Seventy-five respected leaders in education, business, and government issued a call this week to devise shared curriculum guidelines for the new common standards.
The move is notable for finding common ground on a sensitive topic among an ideologically diverse group of thinkers. Signatories include political liberals and conservatives, and those with varying views on controversial education issues such as charter schools, testing policy, and ways to evaluate and compensate teachers.
Among them are university scholars such as Harvard University鈥檚 William Julius Wilson; former top federal education officials in both Democratic and Republican administrations, such as Chester E. Finn Jr., Susan B. Neuman, and Marshall 鈥淢ike鈥� Smith; business leaders such as IBM Corp. Vice President Stanley S. Litow; union officials such as American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten; and urban schools superintendents such as Andr茅s Alonso of Baltimore.
Brought together by the , a Washington think tank named for the AFT鈥檚 late president, the signatories issued a statement March 7 titled
They emphasized, however, that they are not advocating one prescriptive learning plan for all children, but one or more 鈥渃urricular guides鈥� to help translate the common standards in mathematics and English/language arts, adopted by all but seven states, into sound curriculum and accompanying resources.
鈥淭o be clear, by 鈥榗urriculum,鈥� we mean a coherent, sequential set of guidelines in the core academic disciplines, specifying the content knowledge and skills that all students are expected to learn, over time, in a thoughtful progression across the grades,鈥� the document says. 鈥淲e do not mean performance standards, textbook offerings, daily lesson plans, or rigid pedagogical prescriptions.鈥�
The signatories acknowledged that with the nation鈥檚 history of state and local control over education, 鈥渢he very idea of common curriculum guidance will strike many as overly controversial.鈥�
No 鈥楽traitjacket鈥�
But 鈥渃ommon curriculum guidance does not represent a straitjacket or a narrowing of learning possibilities,鈥� they said. For instance, if the guide calls for 4th graders to study the solar system,accompanying materials could suggest ways to teach it. Some teachers could ask students to spend a week building scale models, while others might choose to give a lecture with accompanying video, and still others might weave the topic into lessons about the chemical properties of gases and solids or have students draw or write about the characteristics of the planets.
States鈥� use of the guidelines would be 鈥減urely voluntary鈥� and would account for no more than 60 percent of what is taught in classrooms, leaving ample room for regional variations. The guides would begin with math and English/language arts, but eventually encompass other areas such as history, the sciences, foreign languages, and the arts, the document says.
National Content?
Despite the arguments of the signatories, some viewed the manifesto as a call for national curriculum. Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank, declined to sign it in part for that reason. Mr. Hess said he believes that shared curriculum guidelines 鈥渧iolate the spirit of the common standards,鈥� which he supports.
鈥淭hey were carefully crafted to be agnostic on curriculum, so that there would be lots of different waysto organize scope and sequence, and create and deliver materials, and so educators and state leaders could embrace them whatever their stands in debates about pedagogy, the desirability of school autonomy, and the wars about what to read,鈥� said Mr. Hess, who advocates choice in many aspects of education.
鈥淭hey can鈥檛 go on about a 鈥榗oherent, substantive, sequential鈥� plan for the 鈥榢nowledge and skills鈥� students need and still claim there is enormous room for people to come out with all kinds of instructional and curricular materials,鈥� he said. 鈥淲hat they鈥檙e pushing is a national model of instruction.鈥�
Not so, said Stanford University professor of education Linda Darling-Hammond, a signatory to the paper. The group is calling for a 鈥渧ery lean approach鈥� to outlining the knowledge and skills students need 鈥渋n some reasonable sequence,鈥� as is done in Finland and Japan, where a K-12 math curriculum might run a total of 10 pages, she said. The actual curricular units and lesson plans are then left to educators to develop, she said.
鈥淲e鈥檙e trying to make a case for the fact that it matters how we organize curriculum for instruction,鈥� she said. 鈥淭eachers need that set of curriculum tools, and we need to be paying attention to that. This is not the highly prescriptive curriculum that many people think of in the United States. This is, 鈥榃hat are the big ideas, what are the big concepts, that need to be taught for kids to acquire this set of knowledge and skills?鈥� 鈥�
Mr. Finn, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, said he doesn鈥檛 regard national standards or curriculum as 鈥渢he devil鈥檚 curse鈥� if they鈥檙e high-quality and voluntary. 鈥淚t鈥檚 dumb to have good standards not accompanied by good curriculum,鈥� he said.
The group also called for establishment of a 鈥渃ontrol body鈥� of teachers, content experts, curriculum designers, cognitive scientists, and assessment experts to judge various curricula, textbooks, assessments, and other resources on how well they reflect the standards.
The paper is scheduled for publication in the spring edition of , the quarterly magazine of the AFT. The 1.5 million-member union called for shared core curriculum in the winter edition of the magazine.
At a recent AFT committee meeting, some teachers and top officers expressed concern that common assessments were being developed from the common standards with no curriculum in between. That concern is repeated in the Shanker Institute document. (鈥淎FT Presses Need for Curriculum Linked to Standards,鈥� March 2, 2011.)
