EDUCATION IS A BATTLEGROUND. GOOD TEACHERS ARE WARRIORS. THESE ARE THE FRONTLINES.
 

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Release: March 28, 2010
Wordcount: 621

Crossing the Rubicon

“Education is a pendulum; it will swing back” is a common statement from veteran teachers. It is true that many education reforms seem to rise from the grave. The current push for individualized intervention is a re-run of the failed diagnostic teaching and individualized education reforms of the late 1960s. But if we are coerced into adopting a common core curriculum, it will never swing back in our lifetime. We will have “crossed the Rubicon.”

For those not familiar with this phrase, when a victorious Julius Caesar returned from Gaul with his troops, and crossed the river Rubicon into Italy against orders, he committed himself to a deadly course of action from which he could not turn back.  Why do I consider a national curriculum to be so dangerous to American education? And why couldn’t we easily withdraw?

I saw a national curriculum in Hong Kong in 1977. I taught at the American high school where we had a standard U.S. curriculum. As professional teachers, we decided what, when and how to teach. Biology classes were expanding. We needed to hire a local teacher. “Local hires” came from British system schools where every biology teacher in the Commonwealth was on page 24 of the Nuffield syllabus on day six of school.

I remember being in the office when we hired the British teacher. Her first question was; “What syllabus must I use?”

“You decide what to teach,” I replied. [Panic]

“What textbook must I use?” was her next question.

“You can pick from any high school biology textbook,” I answered. [More panic!]

We reduced her distress by giving her a first period planning period so she could observe my American-style class.

It took her over a semester to break away. She was a scuba diver and we encouraged her to take her classes down to the beach—to teach to her strengths. By the end of the year, I asked her how she liked teaching in an American school. “I could never go back to the assembly line teaching,” she said. She excited her students in marine biology and involved them in small research projects that never occurred at King George V High School. She now understood why American students were more questioning and creative because her teaching was no longer directed to test preparation and memorization.

Today, I travel each summer to China where they too have a national curriculum. Every teacher aligns their courses with the “gao kao”–the all important leaving exam. Scores on that test determine a student’s life. To use educationist terminology, it is “total assessment” of the student, the teacher, the textbook, and the school. And the current scoreboard of Nobel Prizes to Chinese educated in China and researching in China stands at zero. America has over 270, far outpacing all those countries with national curricula.

China realizes the teach-to-the-test system leads to memorization and prevents the creative and highly variable questioning that the professional American science teacher used to do. China wants to change, and the Shanghai sector removed biology from the “gao kao” test in the mid-1990s. Immediately, China’s students (with the concurrence of parents) ignored biology to focus on other tested material.

Once we are caught in a national test-prep system, the whole system re-tools for memorization. Teachers have no need for, nor is there time for, creative questioning. Good teachers leave. New teachers do not learn the open questioning and research methods.

Singapore and China realize the price they have paid for test prep schooling, and are struggling to get away from standardized curriculum. American educationists, ignorantly thinking they are doing something “new,” are charging ahead.

The common core national curriculum is the Rubicon that we must not cross.

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John Richard Schrock




 

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