Curriculum Matters

In this week's issue, I have a story about the continued growth of forensic science courses in schools, a trend that can almost certainly be attributed partly to the "CSI effect" or the public's fixation on cops-and-crime TV shows.

When reporting on teachers taking on a relatively new topic in science, one question I'm always curious about is where educators get their classroom materials, and ideas for lessons? The teachers I interviewed for this story tapped some interesting sources, including local police departments and forensics experts, as well as research on forensic science and the TV shows themselves—sometimes to test the veracity of an idea or concept presented on the show.

One teacher whose account I was not able to include in my story was Brian Pressley, who teaches science at Brunswick High School in Maine. Pressley is also a textbook author, and he recently wrote a new book on forensics, published by Walch Education. In addition doing a lot of research and reading about forensics, Pressley gathered ideas from his school's security staff, who have law-enforcement training. The teacher said he knew that forensics would be a popular topic for a book after witnessing the reaction at several professional development conferences of science teachers.

"Teachers were standing in the doorway, trying to get information," he said of one crowded session. He thought he'd have better luck at another one later in the day, but "people were out the door at that one, too," he recalled.

About three-quarters of the members of the National Science Teachers Association who responded to a survey a few years ago said some kind of forensic science was being taught in their schools. If you're teaching forensics, how did you develop a curriculum for your class?

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A couple of my colleagues have written about Grover "Russ" Whitehurst's recent paper on the importance of curriculum in improving schools. To sum it up, Whitehurst, the former director of the federal Institute of Education Sciences, says the research suggests there's a greater payoff for students in addressing curriculum than on the issues that seem to be receiving the most attention from the Obama administration, at least publicly—charter schools, early childhood ed, common standards, merit pay for teachers. Whitehurst makes that analysis based on his examination of the "effect sizes" of various education policies—basically, the relationship between an ed policy and an outcome, as judged on statistical-numerical terms.

I'd like to touch on one of Whitehurst's observations that some EdWeek readers may have overlooked. In his introduction, the former IES chief says he sees a very different focus in ed-policymaking from the Bush and Obama administrations. He argues that the Bush team, in which he served, was very keen on improving curriculum. This occasionally caused problems: the administration was accused of overstepping its legal grounds on curriculum through the federal Reading First program, as Whitehurst notes in his paper. But the administration also delved into the topic in other ways: creating the What Works Clearinghouse to conduct rigorous evaluations of curriculum, and launching a number of other studies of curricula across subjects. (He also could have mentioned Bush's creation of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, which probed curriculum, as well as other issues, in its study of how to prep the nation's students for algebra.)

Whitehurst then looks at the Obama administration and sees different interests:

"In light of the legislative prohibitions on endorsing curricula and the political taint surrounding Reading First, one can imagine high-level meeting in the Obama administration in which curriculum and third rail were mentioned in the same sentence. But one can also imagine an administration that is staffed with policy makers who cut their teeth on policy reforms in the areas of school governance and management rather than classroom practice, people who may be oblivious to curriculum for the same reason that Bedouin don't think much about water skiing.....

"People who are trying to create more charter schools, or pressure unions to allow more flexibility in hiring and firing teachers, or transform schools into one-stop shops for community needs, do not sort with people who are trying to improve the teaching of fractions or children's reading comprehension. The disciplinary training, job experience, professional networks, and intuitions about what is important hardly overlap between governance and curriculum reformers. For the governance types, teaching resolves to the question of how to get more qualified teachers into the classroom, e.g., 'How can we remove the artificial barriers to entry into the profession so that smart people who want to teach don't have to jump through the hoops of traditional teacher training and certification?' For the curriculum reformer, teaching is about specific interactions between students and their curriculum materials as shaped by teachers. For a curriculum reformer, teachers with higher IQs and better liberal arts educations are desirable, to be sure. But just as people with musical talent have to work hard to develop musical skills and have available to them exceptional compositions if they are to be successful musical performers, so too bright aspiring teachers have to learn a lot about how to teach and have good curriculum materials if they are to be effective with students. Thus being smart is the starting point of becoming a good teacher for a curriculum reformer whereas it is often the end point of governance reforms.

"Let's assume the Obama administration has ignored curriculum inadvertently because it is staffed with governance people who are simply valuing what they know. If so, then the administration would do well to heed Obama's assertion that, 'you do what works for the kids.' The administration should be open to all the categories of reform and innovation that could have an appreciable impact on student learning."

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One of the nation's best-known environmental organizations has released a report that it believes makes a strong case that providing students with more time outdoors increases their academic preparation and success.

The report, "Time Out: Using the Outdoors to Enhance Classroom Performance," released by the National Wildlife Federation, offers a compendium of research on the link between outdoor time and student learning. Oftentimes, the key step in getting students outside is turning off the TV or the computer monitor.

The report draws not only from case studies and other documents related to student performance, but also from medical studies and surveys. Limiting outdoor time can reduce students' attention spans and increase their aggressive behavior, the report says. It can also improve academic performance and maybe even promote better eyesight, according to the document. The report offers tips for parents and policymakers looking for ways to increase the amount of time children spend outdoors.

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The United States trails most industrialized nations in the amount of public spending on younger children, according to new data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD. This spending increases, however, as children get older, and the U.S. system outpaces other developed countries in resources channeled toward students in the 6-11 and 12-17 age groups.

While overall U.S. public spending on children ranks among the highest across the OECD, child poverty rates in the United States stand at 21.6 percent, nearly twice the OECD average, the report says. Public support for children, as measured in the study, includes cash benefits and tax credits for families, education, and childcare. It does not include public spending on health, according to the OECD report.

Educational attainment in the U.S. compares poorly to the average among those nations, it finds. Additionally, this country has higher rates of infant and child mortality and of low birth weight than the OECD average, the report finds.

To OECD officials, the message from the data is that the U.S. should spend more on young children and disadvantaged teenagers. "Despite the United States' strong research and policy tradition in the area of child well-being, too many American children are still behind," Simon Chapple, the co-author of the OECD report, said in a statement.

It's probably worth noting that, when OECD has released reports in the past, not all researchers have agreed with the Paris-based organization's policy ideas. Some observers, like Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution, have said the organization oversteps its bounds and strays into subjectivity when it issues policy recommendations in reports that put forward statistical data.

What's your view—are the OECD's latest findings on the money?

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