Why Curriculum Doesn't Matter

...Administrative convenience9 Or simply blind adherence to a particular view of school organization...

...The notion has some appeal In my view they are essentially expressions of fundamental differences in morals or in conceptions of the polity, rather than educational initiatives If I am right, then debates over differing educational methods are at root symbolic conflicts over exactly whose values and lifestyles will be elevated to official status While this may make us cautious about expecting specific social outcomes from changes m school policy or practice, it would be a mistake to think that social symbolism is without impact The schools, aftei all, are a receptacle for many of the society's most important images ot itself—the mythologies of the melting pot and equal opportunity, for example—and a society's self-image has a powerful effect on its aims, its collective action, and the activities it will tolerate from its citizens All of this may help us understand why school reforms seem so important, even though they appear to have little direct effect But does it tell us anything about what the schools ought to do...

...Are they worth the struggle9 Doubt spreads, and with it inertia Or perhaps we think the schools should improve education tor the poor and thereby remove barners to equal opportunity...

...A moment's reflection on the current vacillation and contusion over school desegregation makes one wonder During the 1960s America moved with painful hesitation toward more effective enforcement ot the Blown decision of 1954, and by the very end of the decade real progress was visible for the first time But many ot those gams aie now in doubt Of course, more is lacking than the example of clear commitment in the national government The very object of all the effort—desegregated schools—has begun to seem an impossible enterprise School officials and teachers are not infrequently unwilling or incapable instruments of desegregation policy Black students complain increasingly of harassment and discrimination —they demand separate curricula, separate programs, separate buildings What gets taught in desegregated schools of this sort...

...Why Curriculum Doesn't Matter BY DAVID COHEN IT IS A LITTLE difficult to wnte about what schools ought to teach Or at least to write about it with anything but a sense of reserve Do we think the schools should teach racial justice...

...Just as Federal efforts began to move in this direction in the mid-'60s, James Coleman and his associates published the most comprehensive analysis of American schools ever earned out Their findings indicated that differences in the resources schools devoted to education had no effect on differences in how much children learned Reanalyses of the evidence only confirmed the Coleman leport, and the search for othei evidence turned up mountains of earlier research pointing to the same conclusions As if to echo all this, evaluations of various recent efforts to impiove education for poor children have also yielded uniformly negative results Except in a few university-based demonstration programs, none of the billions spent on compensatory education seems to have improved achievement beyond what would have occurred in any event Here too, however, there is more than official failure All of these programs operated on the assumption that improved school performance would lead to more schooling, and that more schooling would lead to a more equal distribution of jobs and income But as the facts were brought to bear on these assumptions late in the last decade, the logic did not quite hold up When we take the influence of inherited social and economic status and educational attainment into account, test scores do not have much of an impact on the distribution of income True, people who go farther in school get "better" jobs, and people with better test scores go farther in school Yet neither of these relation-ships is as strong as the prevailing dogmas would have us believe, and it is not clear what they mean If people who attend school longer get better jobs because schools make them more capable intellectually, we would expect that smarter people would wind up with better jobs, everything else being equal When everything else is equal, though, smarter people don't get better jobs Indeed, within broad occupational rankings it appears that the determinants ot success on the job have nothing to do with test scores, and a good deal to do with attitudes and behavior This suggests that the stress on education as a remedy for inequality may be strategically incorrect Finally, we might think that schools ought to impart more humane values and perspectives, by virtue of what they teach or how it is taught This idea is seen in such diverse quarters as the black studies/ Negro history upsurge, the movement toward open classrooms, and various efforts at cuinculum reform But there has been a good deal of research on the development of children's political views, and most of it has found that these change little or not at all over time If schools had much of an impact on them, they would hardly be so stable through childhood and adolescence One might counter that the whole purpose of the public schools' program of political socialization is to instill a common body of ideas m all children Yet the famous Eight Year Study of students in orthodox and progressive colleges and universities —including schools like Bennington that encourage difference—reveals little change in their attitudes during the undergraduate period And a massive survey of Catholic Americans showed that the pohucal mmd set of parochial school graduates was scarcely different from that of similarly situated Catholics who attended public schools These results cannot be very heartening for those people who envision the schools as a vehicle for liberalizing (or conservatizmg) the attitudes and values of the next generation's adults If anything, they indicate either that basic attitudes are relatively intractable or that very different schools would be required to produce much change In fact, all the evidence leads to the conclusion that schools might best be regarded as passive reinforcers of abilities, aspirations and values established elsewhere In a way this should come as no surprise, for the schools are the only public institutions devoted to socialization in a society dominated by private institutions and associations It is unreasonable to expect a single public agency to compete effectively with the influences of family, religion, ethnic group membership, and inherited social status NONETHELESS, almost everyone holds the contrary view Americans have a passion for translating their latest ideas about social change into programs for public school reform Proposals to remake society by way of the schools predate Dewey, and they continue to multiply Nor is it hard to understand why reformers take this tack The schools almost always proclaim the offending dogmas or social relations as gospel, it is almost universally assumed that virtually anything can be accomplished by rearranging the institutional environment, and it is more alluring to believe that change can be produced by teaching children new ideas than to believe that it must be produced by forcing new social arrangements on adults In a sense, then, the American obsession with school reform is perfectly intelligible Given the belief in the shapmg power of the social environment, it is no more surpus-mg to find Americans thrashing out their disagreements about society in debates ovei pedagogical theory and schools than it was to find medieval intellectuals working out their social arguments in debates over theology and churches If schooling is nothing else in this country, it has become an important vessel for all kinds of larger social concerns Does this mean that school reform proposals and the ensuing controversies should be read only for their symbolic import...

...Is it the preservation of status advantages...

...Theie may be a modest lesson here Children are universally compelled to spend six hours a day in school for 10 years To the extent that we continue to think of schools as the place where positive social ends are achieved (equality, community, brotherhood), we might be willing to tolerate unpleasantness visited on children as an unhappy but worthwhile price for harvests gatheied later Yet if our belief in the schools' omnipotence fades, we may be willing to confront some simple problems concerning the way schools treat children As I see them, the problems come in three clumps One involves the classification and assignment of students to ability groups, to high school cumcula, to classes for the retarded, or to various other sorts of special" education This is hardly trivial, whether one is admitted to a regular or retarded class, to an academic or vocational curriculum, is likely to make quite a dent in one's academic and later career And assignments are almost always mandated by school officials, usually with little consultation and no appeal, review or external scrutiny They are made partly on the basis of teachers' or counselors' uidividual judgments (which often carry overtones of punishment), and partly on the basis of one or two test scores (which are subject to considerable measurement error, to say nothmg of uncertam applicability) There never has been any evidence that "dull" children assigned to a group of similar children learn more than dull children who remain in a mixed setting Nor is there any evidence that college-bound students grow more stupid m a mixed curriculum than in an academic one (although they might acquire less expertise in certain subject areas) But in both cases there is plenty of evidence that the mere classification has a considerable bearing on students' subsequent chances In other words, nothing indicates that these classifications serve their ostensible purpose—the improvement of learning—but much indicates that they affect later classifications which themselves have a real social and economic significance If there is no convincing proof that school classifications serve a valid educational purpose, what is their function...

...But the changes suggested here have the singular virtue of being consistent with what schools actually seem to do, rather than with reformers' views of what they might do...

...Probably all of these considerations play a role, but none of them justifies present practice If high school courses were arranged the same way colleges arrange theirs (that is, by area concentration, limited prerequisites and student choice), that much flexibility, fairness, and responsiveness would be gamed without the slightest loss of academic quality The chief advantage, of course, would be elimination of the needless and irrational compulsion that evokes boredom, passivity or hostility Similarly, if ability groups in elementary schools were eliminated, the only cost would be the teachers' sense of convenience There might be less damage to students, and there would surely be fewer invidious distinctions And if careful external review and redress procedures were provided for any classification decisions—especially those grave matters concerning "special" students—nothing would be sacrificed except the potential for caprice and unfairness THE SECOND major group of problems involves disciplinary mechanisms The most offensive means of in-school discipline is the use of academic work as a form of punishment That the practice is widespread makes it no less repugnant and counterproductive, it is rational only if the purpose of schools is to teach contempt for learning and indifference to books The use of expulsion and suspension is a different story The ultimate weapons in a school's disciplinary arsenal, these presumably are not resorted to until it is clear that there is no way to accommodate an individual student within the school, or to help him in some other institution But while there are many youngsters who cannot come to teims with the schools, it is not manifest that expulsion is a proper solution m a system of universal compulsory education, nor that these extreme measures are generally employed equitably Too frequently they are used to get rid of students the schools prefer not to deal with, and typically the students involved are not accorded even minimal protections They have no representation and no recourse to regular review or appeal Like the imposition of academic work as a means of discipline, expulsion and suspension teach by example, it is hard to imagine a student coming away from such an experience feeling that he has been treated fairly Finally, there are problems related to the schools' collection, application and retention of information about students and their families Many school systems keep files containing unchallenged judgments by teachers and guidance counselors concerning a student's ability, motivation or promise for future work, and these may be used to his detriment without his ever being aware of their existence Scores on IQ and achievement tests are also recorded and given to prospective employers or other schools without permission, even though the tests are of doubtful validity in this regard The results of still more dubious psychological or career aptitude exams are usually treated in the same heedless fashion In some instances, parents as well as students are subject to informal evaluations by school officials that find their way into widely available dossiers The schools' precise legal obligations in these areas are only beginning to be defined, but as a matter of policy the lax management of information is neither wise nor useful By collecting more data than they need, much of it questionable, and generally excluding families from access to it, the schools have effectively barred any opportunity to challenge then- version of things One might be less troubled if schooling was not thought so important, but there seems little prospect of that opinion receding Changes in these areas would have limited value, at least by the standard of previous liberal school reform They promise no shift in students' abilities, no change in their attitudes or values, and no consequent improvement m the aptitude or character of the next generation They are essentially procedural, yet might teach by example, offering a model of institutional arrangements that could be applied elsewhere Their basic justification, however, is that they would make schools more humane This is a modest goal, and it rests on what I admit is a more skeptical conception of the schools' influence than is currently popular...