K-12 Curriculum Development

The Galen Education Project – Tract 1
Education is the Guardian of the Past & the Trustee of the Future
The Well-Intentioned ‘Race to the Top’ Leaves Only Teachers Behind
It will take unprecedented courage to take command of our own narrative and reduce our vulnerability
There are some great teachers, and even some great Teacher Preparation programs, but these are random occurrences where consistency is essential. The reason is simple: Professional Education is missing fundamental standards found in all other professions. There is no standard curriculum, no sincere effort to identify Best Instructional Practices, and truckloads of weak consultants and players with diluted degrees serving up their own brands of Faculty Development. Courses with the very same title and syllabus can be as different in principles and practices as is Lightening is from a Lightening Bug. To be called a profession it is imperative that a profession, one way or another, needs to convene an ongoing forum to collect and prioritize the core content of principles and practices that every member ought to know. Ironically, Teachers worldwide are being held to standards for annual yearly progress of their students. Meanwhile, Professors, Learned Societies & commercial schools, and some painfully self-serving non-profit foundations and Universities never even address the need for solid pedagogic content. Worse, those that do publish material under titles referencing Best Practices are quite simply hype, if not fraudulent. With few exceptions the current crop of in-charge “Leaders” - who once were mere administrators - dangerously resembles the Investment Bankers who remain in charge of the economic systems that they nearly bankrupted. Perhaps the only way to expose and reform this systemic disaster would be a class action by teachers &/or parents & students against all of us who have been complicit in these myriad layers of self-interest actions bordering on malpractice.
Since the likelihood of legal action is a remote it would be wonderfully unprecedented for a leveraged agency, such as the US Department of Education or a sate department of Education to hold a virtual convention of the nation’s leading educators to consider and ideally endorse a covenant of principles and more importantly prescriptive practices. Ideally this would occur on an open-access website that transparently allows these to be challenged, tweaked and further specified for different age-grade-linguistic & situational conditions. Additionally, such a rolling convention also could address differentiated staffing based on what schools are expected to do, and with a differentiated set of Best Practices for each function as exist between doctors and nurses, attorneys and paralegals, etc.
Schools are expected to carry-on three essential although overlapping functions: 1. Teach new concepts, content and a positive disposition toward self-directed on-going learning; 2. Provide assessment and targeted supervised practice in these objectives; and, 3. Operate a massive custodial role that keeps students in school for at least seven-nine hours a day for about 200 days a year for about 13 years, and now through at least 2 more years of college. Our labor market and economic system depend on schools to meet these criteria. The problem is not the expectations, but that staffing, resources and organization do not reflect these societal expectations. And, sadly there is no coordinating free market in which to gain access to the best pedagogical ideas and practices. But, this is another complex issue requiring several additional paragraphs that have now become all wrapped up, if not convoluted by vouchers and charter schools.
Meanwhile, please consider joining the websites below offering a potential startup means of getting the current system moving in the right direction. As an aside, taxpayers would be grateful since increasing classroom effectiveness and adding differentiated staffing could bring about efficiencies that could save billions of dollars with even the smallest degree of adoption. With your support we hope to formally organize ourselves around the title: The Galen Project in honor of Claudius Galen (131-201) a great teacher-practitioner, compiler and systematizer of Greco-Roman medicine, physiology, pharmacy and anatomy. Please join the narrative at: http://teacherprofessoraccountability.ning.com/main/invitation/new?xg_source=msg_wel_network And…http://bestmethodsofinstruction.com/
Anthony V. Manzo, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus,
University of Missouri-KC, (ret.) CSU-Fullerton
avmanzo@aol.com