Chicago School Chief Shows Little Understanding of What Constitutes Good Teaching

Last week, Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd Bennett unveiled a new Interdisciplinary Latino and Latin American Studies Curriculum (ILLSAC) for the city’s kindergarteners through 10^th graders.  According to CPS’ press release, this curriculum “focuses on the history, arts and culture, and contributions of Latinos and Latin Americans, along with the cultural diversity of the Americas, including Central and South America and the Caribbean.”  Bennett stated in the press release that these diverse populations’ “triumph over ignorance, prejudice and discrimination is the quintessential American story – and finally that story will be told in every grade and in every school across CPS.”  The curriculum consists of individual units of study and “launch lessons” aligned with Common Core standards.  The new curriculum is expected to make CPS a “pioneer.”  “This is huge,” Bennett told The Catalyst, adding, “We copyrighted it so we can sell it.”

Image from Chicago Public Schools
Available at http://cps.edu/Spotlight/Pages/Spotlight362.aspx

While the inclusion of previously underrepresented populations into school curricula is a positive development, CPS’ new ILLASC unfortunately represents what is wrong with current educational reforms.  The top-down development and dissemination of prepackaged curricula from administrators to the classroom is the worst form of teaching, demonstrating a lack of awareness of students’ academic abilities and intellectual needs.  There are several reasons why this is.

First, disseminating a prepackaged curriculum of lesson plans, instructional materials, and assessments assumes what students already know and are able to do.  Good instruction should be based first on teachers’ assessments of their students’ knowledge and abilities in order to tailor instruction for their students’ cognitive and academic needs  Students cannot be expected to get to point “C” unless their teachers know if they have been to points “A” or “B” to begin with.

Second, prepackaged curricula like the ILLSAC advance a homogenization of students’ knowledge and abilities.  Teaching an out-of-a-box curriculum with predetermined lessons, supporting materials, and assessments not only assumes all students know all of the same content and possess all of the same abilities, but also assumes that all students can and should progress along the same learning curve towards the same outcomes.  The fact is that each teacher’s classroom contains a multitude of students who possess a variety of skills and different levels of content knowledge.  This holds true for teachers across the city as well as for teachers within a particular school.

The irony with this of course that in devising a curriculum that promotes awareness of and appreciation for diversity, Bennett ignores students’ diversity of skills and knowledge.  When speaking of diversity, administrators, policy makers, and politicians tend to speak solely in terms of race and ethnicity.  What often left out are other forms of diversity, such as language abilities, cognitive abilities, gender, and socio-economic status to name a few.  Granted some students do receive additional supports in the forms of special education or bilingual education, but recent treads of shrinking financial resources supporting those with differentiated instructional or language needs does not inspire much confidence, nor does the fact that some of these other aspects are not addressed at all.

Finally, Bennett’s declared intent to sell this curriculum should raise concerns among all educators.  The lack of explanation of how the ILLASC will be sold and who will reap the profits of such sales is problematic indeed.  More so, however, is what I have outlined already.  Bennett’s implicit assumption is that students outside of Chicago will benefit from a curriculum designed for the students of Chicago.  As such, the city’s schools chief assumes that all students – regardless of location, educational backgrounds, or other aspects of their existence – are just like CPS students in what they know, what they can do, how they learn, and how they develop educationally.  This is an unfortunate assumption Bennett and her ilk have made about contemporary teaching and learning, representing the worst kind of education.