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In my last post – Dear Teachers: Don’t Write Curriculum. Demand It. – I argued that subject teachers need a full-blown curriculum as basic equipment for their job, and that it’s their school or district’s responsibility to provide it for them. Briefly, writing curriculum and classroom teaching are two different jobs. It may be cheaper for schools and districts to hire the same person to do both jobs, but it’s a bad bet for students. If you’re a school or district leader who is economizing in this way, this post is for you.

Many school districts provide curriculum for their elementary teachers in ELA and math. Some provide instructional materials for science as well. Very few provide a separate curriculum for elementary social studies. If your elementary students learn any history or social studies, it’s likely by way of materials incorporated in the ELA curriculum or by teacher discretion. 

When your students get to the secondary level, teacher discretion reigns. The standard excuse is that subject teachers at the secondary level have the expertise to design their own curriculum. In fact, you’ve simply left teachers on their own, or, in the vernacular, given them “autonomy.”  

If this is true in your school or district, then you likely can’t answer the most basic question a curious parent might (and should) ask you: what is my child learning in school? 

Teachers Decide

If you’re lucky enough to lead a school or district in one of the thirteen states that tests in social studies, you can give a rough answer for the tested grades. If you’ve provided your secondary teachers with textbooks, you can point to those as a rough approximation of what all students are expected to learn in social studies. How rough? That depends on your systems for supervision, evaluation, and professional development. The odds are high that your resources are thin in these areas, and that whoever does the supervising and evaluating is not a content expert. 

So, if you’re honest, you might tell the inquiring parent, “I don’t know what your child is learning. We haven’t provided a curriculum, so teachers decide.” 

The fact is, you’ve delegated final responsibility for deciding what children in your district should learn about the human world to individual teachers – new teachers, veteran teachers, well-trained and knowledgeable teachers, and not-so-well trained and not-so-knowledgeable teachers. Some of them aren’t even social studies teachers, but rather generalists, or subject switchers, or coaches. 

If that’s your situation, then imagine a student’s journey through your district’s classrooms. Let’s just consider middle school, grades 6-8. If teachers choose what to teach in social studies, then what students learn in social studies in Grade 6 depends a lot on which teacher they get. In grade 7, teachers probably need to assume that the students they’re inheriting know different things and need to plan accordingly. They themselves are probably teaching different things, so Grade 8 teachers need to plan for students who have had a variety of combinations of Grade 6 and Grade 7 teachers. They themselves probably teach different content in different ways. 

Then those students go to your high school, and the same randomization project begins again. The result is that your students’ disciplinary knowledge and skills develop in a haphazard way. 

The same is likely true for your teachers’ knowledge and skills. By saddling subject teachers with two jobs, curriculum writer and classroom teacher, it’s unlikely that they will achieve excellence in either one. 

An Alternative

There’s an alternative world we could choose to live in. It looks like this: 

Each district, CMO, and independent school has adopted a complete, coherent social studies curriculum that aligns with the science of learning for each grade and course it offers. This curriculum has been reviewed by experts in the field, aligns with state standards (such as they are) and has been made available to the community at large. What students are expected to learn is not a secret. Teachers have adopted, internalized, and implemented this curriculum in each course and grade. They receive professional development aligned with the curriculum they teach. They routinely share best practices for effectively communicating the curriculum to all of the students in their charge. 

Now, when parents ask what their students are learning, you can answer the question with confidence. 

How do we get to this different and better world? A bunch of things have to happen. It won’t be easy. But the first step is obvious: as an educational leader, decide that it needs to happen. 

G.S.