Read, Then Lead in District 200 Middle Schools

Wheaton-Warrenville School District 200 has just posted, for community review and comment, curricula for a variety of new middle school courses.  These include “Collaboration and Leadership”, “Eighth Grade Digital Authorship”, “Digital Literacy”, “Foundations”, “Entrepreneurship” and “Seventh Grade Navigating Informational Sources.”  The materials are available here. 

These new courses emerged from an ongoing review of the middle school schedule.  Traditional classes like shop and cooking are being pushed aside in favor of what the District likes to call “21st Century Skills” to be obtained through “21st Century enabling objectives” (whatever that means).  Use of "technology" and "21st century" in course descriptions is the ed-world's marketing equivalent of "new and improved."

Unfortunately, far too many District 200 students have yet to master skills from previous centuries, like reading and math.  Of our eighth graders tested for the 2011 district report card (see page 5), 23.5% don’t meet state BASIC, minimum standards in reading, defined as “partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at a given grade.”  In math, the figure is even worse:  27.4% of eighth grade students don’t even have PARTIAL mastery of fundamental math skills for eighth grade (based on the state definition).  For the $12,000 per year per student we are spending (page 3), shouldn’t we demand better results?

Adding courses with attractive sounding titles, but no objective standards, is exactly the wrong approach.  For example, how will students in the “Collaboration and Leadership” course be evaluated?  The curriculum tells us:  a student will “participate in role plays requiring use of conflict resolution skills” or “keep journals” to “record progress on creating and monitoring self-improvement goals” and “document his/her learning on interpersonal skills.”

Each curriculum also calls for student “self-reflection” as evidence of learning.  Call me old-fashioned, but aren’t we paying our teachers an average of $77,407 per year (page 2) to teach and evaluate?  Someone once said, "readers are leaders."  We don’t need reflective, self-expressive, but unlearned children.  Too much of this material is just warmed-over new age nonsense.

With a largely or entirely subjective assessment process, the District can simply claim student success, and who can prove otherwise?  This type of standardless environment is just what some edu-crats want.  They love to blame “teaching to the test”, and see hard and fast test standards as the real problem, because those standards can’t be easily manipulated.

A course on “Entrepreneurship” might seem more grounded, and appeal to the business minded.  But how can budding eighth-grade entrepreneurs succeed when one in four of them lacks partial mastery of basic math and reading?

New courses mean more faculty committees and stipends paid, new books to buy, and more administrative activity to give the impression of achievement.  Even former superintendent Gary Catalani once acknowledged that technology is outdated the minute it arrives.  Kids intuitively learn the latest gadgets.  The school’s job is to teach them foundational mastery of core academic skills – the three Rs – not the three i’s:  iPads, iPhones and iPods.  I haven’t used the TRS80 or Apple IIe computer from my school days in two decades, but I still prepare food and make basic home repairs with skills I learned in junior high cooking and shop.

I encourage all community members to review these course descriptions closely and submit comments.  I’m often accused of focusing only on financial issues in District 200.  It is certainly true that schools cannot operate without a sound financial footing to balance the budget without breaking the back of taxpayers.  But the purpose of schools, after all, is to educate children, and the curriculum is the road map.  Reviewing these curricula tells us what our administrators are up to, and exposes what are, in my opinion, some of the major flaws in contemporary educational thinking.