Curriculum Standards and Content Reading in Fayette Middle Schools

About a month ago KSN&C picked up a comment from Anonymous, a Fayette County middle school teacher. The commenter was exasperated.

As an educator, I'm beaten. What I do isn't good enough for Stu or Jack Hayes.

Yesterday we were told we should not be using novels in teh middle school. Kids should only be reading non-fiction! I don't remember the rationale that was offered. Frankly, I don't care.

I'll let Greg Stmbo take my two days. It will mean I spend less time hearing what I'm doing wrong from Jack Hayes and Stu Silberman....I used to love my job in Fayette County Schools. No longer.

Well, I let that simmer for a while and finally got the chance to follow up the other day.

FCPS Director of Student Achievement Support, Jack Hayes responded to KSN&C inquiries saying, "We absolutely want our middle school kids reading novels, and poems, and plays, and short stories." He explained,

The conversation that has been going on is around our curriculum standards. They’re no longer developed around [the] genre of reading, but around “big ideas” that clearly require us to teach from not only those literary formats, but also technical pieces, informational pieces, blogs, online journals, persuasive pieces, etc. It’s not just about novels, but about a world of reading that we’re preparing our kids for.

I can't tell you how happy it makes me to know that KSN&C (and maybe a few other blogs) might contribute content for middle schoolers. Although now that I think of it, he didn't really specify KSN&C. But I'm sure that's what he meant.

But, I digress.

Hayes continued,

As you know, we spend a lot of our time in classrooms, and the topic has come up that in some of our schools we seem to be very heavily weighted toward teaching novels (almost exclusively). In those cases we’ve opened the conversations about long-range curriculum planning: are we just going to teach reading from novels, or at some point teach from the countless other forms of texts kids will come across...

So in Hayes's mind, it's a matter degree. Some novels - fine. But all novels - not fine.

Hayes suggests that the mix of genres "will better prepare [students] for success in high school, college and beyond." To support his argument, Hayes reminds us that "very few of us actually read novels on the job, but most of us read constantly on the job."

As you know, change isn’t always easy, and in many cases that conversation has been difficult for folks who love teaching novels, and who actually went into teaching with that in mind. It was okay when I first started teaching, because we didn’t have standards that suggested (or required) otherwise. But like it or not the standards are here, and are forcing us to do better by our kids as far as preparing them for high school, college and the world of work. So, no, we aren’t discouraging any of our middle schools from using novels to teach reading, but we are encouraging them to use many, many other things alongside them.

Hayes chalks it up to a misunderstanding.

I regret that someone (or some folks) misinterpreted that conversation, but I suspect it’s more about feeling challenged to shrink my novel list from ten titles to five so that I can pick up some of the other things I need to be teaching from.

English, Math Time Up in 'No Child' Era

44% of Schools Polled Reduce Other Topics

In the five years since a federal law mandated an expansion of reading and math tests, 44 percent of school districts nationwide have made deep cutbacks in social studies, science, art and music lessons in elementary grades and have even slashed lunchtime, a new survey has found.

The most detailed look at the rapidly changing American school day, in a report released today, found that most districts sharply increased time spent on reading and math.

The report by the District-based Center on Education Policy, which focuses on a representative sample of 349 school districts, found recess and physical education the only parts of the elementary school day holding relatively steady since enactment of the No Child Left Behind measure in 2002.

The survey provides grist for critics who say the federal testing mandate has led educators to a radical restructuring of the public school curriculum in a quest to teach to new state tests. But backers of the law, which is up for renewal this year, say that without mastery of reading and math, students will be hampered in other areas.

This from the Washington Post.

We all know that most schools put the most instructional time into the assessed portions of the curriculum, but Margaret Spellings would prefer that you didn't give the study too much weight.

Harvard approves biggest curriculum change in 30 years

Harvard University on Tuesday approved its biggest curriculum overhaul in three decades, putting new emphasis on sensitive religious and cultural issues, the sciences and overcoming U.S. "parochialism."

The curriculum change, proposed on February 8 after three years of faculty debate, is intended to counter criticism the oldest U.S. institute of higher learning was focused too narrowly on academic topics instead of real-life issues.

This from CNN.