Why? Is there any correlation between the teacher's credentials and the students' achievement?
I don't know of any studies that show a correlation. Which means that it's a correlation that's worth studying.
Most schools have similar curricula that teachers are supposed to cover in each class. I think that if you laid the curricula from two different school boards side by side, it would be very difficult to tell which came from the wealthy district and which came from the failing school. The main difference is in the quality of the teachers.
Perhaps I am having trouble explaining what I mean. Therefore, I shall use an anecdote.
I have a friend who's a teacher. She was telling me one day that she is being told how to teach by the school's administrators. The way she is supposed to teach is that all of the children in her classes are "paired up" and whenever she asks a question the pair has to answer it. However, she has to make sure that the pair consult each other first before answering the question. Her school has decided to adopt this method of teaching because it has shown promise in other schools. However, my friend does not really like that method of teaching. I may also add that the students may not like it either.
So what I object to is outside interference from allowing teachers to teach using whatever methods they can to get through to their kids. I would rather that teachers be exposed to different and new methods of teaching and then let them apply those to their classes that they believe would benefit from it rather than having school boards and administrators dictate a singular "catch-all" method for teaching. Students are individuals, and the teachers should be allowed to teach in ways that suit the individual needs of their classes rather than be dictated to by administrators.
And I admit that I know very little about the public school system, as I went to a very small rural private school. However, because of that, my high school was beholden more to the schools' board of directors. Because of this, the teachers were given a lot of freedom in how they taught the students in their classes.
Even though we were too small to have formal AP classes (I didn't even hear about those until my junior year) the school would group students in different classes according to their ability and according to their learning style. For example, I was in most of the "advanced" classes with the other Type-A hyper-competitive overachievers in my year, where we often had pop quizzes, given extremely high goals, and greatly challenged because we were so self-motivated. For those same subjects, however, were students who took their education more "casual" and didn't apply themselves as much. For those students, teachers used different strategies in order to educate them.
School boards don't do lesson plans, teachers make their own according to criteria set forth by the school administration.
Schools should NOT be allowed to become too localized. The upper grades at a school in Idaho that my kids attended had very few advanced classes. The farmer mentality prevailed, and farmers don't see the need for such things. We moved to AZ, and the schools there were far superior.
I suppose what I mean to say is that I am more concerned with administrators dictating
teaching methods than I am with regards to curricula. I agree with you that we should give students access to a broad curricula to learn from. What I'm more opposed to, though, is teachers being mandated on
how to teach whatever curricula they are told to teach.
