Unlearning to Label? Holding High Expectations and Differentiation in Tension

• In Event: 52.058 - Teaching for Equity in Complex Times: Negotiating the Common Core State Standards in a High-Performing Bilingual School

Abstract

In an era of high-states accountability, standards-based reforms influence literacy/language arts (LA) instruction, and not necessarily for the better (Coburn, 2001, 2006). For example, research indicates that standards can encourage educators to narrow the LA curriculum (e.g., Valli & Chambliss, 2007), adopt reductive notions of what “counts” as reading (e.g., Pacheco, 2010), abandon locally responsive curricula in favor of test-aligned LA programs (e.g., MacGillivray, Ardell, Curwen, & Palma, 2004), and, even engage in practices that oppose their professional understandings of effective LA instruction (e.g., Dooley & Assaf, 2009). Especially in schools where teachers feel pressured to produce outcomes that will raise and/or maintain particular levels of performance, policies can press teachers away from student-centered approaches that balance skill instruction with the development of meaning-making and social, emotional, cultural competencies (Anagnostopoulos, 2003; McNeil, 2000).

Such dynamics are not those one might expect to uncover at a school celebrated for generating high achievement on traditional and non-traditional indicators (e.g., standardized tests and indicators of biliteracy). And yet, this paper documents their presence and consequences therein. The paper reports on a constant comparative analysis of qualitative data collected over two years in one high-performing K-8 bilingual school. The study’s underlying framework—socio-cultural learning theory and CHAT, specifically—guided analysis (Roth & Lee, 2007; Vygotsky, 1978). For example, because CHAT foregrounds the collective, mediated and contradiction-rife nature of human activity, our analysis attended to the rules, roles and relationships mediating how teachers made sense of and instantiated policy tools—in this case, the CCSS.

For example, findings focus on the tension that teachers’ experienced between holding high expectations for learners on the one hand and differentiating instruction on the other. As referenced in paper 1, the school’s high-expectations-for-all ethos—coupled with a specific kind of CCSS-aligned “rigorous” instruction alongside generalized pressure associated with maintaining “high performing” status—led teachers to design exceptionally challenging standards-aligned instruction. Ironically, even as teachers strove to earn (and keep earning) a “high performing” label, they actively resisted using any labels when describing students. This resistance was rooted in their sense that any labels—such as “English Learner,” “gifted” or “learning disabled”—would undercut their opposition to prevailing deficit views about their students (Valencia, 2010). Ironically, findings indicate that this stance impeded their enactment of “equity pedagogy”—pedagogy in which teachers respond flexibly and adaptively to students, as a collective and as individual diverse learners (e.g., Banks & Banks, 1995). Instead, teachers mostly offered “universalistic” instruction, which inequitably impacted students’ opportunities to learn. This one-size-fits-all approach also meant that teachers paid limited attention to enhancing instructional relevance, whether by drawing connections between standards and students’ interests or by leveraging students’ lived experiences and funds of knowledge for deeper learning.

Ultimately, this paper suggests that the high-stakes accountability confers inherent risks even on “high-performing” schools and accomplished bilingual teachers. It thus concludes with questions concerning the costs incurred by and alternatives to a system that presses teachers toward policy implementation in ways that preserve and even exacerbate educational inequity.

Author

• Joyce Melissa Gomez-Najarro, California State University - Fullerton