Cycle Five: What Constitutes a Successful Curriculum?

Cycle Five: What Constitutes a Successful Curriculum?

I’ll start this post by reflecting on a statement I dropped into a previous post:  know your purpose.  To evaluate a curriculum, and determining “success” requires evaluation, one has to know what the purpose of the curriculum, and really the purpose of education is.

Consider Central Park East.

            These folks know their purpose, because the school was started with a clear purpose in mind, and it hasn’t drifted too far from that.  They know that they have challenges, they know that they have failings, but they also know that are “working” their purpose and are posting successes. 

            What I appreciate most about this particular school and staff is how holistic their goals are.  Throughout this course we have looked at the varied and multiple meanings the “curriculum” can have.  These folks get it.  They understand that schools need to be about more than education…they need to be about learning.  The frustration over the inability to effectively address racism within their school reveals the depths of their convictions and their purpose.  Their open acknowledgement of failure reveals the purpose-driven nature of their evaluation of their curriculum.

Consider the schools within the Harlem Children’s Zone. 

Again, a clear purpose has lead to results that, though questionable based upon financial considerations, can be considered a success by those whose job it is to evaluate the schools, curriculum and programs. 

To a point.

“A few recent studies have broached the question of what was helping the zone’s students raise attendance and test scores: the interlocking social services, or what was going on in the classroom? But they were based on state test results in years when the exams were easier to pass, and they may now be less conclusive.”

            Outcomes can’t always be directly linked to a purpose.  In other words, it is fallacious to use outcomes as the sole evaluation criteria when determining the “success” of a curriculum.    In the Harlem Children’s zone, the plan was to introduce more than one variable into the educational environment, and it appears to be effective, regardless of cost.  The plan does, however, make it much more difficult to evaluate the curriculum being taught in the classroom.  In an age when teacher job-security is tied to student performance, not only at private and charter schools but public schools as well, effective and accurate curriculum evaluation is a must.  Yet what if the challenge isn’t with evaluating the curriculum, but with the purpose of it in the first place???

Consider Battle Creek Central High School. 

For the past five years we have had five different principals, two different superintendants, six different grade principals, and a staff reduction of about 35%.  This, by the way, goes against the Harlem model. 

In referencing the Harlem Children’s Zone, it was stated “You really have to put money into personnel,” said Marquitta Speller, who has been the high school principal since January. “I don’t think you can experience the same level of success without the same level of resources.”

No kidding.

With these leadership changes as a backdrop, we are also a school that allows instructional departments to write their own curriculum (I’m not going to rehash my car-drive-mechanic-factory analogy).  Our leadership has been so inconsistent that our purpose, in terms of instruction, hasn’t been clearly defined.  Consequently, each department has rewritten it’s curriculum to a new set of guidelines almost annually.  No wonder we are a PLA school.  How could we have effectively evaluated ourselves and used those evaluations as a tool to improve when our standards and purpose changes constantly, at a more outlandish rate than the change in state standards. 

Our latest administrative hire, the building principal at Central, has defined a simple, firm and clear purpose for us: get off the PLA list.  Everything that we do here is checked against that, and that starts with instruction. 

So what constitutes a successful curriculum at Central? 

One that raises student performance on the MME and gets the school off the PLA list.  It’s that simple.  There is no room for philosophical arguments about pedagogy.  Our purpose is survival, and evaluating our success is much easier.