What happens when teachers don’t feel fulfilled teaching a highly successful curriculum? They destroy it, and they destroy children’s education along with it.
That is the chief takeaway from a Time piece on the renewed push to emphasize phonics in the reading curriculum. The piece jumps off with the experience of Kareem Weaver, an Oakland teacher who says: “For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading.”
This was due to a “very structured, phonics-based curriculum.” Despite the obvious success of that curriculum, Weaver says teachers hated it. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” Weaver said. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out.” They succeeded, and Oakland children paid the price. Reading proficiency in the Oakland Unified School District abruptly decreased from 2014 to 2015, when the curriculum change was introduced. It hasn’t rebounded to pre-2015 levels. The district has a reading proficiency score of just 34%, well below the already stupidly low California state average of 51%.
Weaver and other Oakland teachers have recognized their mistake. They are working to reinstitute a phonics-based curriculum. But it is much harder to rebuild something than to tear it down, and Oakland students have been set back years by all this drama.
And no, it is not “dehumanizing” or “colonizing” to expect teachers to use a proven, structured curriculum that actually works. That is quite literally their job, and like all responsible, employed adults, they are rightly expected to perform their duty.
Teaching is a demanding job, as it should be. Teachers have to deal with impressionable children, which is hard enough, but they also have to prepare them for the future. That is a lot of responsibility. It requires putting the needs of children before your preferences. If you are not fulfilled by helping students learn — if you instead seek to be validated by curriculum — then you have gone into teaching for the wrong reason.
Weaver and other Oakland teachers figured this out in the end. Better late than never, but the students they failed will never have those years back.
That’s why it must be clear to every teacher who enters the workforce now that evidence-based curricula such as phonics have been adopted for a reason. Possibly the only bright side of the COVID-19 pandemic is the renewed scrutiny and focus on schools and how important they are for children. Children, not the whims of teachers or administrators, should come first in every discussion of school policy and curriculum.
