As education emerges as a key issue in next year’s governor’s race, presumed Democratic nominee Phil Bredesen might think he has something to brag about. As mayor in 1997, he persuaded the Metro school board to adopt what’s known as a core curriculum for Metro’s K-8th graders—a rigorous program of learning that details what students should know and when they should know it.
The problem, however, is that core curriculum has yet to really take in Metro. It has brought the system closer to uniformity, but the degree and style of how core is taught varies from school to school and teacher to teacher. And now that Pedro Garcia, Metro’s new director of schools, is running the show at Bransford Avenue, Bredesen’s education legacy soon may disappear without a trace.
Sandra Johnson, Garcia’s California recruit from his old district as Metro’s chief instructional officer, briefed reporters last week on the new plan to boost the district’s chronically lagging test scores.
“Core curriculum is up in the air,” she said when a television reporter quizzed her about the program. “Everything is up in the air.”
The reason for such turbulence is that Garcia and Johnson want to develop entirely new standards that are both “clear and rigorous.” More importantly, they say that they want the new standards “to ensure student success in the 21st century.” While Johnson would not comment specifically on Metro’s curriculum as it now stands, she did say that most districts often fail to make it clear what they expect students to learn and when they expect them to learn it. She also said that most districts don’t prepare their students to work in a marketplace where critical thinking skills are required in nearly all jobs.
Garcia and Johnson plan to work with teachers and principals on developing these new standards, which will also be used to hold schools and teachers accountable. But it seems the California duo already knows what they want—and that seems to be a curriculum that is more functional than core.
Inspired by E.D. Hirsch’s 1987 best seller, Cultural Literacy, core covers staples of the western civilization intellectual tradition, from Robert Frost to the Bill of Rights, along with a few perfunctory nods to state and local concerns. Last week Johnson talked in general terms about what all high school graduates need to know, regardless of whether they plan to go to college or play professional basketball. She outlined how students needed to master basic concepts—from “organizing information into logical paragraphs” to being able “to depict relationships using tables, charts, and graphs.” Their approach seems more bottom line oriented—for example, rather than have high schoolers write all their English papers on such crusty topics as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s use of light and dark imagery, they might all also be asked to write a business proposal, a technical letter, or a résumé.
That doesn’t mean that all of Metro’s public school kids will turn into single-minded careerists—for the record, Johnson is a former English teacher and, as such, certainly understands the importance of a rich, intellectual base. She seems to want to develop well-rounded high school graduates who can get and keep decent-paying jobs. What she is doing now is developing standards for each grade that measure whether students are working their way up to that point.
Johnson says that they’ll evaluate the core curriculum as they develop their own “standards-based curriculum.” To the extent that the two overlap, core might stay, she says. But where they are different, don’t expect them to shelve the standards that they develop. So while Garcia and Johnson will keep the basic premise of core intact—that students throughout the county need to be learning the same things at the same time—what exactly those things are is up in the air.
What Johnson didn’t say—but is no doubt evaluating as well—is how core curriculum compares to what the state tests. Marva Woods, the principal at Dupont Hadley Middle School, says that while core curriculum has its strengths, it doesn’t always include the subject matter the state teaches. For that reason, she says, she supports taking another look at the program. “Reevaluating core might be a good thing,” Woods says. “We live and die by test scores.”
That may be an unfortunate reality—but it is a reality nonetheless, and one that Garcia and Johnson keenly understand. After all, Garcia’s entire raison d’être is raising student test scores. So even if core is teaching the right things, if it doesn’t cover the material on state tests, what good is it?
Besides, few teachers agree on how they are supposed to teach core, according to Harry McMackin, president of the Metro Nashville Education Association, the local teachers’ union. That alone might be reason to reevaluate the program. “Teachers have differing philosophies. The major concept of core curriculum is to expose kids to basic historical facts and a core set of principles from the full-range of western civilization. Yet this exposure is not in-depth because they could never have the time to do in-depth work,” he says. “That leads to confusion—do we teach to in-depth understanding and mastery or do we teach to mastery? Teachers have differing ideas on this.”
And they are not going to be an easy sell. As McMackin says, teachers might not react too kindly if they are told to change what they teach for the second time in less than five years. That is especially true if they have no input, which he says is currently the situation. “I think it’s fair to say that, as of today, we have had no conversation on changing standards, curriculum, or anything else,” he says. “I’m not alarmed by that because it’s still early in the process. But if it continues like this, it will not be successful.”
Which brings it back to Bredesen. He was definitely on to something when he brought a standards-rich curriculum to Metro schools. That will remain intact. But core as we know it might not. Which just serves as a reminder that talking about curriculum is the easy part. The tougher task is implementing it.
