Creating curriculum has been a solitary endeavor. Isn't it time for a change?

     Writing and developing curriculum for instructing World Language at the middle level here in Maine has been a solitary endeavor for the most part. A few years have seen me working with another World Language teacher to plan our French/Spanish classroom curriculum for grade 6-8. There were also a few years where our curriculum was developed to be part of a library research class. Other than the two year integration with a library research class, I have been on my own to generate curriculum for my subject area’s grade level needs. From time to time, I would communicate with the high school teachers who would be accepting my 8th grades students to see “where students were” on our somewhat  flexible continuum of transitional curriculum for the 8th grade student entering a high school Spanish 1 or 2 level class. My curriculum has been loosely based on the text supplement for the subject.  
   I can recount similar experiences with curriculum writing and development in Massachusetts, where curriculum writing was mainly text based for the high school level, and for part of the middle level. Exploratory format for the lower middle level grade levels was thematically generated. A highlight of preparing curriculum in Massachusetts was that we were actually paid to do so, a fun little motivating perk!  So, despite this short lived additional income, most of my experience with development and has been a solitary, confusing and ever changing task that is dictated by the annual, and once again, ever changing needs of the schedule as is seen through the eyes of the powers that be. In my district, the school board makes decisions about which subjects will be added/ deleted to our grade level programs. These dictates are then passed to the superintendent, and finally to the administration of the different schools, who then implement the dictates. The form of the programs and their various curricula is now subject to budgeting, time constraints, and several other factors which greatly affect learning in the classroom and beyond. Grade level instructors are rarely, to never asked for input/consultation about what, how, when, where, and in which form instruction will take place in my school district.
   Our school has recently been involved with a program called RISC, the reinventing schools coalition, which is helping us to transform our school into a school which is driven by performance based assessment and close alignment to state and national standards. On top of those changes to which instructors are required to show progress in implementation, my subject area has recently undergone some drastic changes. Briefly describing this scenario,  takes us to four years ago when we  began to initiate a k-8 Spanish language program. This has posed and imposed some concern for my fellow World Language teachers and I as we struggle to meet the needs of aligning k-4 curriculum with middle level and then also to accommodate for student transition into the high school levels, as well as high student volume in our heterogeneous classrooms.  I think it is important to add that as I began a graduate program in middle level education a few years ago, I was so excited about the possibilities for second language student learning in an integrated format. It has been frustrating to see a lack of commitment to progress in that area. A trend that we never saw come to fruition, or really even germinate in our middle school. Now, we are adopting a standards based program and we have never even mastered the integrated approach to learning! How can this be possible???