Episode 6. Intro to the "Big Textbook Mess:" Stuffing the Mess Into a Can

In this episode of K 12 Confidential, the host introduces the 'Can Curriculum Mess' series, outlining the basic problems with large textbook companies in U.S. K-12 education. The episode discusses the massive profits of these companies despite low literacy rates, and the detrimental effects of canned curriculum on both teachers and students. It highlights how such curriculum limits teacher autonomy, fails to meet the specific needs of students, and contributes to teacher burnout and shortages. The host shares personal anecdotes and experiences to illustrate these issues, and mentions an upcoming episode featuring teachers who fought against harmful canned content but lost. Listeners are encouraged to share their own experiences and sign a petition for a K-12 Educator Governing Board to allow teachers to lead the profession from within.

00:00 Introduction and Episode Overview

00:24 The Big Textbook Problem

02:34 Understanding Canned Curriculum

05:17 The Impact on Teachers and Teaching

16:44 Real-Life Examples and Challenges

29:10 Broader Implications and Future Episodes

32:49 Conclusion and Call to Action

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Transcript

 Hello, welcome back to K 12 Confidential. We're mixing things up today and rolling out our Can Curriculum Mess episodes now. We're gonna come back to the teacher pay mess, we promise, but we needed to pivot to meet the needs of the teacher's coming on. Right now, they're all full-time teachers, so schedules being what they are.

We had to change the timing. No problem. Teacher. We got you. This episode you're going to hear today is a short introduction outlining the basic problems with. Big textbook. I recorded this last year, and when I was editing it later, I realized that I was not comfortable naming and shaming the specific big textbook company that I was talking about for fear of them suing me.

There are only a few textbook companies in America making money hand over fist, the largest of which is going to clear over $2 billion in profit this year, and yet. We are in the bottom of the world in literacy rates. Yeah, so anyways, I was worried, so I bleeped out their names. You're gonna hear beeps in this recording.

The next episode on this theme includes a conversation with the teacher. Actually two teachers who need to remain anonymous. They fought back against harmful can content for secondary ELLs. These are English language learners. They fought hard and lost. It's a devastating story of gobs of your taxpayer dollars being misspent.

So stay tuned for that episode coming up right after this one. If you're a teacher who has their own tragedy of the harmful effects. A big textbook and you'd like to speak about it on the podcast even with your identity concealed. Please contact us and we will be happy to bring you on the podcast. And now stuffing the mess into a can.

The harmful effects of Big Textbook in K 12 education. 

K 12 Education is a mess. Us literacy rankings are in the bottom half of the world and are a hidden cause of the erosion of our variability to effectively self govern. How did we get here? America's teachers can tell you and the answers will shock you.

This is K 12 Confidential.

What is can curriculum? Let's start with that. I mean, if you're not a teacher, you've probably never heard this phrase before. Let's start with the word curriculum. And I think we all know what that means. This is just the stuff we have to use to help our kids learn. We think of it usually as a textbook, but it can be any materials.

And this is both the content that we're gonna teach as well as the formative and summative assessments. These are like the quizzes and tests that come with our material. Um, little workbooks, exercises, things like that. That's curriculum. Okay. Canned curriculum. A pejorative term to be sure is when a ton of what we call pedagogy gets dialed into these things.

What is pedagogy? Okay, so these are. The approaches, the styles, the way that we teach the curriculum, like in small group discussion, whole, whole group discussion using various different protocols. We have a lot of tricks up our sleeve as teachers, the veteran ones of us, and we often know what works best with a certain vibe going on in a room.

And then also like we pivot the content to meet the needs of the kids that year, and we're constantly like reflecting. That's what we're taught to do in our profession, reflect, and we are told that we're supposed to innovate in our lessons because at least in California, I don't know what the deal is anywhere else because we're so siloed and it's all so different, but.

We are, um, assessed on a five point rubric for our teacher evaluations, and to get a five in any of the six domains that we are graded on when we're being observed, you have to be what's called an innovator, which means you're doing something new. And the irony is, can curriculum doesn't let you do that.

It doesn't. And so if you're doing what you're told, which is implementing CAN curriculum and doing all of the things exactly as you're being told. 'cause can content, there's no room to innovate, right? They don't want you to innovate. So if you're doing that, you can't score the highest on you are teacher evaluation.

Ah. It's crazy. It's crazy. So again, curriculum, the stuff we used to teach can curriculum is really dense, really thick. Six spiral notebooks filled with almost like scripts and in some cases not almost, it is scripts and it gives us no room to pivot and shift. So like why or why is this bad and how is it contributing to the teacher shortage crisis?

So here we go. Number one, we don't make it. Yeah, teachers don't make this stuff. It sounds so weird to say it, but it's true. Teachers are not allowed to sit down and make the content that we use. It is all bought by big textbook. And I'm using that phrase because I'm trying to get you to think of big pharma.

It's, and a few, several textbook companies that, uh. Just are right there. Always selling the districts on these really expensive curriculums. And the more they put in there, the more they're able to charge. And so they've gotten so onerous and so thick that they are overwhelming to teachers and they give like no room to pivot to meet the needs of the kids we have.

So, um, and they're not effective. It's sometimes they're met. They're never great can curriculums are never great. Sometimes they're meh. Oftentimes they're downright awful, and there are sometimes even still where they're harmful. And we're gonna be talking about that in the reading instruction episode because yeah, teachers don't make this stuff.

The people who are making this stuff may be used to be teachers, maybe not. Okay. Some of them not, and they haven't been teachers for a while or they weren't teachers for very long, and we have this like ridiculous idea that somehow these people who aren't us know more than we do. And so it's extremely, extremely frustrating and demoralizing as a teacher, especially like a veteran teacher.

Like so many of the teachers that we know. Who've really spent a long time honing their craft and have been working in these specific populations for years. And we know these kids well, to be told here, you have to do this exactly like this. Yeah. And when teachers are not brought into the big decisions about curriculum, there is nobody there to act as a check and balance.

When district office leads who. Maybe never even taught your subject or your grade or making decisions about your curriculum. Right? And they're looking at data. They're being given all of these like quote unquote research back curriculums, and they see the data. They don't even peel back one layer of the onion to make sure it's good data.

They are very easily convinced by like biased information like student. You know, glowing student reviews of this stuff and teachers can look at it and see almost instantly that nothing they're saying is true. Right? But it's because we just tick boxes and we have to make things look good on paper. They have the data to prove that this stuff works.

But, and this is the big, but here guys, they are telling our district office leads that we have to teach the curriculums with fidelity. This is a phrase, this catchphrase that's caught hold in K 12 education, which just means do it exactly as this is. Teachers are being told. And I'm not kidding, I just heard this, that starting from day one of school, they have to jump immediately into the content in order to fit it all in.

'cause it's too much, it's too big In order for it to say that it's doing quote unquote doing all of the things that they say they're doing. You have to use every single day of the school year to teach the content. So you're not allowed to like build relationships with the kids. You're not allowed to get to know the kids, teach the kids your classroom protocols, build relationships, because a number one way to manage behaviors in your classroom, which is by the way, so important right now because of this post COVID world.

I don't even say post COVID, I mean. I've had COVID twice, and I know people who have it right now, teachers who've already caught it from the job and don't have sick leave and have to use all their own sick leave to cover their absence. I'm gonna say this COVID world is is nuts. Like we're still trying to figure out exactly what is going on with their kids, and we desperately need that time to build relationships, but we're being told you have to start teaching this content on day one to fit it all in.

And the research to back it up is bogus. You guys, it's bogus, it's doctored. It's just ticking boxes and making things look good on paper. And if you put a teacher in that room, they could call that out. We're not included in those decisions. We're not, and these people think that because they taught for a few years, years ago.

At maybe a different level or an entirely different subject that that qualifies them to make decisions right here and now for all of us, including the highly veteran teachers who've been teaching a order of magnitude more than the people who make the decisions in these district offices. So there's that.

There's the problem with bogus data and district office people not peeling back the layers of the onion to see what the stuff really is. We have a phrase in any research backed field, and I learned about it in my educational leadership program, um, from the people that were teaching me, and it's called cherry picking data.

And it, I think you, if anyone who's done any research or data-driven work. Should be very well aware of this term. It's when you're not using a full breadth of information and you're just using the data that you want, that proves what you want it to show. And if you cherry pick data, it's very, very easy to miss if you're not using.

A discernment, a level of discernment that is, you know, a just a modicum of incredulity. You know what I mean? Like, ah, let's look at this a little further. No, no, no, no. The district office leads are not doing that. And so when they look at cherry pick data, they just believe it, right? Especially if it reduces or completely removes any degree of nuance or complexity, because they want things to be extremely simple and just move on quickly.

So if. It shows something and it it that is, that they say is true and it removes teacher choice. That lets us get into the weeds and sort of nuance a thing out. They're frightened of that. They want easy, quick, simple. So that cherry pick data, bogus data, gives them exactly what they want. So it's not made by a teacher, so it's not as effective as it could be.

And when you see your kids struggling with it 'cause they're bored or it doesn't make sense to them, it makes you wanna leave the profession. So that's like the first thing that's wrong with it. The second thing is when teachers aren't given the space to grow their own pedagogical practices. They never hone their craft.

You will be a better teacher if you're given something more bare bones that you have to customize for your kids, and then you have self-possession, right? Then you know what works and you can fight for it. But if you're constantly being told, do this this way, exactly at this time or else. Then you don't get to grow that practice.

You're basically like a robot. And why in the heck did we get credentials then? Like why do we even need a bachelor's degree if we're like teaching robots reading scripts? Am I right? Yeah. So it's not good. It's bad for us because we don't get better at our job. And it also harms kids 'cause they're not getting the best learning opportunities too.

Right. But the other thing is it leads to teacher burnout because. Especially if, especially if you're like us and you really need to have autonomy and creative freedom. Anything you do as an employment practice, which limits worker autonomy and worker creative freedom leads to greater worker burnout.

Like we know this, right? And so we have this teacher shortage crisis problem and what's so like. Frustrating is so, or Boris, like the snake eating its own tail is part of the reason why we have this problem is because teachers don't have creative freedom. And so since we don't have the teachers, we take away their creative freedom because we don't trust them to teach.

You see that cycle that's going on and on there, it's, it's really awful and unfortunate. This is all coming from this highly paternalistic place that we talked about in earlier episodes where we don't trust teachers to be experts. We don't consult them, we don't give them a space at the table where the big decisions about teaching or being made.

We don't have even a seat there, much less, uh, place leading that work. And so what gets done? What is the decisions that are made? Are not good practice based on expert knowledge. And so you can imagine like these really expensive textbook companies, because of this term we refer to as neoliberalism in education, it, it doesn't mean what you think it means.

I mean, if you, if you don't know what it means, you, you think of neoliberal, you're thinking of like a political stance, which is progressive. No, it doesn't mean that it's a confusing term. All it means is we sort of throw all the big decision making. Creative work that needs to happen in our profession out to the marketplace where people then sort of rally around trying to sell glossy, shiny things to school districts.

And it's not just curriculums, which now are these dense can curriculums. It's like classroom management platforms, computer technologies, platforms for like student attendance and grade books, character education, all of this stuff. Is getting made outside of education without the influence or even input of teachers.

And if you ask a teacher, we are endlessly rolling our eyes like, ah, they did this. They should have asked a teacher, you know, in my classroom I have vaulted metal ceilings. I mean, what? It's an echo chamber in there. Helped design this, who sat down with the architect and said, uh, you need better soundproofing.

It's loud in these rooms. You know, uh, they didn't ask a teacher. They did not ask a teacher. And then they have these like windows really high up that can't be covered, and they, they ordered a projector system. Guess what? Can't see the projection because it's too light in the room. This is just a small example of very bad decisions being made because teachers are not consulted on the work.

So I'm gonna give you an anecdote. Certain subjects are more problematic for can content than others. I mean, no subject should have can content. There should be content and. Maybe a little bit of pedagogy like assistance and guidance, especially for new teachers or teachers who are not like interested in innovating like this, but it needs to be coming from us, from teachers.

So what we're saying is, is that like teachers who wanna do this work, who wanna build curriculum should be allowed to lead it. You decide whatever the heck they need to do to be qualified to do it. Either you've been a veteran teacher who's shown that you have the skills, you go back to grad school, whatever, but you're released for part of your day to build curriculum that is tailored to the unique needs of the kids at your campus.

Or that's, say, your district. That is beholden to some standards. I'm not saying we're not tethered to some accountability and some standards, right. Yeah, and then you give that to your teacher, so then tailor eyes it as they see fit, right? So it's made by us, but getting to back what I was saying about can content being problematic for more problematic, for some subjects more than others, ELA is just a really, really, really hard one for can content.

It's three subjects in one. That's why we call it English language art, reading, writing, and understanding literature. Okay, so. It, it is very difficult to provide good can content at the secondary level. For this, you need, you need high quality content for first, second, and even third grade ELA. 'cause those are the foundations of reading years.

And when bad decisions get made high up that don't include the teachers in the first and second grade classrooms, you wind up with. Sold a story, the podcast that we are gonna be talking about in a future episode where we all buy horrifically ineffective reading instruction materials. Sorry, it's not funny, but it's just the most glaring evidence of why not bringing teachers into these rooms leads to disastrous results.

But anyways, I'm, I'm, we'll get to that in a future episode. In my example, my district decided to buy can ELA curriculum at the secondary level, specifically for middle school teachers who, you know, one of the, one of the through lines about CAN curriculum is that it's more common in K through eight. Why female teachers, we don't trust females, um, to make these decisions.

We have multiple subject credentials, so we don't know what we're talking about, right? So they made, they bought this curriculum and we refer to it as that has like a collection of stories, mostly some excerpts of bigger stories and all of this like dense stuff that we're supposed to be doing, which is like a trademarking.

Of something that I already know how to do well, which is close reading strategies. Close reading strategies is a basic framework that you could teach and you could tweak for any story you wanna teach. That gives kids agency and independence to, um, apply strategies which mimic the habits of mind of successful readers.

Like we're taking that invisible process that really successful readers are doing and making it visible and explicitly teaching it well. It's obvious to me that the people who wrote this curriculum understood that. And so in order to show that they were doing something new and different with it, they turned it into like these trademarking things and made the kids super dependent on the version of it.

Whereas the objective with close reading is to make kids independent of us. And to have authentic and um, organic reactions to the text themselves. This twisted, perverted version of close reading makes the kids extremely dependent on the outside assistants. But the problem goes beyond that because for ELA teachers, we have no holds barred with whatever stories, novels, whatever, that we wanna teach.

'cause we don't have to deal with copyright infringement. Provided that you're allowed to teach it according to the rules of your district. We don't have to pay money to anyone for copyright rules. Now, that's not true with the textbook companies 'cause they're using printed materials in those anthology, those thick books.

So they have to pay for the rights to use them. When we didn't need to pay for the rights to use them at all. So then we're stuck using these stories that they have curated for us that cost us big money, which were already free to us in the first place. Right. And they're not tailored, I mean, with ELA, we're talking about fictional stories that.

Big, big agendas purposes that the author has included to try to raise awareness to certain things, to try to elicit certain reactions that need to be pivoted and shifted to meet the needs and the identities that the kids in your space. So here's my example. Beginning of last school year, right before nine 11, and I should say we have a huge population of Muslim students at our school.

And there was like a lot of unchecked Islamophobia that had been going on in my district for a number of years. And I started a Muslim student union because I understood we need, I'm not, I'm not Muslim, okay. But I understood that we needed to create safe spaces for our Muslim students. And then I'm given this CAN curriculum last year and the very first unit that I'm being told I have to teach has, I am Malala in it.

Which I think if we all know Malala. Fantastic, beautiful human being, and the full story is very eloquent and she's still Muslim today, but we also understand that she was on the receiving end of horrific gender-based violence that was specific, a specific version of it in the Islamic world. Now, to be clear, gender-based violence exists in all societies.

But my canned curriculum was shining a light on this specific version of gender-based violence. And what was even kind of more tragic was that it was not a whole story where we were able to see Malala's entire relationship to Islam. It was just a tiny piece in which she was shot on the bus. It was the most scary, horrifying part of the whole story, and that's the only part we taught.

And the timing of it was nine 11. I was very angry. I was told I have to teach this at the same time. That's not in my contract, by the way, but I wanted to play along. I don't wanna always be the rubble. It's exhausting to always be the rubble. So I taught it and I had to have really humanizing conversations in that space to honor what, what the fact that it was nine 11, the fact that gender-based discrimination is exists in the entire world and have hard conversations.

With kids who were only 11 years old, these kids were only 11. So we got through that and my blood was boiling the whole way through. And then we're being asked the same unit to teach the novel, the Breadwinner. Okay. If you don't know, it's a beautiful novel, hard, difficult book, but it highlights the protagonist as a young girl.

Who has to assume a male identity in order to work to support her family after her father is killed when the Taliban, um, takes over Afghanistan. Okay. And we just read I Am Aah like, what, what are we doing? Another example, which is highlighting gender-based discrimination in the Islamic world. Right? And guess what?

The war in Gaza had just broken out. And there was like rampant Islamophobia going on in my canvas and I'm just like, I'm not doing this. I absolutely refuse to teach this book right now. This is ludicrous. Like we have to pivot. And I then began this long demoralizing, so stressful exchange between myself and my district office.

Where I was being told I had to teach it and I was flatly refusing, and it's not in my contract. I lost sleep for days on end, finally, and I, and for a long time I fought alone. No one would stand with me, but I had a cadre of Muslim parents in my community that I had been talking with because I started a Muslim student union who had my back, and we were able to slowly turn the tide within my department and we finally decided not to teach breadwinner.

But it was exhausting and the idea that this material needed to be shifted and, um, pivoted to meet the needs of our kids okay, was completely, uh, new to anyone. And if I had not have been there, you better believe that those kids would've had to have read two, two stories during nine 11 in the war on Gaza that featured.

Unfavorable, um, characterizations of Islam. Okay. One is sufficient. None during the war in Gaza. People none, right? So that's just ELA history. What's wrong with history content? Well, the problem with history is the textbooks are very biased. And for example, I also teach history. I teach sixth grade, so I teach ancient civilizations.

We have a textbook that has a chapter for each unit of study, and so we start with early humans where we cover early human evolution, and then we quickly pivot to the hunter gatherers, early humans, and then the neolithic revolution, which is the invention of farming. Okay. That's all one chapter. Then it covers all of the ancient civilizations, kind of in chronological order, like Mesopotamia, Egypt.

Israelite, India, China, then Greece, then Rome. Okay. Greece and Rome are the only units of study in that textbook, which have two chapters each, two, two chapters each. All the other ones only one. And the most important stuff, like if you ask the scholars who are experts in this period of time. The most important stuff isn't even a whole chapter.

It's a lesson in a chapter, which is the invention of farming. That's the most important moment of human history, almost arguably forever, but certainly in the ancient period. And so I have to pivot and shift. I have to add content at the front that is missing and pull away from content at the end because two chapters each for the European history sections is ridiculous, and it's a fight.

Every year, I'm being told, you have to keep up. You have to keep up, you have to do this pace. I do catch up by the end because at the end they're all doing a ridiculous amount of coverage of Greece and Rome, which by the way, they, those kids are gonna get that material again. This is just sixth grade.

They're never gonna get the neolithic revolution again unless they choose to learn it in college. You know? So these are my personal experiences with canned content. And you know, it runs the gambit in if you ask teachers their feelings on it. And I know that some people feel very grateful for their canned content, but I also know that, like, I think all teachers would agree, they, especially when they get veteran and they get a strong command over what they are doing, they need to be able to mold it and shape it into something that works for them and their kids.

But the problem is, is that more and more and more. That ability to do just that is being removed from us. I was in an iCivics conference. iCivics is this really amazing curriculum, which is was created by retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra, Sandra Day O'Connor. Get civics education back into the schools.

'cause we've really, it's kind of fallen away. So anyways, I, I'm a huge fan of iCivics. I love UI civics. Anyways, I was at a conference over the summer and I had this like, really cool opportunity, rare opportunity to talk to teachers from all over the country. And by the way, that's what this podcast series is doing, connecting us to each other because together, when we start exchanging notes, we are powerful.

I am blown away by the stuff going on in other places. We need to all understand, we need to all have a, be a, the ability to characterize what's going on. But when I talked to teachers from, let's say, Arizona, Louisiana, other places, they were saying that over the last five years in particular, they've had a bunch of stuff stripped away from them.

And so here's where can curriculum seems to be most heavily implemented. Definitely red states over blue states. The red state, blue state thing, as I said before, isn't really, um, pronounced in the teacher shortage, but in this, in this specific case, yes. Red states less power and authority to shift to the meeting the needs of your kids.

Yes. Places that are from historically marginalized communities because why the teacher shortage is so bad there. And so they buy this very dense, uh, curriculum that has all these scripts. I mean, you literally have to read like 60 to 70 pages just to teach one lesson. That's how much front loading they have to give the teacher because they're assuming the teacher doesn't know anything.

And I'm telling you guys right now, you cannot mitigate away the lack of a veteran teacher. You just can't. We're, there's an art and a craft to what we do. It's not just a craft. And we need to be able to hone that and then mentor other new teachers. And if you don't work on the problem of why we don't wanna be in our profession, nothing you can buy outside is gonna fix that problem.

So that's another place where this can curriculum has. Is bigger, has bigger reaches. It's more deeply entrenched, but also K through eight. I think I mentioned that a moment ago, K through eight has more canned content. Why? Because they're more females. Right. But in the high school world, even in blue states that don't have historically marginalized populations, I'm starting to see it crop up in there too.

Okay. So, and that gets us to this next episode that we have coming up of an ESL teacher. Who had an ESL degree and he, uh, he was an expert and we say ESLs English is a second language instruction. So he had like newcomers, kids that didn't know English very well at all, and he had a really finely tuned framework and style for getting them as quickly as possible through those foundations of English language acquisition and then out the door and able to go into what we call mainstream classes.

So they start off from what we call shelter classes, and then they end up in what we call mainstream classes. And instead of like leaning into the veteran teachers who built that program from the ground up, they decided to buy a CAN curriculum and it was really awful and had a very devastating consequences.

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