertently started the fight. A few thoughts on their posts:
The issue of whether testing has crowded science and social studies off the curriculum is beyond dispute, and I’m not swayed by the argument that if 44% of schools report a narrowing of the curriculum under NCLB, then the legislation is not the culprit, since 56% report no deleterious impact. If 44% of patients reported an adverse reaction to a medication, it would be off the shelves before the sun set. So it’s a problem.
Eduwonk is absolutely correct, however, in noting that good schools focus on curriculum and instruction. “While low-capacity schools may have spent time on social studies pre-NCLB,” he writes, “it’s a safe bet that many of them were not teaching it very well.” But the opposite is also true: most good schools were good schools without any external accountability measures whatsoever, so that’s not where our focus belongs. If the functional structures are in place — strong leadership, good teachers, active oversight, engaged parents who are informed consumers of education, etc. — there are multiple levels of quality control to assure good outcomes. NCLB is all about making bad schools act more like good ones in the absence of those self-policing mechanisms.
Likewise, the argument that NCLB shouldn’t turn schools into test prep mills because “it’s not effective anyway” is similarly unpersuasive. Forgive me if I sound cranky about this, but if every school was filled top to bottom with teachers who immersed themselves in educational literature and altered their instructional practice on a dime based on research, we could all go off and blog about Caribbean vacation resorts, shopping for shoes and fishing. Look outside a failing school and you will not see a line of bright, energetic, highly qualified teachers, steeped in best practices waiting outside the door to replace the broken bats swept up in the accountability dragnet. It does no good whatsoever to talk about what schools should do, and ignore, as Eduwonkette correctly says “what is happening on the ground.” You educate kids with the schools you have, not the schools you wish you had.
In fact, the very argument of whether NCLB narrows curriculum implies a misplaced either/or orientation. It would be a mistake to simply say the accountability medicine is worse than the disease, so therefore we should go back to living with the disease. If the cure is worse than the disease, then find a better cure. Eduwonk is therefore uncharacteristically unkind in suggesting that Eduwonkette is an “apologist and propagandist for the status quo.” I don’t see it that way, and I see nothing in what she wrote that states or implies that she sees it that way either.
Lastly, I’m struck by Eduwonk’s self-described bottom line: “Overall the issue is that we should worry about the quality of the teaching rather than just the quantity,” he opines. “But this entire conversation, as Eduwonkette’s post indicates, is about the latter.” To frame the issue as quality vs. quantity of teaching is to remain silent on the quality and quantity of the curriculum. Forgive me from straying from the standard homily about a good teacher being the most important factor in student achievement. A good teacher delivering a bad curriculum is, I believe, no more effective than a bad teacher delivering a good curriculum. The content being taught matters at least as much as how well it’s being taught, and both matter more than how much of it is being taught.
Here are the facts on the ground as I witnessed in my school and dozens of others: NCLB has proven that practices change very quickly through the application of carrots and sticks, and especially sticks. The accountability measure drives the agenda in a failing school. Period. Full stop. Understand that, accept it, then ask: What accountability measures can we create that will move teaching and learning in a positive direction? Answer that and we’ll start making real progress. Everything else is sturm und drang.
Update: D-Ed Reckoning weighs in here with good sense, mostly. But he says “When schools find out how to teach social studies so that most students are actually learning social studies, then we might begin to know how much time should be spent teaching social studies. But today is not yet that day. And until that day comes it seems foolish to get one’s panties in a twist over reducing or increasing time in any subject.” Fine, except too few educators appreciate the connection between content knowledge and reading comprehension. The worst outcome is reinforcing the mistaken belief that reading is reading is reading, and social studies is some “other.” As Dan Willingham effectively showed at the EdTrust conference last November: Teaching content is teaching reading.
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