Oh, McDonald’s. I won’t eat there. It’s the exact same crappy food with the exact same crappy service every time. Nothing is ever different or exciting. But I will give them this: they are dependable. I do, however, drink Starbucks. A lovely coffee shop where each drink is made the same way every time, unless you ask for a change. Much like Burger King, you can have it your way. So much of our world has become McDonalized (to borrow from Ritzer). And it has moved from food to gyms to…you guessed it, education.
With the onset of No Child Left Behind, specific pieces of education were McDonalized: curriculum. Some districts adopted reading programs that were scientifically proven to teach all children to read. Some districts decided that every teacher at the same grade level would teach the same page of the same book at the same time. That way, when an administrator walked into the room, they would know exactly what the teacher was supposed to be teaching. Schools were no longer places that were serving the specific needs of the community in the way the educator found the best way possible; they were spaces that were privy to the demands of the government who said all children will learn, and they will all learn in this way.
I see this evidenced at the elementary school level where teachers of grades K-3 used a specific reading program. And let me tell you, when those students are finished, they sure sound like they can read. They are expert decoders, as we like to say in the education community. They can decode letters to make them sound like words. But stop a child who seems to read like an expert and ask him/her what they just read and forget it. All is lost. They don’t know. While the program teaches them to decode and read words, it does not teach them comprehension nor critical thinking. In this program, students never read an entire book or story from beginning to end, only pieces of the story that stand out. The beautiful picture painted by the narrative never comes to life. All those hours wasted by the author; hours spent on character on plot development gone to waste.
This beautiful idea of streamlining education also brought about many new jobs. Jobs which were deemed as “incredibly important.” Jobs that took money away from teaching positions and moved it towards more administrative positions. It is now the job of someone at the district level to create new curriculum, curriculum that works for all students (as they have scientifically proven by piloting it in a limited number of schools). All teacher receive these huge gray binders, and for each day one opens the binder, there is the lesson and any necessary materials, all laid out. Sounds nice, right? Less work for me? Wrong. The one year I did use the notebook, I was miserable. Each day I woke up, my excitement had waned. I did not want to go into work for another dreaded day with the imagination killing binder. And my students looked like they wanted to take a nap. So, I did the best I could; I altered the lessons and brought in my own material, just as I would have had I been able to use the standards to guide my curriculum. Only, this time, I was just sprucing up someone else’s boring curriculum, which turned out more difficult than starting from scratch.
And the best part was, we were all gathered to give feedback on the lessons. And what happened the following year? Had the lessons changed? No. The same gray binders made their way to the same grade level teachers to teach all over again. We weren’t going to waste someone else’s effort just because it didn’t work for our students! No! In the name of No Child Left Behind we were going to teach the pre-made curriculum!
I do agree with one small piece of No Child Left Behind: all children can learn. But I will say this, not all children can learn based on something that has been McDonalized. The McDonaldization of education must stop. It is killing the imaginative and inventive spirit of our nation. My students are becoming close minded yes-sayers who simply do as they are told and do not think first. And due to these “scientifically proven” programs, I am finding that they are becoming less and less skilled along the way.
Good bye, McDonalidization. You are no longer welcome in my classroom.
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