Prepackaged School Reform - school use of standardized curricular programmes

School Administrator, Jan, 2000 by Jay Mathews

For regular teachers, Miller says, a program like Success for All can be a crutch. "It takes off the pressure to be creative. It takes off the pressure to diagnose and respond to student needs," he says. But for paraprofessionals still training to be teachers, the scripted program "raises their level of confidence and self-esteem," Miller adds.

It helps his after-school teaching budget stretch further, he says, "and in the process they learn a lot more about what they have to do to raise kids up to a new level."

Jay Mathews is an education writer with The Washington Post.

Teaching Scripts in the Hands of Paraprofessionals

In Caruthers, Calif., school superintendent Dwight M. Miller has a small district with large problems. He has just two schools, Caruthers High and Caruthers Elementary. About 60 percent of the 1,400 students are from Hispanic families and 75 percent are poor enough to qualify for federally subsidized lunches.

When the California Department of Education recently produced a list of schools where at least 50 percent of the students were not performing at or above grade level, both of his schools were on it.

Miller has no qualms about looking for outside help and thinks there is a place in his schools for instruction models that have been successful in other schools and are very precise in telling teachers how to teach. Caruthers Elementary has adopted one program created in Dallas run by Voyager Expanded Learning, which is designed to make learning an adventure for students in after-school and summer programs.

Stephanie Nelson, an assistant principal at the elementary school and principal of its summer school, says the Voyager lessons are very prescriptive, telling teachers how to introduce each lesson and giving the questions they should use to stimulate discussion and test how much has been learned. In other schools, such teaching by script has offended veteran faculty members, but the after-school program at Caruthers does not use tenured teachers but paraprofessionals, most of them teachers' aides who are studying to qualify as full-fledged teachers.

This is advantageous in two ways, Miller says. First, the paraprofessionals are cheaper. He has a $100,000 state grant for the after-school program and can stretch that money much further paying teacher aspirants $10 an hour, rather than the $20 or $25 a hour he would have to pay fully trained teachers.

Second, the paraprofessionals embrace the scripted lessons as one more good way to learn how to reach, whereas many experienced teachers would feel they were being babied and demand they use their own methods.

The program is working well, Nelson says, and provides some room for the unexpected. The Voyager lessons suggest how long each segment should take, "but they say never to do anything that stops a child from asking questions," she says, "so that a lesson that is scheduled to take minutes may take much longer."