Everyone Owns the Curriculum
“Some men know the value of education by having it, I know its value by not having it.” Frederick Douglas
Recently, I was talking with the principal of a district about integrating equity and antiracism into their education processes. The focus of the conversation quickly turned to budget and began to crowd out the conversation about the equity work the district wants and needs. Budget and finances often dictate the extent to which schools can do this work. This illustrated to me the need to bridge the perceived gap between curriculum and equity and antiracism work.
According to The Condition of Education Report 2017 report, from the National Center for Educational Statistics, the average amount of money spent on curriculum and instruction was $514 per student. How do we know that the spending on curriculum is validating the need for equity work? Developing or using the best curriculum should include equity, inclusion, culturally relevant content, and antiracism and not be determined by the resources in a district. The frameworks that we are asking educators to use, the guide post from which they teach should be free and open for all to use. What systems and structures could we put into place to shift the emphasis back into creating dynamic, relevant content for all learners? This is not an indictment of the leaders we entrust to make these decisions, it is not an essay on what makes a good curriculum, rather it is a reflection about a system which gives people with fewer resources very little power in choosing what gets taught and limits the knowledge available to students.
Deprivation and control of education has always been a sign of oppression. In her book, “We Want to Do More Than Survive”, Dr. Bettina Love draws on her years teaching and researching in the field of education and argues “that the US educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Instead of trying to repair a flawed system, educational reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education.” Love calls this the educational survival complex. She suggests “To achieve educational freedom — not merely reform — teachers, parents, and community leaders must approach education with the imagination, determination, boldness, and urgency of an abolitionist.”
Dr. Love is articulating how the commodification of education undermines the delivery of education, especially for Black and Brown children. Throughout history we have seen many examples of how this control operates. It is incredibly significant that Frederick Douglas was denied how to read. He knew that education was the fault line where enslaved people were kept disempowered by not being able to read. Although Black communities and other communities of color created strong traditions of education there was still an unequal distribution of financial resources codified in school segregation. It is telling that Black WW1 and WW2 vets weren’t allowed access to the GI bill and VA home loan guarantees. Both programs provided access for white veterans to educational benefits that would uplift those white people and their families for generations. Conversations around educational inequity today often combine economics and racial disparities, gender and other variables and these are important connections to make. These inequities were first rooted in systemic racism.
The idea of ownership of educational resources perpetuates inequity. Addressing the limitations that private interest, intellectual property and content vendors impose might allow for more free and open sharing of educational resources and contribute to a more equitable educational experience for all students. Recognizing how these limitations are rooted in oppression and structural racism can provide us with a path toward creating systems that create the possibility for liberation. It is important to focus on creating new solutions for curating and sharing relevant content in ways that allow schools and teachers to collaborate freely, bringing the best content, planning and frameworks forward for everyone to access. In this unprecedented moment when cooperating effectively and sharing without restriction could mean the difference between success and failure for many students, the importance of open access matters now more than ever.
Reframing how we work with content vendors, designing public and private partnerships that foster community engagement, and examining how open educational resources are evolving may enable even greater access to the educational material educators and students need. The work must emphasize models that distribute learning content and information widely along with budget consciousness without restriction. Here are some frameworks that might serve as starting points.
1. Reimagining Content Vendor Relationships. Leaders working with content vendors need to find bold new ways to expand existing access to support instruction that will happen with social distancing and online learning. Leaders can choose to look for companies that integrate equity into their offerings. It is encouraging to see that many of the top content vending companies pride themselves on having purpose-driven company cultures that value trust and social responsibility and equity. For many companies it is built into their stated priorities. For example, one vendor is reimagining equity and access for diverse youth and offers learning professionals free educational resources that build knowledge about racial equity and culturally sustaining education. Content vendors should consider what the long-term investment could be when offering free or reduced-cost curriculum, training and resources. Investing in schools and students contributes to building a more just and equitable society.
2. Compelling public and private partnership. The most compelling partnership models respond to critical needs and draw on assets particular to the partner schools. Partnerships that include access to programs, mentoring, teacher partnerships, shared curriculum, shared facilities and joint projects that prioritize community engagement. There is an opportunity to foster a collaboration between teachers, administrators, and community stakeholders. That includes sharing ideas about programming, academics, and how to integrate new pedagogy and technology effectively into the classroom and the community. The best partnerships are created with all participants at the table defining the relationship and the strategic goals. All of this is of critical importance, as noted by John Chubb, the late president of the National Association of Independent Schools, the nonprofit organization that represents over 1,400 private schools in the United States:
“Today, every school, whether public, public-charter or private, faces major challenges — preparing students for a rapidly changing future, blending technology with great teaching, serving a much more diverse population, living with fewer economic resources, and more. No school or sector has a monopoly on good ideas.”
3. Open Educational Resources (OER). OERs are teaching, learning and research mediums that enable people to reuse, revise, remix and redistribute content freely. This is an important way of finding and using information that can save educators time and resources. With access to global content “OER,” can also advance student learning with texts, images and videos available for free. Proponents of open ed resources also say “open sharing of resources has the potential to fuel collaboration and encourage the improvement of available materials and aid in the dissemination of best practices.” Although there are many advantages of OER, quality and reliability have been cited as a concern, as well as limited copyright protection and internet connectivity inequities. However, OER can provide unprecedented sharing opportunities for educators and students across the globe.
4. Distributed Open Collaborative Courses (DOCC). The trend toward DOCC’s (pronounced docks) has been growing slowly out of the work of the feminist tech collaborative called the FemTech Network. Designed to be a more connectivist version (where people and technology come together) of a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC). Sarah Kember from the University of London writes about distributed open collaboration and says, “By extension, the first step towards reestablishing knowledge as a public good, and specifically as an urgently needed form of social and environmental justice involves disentangling technology from the limiting values of efficiency, transparency and compliance and promoting instead, values such as equality, diversity, care and inclusion.” The DOCC concept was created with decentralization, collaboration and interactivity as a defining feature. Distributed models are both relational and technological. This collaborative and open accounting of knowledge might do more to incorporate creative practice and integrate students, researchers and teachers as co-producers of knowledge.
If we are to do what Dr. Love urges us to do by approaching “education with the imagination, determination, boldness, and urgency of an abolitionist,” then we must address institutional practices that recreate racial inequity. Embedding antiracist practices into these empowerment frameworks contributes to undoing systemic racism and other white supremacist cultural norms of power-hoarding, individualism and paternalism. Looking beyond ideas of scarcity and recognizing how much we have to share, how collaborative and creative we can be together and including people in the decision making who are most affected by those decisions, we can begin to reestablish the way we access and distribute information and learning resources. By working to distribute learning content and information more broadly these frameworks may begin to create access to the educational materials educators and students need. Now more than ever.
GET LIT: What to Read, Watch, & Listen
This section includes what our Equity Architects are currently reading, listening to, and/or watching.
Teaching Isn’t About Managing Behavior
by Christopher Emdin
Chris Emdin describes how the best teachers don’t just keep teaching. He says that “Instead, they use their pedagogy as protest: They disrupt teaching norms that harm vulnerable students. Reality pedagogy interrupts the notion that teaching is about managing students and their behavior.”
Women’s Voices Amplified
by Ana M. Bermúdez
In this episode — Social Justice in the Criminal Justice System — New York City Department of Probation Commissioner Ana M. Bermúdez ’86, P’22 discusses her childhood in Puerto Rico, her early career working with family court and the Legal Aid Society, and her focus on youth and teenage advocacy.
The Michelle Obama Podcast
by Michelle Obama
The Michelle Obama Podcast features the former First Lady diving deep into conversations with loved ones — family, friends, and colleagues — on the relationships in our lives that make us who we are.
*Episodes begin on July 29, 2020*
The Pros & Cons of Reparations
by Stephen J. Dubner
In this episode of Freakonomics Radio, host Stephen Dubner discusses the benefits and limitations of reparations with prominent scholars and experts. While many Americans agree that racism is a major problem, thoughts and opinions on how we should address it vary greatly.
The Urgency of Reopening Schools Safely
by Linda Darling-Hammond
In this article, the author writes a thoughtful and informative piece on how America should be reopening schools with safety as our number one priority. She dives deeper to outline the role and level of responsibility our government has in these steps along with the investment needed to open schools safely.
