CSCOPE is a Texas administered curriculum that is used by Randall High School as well as other schools in the Panhandle and throughout Texas. According to cscope.com the curriculum is meant to be a “comprehensive, customizable, user-friendly curriculum management system built on the most current research-based practices in the field.” True, it is customizable, as Randall teachers are allowed to add their own materials to the curriculum; however, Randall teachers are required to administer the CSCOPE tests and generally follow the lesson plans of the curriculum though sometimes they can get off the path. Aside from Randall, many other schools follow a stricter requirement to follow the lesson plans to a tee as well as administer the tests. This has caused uproar in many schools and homes across the state of Texas as teachers are forced to follow teaching strategies that is not their own.

First of all, whatever happened to letting teachers teach? They went to school and got a degree in physics, English, pre-calculus for a reason – so they could teach it and so they could teach the way they feel the need to teach it. They went to school for teaching because they had a passion for teaching. An undeniable passion for instilling knowledge into the young minds of today is truly all it should take to teach. That’s how they did it before we had standardized testing and the goal to get as many students as possible to pass it. One could even say that this curriculum is put in place merely to produce the best test scores and could even go as far as to say that it is to save face.

CSCOPE is a TAKS Test centered curriculum and all it teaches is how to pass the TAKS Test – nothing more and nothing less. This does not portray true intelligence. In Socrates time, in Beethoven’s time, in Einstein’s time, they didn’t have multiple choice tests. All these men merely had their minds and millions of questions to ponder and paper to write it down – except for Socrates of course. Sure some of them had teachers but they did not constitute multiple choice testing as a way to “prove” their intelligence. Their teachers simply passed on their knowledge and their intelligence to their pupils and that’s what they used to discover and develop an intelligent mind of their own.

Not only is the curriculum strictly test based but the lesson plans are so planned out and robotic that one could put a Toot N’ Totum cashier in the classroom and teach the subject just like a regular teacher might. There’s no room for a teacher to put their own teaching strategies into their classrooms. So why even have teachers? Our country could save millions of dollars to throw out teachers and replace them with robots or even general citizens for that matter. In fact, they’ve already lost many teachers because they‘ve been forced to replace the strategies they‘ve been using for most of their teaching years with the CSCOPE curriculum.

According to the CSCOPE website, the curriculum is “based on practice models from top researchers.” This means that we are getting these ideas from people that are not even in classrooms and far from know what actually goes on in the classroom. Anybody could research the best ways certain students learn but the fact is everybody’s different. Just because one student or one classroom environment or one teaching strategy they researched worked doesn’t mean that that certain strategy works on every student in the state of Texas. Teachers are there too have one on one time with each student and get to know them to meet their personal education needs that is specific to them. If officials would allow teachers to teach the way they need to and listen to their ideas on teaching strategies that they feel that work best, there’s a strong chance that more students would graduate.

There’s no reason to totally throw out CSCOPE as there are some aspects that work. Like, for example, the fact that the curriculum keeps all teachers on the same teaching schedule. This especially helps when a student might transfer from one math class to another or from one Texas school to another. This way, when they transfer, they will generally be learning the same thing at the same time as they were at the previous school. CSCOPE is good for this but it’s definitely not good for taking the place of a teacher in the classroom.