The future of curriculum studies, a distinctive specialization within the academic field of education, is uncertain. This uncertainty is due to external influences and related internal disruptions. Because school reform focuses on improvement in students' scores on standardized examinations, curriculum has become relegated to a means to an end. Forty years of school reform in the United States have reshaped U.S. curriculum studies: first, by removing its main professional preoccupation—curriculum development—and then by reducing the significance of the curriculum itself—and by implication, the significance of its study—in accountability schemes.

Given these circumstances external to the field, it is unsurprising that shifts internal to the field have been dramatic in nature. That loss of curriculum development as primary domain of labor precipitated nothing less than a paradigm ...