YES, SIR/MADAM

With this posting, I want to pick up on my presentation of the various approaches to curriculum.  I have been basing my reporting on one account of such matters, that of Allan C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins.[1]  To date, I have described the first of their listed approaches, the behavioral one.  This posting will look at the managerial approach.  This, along with the behavioral approach, is considered as one of three technical/scientific approaches.  Here, we have an approach that emerged from a behavioral view, but does not have that approach’s penchant for particular curricular content – such as the 3Rs.  Instead, this approach places its emphasis on the bureaucratic authority of managers such as principals and curriculum supervisors or specialists, both at the school site and at the district offices.  The idea is that curriculum should be the product mostly of the work of those who have the authority and expertise to make curricular decisions.  It also places a lot of reliance on scientific findings which emanate from those scholars who study curricular issues.  While this reliance is present, followers of this approach do not see themselves as theoreticians, but instead feel comfortable with the role of practitioner.  They are the ones who actually work in schools and with teachers and other staff members.  Yet, in actuality, most of the work this approach produces often comes down from district offices.  By and large, most of the innovations that these folks have developed and initiated come from “downtown.”

Usually, such efforts are noted for their issuance of a plan which is noted for stated, rational principles and a procedural component of logical steps.  Implementation counts on authority.  Unfortunately, funding does not often have sufficient monies to conduct needed training or gather sufficient information that would reveal the level of support such innovations demand.  This, by the way, is my personal observation of such efforts based on my years of working for the Miami-Dade school district, which Wikipedia ranks as the fifth largest in the nation.

This does not mean that the managerial approach does not necessarily seek and solicit input from teachers and other lower ranked employees.  As a matter of fact, since much of their literature produced by those who scholarly produce studies in this vein point out the importance of such input, many of these practitioners do seek such information as they develop their plans.  They are told that they need to take into account cultural factors that will affect their ability to successfully accomplish their plans.  But I must write that they seem to underestimate how important it is to solicit such input in an organic fashion.  They may ask through surveys what underlings feel, but these other staff members are not an integral part in planning and evaluating what is developed.  At least, that was my experience with such efforts.

During the early 1990s, Miami-Dade embarked on a plan – concocted downtown – known ironically enough as School Based Management/Shared Decision-Making.  The essence of this plan was to institute at each school site a governing cadre of teachers to devise particular policy for their school.  There was a lot of hoopla and, despite ample cynicism, the program began with some in-service training and a lot of encouragement.  What was missing was enough definitional clarity:  what were the authoritative boundaries of such cadres?  Each school had the option of participating and each participating school submitted a model of the structure it was going to put in place.  My school did participate and I was heavily involved in both devising my school’s model and then later in providing leadership.  I ended up chairing the main governing committee for two years – voted in each year.  About a third of the way in my second year, I realized that we were not in a position to institute a modest curricular change that had to do with the sequence of our courses.  Why?  Because it would not be in congruence with the other schools of the district, even though the change would have been in sync with the rest of the state.  Oh well.  This shared decision-making can only go so far.  The whole effort lasted four years.  Final verdict: it was a failure, although certain benefits were derived.

Of course, the above example is only a sample size of one; therefore, people cannot make a comprehensive conclusion from such a limited experience.  Perhaps the plan was good and we were not up to the challenge.  My point, though, and it is bolstered by what Ornstein and Hunkins write, the managerial approach tends to shift authority to ever higher levels of authority.  They report that the states’ bureaucracies are taking over ever more levels of control when it comes to innovation and change.  Of course, within our federal system, the state governments are the ultimate sovereigns when it comes to school issues – not even the central government can tell the states what to do as long as the state is not violating constitutionally sanctioned federal law (that includes US Constitutional provisions).  This gives the state a lot of leeway, if it wishes to exercise such power, in determining school policy within its public school systems.  Historically, many such prerogatives have been left to the local districts, but with increased clamor for improvements, there has been political pressure for the state governments to exert more control and this includes issues involving curriculum.  Consequently, this approach to curriculum does not seem to be abating any time soon.  The only change is that more of the decisions – plans – will probably be emanating from state capitals as opposed to local, downtown offices.

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[1] Again, I will base most of the factual accounts of these approaches on the work of Allan C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins.  See Ornstein, A. C. and Hunkins, F. P.  (2004).  Curriculum:  Foundations, principles, and issues.  Boston, MA:  Allyn and Bacon.

AN ORDERLY APPROACH TO CURRICULUM

If you recall, when I reviewed the four main curricular philosophies, I arranged them from the most conservative to the most liberal or transformative.  That list was perennialism, essentialism, progressivism, and reconstructionism.  In this posting, I will begin my review of the approaches to curriculum development.  They tend to be somewhat arranged from conservative to liberal, but they are better thought of as being arranged from the most technical/scientific to the most humanist/artistic.  The approaches I will identify and describe are behavioral, managerial, systems, academic, humanistic, and reconceptualist approaches.  So, let us begin with the behavioral approach.[1]

The origin of this approach starts in the 1920s at the University of Chicago and the person most identified with its initial development is Franklin Bobbitt.  To get a sense of its early appeal, one needs to remember that the prevailing perception among the professional classes of the time was the then inspiring marvels that were being created by the industrial plants around the nation.  Not only were they producing the great mechanical wonders that were beginning to enter even the home by way of labor saving appliances – for example, washers, refrigerators, and automobiles – but they were also being produced with increased efficiency – the assembly line, time and motion studies, etc.  What developed, according to Raymond Callahan, was a “cult of efficiency.”[2]  This movement, if you will, had repercussions throughout the professional world including education.

At the base of this movement was a reliance on science and technology.  In terms of production processes, the ideas of Frederick Taylor became highly influential.  His innovative ideas concerning time and motion, cost cutting, and reliance on quantitative measures revolutionized how things were produced.  The effect on education was pervasive.  The schoolhouse began to be viewed as a production facility, a factory, in which raw materials were brought in and worked on and shipped out as finished products.  In a school, what was the main raw material?  Students.  They arrived relatively ignorant and they left relatively educated – the final product.  The question became:  how cheaply – how efficiently – could that production process be conducted?  Several practices were introduced that are now considered as just the way education is done:  from the bells indicating when production processes began and ended, to specialization according to subject matter and teaching skills, to increased teacher-student ratios, to lower salaries for teachers.  This is just a sampling of these educational innovations that were institutionalized during this period.

While all of this is part of curricular concerns – remember, curriculum is the strategic plan at a school that affects what and how students learn – those aspects of schooling that directly and overtly affected the planning of learning experiences were also changed.  Here, a string of curricular pioneers began a series of innovations; they include the aforementioned Franklin Bobbitt, W. W. Charters, Ralph Tyler, and Hilda Taba.  From the early part of the last century, Bobbitt and Charters introduced into the curricular language such concerns as goals, objectives, and measured outcomes which were to be demonstrated by observable behaviors.  We began to speak of units of instruction – and later modules – which broke down what was to be taught into manageable segments of material.  The language was also more definitive as these learning segments were made up of clear and precise activities that the students performed in order to accomplish desired behaviors, be they answering questions on a test or successfully accomplishing some skilled task.  An early published work by Bobbitt had over 800 objectives accompanied by clearly stated activities designed to accomplish those objectives.  The plans were the “means” by which identified, stated “ends” were to be attained; that is, measurable behaviors.

As you might have guessed, much of this approach is based on behaviorist psychology.  And like the development of behaviorist psychology, it has mellowed in its ideas through the decades.  The thinking within this approach originally saw learning as just one illustrative example of the stimulus-response view that behaviorists such as Ivan Pavlov, John B. Watson, and B. F. Skinner advanced.  Today, this view of psychology has changed by incorporating findings of other schools of thought, such as those of the cognitive tradition.  The current field of behavioral economics demonstrates that transition – a field that has much to offer education and change theory.

Through the years, this original orientation of technical proficiency has also softened through the works of Tyler and Taba.  Tyler, in the late 1940s, developed a curricular development model that still has significant influence in the curriculum field.  His model took into account more localized, social factors that affect the learning process.  His three origins of curriculum: the student, the social environment, and the subject matter, and his “screens,” social philosophy and learning theory, took a large step toward humanizing the curriculum development process as conceptualized by the behavioral approach.  Taba’s work was more influential in how educators viewed instructional development.  Both took into account more psychological aspects that are unique to individuals that affect their peculiar learning process, but maintain much of the rigor that this approach introduced to education.  Both still saw learning as a rational development, albeit not so orderly as originally conceived by the earlier proponents of this approach.  While I do not consider myself a behaviorist, I do appreciate the ability of identifying those aspects or factors that one needs to address in curriculum work that is offered by the Tyler model.  And I try to view curriculum as needing to take into account the fact that students are individuals with their own cognitive functions and who lead their lives within varying social contexts.  As such, I agree with Ornstein and Hunkins; the behavioral approach will not only survive, but will also continue to be the one approach by which others will be compared.

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[1] Again, I will base most of the factual accounts of these approaches on the work of Allan C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins.  See Ornstein, A. C. and Hunkins, F. P.  (2004).  Curriculum:  Foundations, principles, and issues.  Boston, MA:  Allyn and Bacon.

[2] Callahan, R.  (1962).  Education and the cult of efficiency.  Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press.