Editorials

The Verdicts editorial section expresses the collective opinion of the Verde Magazine staff.

VERDE URGES PALO Alto High School’s faculty to further align course curricula. While we acknowledge and commend the ongoing efforts to encourage coordination between teachers, reducing discrepancies in content, pace and grading within each course are critical to ensuring that students receive the same rigor as their peers and are not being held to different standards.

The English Department began working on course alignment around 10 years ago by designing and refining its curriculum in teams, according to English instructional leader Shirley Tokheim.

“The teams agree on teaching similar skills, a similar number of books and papers, pacing and similar course guides and grading practices,” Tokheim said. “It’s an ongoing evolution, of course, because we also want to be flexible in bringing in new ideas and practices.”

Like the English Department, the Science Department also tries to keep some level of flexibility so that teachers can teach to their own styles, while ensuring that the material and assessments stay the same across similar courses.

“Generally, for the Science Department, because we each teach two subjects, we usually rotate,” AP Chemistry teacher Samuel Howles-Banerji said. “So one week I’ll meet with [regular and honors] Chem teachers and then the next week, with AP Chem teachers so that we can maintain that alignment.”

While we strongly believe that teachers should be allowed room for creativity in their teaching style and lesson plans, we also believe it is important that students enrolled in the same courses should learn and be assessed on the same skills regardless of what teacher they have. The ongoing staff meetings and department efforts are a step in the right direction, but we feel that course alignment has not gone far enough.

Currently, differences between assignments, both in content and difficulty, as well as different grading standards are frustrating and discouraging for many students who feel they are putting in much more time and effort than their peers enrolled in the same courses with different teachers.

“My writing skills are getting better and I feel like I’m thinking smarter, and I’m doing all the right things, but it’s not beneficial because my grade is worse than the other students [with different teachers],” junior Eric Sun said. Because transcripts and grades do not reflect different teaching styles or assignments that may have gone into final grades, we believe that assessments must be standardized across classes as much as possible.

“The goal is that one person who has a Chem or Chem H grade on their transcript means the same as someone else who has the same course grade on their transcript,” Howles-Banerji said.

Creativity within teaching is important; however, we believe that different teaching styles and philosophies should not mean students enrolled in the same classes are assessed differently for the same course. Standardization would mean that teachers can teach their classes the way that they believe works best for them on a day-to-day basis and at the same time, students can expect that they will not have a completely different academic experience depending on which teacher they have. “Giving teachers the freedom to teach class how they want is important because they are a lot more experienced and trained, but it is also important to hold teachers accountable to make sure grading is constant across the classes,” junior Evelyn Zhang said.

We urge all departments to continue their work in aligning course curriculums in teams so that teacher freedom and course alignment can be balanced. We hope that courses can be aligned so that a random draw of one teacher over another doesn’t determine the difficulty of the class, but instead the work-rate and quality of the student can decide it.

Art by MEENA NARAYANASWAMI