The General Education Curriculum A Case of Calling the PROBLEM the SOLUTION Miriam Cherkes-Julkowski The essential criterion for first identifying students with learning disability, providing services to them and then exiting them from support services, is performance in the general curriculum. Failure in it suggests a learning disability (LD). Success in it defines normality. Programs for the learning disabled are designed to enable students to pass according to the objectives of the general curriculum. IEP exit criteria most often are expressed as success in the general curriculum. Teachers are there to “help” the students toward this end and teacher training programs are there to certify that they can. Simply put, the general curriculum and those who minister to it dominate any special education interest, i.e., dominate any interest in individual differences. In this sense, the general curriculum functions as a self-organizing system that marshals its components into a self-confirming, self-enhancing entity. As such, the general curriculum and the culture in which it resides would recruit all teachers, all students, all resources to preserve it. Those, teachers or students, who were effective toward that end would be regarded as successful. In its self-enhancement, the general curriculum would suppress or normalize individual differences where possible and reject those whose idiosyncrasies could not be altered in the interest of preserving the stability of the larger order. Swenson (1997) grounds the natural development toward dominance in well defined principles governing self-ordering systems, animate and inanimate. In his example of the Benard experiment (a classic experiment demonstrating the formation of a macrostructure through uniform behavior at the individual, molecular level), Swenson spares no word in describing the inevitable intolerance of variance, i.e., intolerance of individual differences: ...the variability in the size and shape is progressively eliminated by a process of selection to produce a final state of regularly arrayed cells of uniform size and shape. Special education, under the guise of least restrictive environment, abets the uniformity inducing hegemony of the general curriculum by finding ways for LD students to blend in with it; suppressing or altering individual differences, molding each LD student into one of the normal, “regularly arrayed cells of uniform size and shape”. Note the semantic twist. The least restrictive environment is the one that most effectively restricts individual differences. This reflects a universal principle: ample degrees of freedom for the larger system (in this case, the curriculum) come at the expense of restrictions at the member level (in this case, the individual). A Restrictive, special education environment, by force of implication, would be one unconstrained enough to allow for variability. Contrary to the actual meaning of words and events, the so called least restrictive environment would be the one that locks the students into the homogeneity of the regular classroom. Short pull out interventions that offer strategies for a better fit within the general curriculum would be next. Once all efforts at uniformity had failed, rejection would be the only alternative, i.e., a segregated program outside of the general curriculum. Rejection would be a “win” for the identified student, who now belligerently is allowed his or her individuality, albeit at the fairly high price of being relegated to the category of maladaptive. The more effective the process in the short term, the more doomed to failure in the end. By ensuring its stability through homogeneity, by encrusting itself against change (manifest in part by individual differences), the opportunity for the general curriculum to develop and adapt to actual circumstances that are not themselves stable and encrusted is severely limited if not defeated. Without variability, without individual differences, there is no opportunity for adaptation. Here again the reader is referred to Swenson (2000) for the theoretical and empirical justification for these ideas. Passing in the General Curriculum Pass is meant here in both of its meanings. The obvious one is to fit within the general curriculum by avoiding failing grades, meeting curriculum and teacher requirements well enough to earn an adequate evaluation. It might mean also to earn promotion but in the current educational model promotion is not earned either by the student or the teacher, it is given. The less obvious and here the more important meaning is the one often used when a minority group successfully pretends to be a member of the mainstream community. Edgerton (1993) tapped into this idea in his phrase “cloak of competence” that referred to imitative social skills affixed superficially in order to allow individuals with mental retardation to pass in the community. If the goal is to enlist in the performance standards of the general curriculum, imitation is a highly efficient path to goal attainment. I believe that this is what education is becoming for both identified and nonidentified students, an exercise in affixing shallow, empty routines designed to pass for knowledge and understanding when it is not. The general curriculum encourages this in ensuring compliance to its standards by placing a prime commodity on memorized imitation of prescribed ways of doing things. In the end, regardless of the shallow differences that comprise the reform debate, whether a teacher or school professes to be constructivist or an adherent of the basics, what matters is accurate imitation of memorized procedures, i.e., algorithms for computing, the steps in the scientific process, the hard and fast rules for writing an expository essay. This is what is evaluated on the statewide standards tests, so this is what is taught. In order for special education students to adapt, they must imitate these procedures too. The Impoverished General Curriculum That our general curriculum is failing all of its students is well established. Goals 2000, set in 1994, aimed for a curriculum that would place the U.S. above all other countries in math and science. As of the year 2000, the National Center for Education Statistics, Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) reports that, even within its own standards, our curriculum fails to reach the top half of the 27 ranked countries in math, science or literacy (Lemke, Calsyn, Lippman, Jocelyn, Kastberg, Lui, Roey, Williams, Kruger & Bairu, 2001). Our curriculum is 15th for reading literacy, below Iceland, Ireland and Korea. It is ranked 18th in math, adding this time the Czech Republic whose students perform better than ours. In science our ranking is 14th, still below the Czech Republic, Ireland and Korea. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reports that our curriculum produces students who can recite scientific facts but cannot design an experiment or explain the reasoning behind one (Applebome, 1997; Henry, 1997). The status of science in 2000 (Lemke, et al, 2001) shows a decline in high school science performance and at the same time shows that teachers certified in elementary or general education make poorer teachers of science than those with actual science but no education background. It would not be to anybody’s surprise that this is true in math as well. Math majors who become teachers produce better math students than anyone else, followed by math education majors with general education teachers doing worse than teachers with no education background at all. At least in math and science, the less exposure to teacher education, the better. The literature written by professors of math education and read by teachers to be, it turns out, has little if anything to do with math. Instead, driven perhaps by Accountability Angst, emphasis is diverted from learning any math particulars and instead placed on promoting respect for cultural differences in understanding math and the pretense that math will undermine democracy and subjugate anyone who learns it as a set of principles independent of cultural interpretation. Here are some references, the titles of which go a long way to make the point: Bishop, A. J. (1990). Western mathematics: The secret weapon of cultural imperialism. Race & Class, 32, 2, 51-65. Pool, P. (1990). Blinded by culture. Mathematics Teaching, 133, 12-14. The failure of teacher training programs to deliver math proficient job candidates to schools is disturbingly apparent in an editorial written in the New York Post on January 31, 2002. The writer is understandably disturbed by the allocation of 9 million dollars from New York City board of education funds to the remediation of teachers of math who have failed to demonstrate adequate math knowledge. President Bush seems to be aware of the problem. In his 2002 state of the union address he called for “upgrading” teacher education programs. It is not just math and science. The debilitating role of the general education, whole language and reading recovery curricula has now been the topic of much discussion both professionally (Adams, 1998) and in the popular forum, as in the recent January 5, 2002 op-ed piece in the New York Times (Staples, 2002). As long as success in whole language defines success or passing in the general curriculum, those students who cannot function within it will be identified as having either significant problems or learning disability, this would leave 40% of students (Staples, 2002) identified with learning disability, a figure that surpasses even the current inflation of incidence reported by the U.S. Office of Education, 17.5% (National Council for Learning Disabilities, 2001). As long as success in whole language defines success in the general curriculum, once identified, learning disabled special education students are subjected to the need to be taught to read in a way that synchronizes with the whole language program in the classroom in which they must function. This creates an outrageous distortion in which students who fail in a failed program (Massey News, 1997) must be brought to acquire those dysfunctional skills that did not and do not work for them; all so that they can pass in the program while most probably failing in reading itself. Impoverished Teacher Education Programs Rita Kramer (1991), in her book entitled, Ed School Follies, finds that less teacher education is always better. She documents that teacher education programs are empty of content, disregarding the lack of knowledge of their prospective teachers and in fact encouraging them to believe that education is not about imparting knowledge at all but instead is to “foster life adjustment” (page 26). If adjustment means passing, if it means becoming one of the “regularly arrayed cells”, then the graduates of teacher education programs are agents for conformity and not for insight, change and development. Little wonder that where achievement is concerned, the best teachers are those who have escaped exposure to teacher education programs. Among the serious content that teacher education programs fail to transmit to future teachers is the nature of reading and therefore how it should be taught. At the University of Connecticut, for example, there is no required education course committed to the well established research finding that reading is based in understanding the individual sounds, i.e., phonemes, into which speech can be segmented and to which letter patterns can be mapped; that the sequence of reading instruction should systematically reveal regularities in the print code and not begin with the words most often used by children, as it is in the whole language approach. Instead, teacher education students take courses that only purport to be about the teaching of reading like the one with the following catalogue description: Integration of concepts of linguistic diversity, social and community issues, and exceptionality with clinical experience. A review of requirements at Columbia’s Teacher College and Harvard’s education program shows a similar emphasis on “good” literature and cultural diversity without regard for the facts about what reading is and therefore how it should be taught. At Columbia, listed reading courses address the issue of literature and place culture at the center of defining what reading is: Literacy, culture and the teaching of reading Advanced study of children's literature. At Harvard, the emphasis is on a core of 11 courses, at least 8 of which have no discernible teachable content at all: Visual and Environmental Studies. Design Science: Studio/Seminar Visual Mathematics: Studio/Seminar Education for Social and Political Change Introduction to Critical Theory and Pedagogy Teachers, Leadership, and Power: School Reform from the Classroom Experience in Education: Building a Curriculum The Design of Secondary Schools Early Adolescence: Middle-School Teaching Cognitive Frameworks for Curriculum Design Student Work as Evidence: Investigating Learning and Teaching Special Reading or Research in Curriculum and Supervision The Fall Out of a Failed Curriculum: Special Education Teachers trained to deliver the general education curriculum are not trained in the curriculum. Their own teacher preparation programs have little to say about the concepts, ideas and skills that comprise the content of an education (see Harvard’s course list or one from any number of teacher education programs). Their lack of understanding of the essence of what should be taught renders them incapable of explaining things to their students. Limited by their own entrained inadequacies, they inflexibly resort to drill and repetition as a way to instill ideas rather than allowing the ideas themselves to suggest the various ways in which they might be demonstrated. In their third, masters degree year of their teacher training programs, my education students have told me that learning is nothing more than memorization. Having used the one tool at their disposal, repetition, teachers have nothing left but to conclude that students who have not learned this way, can’t or won’t. If the conclusion is that they won’t, the diagnosis is emotionally disturbed, ADHD or oppositionality. If the conclusion is that they can’t, the diagnosis, assuming ample intelligence, is learning disability. The great fuss about over identification in special education has been laid at the feet of the “profit takers”, those who undeservedly want to reap the advantages of accommodations. An equal amount should be laid at the feet of the general education curriculum, those who teach in it and those who “educate” the teachers to do so. By demanding increasing compliance to an increasingly empty curriculum, they force an increasing number of students out and then hold their reentry hostage to their total compliance to the curriculum that was too empty for them in the first place. The “Special” Education Arm of the General Curriculum With some very rare exceptions, special education students get a double dosage. In line with the repetition solution, they are removed from that which could not be made understandable to them in the first place and brought for “support” into special education programs that ply them with more repetition of the same thing. Only this time, if it is possible, still emptier in its added commitment to promoting the idea that the key to learning sits outside the material to be learned. They are sent to special education programs to learn those meta-strategies, i.e., those strategies that sit outside the material, as an expedient way to get the grade (Cherkes-Julkowski, submitted for publication). The meta-strategies come under many names: metacognition strategies, cognitive behavioral modification, organization strategies, executive function strategies, study skill strategies, mnemonic devices. Under any name, the strategy purveyors proudly admit that the function of their strategies is to find ways of manipulating (organizing) material so that it can be repeated without ever being assimilated. Here are some of the most common ones: Don’t read the chapter. Read the questions at the end of the book and refer to the chapter to answer only those specific questions. This is especially effective in inflating verbal SAT scores. Use section headings as a way to avoid more independent organization of the material. Memorize study guides given by the teacher. Memorize formulas for computations without regard to the underlying principles or the relationships among computational procedures. Memorize steps for writing a paper: first paragraph tells what you want to say, next three paragraphs must say one thing each about what you claim to say in paragraph 1, paragraph 5 repeats paragraph 1. Memorize how to read words and how to spell them without regard for any regularities within the print code. Memorize the steps in the scientific process, without regard for how a problem might be solved, a question answered. Memorize strategies for memorizing. While effective in allowing special education students to pass in the general curriculum, these strategies are ineffective or even prohibitive toward the end of actual learning. Ironically, memorization would not be a problem if knowledge were rooted in deep conceptualization and none of these machinations would be necessary. What would be necessary, however, would be a radical change in curriculum where learning took precedence over memorization, understanding over efficient performance, teaching over repetition and content over empty imitation. As long as special education slavishly works to eliminate or at least disguise individual differences so as to allow students with learning disability to pass, it ceases to be special education. As long as it holds out the general curriculum as the standard for achievement, it allows a festering problem to be labeled as a solution. As long as the general curriculum continues without changing, it inures itself against the constructive influence of those who do not do well within it, fails to make the necessary adaptations for itself and ultimately self destructs (Swenson, 1997, 2000). References Adams, M.J. (1998). Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Applebome, Peter (1997). "Pupils Know but Cannot Apply Scientific Facts," New York Times, May 4, 1997. Cherkes-Julkowski, M. Can America survive its curriculum? Will a generation of learning disabled students be refound? Journal of Learning Disabilities, submitted for publication. Edgerton, R. B. (1993). The cloak of competence: Revised and updated. Berkeley: University of California Press. Henry, Tamara (1997) "Shallow Science," USA Today, May 5, 1997. Kramer, R. (1991). Ed School Follies. Authors Guild Backinprint.com. Lincoln: Nebraska. Lemke, M., Calsyn, C., Lippman, L., Jocelyn, D., Kastberg, Y., Lui, S., Roey, T., Williams, T., Kruger, T. & Bairu, G. (2001). Outcomes of Learning: Results from the 2000 Program for International Student Assessment of 15-Year-Olds in Reading, Mathematics, and Science Literacy. National Center for Education Statistics (2000). Office of Educational Research and Improvement, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education. Available: http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa. National Assessment of Educational Progress. The Nation’s Report Card, 2000, Available: http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ Reading Recovery Failure creates low self esteem (1997). Massey News,October 27. Available: http://masseynews.massey.ac.nz/1999/press releases/27-10-99.htm Swenson, R. (1997). Autocatakinetics, Evolution, and the Law of Maximum Entropy Production: A Principled Foundation Toward the Study of Human Ecology. Advances in Human Ecology, Vol. 6, pp 1-47. Available: http://www.spontaneourorder.net. Swenson, R. (2000). Spontaneous Order, Autocatakinetic Closure, and Development of Space- Time, Annals of New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 901, pp 311-319. Staples, B. (2002). How the Clip ‘N Snip’s Owner Changed Special Education. New York Times. Available: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/05/opinion/05SAT3.html