Is the Problem My Child or the Curriculum?

by Ellen Doman

Parents can become aware of their child’s lack of progress from report cards, meetings with teachers, standardized test results, or even helping with homework. It’s a terrible feeling to realize that your child isn’t learning as well as is expected, particularly when you may not have been previously aware of it. 

A failure to progress academically can have multiple causes, of course, but there are a few things that parents and professionals in the field of education need to keep in mind. The curriculum that master plan implemented by schools and mandated by states is not written, designed, and implemented for YOUR child. This massive plan, which dictates the scope of what is taught and in what order it is taught, is not aimed at any particular student but rather designed to reach some overall goals far removed from specific students. 

Students, including your child, vary enormously in their ability to process information and utilize that information in any way. Although the concepts of visual and auditory learners, for example, are often over-simplified, there are real processing differences among students in every class, in every school. What your child is able to learn and retain out of what is being presented is based on his or her ability to take in what is being presented and store it in a way that can be recalled. 

So, although schools have this massive curriculum designed with no particular student in mind at all, your student may not be equipped to learn it. In other words, this may well be the wrong curriculum and instructional approach for your child. In fact, your child might be able to do an outstanding job of learning, given another approach and a different type of curriculum. Too often, schools function like the military. We have this institution with this structure and this agenda. Your child must fit in and learn to meet expectations. 

Consider that the issue may not be caused by a flaw in your child but rather by flaws in how this system is imposing itself on your child. No school can fully individualize what they do. Even students with IEPs don’t actually get their own curriculum but rather a slowed-down, abbreviated version of the overall curriculum. Homeschooling provides a solution, of course, as long as the parent does not simply replicate the errors the schools have made. Improving how a child processes information allows the child to learn from a wider array of instructional styles and permits the child to learn with less effort.

NACD is here to help your child improve his or her processing and also design a truly child-specific learning plan that paves the way for successful and rapid learning. 

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 39 No. 3 , 2025 ©NACD