Quotes from my summer reading: Critical scholars challenge scripted curriculum

This summer, colleagues in my district were offered a choice of four books that the district would purchase for us to read. I chose Street Data: A Next Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy, and School Transformation by Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan, and on my own I purchased another of the choices, Rachetdemic: Reimagining Academic Success by Christopher Emdin.

Both are great books that will inform my work and research, particularly as I preare to support teachers implementing a new English language arts curriculum in our district. Some of the most affirming and energizing parts of both Street Data and Rachetdemic, though, are statements and philosophies that are in tension or even direct conflict with my district’s choice to define “high quality curriculum” as that which is highly defined or scripted by curriculum companies. Our distrtict has adopted EL for K-8 ELA and Odell for high school, both of which are open educational resources (OER) that include exhaustive teachers’ editions much like traditional textbooks, and that even go so far as to script student-facing language for instruction at the daily lesson level.

To be clear, I do believe that there may be value in adopting a common curriculum to serve as a starting point for a broad, unifying framework for common language, content, and assessment sequences. BUT. I believe even more strongly that any such adoption will require a vigilant focus on responsiveness to our students, communities, and current contexts as we implement the new curriculum—rather than focusing on strict implementation of the scripts and pacing guides published in these commercial or open curricula.

Below, I’ll compile excerpts from books the two books my district offered for summer reading that voice direct critiques of the type of curriculum our district has adopted. I hope that we have a chance this year to discuss the tensions between these scholars’ approach to curriculum and the path our district has chosen. In addition to excerpts from Emdin and Safir & Dugan that remind us to be wary of scripted curriculum, I’ll supplement with the words of other scholars who are often cited in our district who voice similar critiques:

• Gholdy Muhammad’s Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Historically and Culturally Responsive Literacy (2020)
• Lisa Delpit’s Multiplication is for White People (2012)
• Gloria Ladson-Billings’s many scholarly publications (Instead of reading her books, Ladson-Billings is often cited in excerpt or article form in most districts where I’ve taught. I recommend starting with her 2014 article in the Harvard Educational Review.)
• Zaretta Hammond’s Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain (2014)
• Bettina Love’s We Want to More than Survive (2014)

It is notable that these (with the exception of Safir) are Black scholars who have extensive expertise in culturally responsive teaching and related approaches. Our district voices commitment to anti-racist teaching, has supported the work of these scholars, and has purchased these books for us. I’d like to make sure we make time this year to talk about how their critiques implicate our practices and can guide critical steps forward. As a White woman working in the predominantly White teaching population, I firmly believe that we need to listen to and stand in solidarity with Black, indigenous, and scholars of color. But we have to do more than buy and read their books.

“Blanket equity”: Moving beyond packaged curriculum as the answer to equity

In Chapter 2 of Street Data, Dr. Jamila Dugan outlines several different equity traps common in schools, and her description of “blanket equity” resonates with the approach districts like ours take when they adopt a highly defined or scripted curriculum.

“Blanket equity: Investing in a program or curriculum rather than building the capacity of your people to address equity challenges as complex and ongoing places of inquiry. / Ever heard the phrase, “there is an app for that”? Well, if you want to achieve equitable outcomes, there is apparently a curriculum for that. Students aren’t learning at similar levels. Great this new curriculum will fix that. Students don’t feel safe and valued. Great, there is a program for that. While curriculum can be a helpful tool, schools across the country have made sweeping investments in buying new curriculum, hoping that if educators just follow the material, all students will achieve. This trap can cause leaders to become hyper-focused on accountability and implementation, completely forgetting that if equity could be addressed by curriculum, we would have solved our nationals greatest challenge years ago. Whether you opt to use curriculum as a tool or not, our work requires stitching together a quilt with many different textures and features. A blanket will not do.”

Dr. Jamila Dugan, Street Data, p. 38

Here are some additional quotes from Street Data and other scholars that speak to this trap:

• “We need to position teachers and principals as change agents rather than consumers of curricula and programs, zigzagging from one intervention to the next” (Safir, 2021, p. 71).
  • In a later chapter of Street Data, Shane Safir builds on Dugan’s caution against “blanket equity” with this important reminder that teachers and principals must be agentic, not just passive consumers of someone elses plan for change.
• “There are schools where teachers who don’t follow the curriculum or who choose not to follow established scripts about how to teach are threatened. Letters are placed in files and warnings about firings are part of the everyday discourse. Students who interrupt instruction that stems from scripted teaching are also penalized. They are called “disruptive” and are threatened with failing grades and suspensions. In these schools, where there is no space for dialogue about the ineffectiveness of the curriculum in meeting the needs of the students and no questioning of how expectations are embedded into the curriculum, there is often a narrative that is shared with the public about equity being the reason for the type of pedagogy that is being enacted. The public is somehow convinced that equity means teachers have to do the same thing at the same time for all young people. It is in these schools that lines from MLK’s speeches and quotes about equality get weaponized against teachers and used as justifications for teaching that stifles creativity and underminds authenticity” (Emdin, 2021, p. 15).
  • Although I haven’t seen the sort of explicit punishment of teachers that Emdin references, the implicit pressure to comply is often punishment enough. And the connection between “disruptive” students and unengaging curriculum is certainly one that we can all work harder to examine. Equity does not me “same,” as Emdin reminds us, and that’s why scripted curriculum is not the panacea it claims to be.
• “Evidence of anti-intellectualism is seen in the following examples in schools and classrooms: the prescribed and packaged curriculum with scripts for teaching…; the constraint teachers have with curriculum they are being told to teach” (Muhammad, 2020, p. 113).
  • Muhammad’s caution against anti-intellectualism resonate with Safir’s call for agentic rather than compliant teachers. Since our district’s sole measure of “high quality curriculum” is based on implemention of scripted math and ELA curriculum “with fidelity,” we’re omitting these vital elements that Muhammad advocates, despite the fact that Muhammad’s work has circulated widely in our district throughout many schools and leadership circles.
• “I have now lived long enough to understand the persistence of a national or regional pendulum swinging to some newly hyped published program that promises to magically transform all students into readers with the teachers having to do anything but recite a printed script. Unlike successful teachers who preferably start with their students’ needs and present a variety of decoding and comprehension strategies, the pendulum swings tend to focus on one or another set of strategies to the exclusion of others” (Delpit, 2012, p. 60-61).
  • Although she’s talking about elementary, I’ve seen this trend move up in literary education so that now, scripted instruction has also arrived in our middle and high schools.. We’re not focused on decoding in middle and high school, but we are focused on a very narrow set of text-centric, close reading strategies that privilege attention to literary devices, text structures, and generally decontextualized, disembodied literary analysis rather than identity-rich instruction that allows students to analyze literature for authentic purposes.

Responding to student identities

In addition to Dugan’s notion of “blanket equity,” whereby a curriculum is assumed to be the answer to inequitable outcomes, many critical scholars write extensively about the need to center identities in our instruction. It is impossible for any curriculum to prepare for the unique identities of every student, yet it is the challenge and the joy of teaching for teachers to pursue that work every day. Teaching is human work, and if our eyes are on the script, we forget about what Emdin calls “the two subjects that the teacher needs to have the most expertise in.” Read on:

“The reality is that no young person is fully equipped to connect with adults who either fail to see them or dismiss them as altogether. They are not equipped with the tools to orchestrate a plan for moving forward within schools where teachers are not equipped to depart from their script. it is because of this that we must teach students about the power they hold simply by virtue of being alive. This is work that must be done for the student and the teacher. The two subjects that the teacher needs to have the most expertise in is themselves and their students. Your subject is not just your content area. The job of the teacher is to first work totward fully understanding the people and experiences that have shaped them, to reconcile the tensions between who they are and who they profess to be, and then get as far away as possible from any script that doesn’t align with who they are.”

Christopher Emdin, Rachetdemic, 2021, p. 29

Emdin goes on to say that this advice is especially true for teachers of color because of the danger they face of “replicating the same structures they experienced” as students. And so many other scholars—again, scholars of color—that school districts like mine cite and promote in book studies agree that a focus on student and teacher identities is essential to culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy. Enjoy these snippets of brilliance that call us back to humanizing through attention to identity.

• When the Wisconsin Center for Education Research interviewed Gloria Ladson-Billings in 2019, they asked her about misconceptions she worries that people have about her work. She replied, “Probably that people think that it’s something that can be packaged. Someone will come along with something like culturally responsive lessons, as if teachers don’t have to think and plan and decide what appropriate lessons are for the students they are teaching. That’s going to be different for different teachers. If your classroom has a number of recent immigrant students, then the package is not going to attend to that. The way teacher education is set up is that people believe, “Oh, you can always just buy something that will attend to whatever the issue is,” and it really does require thoughtfulness and planning.”
  • I’ve been invited to read other pieces by Ladson-Billings in other district trainings, but it’s often her work from the 1990s or early 2000s, before she had a chance to speak out against how educators were misinterpreting her work. I hope that we can look at her most recent work and the work of scholars who have built on her pedagogies (e.g., Paris & Alim, 2014) and re-emphasized her original contention that culturally responsive pedagogy is not a list of things you “do,” but a paradigm we must continually pursue.
• “Rather than thinking of themselves soley as teachers, they need to think of themselves as designers of curriculum and instruction. After the content, topic, or text is selected, teachers must think about how it connects to students’ lives and how it can be an opportunity to advance their knowledge of self or others” (Muhammad, 2020, p. 78).
  • Gholdy Muhammad, again, calls for teachers to be agentic designers rather than passive consumers because the content, topics, and texts selected for common curriculum mean nothing unless we translate them into terms that our students can connect with in their current contenxts and communities.
• Zaretta Hammond describes these qualities of a “technocratic” teacher: “Has no explicit focus on building rapport. Doesn’t focus on developing realtionships with students, but does show enthusiasm for the subject matter. Holds high standards and expects students to meet them. Very competent with the technical side of instruction” (Hammond, 2014, p. 99).
  • The scripted instruction in EL and Odell include little or not connection to students, their identities, and student-teacher relationships. Of course, their plans don’t preclude relationship building and identity work, but when the plans are so detailed that they already surpass the instructional time teachers have, it is not unreasonable to infer that high-definition curricula like these might steer many teachers toward a technocractic relation to their content and their students rather than one built on responsiveness.
• “Abolitionist teaching is not sustainable without joy. Dark students have to enter the classroom knowing that their full selves are celebrated. Not just their culture, language, sexuality, or current circumstances, but their entire selves, past, present, and future. Their ancestors, their family members, their friends, their religion, their music, their dress, their langauge, the ways they express their gender and sexuality, and their communities must all be embrased and loved. Schools must support the fullness of dark life as a way to justice” (Love, 2019, p. 120-121).
  • Bettina Love spoke in my district before I was employed here, and I’ve heard many educators refer to her lecture as a transformative experience. But as Love points out here, what she calls for when she talks about abolitionist teaching is not something that can be purchased, rolled out, or assessed with an an “implementation with fidelity” rubric. Abolitionist teaching requires daily attention to students’ whole selves. And that work is most certainly not in any script or packaged curriculum.

The bottom line

Canadian educator Michael Fullan is one scholar in school leadership and reform who many administrators cite, and it feels right to conclude with two excerpts from his book The NEW Meaning of Educational Change (2016).

“There is a dilemma and tension running through the educational change literature in which two different emphases or perspectives are evident: the fidelity perspective and the mutual adaptation or evolutionary perspective. The fidelity approach to change, as the label indicates, is based on the assumption that an already-developed innovation exists and the task is to get individuals and groups of individuals to implement it faithfully in practice—that is, to use it as it is ‘supposed to be used,’ as intended by the developer. The mutual adaptation or evolutionary perspectuve stresses that change often is (and should be) a result of adaptations and decisions made by users as they work with particular new policies or programs, with the policy or program and the user’s situation mutually determining the outcome” (p. 29-30).

“We found that there is a natural tendency for leaders to over plan ‘on paper.’ Doug Reeves (2009) captured this fatal problem graphically when he found that ‘the size and the prettiness of the plan is inversely related to the quality of subsequent action and its impact on student learning’ (p. 81). We call it ‘beware of fat plans.'(Fullan, 2010b, p. 24).” (p. 86)

Michael Fullan, The NEW Meaning of Educational Change, 2016

Curricula like EL and Odell are certainly “fat plans” for pedagogical change; they contain more instructional materials and activities than we could ever hope to have time for, just like the textbooks of old did…and the sheer volume can quickly become so overwhelming for teachers that it’s hard to take our eyes off the curriculum materials long enough to see the students in front of us. I’ve been there, crying with my stack of EL teachers’ guides (perhaps more on that in another post).

Although I understand school leaders’ desire to have tighter alignment in curriculum across large districts, as Dugan, Safir, Emdin, Muahmmad, Delpit, and Ladson-Billings agree, the trouble comes when we are more focused on holding teachers accountable to complex, detailed plans than on building teachers’ capacity to plan, teach, respond, and assess in equitable ways that are more faithful to students’ identities than to any script.

I changed my mind

Emdin deserves the last word, as he challenges teachers to embrace the hard work of pushing to center students rather than scripts:

“You must know more about the rubric measuring your effectiveness than the person who is using it, and you must also move far away from the rubric, or assessment tool if it is damaging to your spirit, your intuition, or your pedagogy. A message like this is easy to receive but often gets read through the lens of how hard it is and how unfair it is to have to do more. Yes, it is unfair that we must give so much and do so much just to allow young people to have the conditions they need to learn and the rights they need to be free. However, if we do not do the work, the system remains as it is” (Emdin, 2021, p. 230).