For all I appreciate Ravitch’s coming out stance on testing and accountability, I do not embrace her recommendations at the end of her 2010 book. Although I agree with this statement in many ways, ie “the way to improve schools is to improve curriculum and instruction and improve the conditions in which teachers work and children learn ...” (225), her approach to curriculum here still focuses essentially on delivery of "core" content -- and I would push back both on this idea of delivery as well as this idea of "core." Within this vision too she imagines a truce in the "culture wars" which I would say is also highly questionable, especially within a frame of delivery/consumption. Michael Apple writes that within the dynamics of knowledge, power and teaching in education "is a very real set of relationships among those who have economic, political, and cultural power in society on the one hand and the ways in which education is thought about, organized, and evaluated on the other" in his preface to his book Ideology and Curriculum (2004).
I also think her conceptualization of a standardized curriculum narrows what is possible as well as what I believe is actually urgently necessary. At least at the time of writing of this book, she doesn’t seem take into account the digital meditated and networked world of knowledge within/among which we now need to think about education and schooling. However the environment in which we think about school and knowledge has fundamentally shifted and changed since the beginning of her story. Mimi Ito, author of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Youth Living and Learning with New Media, in a speech at the American Association for School Library Conference in October 2011 says,
… the world around the classroom has also changed dramatically. Established cultural institutions like the textbook, the teacher, or the encyclopedia aren’t the critical passage points for knowledge anymore. Kids are immersed in a networked knowledge economy of free flowing information and constant social connectivity.
Again, I am influenced in my thinking by my work in the field of digital media and learning. Most recently reading the Connected Learning Research report, the authors write that “Today’s American youth are entering a labor market strikingly different from earlier generations.”
Regardless of which job forecasts win out, we anticipate a future of heightened competition for good jobs, and a reduction in the wage premium gained by education. In this context, a neo-liberal vision of a market-driven education system is far more likely to yield a permanent two-track system than an environment in which opportunity and outcomes are widely shared across the citizenry. In order to pursue an educational reform agenda that is oriented towards equity, we need to confront these market realities as well as take into account the highly unequal educational playing field dominant and non-dominant youth encounter. Our educational system will fail those young people who it most needs to serve without solutions that look to education as a way of building capacity and meaningful participation rather than as a pipeline to a shrinking sets of opportunities.
I am also influenced by sophisticated curriculum development work that I have seen teachers I work with created and iterate over time. Curriculum is a "complicated conversation" (Ellsworth) and always reflects larger trends and influences in the society at larger (both explicit and hidden) ... so I don't agree with Ravitch that is is the domain of educational professionals versus teachers (note: I'm not sure I even understand this distinction btw, so that's a question) or "the what" versus "the how," (as she puts it on 226) and I'd be interested in discussing that more.
To support a conversation around curriculum, I found this post by former principal Frank Murphy in the Philadelphia School Notebook, which takes a historical view and shows the circular nature of the impact of “reforms” on curriculum and instructional control over the last decade in Philadelphia. And comments here by educators like Christina Puntel and others, make suggestions about directions to go that reach back historically to a time when teachers were in charge of their own curriculum and instruction decisions. These strike me as key pieces to hold onto as we move forward.
What did we know in the field from before NCLB about this curriculum and instruction? And what do we need to keep learning in order to move forward, in the name of equity and democracy, within radically changed and changing social, economic and educational environments?