Having a curriculum is not a silver bullet. It does not solve all our educational problems. But not having a curriculum indicates our unwillingness or inability to define what we are trying to accomplish. To paraphrase the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland, if you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there. The curriculum is a starting point for other reforms. It informs teachers, students, parents, teacher educators, assessment developers, textbook publishers, technology providers, and others about the goals of instruction. It provides direction, clarity, and focus around worthy ends, without interfering with teachers’ decisions about how to teach.
Other nations that outrank us on international assessments of mathematics and science do not concentrate obsessively on those subjects in their classrooms. Nations such as Japan and Finland have developed excellent curricula that spell out what students are supposed to learn in a wide variety of subjects.3 Their schools teach the major fields of study, including the arts and foreign languages, because they believe that this is the right education for their students, not because they will be tested. They do the right thing without rewards and sanctions. Their students excel in the tested subjects because they are well educated in many other subjects that teach them to use language well and to wrestle with important ideas.
If we are willing to learn from top-performing nations, we should establish a substantive national curriculum that declares our intention to educate all children in the full range of liberal arts and sciences, as well as physical education. This curriculum would designate the essential knowledge and skills that students need to learn. In the last two years of high school, there should be career and technical studies for students who plan to enter the workforce after high school graduation. But they too should study the arts and sciences, so that they too may gain a sense of life’s possibilities. Because we are all citizens of this democracy, because we will all be voters, we must all be educated for our responsibilities.
Some will object that a country as diverse as ours can’t possibly have a national curriculum and will point to the debacle of the voluntary national history standards as evidence for their skepticism. The counterargument is that our nation had a de facto curriculum for most of the nineteenth century, when the textbooks in each subject were interchangeable. For the first half of the twentieth century as well, we had an implicit national curriculum that was decisively shaped by the college entrance examinations of the College Board; their highly respected examinations were based on a specific and explicit syllabus, designed by teachers and professors of each subject.
But what about the culture wars that will surely erupt if there is any attempt to decide what will be taught and learned in any subject? We can now see, with the passage of years, that it is possible to forge a consensus in every contested subject-matter terrain if the various factions accept the necessity of working together and the futility of trying to impose their views on everyone else.
There is reason to hope that the curriculum wars of the 1990s have ended, not in a victory for either side, but in a truce. Where once there were warring partisans of whole language and phonics, now there is a general recognition that children need both. Beginning readers must learn the sounds and symbols of language, and they should learn to love reading by hearing and reading wonderful literature. Teachers should make sure that all children have a steady diet of good—no, excellent—literature in their classrooms. I would go further, hopefully not harming the possible consensus, to insist that all children should learn grammar, spelling, and syntax, which will enable them to write well and communicate their ideas clearly. Knowing the basic parts of speech will improve students’ ability to understand and use the English language well.4
Furthermore, I suggest a short reading list—not more than ten titles—of indispensable literary classics for each grade. Carol Jago, a high school English teacher and a past president of the National Council of Teachers of English, wrote a delightful explanation of how and why to teach the classics today.5 Back in the days of the culture wars, it was taken as a given that any list would be oppressive, exclusive, and elitist, privileging some while leaving others out. One hopes we have moved beyond those contentious times and can at last identify essential writings that have stood the test of time and continue to be worthy of our attention.
Without the effort to teach our common cultural heritage, we risk losing it and being left with nothing in common but an evanescent and often degraded popular culture. Let us instead read, reflect on, and debate the ideas of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Henry David Thoreau, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. E. B. DuBois, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Lewis Carroll, and many others whose writings remain important because of their ideas, their beauty, or their eloquence. Let us be sure that our students read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and other basic documents of our nation’s founding and development. Classic literature coexists happily with contemporary writings, especially when students are encouraged to engage in discussions about timeless issues such as the conflict between freedom and authority, the conflict between the rights of society and the rights of the individual, and the persistent dilemmas of the human condition. I do not suggest that it will be easy to shape lists of essential readings for every grade, only that it is necessary not to shirk this obligation if we wish to have excellent education for all. An English language arts curriculum without literature—real, named books of lasting importance—is no English curriculum at all.
In mathematics, the wars of the 1990s between traditionalists and constructivists have also subsided, although they flare up from time to time when parents discover that their children can’t add or subtract. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which initially emphasized the role of discovery learning and social interaction in learning, now recognizes that students must learn the basic facts of computation, which are necessary for successful problem solving and critical thinking. Many districts that mandate constructivist programs realize that they must also teach basic mathematical computation. A consensus is possible. The results of international assessments, in which American students have faltered over the years, have helped us to understand the importance of avoiding extremes and unnecessary polarization.
In the sciences, the ingredients for a solid, sequential curriculum are at hand, based on work already completed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Project 2061 and the National Research Council. Students should study science in every grade, but this is hard to achieve when there are not enough science teachers. The study of science is also hobbled by the theological and political debate about evolution, which shadows every effort to devise science curricula on a statewide basis. The first problem can be solved with determination and resources; it is not beyond our reach. The second is not easily resolved because it involves a conflict with deeply held religious beliefs. Education authorities must separate teaching about science from teaching about religion. They must clarify to parents and the public that these are not the same. In other words, science classes should teach science, as validated by scholarship, and religion classes should teach religion. This principle cannot be compromised without doing injury to both fields of study.
Even history can be rescued from the culture wars, which now, one hopes, are a distant memory. In contrast to the voluntary national history standards, which unleashed a national furor, Massachusetts, California, and a few other states have demonstrated that it is possible to develop a history curriculum that is challenging and lively. Arguments over whose history should be taught amused academics and polemicists in the 1990s but helped to stifle the study of history in the schools.
At present, most students plod dutifully and unenthusiastically through obligatory textbooks of 1,000 or more pages stuffed with facts but lacking in narrative or intellectual excitement. The great stories of brave men and wom
en, of heroes and villains, of tragic decisions and extraordinary deeds, are gone. The textbooks avoid controversy—which would hurt sales—and maintain a studied air of neutrality, thus ensuring the triumph of dullness. In The Language Police, I wrote that the systematic sanitizing of textbooks had turned school into “the Empire of Boredom.” The same children whose textbooks avoid controversy have easy access to eroticized violence and sensationalism on videos, television, the movies, and the Internet.6
History should be as exciting to young people as anything on television, but their textbooks turn it into a listless parade of names, themes, wars, and nations. Among all the subjects tested by the federal government, U.S. history is the one in which American students register the worst performance, even though almost all students are required to study it.7 To restore excitement and vitality to this subject, teachers and curriculum designers must raise questions, provoke debates, explore controversies, and encourage the use of primary documents, narratives written by master historians, biographies, documentaries, and other visual records of important events and personalities. Biographies are a terrific way to introduce elementary-age children to history.
In the arts, we should agree that all children deserve the opportunity to learn to play a musical instrument, to sing, engage in dramatic events, dance, paint, sculpt, and study the great works of artistic endeavor from other times and places. Through the arts, children learn discipline, focus, passion, and the sheer joy of creativity. We should make sure that these opportunities and the resources to support them are available to every student in every school.
Many educators and parents worry that a national curriculum might be captured by “the wrong people,” that is, someone whose views they do not share. I too worry that a national curriculum might be no better than the vacuum that now exists, might fail to lift our sights, and might fail to release us from the shackles of test-based accountability. There is also a long-standing, deep-seated fear in this country about the federal government taking control of the curriculum. This fear stems from the individualistic, libertarian strain in American history, which harbors a certain suspicion about “those bureaucrats” in Washington, D.C., who might try to impose wrong-headed ideas on our neighborhood schools. In fact, it is currently a matter of federal law that the U.S. Department of Education is not permitted to impose any curriculum on the schools. Thus, any national curriculum must be both nonfederal and voluntary, winning the support of districts and states because of its excellence.
Of course, a voluntary national curriculum might be established by private organizations, as the College Board did in the first four decades of the twentieth century. State officials might work together to create a curriculum that is national but not federal. As I write, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, working with state education departments and groups such as Achieve, are trying to develop common standards in reading and mathematics for the nation’s school. It remains to be seen whether these organizations, with all their political muscle, will be able to circumvent the pitfalls that have plagued previous efforts and avoid the empty blather that has made most state standards meaningless. If they draft standards only for reading and mathematics, then their effort may reinforce the skills-only approach to schooling that now prevails.
If it is impossible to reach consensus about a national curriculum, then every state should make sure that every child receives an education that includes history, geography, literature, the arts, the sciences, civics, foreign languages, health, and physical education. These subjects should not be discretionary or left to chance. Every state should have a curriculum that is rich in knowledge, issues, and ideas, while leaving teachers free to use their own methods, with enough time to introduce topics and activities of their own choosing. That would avoid unnecessary duplication from grade to grade and would guarantee that children in different districts—rural, suburban, and urban—are getting access to the same opportunities to learn.
Even now, about 1,000 schools use the Core Knowledge curriculum, which describes explicitly what shall be taught in the full range of liberal arts and sciences in each grade. Teachers in these schools spend about half their day teaching the Core Knowledge curriculum, not through rote drill but through projects and activities. The rest of the day is available for their own choices or for fulfilling local and state requirements.8 Students who have the benefit of this kind of sequential, knowledge-rich curriculum do very well on the standardized tests that they must take. They do well on tests because they have absorbed the background knowledge to comprehend what they read.
Why is the curriculum important? It is a road map. Without a road map, you are sure to drive in circles and get nowhere. To be sure, some people like driving in circles, and some educators like teaching in a school without a curriculum. In a nation that prizes liberty, those schools should continue to do as they please. But most schools will want to know what teachers should teach and what students are expected to learn. A sound curriculum ensures that young people will not remain ignorant of the most essential facts and ideas of the humanities and sciences. Background knowledge is critical to understanding and learning; whether one studies history or science or any other field, background knowledge is crucial in enabling the student to quickly grasp and integrate new information.
To have no curriculum, as is so often the case in American schools, leaves schools at the mercy of those who demand a regime of basic skills and no content at all. To have no curriculum is to leave decisions about what matters to the ubiquitous textbooks, which function as our de facto national curriculum. To have no curriculum on which assessment may be based is to tighten the grip of test-based accountability, testing only generic skills, not knowledge or comprehension.
Why not leave well enough alone, and let the textbook publishers decide what all children should learn? To anyone who might be satisfied with this response, I say: Sit down and read a textbook in any subject. Read the boring, abbreviated pap in the history textbooks that reduces stirring events, colorful personalities, and riveting controversies to a dull page or a few leaden paragraphs. Read the literature textbooks with their heavy overlay of pedagogical jargon and their meager representation of any significant literature. Note that nearly half the content of these bulky, expensive books consists of glitzy graphics or blank space. Challenge yourself to read what your children are forced to endure, and then ask why we expect that textbooks—written and negotiated line by line to placate politically active interest groups in Texas and California—are up to the task of supplying a first-rate curriculum.9
One of the few states with an excellent curriculum in every subject is Massachusetts. Perhaps not coincidentally, students in Massachusetts have the highest academic performance in the nation on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and rank near the top when compared to their peers in other nations. When Massachusetts participated in the TIMSS international assessment in 2007, its fourth graders placed second in the world in science, surpassed only by Singapore, and its eighth graders tied for first in the world in science with students in Singapore, Chinese Taipei, Japan, and Korea.10 When students in Minnesota took the TIMSS tests, eighth graders tied with Singapore in earth science; in mathematics, their performance was mediocre, like the nation’s. William Schmidt, the U.S. coordinator for TIMSS, said that Minnesota has a strong curriculum in earth science, but not in mathematics. The lesson, he concluded, is that American students “can be the best in the world when we give them a curriculum that is focused and coherent and that is delivered by teachers well trained in the content being offered at that level.”11
If our nation or states or districts have a good curriculum, we must ensure that our assessment systems reflect and reinforce what is taught. There is a maxim among educators that “what gets tested is what gets taught.” The assessments used in our schools should be as good as the curriculum. I do not seek to abolish standardized, multiple-choice tests; they give a quick
snapshot of student performance at a specific point in time. But they are not sufficient to measure student learning. To lift the quality of education, we must encourage schools to use measures of educational accomplishment that are appropriate to the subjects studied, such as research papers in history, essays and stories in literature, research projects in science, demonstrations of mathematical competence, videotaped or recorded conversations in a foreign language, performances in the arts, and other exhibitions of learning.
Nor should test scores be the sole measure of the quality of a school. Every state should establish inspection teams to evaluate the physical and educational condition of its schools, to ensure that a full curriculum is taught (not only the tested subjects), and to review the quality of teaching and learning. Inspectors should judge teaching and learning by observing it, not by using checklists to note whether students have “learning goals,” teachers have “data binders,” schools have “data inquiry teams,” or other nonsensical requirements based on the jargon of the day.
The goal of evaluation should not be to identify schools that must be closed, but to identify schools that need help. The job of educational authorities is to solve problems, not evade them by shuttering schools. When schools are struggling, the authorities should do whatever is necessary to improve them. This may mean professional development for teachers, smaller classes, targeted programs in reading or other subjects, after-school activities, additional tutoring for students, extra supervisors, a better disciplinary policy, parent education classes, and other interventions that will strengthen the school’s capacity to educate its students.
The Death and Life of the Great American School System Page 30