NJ Education Report

Math teachers (see this post) are not the only group raising questions about the D.O.E.’s revisions of core curriculum content standards, the mandated teaching guides for school districts in New Jersey. A group called The New Jersey Social Studies Educators has issued a scathing critique of the proposed N.J. core curriculum standards for social studies. The signatories on their Statement (go here, and then click on the “Statement” on the left) include two professionals who were directly involved in writing the standards (Ivy Urdang of the NJ Council for Social Studies and Arlene Gardner of the NJ Center for Civic and Law-Related Education) and other luminaries in the NJ social studies community: representatives from NJ Social Studies Supervisors Association, NJ Council for History Education, NJ Council for the Social Studies, etc. This group charges that the proposed standards:

Do not constitute a coherent and well-designed approach to social studies education that will guide teachers;
Do not effectively integrate geography, history, civics and economics;
Provide no articulation or scaffolding of kindergarten through grade 12;
Do not meet existing statutory requirements for Holocaust and genocide education or N.J. history;
Have glaring omissions and perplexing redundancies and inaccuracies;
Include confusing Cumulative Progress Indicators and cumbersome and ineffectual sample lessons and foundations;
Lack intellectual rigor or sustained emphasis on critical thinking;
Lack meaningful opportunities for student engagement; and
Do not reflect the efforts of the clarification project or any current scholarship or research in social studies education.

What’s a Clarification Project? Apparently some first step in the process of developing the standards; here’s a letter from Assistant Commissioner Jay Doolan regarding this phase and, appropriately, asking for feedback. But here’s a wrinkle. One way this project achieved its gravitas, apparently, was through the heft of a national education consultant named Grant Wiggins, who seems to be an industry unto himself. Wiggins has developed a model for curriculum development called Understanding by Design (UbD, which may be trademarked) and conveniently has a contract with Pearson, a major publisher of school textbooks. Doolan carefully notes in his memo that the standards were developed “under the guidance of Grant Wiggins,” who also supplied a training video. But one of the NJ Social Studies Educators’ criticisms is that

The proposed standards do not include Grant Wiggins’ Understanding by Design model, which was the basis for the Clarification Project conducted in NJ a year ago to help bring greater rigor and critical thinking to the existing social studies standards. In short, the authors of the proposed 2009 social studies standards failed to consider, make reference to or in any way use the existing scholarship and research in the field of social studies education.

The NJ Social Studies Educators recommend that we chuck the current proposal (which, by the way is twice as long as the 2004 CCS) and call for a do-over. It’s that bad.

Meanwhile, we’d be curious to know what the budget was for this curricular effort, how Wiggins regards the final product, and who exactly is writing the core standards — the bedrock of instruction – in New Jersey.