Author: Kirstin Beatty, Founder
The MA house unanimously approved a new bill H.4642 for school literacy that replaces local control with a requirement for literacy & screening tools approved by the education commissioner, along with more student data. The house vote was unanimous despite opposition from teacher unions (because since when does the legislature listen to the people or teachers – see here). The senate has yet to vote.
While this may sound great, my feeling is that if you want something done right, you do it yourself.
Instead, this bill requires pre-approved curriculum & practices that are “accepted by a peer-reviewed journal” or similar, so curriculum becomes the property of big businesses because peer review and ‘evidence-based’ research requires big money. Teachers have experience, creativity, and heart, which we lose by propping up industry curriculum and programs. Imagine if we ignored clinical experience of doctors, and instead allowed pharmaceutical companies to make medical decisions.
When I taught, this same language was used to require me to use an ‘evidence-based’ reading program that students and I hated. Interestingly, the program could do things that I was not allowed to do as a regular teacher. I could not drift from educational standards set by the state, but the program could and did. It seems quite unfair to call teachers and schools failing when failing schools are often under the gun to toe the line just as the state prescribes. In other words, our state standards are not flexible, students need flexible, and state schools failing under state standards must mean that standards are failing. My industry program included phonics, which I knew how to teach, but I could not use phonics unless using the industry program materials. Several times I went to the principal or someone else to ask if I could teach reading myself, my own way, and was told no.
The program, however, was researched by big business and happened to be one of the few, maybe the only, evidence-based programs around and we had to use it being a ‘failing’ MA school. Anytime I said the program wasn’t working, I was ignored because the program was “evidence-based” and I was just the poor soul teaching and suffering along with my students.
That program was Scholastic, which makes a hefty profit selling such programs. With that program, there wasn’t any control by the teacher of the curriculum, and it was soulless. Every day some student would say, “Do we really have to?” or “They can’t be serious – this is so lame.” This corporate program was corporate. Our required chapters included one on student protests against the loss of MTV (dated, yes) and, yes, I checked, at one time MTV was connected to Scholastic – and so on in that vein. The pages on proposed jobs and salaries neglected anything about the cost of living or a living wage. Anything in the classroom I created to go along with the curriculum was supposed to be copyrighted by Scholastic, but I wasn’t supposed to veer much. I had a script of words to say for each lesson, maybe so I wouldn’t ever suggest that required computer use was harmful to student health. I worked with one nice student hard to get him to read an easy-reading book, and when he finished he threw it across the room and said it was trash, why should he bother trying to read. I had to agree. There’s junk, and there’s literature.
When my better behaved Scholastic class was taken from me, 3 confident teachers (1 long-time teacher, 2 long-time teacher coaches) went and found out just what I meant. Across the hall in another classroom, I could see papers and books flying along with the sounds and movement of student chaos, and then suddenly the coaches disappeared and left that lone teacher fully alone. There was no one for all, all for one, the door was locked, and that teacher started just to sit and just watch students work alone on packets of handouts instead of the Scholastic program.
This bill also proposes to do a pilot study that will give whichever school and whichever teachers are involved lots of money. This is how it was with Scholastic, as in Massachusetts the 5 years of evidence-based research occurred in Massachusetts. Turning schools into research programs with bribes is not a good practice. Anyone with sense can tell you that students deserve the best, instead of to be guinea pigs to create a new evidence-based program that someone can sell. What is good for students is something good teachers can see, and it doesn’t take research to do it. Then, we also don’t need to collect all this data that is also part of the proposed bill – student data collection disrupts privacy rights, wastes useful time, and hogs energy.
Our education standards have been propped up as the answer to education, but this is a farce. Academic freedom is the life of education, and our education standards take this away along with allowing corporations an inside track.
You know what academic standard is missing from our K-12 scientific curriculum? A general scientific standard anywhere at all – in biology, chemistry, physics – that considers environmental health in relation to all technologies (e.g. GMOs, chemicals, radiofrequencies, ultrasound). At least, it was so when I checked about 5 or 8 years ago. When our educational standards were first designed, our commissioners were also closely tied to the tech industry. So, it can’t be an accident that our educational standards repeatedly require the use of digital technology, such as absurdly in preK. There are people who think tech is great, but it is an impediment to learning and a waste of time to dump it in all subjects.
Yes, I did prepare a bill that I thought quite reasonable to limit school screen time and it never saw the light of day. H.4642 makes it easy for the commissioner to be bribed, as well, and to prefer digital curriculum that annoys teachers because it is typically privacy invasive, micromanaging, screen-centric, black boxed, and scripted outside of local and teacher control. And now I see the same raw deal that left me with Scholastic in a ‘failing’ school moving forward to impact all schools through H.4642.
I have heard that legislators are afraid to disagree with leadership because their individual town or city will be harmed. For me, when we try to protect just our own turf, we lose sight of bigger issues. I understand that if leadership targeted a town, that this would hit hard. I’m guessing this could hit new fire station equipment, extra school funding, even a dangerous bridge repair. However, house legislators need to call out leadership to remove the power that comes with abject compliance. At the very least, plan a rebellion. We need something better for all in the long run, such as to protect students from industrial interests, to address environmental health, pharmaceutical costs, or the high cost of public utilities (at a time when their own profits are excessive), and to make sure that the legislature is democratic and responsive to the public instead of to industry.
Note: Thanks to Act on Mass for sharing happenings on this bill in their newsletter.