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Article Excerpt
The push for a national curriculum is gaining momentum as reformers press states to acknowledge "world class" benchmarks for student achievement. The topic had been dormant since Clinton-era efforts to promote "voluntary national standards" yielded little more than charges of political correctness. With No Child Left Behind now stirring concerns about disparate state assessments and sometimes incoherent state standards, has the time come for the new president and Congress to press forward on a national curriculum? Chester E. Finn Jr., Education Next senior editor and longtime champion of standards-based reform, says unequivocally "Yes!" and lays out his vision of what it should look like and how it should work. Deborah Meier, founder of New York City's Central Park East Schools and author of The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem, is equally vehement in arguing "No!" while providing her own set of strategies for improving our nation's schools.
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EDUCATION NEXT: Should the United States have a national curriculum?
Chester Finn: Absolutely, positively yes, provided that we properly define "curriculum," and ensure that the states' participation remains voluntary. In the core subjects of English, math, science, and history (including geography and civics, never say "social studies"), there is absolutely no reason why we ought not ask all young Americans to learn most of the same things while in the elementary and secondary grades. That doesn't mean all teachers should follow identical lesson plans, that everybody needs to read the same poems and plays, or that a rigid "scope and sequence" should be clamped onto all schools and school systems. But the basic content of, say, 4th-grade English or 6th-grade math or 8th-grade science should be the same from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. And that content should be married to national standards of "proficiency" in these subjects at these grade levels, and joined to national exams by which we determine how well and by whom this is being accomplished.
The curriculum should cover grades K-12 and leave plenty of room for state, local, and building- and classroom-level variation and augmentation. Particularly in grades 11 and 12, it would make sense to offer (as high schools do today) some choice among courses in science, history, and English; one English class might focus on drama, another on creative writing. A charter or magnet school might specialize in art and music, while another concentrates on science and math, in addition to the academic core.
One way to picture the core is the " 1,000 question" approach, which blends standards, curriculum, and assessment. Here's a simple version: The testing body (perhaps a consortium of states, possibly a spinoff from the National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP]) would publish--this is all totally transparent--maybe 1,000 possible exam questions dealing with, say, 7th-grade science. A generous portion would be open-response and deep-thought queries that probe a student's ability to make sense of what he or she is learning, not just parrot it back or fill in bubbles. The national end-of-course exam in 7th-grade science would consist of a subset of those questions. Any student able to answer all 1,000 would likely get a perfect score on the exam.
But 1,000 is...
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