Curriculum Studies in Relation to the Field of Educational Administration

Historically, there was a relatively strong linkage between the fields of curriculum and educational administration. Although educational administration has always focused primarily on the education and at times the certification or licensure of superintendents, principals, and assistant principals, the field also has educated individuals who play curriculum-related roles within school districts (e.g., director of curriculum and assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction) and who play a range of curriculum-related policy roles in government.

Within the academic realm, there also was a close relationship between the two fields in the first half of the 20th century. During that time, in fact, curriculum courses normally were embedded within educational administration programs. In addition, curriculum was viewed primarily as a document that prescribed what should happen in the classroom to produce desired results; consequently, virtually everyone assumed that school administrators needed to understand how to make a curriculum and to understand the basic principles of curriculum and instruction. How to Make a Curriculum is a book by Franklin Bobbitt, and Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction is a book by Ralph Tyler. Invariably one or both of these books were used in administrator preparation programs throughout much of the 20th century.

In the century's final decades, however, a new breed of curriculum scholars challenged what they referred to, pejoratively, as the Tyler Rationale, and curriculum studies, in essence, became a separate and radically different field than educational administration.

Although researchers in the educational administration field continued to focus their research on issues such as the effects of different school structures on such things as school climate and student learning, school effectiveness and its correlates, and the impact of school leadership on student achievement (as measured by standardized test scores), scholars such as William Pinar and Madeleine Grumet were reconceptualizing curriculum studies in radically different ways. Among other things, the reconceptualist movement attempted to strip the concept of curriculum of its institutional associations. The institutional, curriculum-as-document view was replaced by a conception of curriculum that equated the concept of curriculum with a highly personal—but also, somewhat paradoxically, a highly theoretical—search for personal meaning.

Another line of criticism came from self-described neo-Marxist curriculum scholars such as Michael Apple. Rather than challenging institution-based views of curriculum and embracing philosophical schools of thought such as existentialism and phenomenology, as Pinar and Grumet did, neo-Marxist scholars embraced critical theory and a macroview of institutions. This view assumed that school curricula—including those things that were taught informally through the way schools were structured—that is, the so-called hidden curriculum—were one of the vehicles that helped the larger society reproduce itself and, in the process, keep the powerful privileged and those at the opposite end of the empowered–disempowered continuum poor and disadvantaged.

Interestingly, the field of educational administration was experiencing its own theory movement [Page 255]at approximately the same time that curriculum scholars were embracing theory. What educational administration scholars meant by theory, however, was quite different from what curriculum scholars meant. Although curriculum scholars looked to the humanities and European social thought for inspiration and guidance, educational administration scholars attempted to generate the sort of empirically tested social science theory that promised to provide the sort of institutional control that the new breed of curriculum scholars railed against.

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