When you talk with Americans about how our education reforms are going, you will hear about something called The Common Core State Standards Initiative.  Usually, the words "Common Core" are uttered disparagingly.  Advocates for teachers resist the idea of education being reduced to something graduated and quantified.  Advocates for local control see The Common Core as a power grab by the central government.  Advocates on the religious right worry that the a liberal cultural elite will deploy The Core as a way to secretly teach their children subversive things like ... the actual age of the earth. I have now had direct and intimate experience with The Core.  Unlike most that opine about it, I have been forced to read deeply into it and apply it in the context of a real teaching job.  At LEAD Public Schools, for English Language Arts, we used a Core-based curriculum called EngageNY.  Our first book is the one that you see pictured here -- Linda Sue Park's A Long Walk to Water -- an absolutely brilliant choice.  Park's book is a very easy read that not only walks the reader through a wide range of cultural contexts but also exposes the reader to a range of literary techniques.  You can look through the first several weeks of recommended curriculum; I defy anybody to tell me that it is any less than a work of collaborative genius. Is absolutely everything you need in there?  No, but by the time you have studied the logic of how the lessons are laid out, it is easy to figure out what the students will take an interest in and find the supplements you need on line.  For example I realized that the concept of "culture clash" was vital to understanding the book, and that that was a concept that was eluding the students, so I showed them first this footage of Sudanese Sufis in Northern Sudan encouraging them to point out the similarities and differences between their culture and the culture of the Northern Sudanese Muslims.  Then I showed them footage of Dinkas in Southern Sudan getting them to articulate the cultural gulfs that must exist there, and the likely judgements people might make about each other.  EngageNY offers all sorts of opportunities like this to improvise. ... if the community entrusts the teaching profession with the power to adapt systems to the dynamic circumstances of a genuine learning community. But this is not where we are right now.  The Common Core and its extensions, like EngageNY, are being used at LEAD (and probably elsewhere), not as a valuable tool for helping teachers to plan beautiful year-long courses, but as a short-cut device for making the claim to outside entities that the kids are being taught well.  Energy that might otherwise be invested in developing materials and making more connections for the students is invested in making sure that adherence to the core is clearly documented:  "You want to know how we teach our kids?  Look at EngageNY.  That's how we do it." But Peter, the counter-argument goes, you just said that EngageNY is a good curriculum, so what's he problem?  The problem is that curriculum is not ultimately what makes a class.  It is the intersection between the teacher and the student that makes the class.  Placing curriculum first breaks that intersection. Here is an example.  Apparently, prior to the seventh grade, my students were taught something called a "T.I.E.D. Paragraph"

Topic Sentences / Transition

Introduce Evidence / Reason

Evidence / Reason

Discuss

It's a fine framework, amongst many others that I have encountered.  I won't go into the details of T.I.E.D. here.  You can look them up.  In terms of the writing my students were producing, I was still getting paragraphs that read, "Salva was scared.  I know this because there is evidence in the book.  In the book it talks about how scared his was.  This shows that Salva was really feeling the fear a lot." A lot more careful scaffolding was needed to build the students towards being able to pull meaningful evidence from the book and really explain the relevance of that evidence, and then find more creative ways to end a paragraph.  But I began to get feedback from my superiors that went along the lines of "don't fall behind in the curriculum.  They are using the T.I.E.D. format well enough." The whole question of T.I.E.D. aside, these kids were not writing up to their potential.  What was supposed to be a tool to help us get the kids to write better had become the goal in and of itself.  And if a student could write badly and still be writing in a format that was still arguably T.I.E.D., then that was considered adequate. My authentic assessment of the students' needs and abilities was subordinated to the matter of making sure that we didn't "fall behind." Systems, not curriculum, is where education needs to look to optimize accountability.  Too often, curriculum is hauled out and presented as a stand-in accountability mechanism:  "I make myself accountable by showing you the textbook that I am using."    Anytime an educator communicates in that way, it is an evasion -- either by him or herself or by his or her superiors. Curriculum, rather, is a tool for maximizing the value that can be obtained in the interaction between a teacher and a student.  So returning to the topic of exalting the teaching profession, we do so by subordinating curriculum to that interface between the teacher and the student.  That is where the teacher adds value. ... to be continued.