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CORRECTING THE CURRICULUM
What should be done to improve our students' education? March 24, 1998 |
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Questions asked
in this forum:
Why are students going downhill as they enter high school? What are the pros and cons of a national curriculum? What can or what should we do to make education more relevant to our students? How important are math and science scores? Wouldn't reducing class size and teacher workloads improve the situation? Is it a question of not holding students to high enough standards or a lack of parental involvement? Are there better teaching techniques, such as Montessori? Caryn Robertson of Landenberg, PA asks: What are the pros and cons of a national curriculum?
Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, responds:
A national curriculum on its face may sound like a good idea: every student on the same academic page, so-to-speak, with no knowledge gaps as they move, in our highly mobile society, from a school in one district or state to another, and the same foundation as they enter college or the workforce. However, education has always been the province of the state, and best delivered and directed at the local level, where the input of the community, including parents and teachers, can be most meaningful. One could argue that the recent national curriculum or national standards movement has actually reinforced why the states are a better venue to produce high academic standards. Efforts to create voluntary standards for both history and English were marred by political ideology more than a concern that children be challenged to the highest standards.
I would be in favor however, of rigorous, independent national assessments against which state standards and local educational delivery could be measured and evaluated. We currently have such national assessments on a limited scale in the form of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
Gerry Wheeler, the executive director of the National Science Teachers Association, responds:
While many countries opt for a national curriculum, we in the United States have traditionally chosen to have states and local school districts design curricula that they believe best fit the needs of their own students. This will not change.
We do, however, need a common vision of what high quality science education looks like. Fortunately, this exists in the National Science Education Standards, which many states have incorporated into their own standards.
The science standards urge us to involve students actively in learning science by having them ask questions and explore their own answers to them. The standards remind us that science is for all students at every grade level, not just those who eventually will be scientists and engineers, as we have thought too often in the past.
Unlike a national curriculum, these standards are voluntary guidelines so that local school districts and schools can incorporate them to address local needs.
Marc S. Tucker, president of the National Center of Education and Economy, responds:
Almost every nation that outperforms us - and there are many - has a national curriculum. As a practical matter, our curriculum is set by the textbooks that teachers use. Publishers decide on the content of textbooks by sending their salespeople to teachers committees all over the nation and asking them what they want in the texts. The result is the biggest, most expensive texts in the world. They are full of a little bit of everything. Taken as a whole, they are, in the words of a recent report, "..a mile wide and an inch deep." The insignificant gets the same treatment as the essential and all of it is very brief. These texts are so big that no teacher can get through them. But many try. Each does it in their own way. So no teacher can count on the students coming into her class having been exposed to anything in particular. Contrast this to other nations, where the curriculum is set to standards for each grade, grade by grade. Each topic is alloted enough time to teach it well and once it is taught, it is learned. Students who move from one end of the nation to another do not have to study in one year the same thing they learned in their old school last year or two years before. Salespeople do not have to travel the nation to find out what should be in the textbooks because the nation has already decided what should be in the textbooks. National curriculum works.The critics are worried that a national curriculum would be set by the same elites that brought us the new math and other fads. And they charge, too, that it would be set by academics and other so-called liberals who would flout the values of many mainstream Americans. The experience in other countries would suggest otherwise. No work of this kind gets very far in a democratic country - ours or any other - that is not the result of broad participation and review leading to a working consensus. There are other critics who say that setting academic standards for students really ought to be a main part of the professional responsibility of teachers, school by school. In their eyes, setting national standards would deprofessionalize teaching. I do not agree. One has only to visit other nations that have national standards to see thousands upon thousands of teachers who are consummate professionals. Being a professional teacher has mainly to do with being highly knowledgeable and skilled at bringing students from a wide variety of backgrounds up to high standards, not with inventing the standards.
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