As a bilingual middle school curriculum writer in my district, I have spent the past several months digesting and making sense of the Common Core Language Arts Standards for grades 6-8. Our charge has been to design model lessons and essentially write canned curriculum that new teachers can use as they begin their careers in our district. As you might imagine, this work is challenging enough when it's for English Language Arts, but when it's for Spanish Language Arts, it presents an entirely different set of puzzles. My most recent revelation throughout this work is that as much as the Common Core strives to align schools with a set of common performance expectations, implementing these standards becomes anything but common across districts. This is mainly due to systems-level inequities, such as disconnected learning environments, unsustainable technology budgets, and inconsistent student access to technology in school and at home, including technical support when students experience a problem.
The system of bilingual education at the middle school level (with the exception of one school) in our district is designed in a disconnected way from regular core instruction. This is contradictory to best practices for a strong bilingual/biliteracy-focused program which requires thoughtful integration across disciplines in the core, and a strategic, clearly-defined literacy block in which students systematically learn literacy and language strategies in one language and bridge and apply those understandings to the other language. Spanish Language Arts and English Language Arts are not supposed to exist independently from one another; they need to be integrated to be effective.
Working with this vision in mind, I have been collaborating with the English Language Arts teachers at both 6th grade and 7th grade in my building so that we can design units that are at least superficially integrated with each other so that my Spanish Language Arts class can seem to bridge and extend what students are doing in their English Language Arts class, rather than be a translation or repetition of what the students did that morning in their English Language Arts class. This is quite difficult, considering we have to align Spanish Language Arts instruction across two different classrooms at each grade level (for a total of four environments).
We finally got to a point where we thought we had beaten the systemic challenge of trying to align Spanish Language Arts instruction with English Language Arts instruction, using the same set of standards in the same scope and sequence, without repeating or translating what was practiced and learned earlier in the day in English, but as I was working more on the actual lesson design last night, I came across another singificant roadblock to our students' success: access to technology.
Technology across any district or state is horribly inconsistent, and at my school we are nowhere near having a 1:1 student to computer ratio. So, when the Common Core mandates that all students in grades 6-8 are completing some form of research project during the second three weeks of the second quarter of school, which also happens to coincide with our requirements to administer the standardized computer-based test for reading comprehension (the MAP) and an hour-long Gallup Survey to assess student climate, access to technology just isn't there. How are these students supposed to do research with technology that the district cannot afford to buy?
Furthermore, all 440 students in my building are then required to use technology to acquire fluid typing skills, collaborate with the teacher and each other, and create a variety of presentations for their projects using the Internet and different applications. Without a 1:1 student to computer ratio, this is impossible to complete during the school day; and so the most logical response is that they need to use the technology at home to complete their assignments. I teach in an urban school where students have very inconsistent access to technology in their homes--and some students don't even have a place to call their home. Expecting that all students will be able to use technology outside of the school day is not a reality, and even if they could use the technology, often the kinds of projects and collaboration they need to do require a fairly sophisticated understanding of the technology and the Internet, and students might not have access to tech support outside of the school building. How are these students supposed to get their homework done when there might not be anybody able to help them?
It is not only the urban schools who are experiencing these problems. Due to recent public school budget gouging across my state, poor, rural districts are finding themselves ill-equipped to deal with the demands of the Common Core. Forget being able to purchase technology, some of these areas are still trying to get access to reliable broadband Internet, a state project that our governor struck down two years ago. How are these students supposed to do research and complete their assignments with technology that is not even available to them?
As it turns out, the more I understand about the Common Core State Standards, the more I see that instead of aligning schools across the state and nation, these standards are actually driving wedges between these districts, which negatively affects our student achievement. The standards themselves are fairly reasonable; however, when they are coupled with severe budget cuts to education, they are impossible to implement with fidelity and will leave large groups of our students behind. If we truly want alignment in schools and if we truly want equity in education, then we have to get to the root of the issue, which is economic equity. We have to figure out how to level the playing field so that all students have equal access to a high-quality education. We need sustainable, healthy budgets in our schools; we need local control to make decisions with our specific students' needs in mind; and we need to retain high-quality teachers who are able to deliver the comprehensive instruction required by these standards. Above all, we need to fund our public schools adequately and appropriately so that we are able to deliver on our promise of a free and appropriate public education for all...not simply for all "who can afford it."
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