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.

New Year, Same Dangers

During recent weeks, millions of children returned to school to start a new academic year.  Unfortunately, this early into the new school year, we already have another report of a gunman entering a school threatening students and educators while making parents and the community at large worried and anxious.  The recent event in Georgia thankfully ended without any fatalities, which l presume is one reason why we did not witness the point-counterpoint ranting in the national media about gun control that developed in the wake of the Aurora theater shootings, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, or other similar headline-making events.  Regrettably, it takes a single massive loss of life for gun violence to enter the national consciousness.  In this way, sadly, loss is relative.  Nevertheless, gun violence in Chicago – which has become an all too regular way of life – is an important local issue with greater significance at the start of this school year.  The recent shooting of five people brings this into sharp relief.

Over the summer, Mayor Rahm Emanuel pushed through his plan to close 50 Chicago Public Schools, arguing that it was necessary in order to, among other things, save money on underutilized schools and have students in so-called failing schools attend quote-unquote better schools.  Emanuel further aimed to ease parental and communal concerns of how the school closings jeopardized the safety students who had been displaced from their traditional neighborhood school and now had to cross boundaries claimed by rival gangs in some of the city’s more dangerous neighborhoods.  The Safe Passage program deploys police and fire department personnel augmented with recently hired part-time city employees to intersections along the routes students travel, escorting them to and from school.

Image from The Chicago Tribune, August 08, 2013; available at
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-08-08/news/ct-met-cps-safe-passage-20130808_1_safe-passage-program-elementary-schools-cps

A shooting along one of these Safe Passage routes, however, calls the entire enterprise into question.  On August 19^th – on the eve of the first day of school - five people were shot in front of the Uptown Baptist Church, with one victim later dying from his wounds.  While early reports described the incident with the catch-all label of “gang related,” it now seems that the victims were innocent bystanders, participants in some of the Church’s outreach programs for the homeless.

Now with the first weeks of school behind us, Chicago Police Commissioner Garry McCarthy calls Safe Passage a success.  Still, two interrelated questions linger.  These are: how long before another shooting of innocents along a Safe Passage route occurs, particularly when asking how long can Safe Passage survive.  Even now, stories are emerging of Safe Passage personnel abandoning their posts or out rightly quitting.

I have written before that schools should be welcoming environments in which students feel safe, but a safety not created through militaristic elements or authoritarian practices.  I wonder, however, what hope is there for school children to feel safe in school when they cannot feel safe on the way to school?