If you examine Amplify ELA, a highly rated literacy curriculum recommended for use in a number of states, you will notice something interesting. An entire unit on Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera has been removed from their 8th grade course of study and inserted into 7th grade. The readings, assignments, and assessments remain essentially unchanged. So why is this content, designed to be rigorous and challenging for 8th grade, being moved down a year? Was it too easy for the older cohort? Did it flow better from the 6th grade curriculum?
No. The unit is not more developmentally appropriate, in either form or structure, for 7th graders, nor was it designed with them in mind. There was simply more content that had to be added to 8th grade, so the unit was pushed down to make room. Amplify is not unique in this; curricular push-down is happening across all content areas and age groups in the American public school system.
Why is this curricular push-down happening? There are a few reasons, including the increasingly competitive nature of college admissions and the ever-increasing difficulty of standardized tests of achievement.
More students are applying to college than ever before. The desire to be competitive for an institution of higher learning in turn drives the desire for honors-level and Advanced Placement courses at the high school level. “Playing the Admissions Game: Student Reactions to Increasing College Competition” examines these trends and how students have responded to them. This 2009 article notes that modern high school are much more likely to take an advanced class such as calculus than their counterparts ten or twenty years ago. For a high school student to be prepared to take calculus their senior year, as is increasingly the expectation, they need to enroll junior year in the math class that might otherwise have been taken senior year — and then the class that would have been junior year in sophomore year, and so on. The push-down continues throughout all levels of curriculum.
In 1994, David Berliner and Bruce Biddle published the book The Manufactured Crisis, an analysis of myths about achievement in American schools and who benefits from their perpetuation. I highly recommend this thorough, well-researched read, which is no less relevant now than it was at the time of its publication. Today, I particularly want to highlight a key section from the second chapter. “According to Robert Linn, M. Elizabeth Graue, and Nancy M. Sanders, each year students tend to score higher on [commercial] tests” (p. 31). On a number of tests published by private companies, such as the SAT, student achievement actually increases every year. That’s our goal, isn’t it? We as teachers are always pushed to improve our student scores over time. However, “these tests [such as the SAT, MAT, CTBS] are recalibrated every seven years… [T]he test developers… make certain that in all cases the typical student again scores at the fiftieth percentile rank… In other words, whenever the tests are recalibrated, the achievement gains that students had earned over the past few years are wiped out in the process” (p. 31). This is standard practice, and is done regardless of what else might be happening in our society at the time. For example, in Massachusetts in 2022, the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education decided to raise the passing score on MCAS required to earn a high school diploma, in spite of the fact that students had missed two years of school in a traumatic global pandemic. Additionally, it is important to note that recalibration includes not just reassigning point values but also introducing more difficult questions and content to ensure that only the most accelerated students receive high scores. The curriculum then must be adapted to the new test, and teachers have to teach to the more difficult content in order to ensure their students succeed. That is one cause of the push-down we observed in that Amplify ELA curriculum: what used to be considered 8th grade skills or content by a standardized test manufacturer is now directed at a younger age.
Although this article began with a middle school example, the effects if push-down begin to be felt much earlier in a child’s educational career. The article Debunking the Myth of the Efficacy of Push-down Academics explains that “[e]ven though standardized testing under the [No Child Left Behind] guidelines does not start until a child enters the 3rd grade, many researchers and practitioners argue that the pressure on teachers to have their students perform well on tests has inadvertently created an ‘accountability shovedown’… an attempt by educators and administrators to build stronger academic skills at a younger age so that when the students are old enough to be tested they are more likely to perform well on the tests” (p.2). This is extremely harmful for early childhood education, where young students are losing vital, developmentally-necessary time on imaginary and social play in order to meet increasing academic demands.
This curriculum push-down serves no one. It creates students who are anxious, overwhelmed, and being asked to do developmentally-inappropriate school work (for example, the increasing introduction of algebra to students who are still acquiring abstract mathematical thinking). It devalues the professional expertise of teachers, requiring them to act in contradiction of their own values and what they know will benefit students. It places ever-increasing pressure on teachers to meet impossible accountability standards where the goalpost is constantly moving. All of this contributes to the known problem of teacher burnout dissatisfaction and burnout. Why play a losing game, where you know you will never succeed and your students will struggle in the process?
So, today’s answer to the question of why teachers leave schools: inappropriate curricular push-down.
