Despite islands of educational excellence worthy of the designation “world class”, the US public K-12 education system remains in crisis. More than thirty years after the publication of the National Academy of Sciences Report on A Nation at Risk, students’ knowledge, skills and understanding of reading and mathematics content among U.S. students remains on the decline.
In perhaps two-thirds of U.S. schools the problem is only chronic. Administrators, teachers and other school and district staff continue to hold meetings, examine data, make plans, inform the community and encourage students. These schools feel lucky when they are able to hold their own, to keep changes in achievement levels flat. They rarely rise, and when they do it is more likely attributable to a change in rating performance than a substantive increase in learning. And they are lucky.
For a third of our nation’s students the problem is acute and non-responsive to efforts aimed at improvement. These students attend schools in areas where math and reading skills remain shockingly low for a large portion of the student population. They typically represent impoverished communities, often with large minority populations, high unemployment rates, and little hope.
For too many students in these communities education is viewed as largely irrelevant, boring and encouraging of a type of cultural assimilation that is ‘other’ and likely only to alienate one from one’s own group. These are places where hope is either dying or has already passed.
The current K-12 system has no upgrade for this crisis. It is not simply a matter of better pedagogy, more captivating instruction and increasing numbers of phenomenal teachers. That all helps, but it doesn’t solve the fundamental problems faced by these schools. At least not alone. That’s because the fundamental problem facing these schools is not a lack of excellent pedagogy, captivating instruction or phenomenal teachers, but the very structure by which we carry out the educational enterprise. The educational system itself. The box we educators live in and can’t imagine an ‘outside of’.
That’s the problem. Our ‘box’ is old, outdated and unsuited to the twenty-first century, precisely because it is unsuited to the students or the culture of the twenty-first century.
We have the technology. We have the skills. We lack the vision.
Stay tuned.
What is a transformative curriculum design?
As the name implies, it is a curriculum designed to transform. In particular it is a curriculum designed to transform the day-to-day educational experiences of both teachers and students. It is intended as a response to the challenges faced by low performing schools in particular but represents a complete re-tooling of what a curriculum is and what the day-to-day activities of students and teachers looks like.