Oscar Newman

Reading Response #1

Educational Objectives – Help or Hindrance

Educational objectives need to be clearly articulated, according to conventional wisdom (from

1967) in order to state goals of a curriculum, organize content, and allow for assessment.

However, the emphasis on objectives is not without its own history and stems from the

scientific movement in education.

1918 Bobbit in the curriculum takes the most functional approach: go out in the world and

identify the “forms of knowledge men need” and then establish these as objectives for the

curriculum. More specifically: determine a structure of these skills into units and then

determine lessons that will teach the sequence of understanding that will lead to mastery of

some important knowledge.

An interesting criticism of the use of objectives in education is that the teachers mentioned

abstractly in the article seem to be creating curriculum independently. This may be part of the

issue. Is the job of teachers to create curriculum? Is there role merely to be consumers of

content? Do teachers have time to create curriculum? Maybe not... 1

“Milking the children for what is educationally valuable”? Really? Yeesh! This is literally the

1 In Chicago Public Schools, for example, elementary (meaning K-8, there are few middle schools in Chicago)
teachers lost five 30-minute preparation periods as a consequence of implementing a 20% longer school day
that resulted in a seven-day strike in the 2012-2013 academic year. Teachers currently have the five hour-
long preps that were left over, one of which is principal-directed. The current proposed contract gives
principals direction over three out of those five prep periods (primarily to allow principals to use teachers as
substitutes since teachers can no longer bank their sick days as in the past; i.e., “use it or lose it”). High
school teachers have more preps (but are in the same union). This was an important part of the recent strike
authorization vote that was resoundingly (94% of union members voted to authorize) successful. The strike is
currently set to begin on October 17. The point of all of this is: we're supposed to design our curriculum as
well? When? Apparently on our own time and dime when we are not dealing with responsibilities in our
personal lives.
worst possible analogy for what we may more commonly term a “teachable moment” I have

encountered.

Problem areas in the field of curriculum:

• Too many standards2.

• Specificity/convergence of standard may vary by discipline. (Art education seems to be

a favorite “problem discipline” in many of our readings.)

• Assessment: possible in some areas, arbitrary in others.(See above)

• Assessment: Focus only on that which is measurable; not everything is.(“But how do

you make sure that our investment in public education is a sound one?””How can we

shut down the bad schools and fire the bad teachers?”)

• Prescriptive objectives may detract from the learning outcomes in experiential learning.

(Have fun telling your principal that when they ask you to submit lesson plans every

Sunday night. This is also a fun contrast to Understanding by Design, which seems to

take the opposite approach.)

The article seems to circle around a fairly standard false dilemma in education: Is teaching an

art or a science? This may well speak to a poor understanding of both science and art, but it

seems to encompass the difficulty in establishing standards for successful teaching without

limiting the ability of teachers to harness creativity to teach effectively in very different ways. It

would be interesting to compare this to recent attempts to address this issue, like the National

Board for Professional Teaching Standards documents, like What Teachers Should Know and

2 A potentially interesting point to revisit now in the wake of the National standards movement.
Be Able to Do.

Conclusion: There are standards and objectives in schools. We can treat them as open areas

for interpretation, and it is clearly important to understand the history of why competing ideas

succeeded or failed over time. I would add two areas unmentioned by the author, but

absolutely important in discussions of teaching. The first is teacher preparation. In the realms

of science and mathematics, with which I am most familiar, the preparation of teachers in

those two areas is poor. As a result, the implementation of whatever standard is used to

determine what is taught is weakened. Second, in the face of poor teacher preparation, there

is a focus on “teacher-proof” curricula3 that remove the critical practitioner component of

planning and present scripted lessons with pre-selected objectives. Should teachers have

resources to use? Absolutely, it would be asking a lot of inexperienced teachers to also have

to learn to design and implement a curriculum 4. At the same time, academic freedom and the

ability to creatively provide meaningful instruction may be necessary to keep teachers in the

classroom5.

3 Of course, there are also progressive reasons for standardized curricula, e.g., high mobility rates in a district.
In Chicago Public Schools, the overall rate in 2018 was 11%. Notably, this was higher for some subgroups;
e.g., Black students (15%), Low Income (12%), and students with IEPs (13%). The state rate was 7%. Last,
this masks a greater discrepancy between different schools: my first school (91% Low Income, 14.6%
mobility), my current school (68.8%, 0.9%), my children's school (63.5%, 3.5%), another school in my
school's network (100%, 24.4%) represent very different educational experiences. Standardized curricula, at
best, represent an attempt to address equity.
4 Also, this was my introduction to teaching. I survived, but I am not certain it represents best practices.
5 Also, don't get me started on the “Teacher Shortage.” Turnover is a real issue that represents hemorrhaging
resources in the most challenging districts, but the continual sense of bewilderment of the exodus of
professionals whose pay, benefits, bargaining abilities, and working conditions are under neoliberal assault is
asinine. See also OECD data on ratio of US teacher salaries for similarly educated workers in other fields.