Sunday, March 7, 2010
National Curriculum
I found it interesting the suggestion by Jacobs that a "national array of thoughtful, well-articulated curriculum options" be made available by the federal government as a sort of guideline for states to work under. Notice that Jacobs is not saying that we should have a national curriculum but a variety of resources supported by the federal government. This could be used as a framework by states and give common language and an understanding of effective curricular examples. Standards could be developed with input from the best teachers at all levels and unite our educational system. At the very least, teachers would have access to methods that were supported by researchers and teachers alike. A great system would also have instructional strategies available to teachers as well. I'm sure this would be a huge undertaking and that our federal government would somehow find a way to screw it up but it seems as though these curricular options would provide a great impetus for change within our educational system and a useful model for any educator.
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I did my comp ed paper on New Zealand and they had a national curriculum. It was very visible to anyone that was interested in learning about it and from what I read, teachers and parents were pleased with it. I am still stuck on the idea from a video we watched last week and her talking about how the US is like 50 different small countries because of the different things each state needs. My school is headed towards standards based education (as is Maine), so it should be an interesting process and hopefully it will be beneficial to us all.
ReplyDeleteHave you heard about the Common Core Standards that are about to be released for public comment (only the language arts and math)? I know these are only standards, but in my opinion standards often drive curriculum. Maine has signed on to use the Common Core standards. To be a participating state you have to teach 85% of the standards for each content area. That will drive curriculum. I wonder if we will see lots of creative ways to create a curriculum that teaches these standards. Or will it be more of the same?
ReplyDeleteI think the move (48 out of 50 states, with Alaska and Hawaii being the holdouts) toward common core state standards is a good thing; we are really different demographically than the countries with national curricula like Japan, New Zealand and Finland, so I don't think a national curriculum would work very well. However, the common core state standards would help to eliminate vast differences in what a student learns based on where they grew up, and with collective creative work to flesh these standards out in each state, we can capitalize on our uniqueness and diversity while working toward meaningful, high expectations for learning everywhere! You can see the Common Core State Standards at http://corestandards.org/
ReplyDeleteStandards do drive curriculum...but I am not very hopeful that the common core state standards are going to help us any more than the standards we already have.
ReplyDeleteEven with common core state standards in place in the U.S., we'll still have a huge discrepancy in implementation and assessment of them.
I think there are two critical things we need at this point:
• Allow (coerce/encourage/require??) all teachers to get involved in the curriculum process that standards "beg" us to do.
• Each school or district needs to put in place a process for curriculum development (as we are trying to do in EDC 533) that is understandable, makes sense, and USED in curriculum development.
The jumping around from standards to assessments to pieces of the curriculum simply means that we are making good decisions in our own schools.