Many educators express skepticism toward standardized curriculum and enumerate its limitations in serving all students.
Educators unpack the perceived failures of standardized curricula to meet diverse learning needs and question the motivation behind requiring teachers to follow a set curriculum. Many also still acknowledge the value of curriculum consistency.
Sample Educator Conversations:
- Educators are skeptical of district- and state-level leaders’ motivations for rolling out “boxed” curriculum, seeing it as a bid for control over teachers and a diminishment of professional status.
- Teachers don’t see curriculum as designed to support all students, but rather to exert top-down “control over content and pedagogy.”
- They wonder if calls for curriculum reform are responding to high numbers of veteran educators exiting the profession, with curriculum intended as quality control for inexperienced educators, preventing them from “flying the plane while building it.”
- Educators identify a failure to collect data about the impact of scripted curriculum on school culture, student success, and teacher retention, noting that we’re not “collecting the full story nor the data that matters beyond test scores.”
- Many classroom teachers find it necessary to modify and adapt the required curriculum to support diverse learning needs, and they don’t see sufficient guidance for differentiated support.
- Educators say standardized curriculum is missing “scaffolding and differentiation to [meet] everyone’s needs,” that it is “not designed for ELLs and is not meeting their needs,” and that “there is no such thing as one-size-fits all curriculum.” A teacher says: “Most teachers know this. It’s the ed-adjacent folks who need to understand.”
- Teachers find their curriculum insufficient to provide quality, holistic education. One says that if they followed the curriculum as directed, students would “never co-read a whole chapter book – never learn to annotate a text – never learn any Black History – never do project-based learning.” One notes that teaching scripted literacy curriculum without responding to students’ diverse needs and interests “is not scientific – drains the joy out of learning – leads to inequities.”
- Amidst a high volume of critical discourse, some educators point out the value of curriculum consistency:
- Educators point to value for students who move between schools.
- Interventionists, including special education teachers, find it easier to support students within a school: “It helps when pulling groups from different rooms to have similar context, even if we are working on skills that are IEP based.”