I’m in a district where they’re trying to set this up, and even if you manage to get a coherent set of expectations going, it’s pretty problematic, for what I think of as the Soviet Front Effect (there’s probably a better name for it).
As I understand it, and I might very well be mistaken, the Soviet army broke the back of the Nazis in World War II not because of superior tactics but in spite of poor tactics. And these poor tactics were a result of General terror, which is to say, the generals were terrified.
Military strategy and tactics were laid out in Moscow by the Politburo and/or Stalin (I’m a little fuzzy on this part), out of a desire to streamline, to be sure that everyone was coordinated and doing the same thing, and that military approaches were in line with orthodoxy. Generals who deviated from Moscow’s orders were looking at Siberia or worse. So when generals confronted conditions on the ground that didn’t match Moscow’s orders–either because they saw opportunities Moscow didn’t anticipate, or dangers Moscow didn’t anticipate–they often proceeded with Moscow’s orders anyway, getting troops needlessly killed.
When Central Office plans curriculum, something similar approaches, albeit with less bloodshed. They can come up with programs that, from central office, look wonderful, generally because textbook companies can hire very effective salespeople to convince central office about how great the curriculum is. And they can enforce the curriculum on teachers, telling us we must follow specific pacing guides, read specific scripts, use specific worksheets, etc.
But a teacher in a classroom might notice an opportunity–a “teachable moment”–not listed in the curriculum. The teacher might have a special skill, whether it’s playing an instrument or quilting or a knack for chemistry or knowledge of game design, that could be used to make lessons come alove, given the opportunity. Or maybe a teacher notices that a particular curriculum doesn’t work very well at explaining how fractions work (despite what the textbook salespeople said), or that it spends too long on digraphs, or that it fails to provide opportunities for differentiation.
The more the district makes its curricular expectations clear, the less flexibility teachers have to meet the specific opportunities and challenges that occur every day in the classroom. It’s doubly demoralizing for teachers, first and less importantly because it minimizes their sense of professionals who eercise judgment, and second and more importantly because it forces them to teach is suboptimal ways and to watch students suffer accordingly.
Teachers don’t design widgets, and any educational system that treats them as assemblyline workers is going to fail. The challenge is to design an accountability system that provides very wide latitude in teaching methods while holding teachers accountable for results, and ALSO recognizing that student achievement and growth are both highly dependent on external factors outside the teachers’ control.