Annotation from SA Lease Moms: Nosotros are proud to share guest posts from hallmonitor covering San Antonio's public schools.

sonidos iniciales - photo by Robin Jerstad for Folo Media
Photo by Robin Jerstad for Folo Media

At the 2022 Didactics Writers Association National Briefing, Freeman Hrabowski, president of University of Maryland, Baltimore County said that taking downward Amalgamated monuments, and renaming dorms is "great." He said it in such a way though that implied a "merely" was coming.

And information technology did.

Symbolic gestures are "slap-up" he explained, only they are aren't the solution to inequity, "because the children still cannot read."

The problem for Hrabowski, and many others, is that didactics stories tend to drift in one management or the other. On one side: test scores, school finance, education and learning, ed tech, charter school policies, etc. On the other: segregation, achievement gaps, and discipline reform.

One grouping of stories might be about an award-winning pre-K curriculum, the group would cover literacy gaps. But it's relatively rare for a reported story to brand the connection between curriculum and inequality, except in the virtually obvious cases.

So the group of writers attracted to Hrabowski's panel most colleges confronting their racist pasts might accept been different from the grouping that was attracted to the panel on curriculum. I did go to both, by chance, and as one of the journalists firmly in the "systemic inequity" corner of the crush, I am now sold on the fact that curriculum belongs there.

Sonja Santelises, CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools, sold me on it. Content is an equity issue, she argued, because of gaps non just in the skills (like leadership and problem-solving) of educated and uneducated people, but in the torso of things that they know. The content. So we practise a disservice to high school graduates when they graduate without the content knowledge expected of educated people—having never heard of Geoffrey Chaucer, Niels Bohr, or Malcom X.

"To say that content doesn't matter is frankly professional malpractice," Santelises said.

It'southward also critical that the content be affirming of the learners, she pointed out. Meaning, black and dark-brown students demand to learn black and brownish historical and literary genius. They need the solid foundation of knowing that they come up from generations of builders, innovators, leaders, and thinkers in every bookish realm. White kids have been getting that for equally long as public school has existed.

Without practiced curriculum that foundation isn't level.

Information technology reminded me of the Mexican-American Studies curriculum debacle here in Texas, when the lack of Mexican-American visibility in approved curriculum became too glaring to ignore. But then, the text book being proposed to the State Board of Education was inaccurate and demeaning.

Information technology was a classic "WTF, Texas?" moment, but actually, the fact that Mexican-American studies content had been previously left upward to individual districts, schools, and teachers is not entirely different than the rest of what kids larn at school.

Teachers typically experience it's their professional person duty to develop their ain curriculum, University of Southern California researcher Morgan Polikoff said. "I'm not sure most teachers have the skill to do that."

Nosotros know that a good instructor makes a huge difference in a child'southward learning feel, and yet, we are going to widen the gap between those teachers by allowing curriculum development one of the skill sets they have to have—on pinnacle of instruction, emotional intelligence, classroom management, and cultural competency—when nosotros accept admission to proven curricula developed by learning and content experts to whom our children volition never have access except through the books those experts wrote and have made available for buy to our schools.

The thing is, Santelises said, great teachers are great at the art and science of teaching. Direction, trouble shooting, differentiating. There's plenty of need for rockstars, but they don't have to exist composers too. Nosotros demand to reduce the variables, not increase them.

"I only do not think nosotros are at a place in the country where nosotros tin just plough everybody lose," Santelises said.

I've recalled stories well-nigh scandals that broke because a teacher essentially pulled her content from an online source, and some enterprising kid found it and distributed it. Or a teacher decided to create his own homework consignment on the pros and cons of slavery.

Clearly, leaving curriculum creation in the hands of teachers is bully for the news cycle, and not so dandy for quality control.

In theory, quality control is the job of assessment. Kids have a test, nosotros know if their teacher delivered. Obviously a unmarried snapshot of a kid's test taking power and content call back is not nearly equally authentic equally we'd like information technology to be, simply there's no reason it shouldn't be part of a diagnostic system, which would exist part of an accountability arrangement.

To which states are like, "Nah, we'll just build our whole education system around this test."

That'south what Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) are for: setting benchmarks of what kids need to know at each depot on the way to "the exam." The TEKS are not curriculum. They are a cheque list of what you need to know, not the map of how to go there. The skill that eclipses all of this, is, of course, test taking.

in Texas, the TEKS are fix by an elected lath of politicians (the State Board of Pedagogy) who accept every reason to exist content-controversy averse. Except when they aren't (see Mexican-American Studies debacle).

Moving across teaching kids how to take a test, information technology'southward even so so much easier to but focus on critical thinking, group collaboration, and other skills that, while absolutely necessary to thrive in 21st century professional America, don't necessarily prepare you apart from other candidates in an interview.

"Nosotros have a mania about teaching skills because we are uneasy about like-minded on content," said David Steiner, executive manager of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy.

Leaning heavily on skills (critical thinking, collaboration, etc) relieves the mental and social labor of trying to address the racial gaps in the content, or to mediate between those who want global literature vs. those who want Western cannon.

There are fights worth fighting, and we're fugitive them. The result, Lerner went onto complaining, is that poor students will e'er be academically underfed if all they are getting at schoolhouse is the "thin gruel of skills-based instruction."

Because those overwhelmingly-white heart class kids? They're getting content. They're going to summer military camp with the oceanographers and the Egyptologists. Some of them alive with architects and nutritionists and other content experts.

You know what else they are getting? Phonics.

For a while now, stories have been sneaking into the media virtually how abandoning phonics curricula has been tanking literacy levels for our kids.

In its place nosotros have "counterbalanced literacy," the latest iteration of "whole language" where kids recognize a series of words by sight and use that base to add to their visual vocabulary based on books that they are excited near and motivated to decode.

When I first heard about balanced literacy I was all nigh it. Excited kids? Aye! Post-obit their passions? Yes!

Except it's not working. Turns out that the English language language is far more than vast than the black squiggles and sounds associated with them. Those blackness squiggles and associated sounds are subject to a rather technical decoding procedure, which has been studied and mapped. Best practices have been discovered, and they are pretty precise. So, boring as information technology may sound, memorizing the various sounds made by "ough" and "ie" is actually learning to read.

I don't know if the resistance to phonics has to do with the zeitgeist backside originality, or if it has to practise with how difficult it is to get kids to appoint in the drudgery of memorization. Nonetheless, what I exercise know is that if there's not a phonics curriculum, then phonics goes on the extracurricular schedule correct betwixt pianoforte lessons, swim team, and ballet.

Yous know how I know? Because the phonics tutor just left my house. Instead of pianoforte lessons this summer, my kindergartener is taking phonics lessons.

This is not a rich school/poor school phenomenon. Wealthy schools take bought into whole language and balanced literacy just as much equally everyone else. But disadvantaging every educatee equally—in improver to beingness a crappy thing to do—won't become you disinterestedness. Because parents. The inequity becomes a household-by-household result.

Wealthy parents panic when their child tin't read, rent a tutor, find a program, or purchase an at-home phonics programme and they pay whatever it takes to become that kid reading. Frequently those services are non affordable for working families. A reading kid is going to excel where not-reading kids struggle, so the literacy gap feeds all the other gaps that nosotros've gotten so used to seeing. It masks the fact that there's a curricular deficit, because it seems totally normal to us for poor kids to lag behind.

And so when Hrabowski observed that depression income, blackness children are not reading at the appropriate levels, he was getting to the heart of the socioeconomic inequity fueling our American pedagogy organization.

And information technology'southward a curriculum issue. I'll be damned.

Originally published as "'The children all the same cannot read.' How I became convinced that curriculum is an equity issue." Hall Monitor, June two, 2019

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