The case for putting curriculum on a reform pedestal
While city education officials have made reforming teacher quality their first priority, others argue that by improving curriculum they could do more with less.
In the GothamSchools community section, former president of the Community Education Council for District 2Matthew Levey writes that creating a citywide curriculum would not only help new and struggling teachers, it would be more efficient than having schools write their own.
Curriculum reform must play an equal role in our efforts. A recent Brookings Institution report noted curriculum’s strong impact on student outcomes. Importantly, in a system as large as ours,State adds another testing day to schools’ schedules
Teachers and principals are not taking kindly to a recent State Education Department decision to have students take a test in between their already-scheduled high stakes state exams.
State officials scheduled the field test, an experimental exam that doesn’t count toward schools’ and students’ progress, on May 4, between the English and math exams that all students in grades three through eight take. The new schedule means that over the course of a dozen days, students across New York will take three tests, leading administrators and teachers to worry that “test fatigue” will set in and affect students’ scores.
