The Langs eventually hired a tutor for Nick so he could catch up to his classmates; his stomachaches are over. But for educators, his story illustrates a continuing headache. Unlike virtually every other industrialized country, the United States has no national curriculum and no agency that supervises the development of classroom materials. Each of the nation’s 15,367 school districts is a kingdom unto itself with the power to decide what its students will be taught. The system guarantees local input–a plus-but has made it difficult to institute widespread change. Reformers say that without national standards and other incentives to duplicate successful programs, models for educational change will remain just that-models. “Right now, we have victory gardens,” says Eve Bither, Maine’s education commissioner. “We need amber waves of grain.”
The seeds of change have been planted. Around the country, educators and public officials are trying to define a common body of knowledge that all students would master before graduating-in essence, an American version of a national curriculum. “I think it’s the biggest change since Horace Mann created the common school early in the last century,” says Ernest L. Boyer, president of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In some cases, the reformers are experts in a particular subject area; for example, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has developed student performance standards that emphasize real-life problem-solving over mere computation. Others are working on a series of more sophisticated national tests pegged to new curriculum standards.
Washington is also getting into the act. In 1989, President Bush and the nation’s governors agreed on six goals at the Education Summit in Virginia. Two years later, Congress established the National Council on Education Standards and Testing to figure out how to reach those goals. The council’s report, issued in January, recommended establishing standards for students in all grades and a national testing system to ensure that students meet those standards. The council members–politicians, educators and businessmen-set up task forces in English, math, science, history and geography to raise standards in each subject area. Their reports, scheduled to come out in the next two years, are expected to urge the introduction of more intellectually engaging material at an earlier age, along with a more hands-on approach to teaching rather than lecturing. Other task forces are studying national tests and implementation.
This movement challenges a sacred principle of American parenthood and polities: local control of education. Even now, many reformers are reluctant to use the words “national curriculum” to describe the effort to set standards. “In my district, you don’t use those two words,” says Rep. William Goodling of Pennsylvania, a member of the standards council and a former schools superintendent. But public opinion is changing. Recent polls have shown that the vast majority of Americans favor standards of performance for all schools. “What we’re seeing is the American equivalent of the developments now underway in Eastern Europe,” says David Cohen, a professor of education at Michigan State University. “It is a revolution.”
The shot heard round the education world was fired in 1983, with the publication of “A Nation at Risk.” After that widely publicized federal report described education as a national crisis, it became more acceptable to think of national solutions. At the same time, American school officials, reacting to public concern about global competition, began looking overseas to see how other countries educated their future workers. They found that countries whose students scored highest on international tests all had a planned curriculum. In some countries, such as France or Germany, the education ministries control the lesson plans through national tests, which determine whether students move up to universities or go out into the work force. The curriculum is geared to the tests. In Japan, the government strictly screens school textbooks, giving it a virtual lock on what is taught in the classroom.
American reformers expect a national curriculum to be much more flexible. All proposals leave room for regional differences and allow teachers to come up with their own methods of interpreting the material. But all students will be expected to master a core body of material. “This is not an attempt to tell teachers what to do,” says Marshall Smith, dean of Stanford’s School of Education, “but rather to suggest what should happen over a three- or four-year period.”
It’s unlikely that any federal agency will try to force changes in the classroom. Districts will probably still be autonomous, but there will be tremendous outside pressure to get with the program. Smith and others say that a national quasi-governmental agency, such as the standards council could coordinate teacher accreditation, development of standards and testing. Reformers expect the tests to be powerful incentives. The new exams will be very different from current standardized tests and will probably include much more essay work. In order to get good results, schools will have to teach the new curriculum.
If a form of national curriculum takes hold, it may not be in place until today’s first graders are in college. There are many obstacles ahead– creating new tests, training teachers, convincing local district’s to go along. But reformers say momentum is on their side. The hard part is turning that momentum into schools that work.
