Excellence

Excellence refers to emphasizing specific curricular areas in hope of best ensuring economic growth and national unity. Excellence may be viewed through a variety of historical contexts, but is generally a reaction to schooling aims and practices that impair students' ability to compete in the local, national, or global marketplace, and strives for the development and transmission of national unity and civic literacy. A central means of doing this is through the creation and implementation of content-area standards assessed through standardized testing and/or a national curriculum. The excellence movement in the United States has had a profound effect on educational policy nationally and curriculum studies within the academy as many of the initiatives, curriculum, and research agendas constructed are grounded upon the central notions of this quest.

What makes the excellence movement distinct from other curricular movements is its emphasis on collective concerns such as economic growth and national unity. The quest for excellence can be seen as an imposition on the schools insofar as the movement resulted from events that occurred outside of the schools. During the middle of the 20th century, the excellence movement developed in two interrelated ways. First, schooling in that era brought forth sharp criticism against the anti-intellectualism of the public schools from academicians and military leaders such as Arthur Bestor and Hyman Rickover. Second, Sputnik I's launch on October 4, 1957, drew focus toward matters thought essential to national defense and unity. [Page 359]One manifestation of this was the 1959 Woods Hole conference at which academics and scientists attempted to deconstruct the central tenets of specific academic areas. The excellence movement led to much educational experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s and emphasized the need for schools to deliver specific content (e.g., math and science) seen as important to the economic growth of the United States and instruction that fostered national unity. This experimentation provided fertile ground for curricular theorists to construct a variety of educational programming that either supported the goals of the excellence movement or constructed other opportunities for children that emphasized the whole child.

In 1981, then Secretary of Education Terrel Bell sponsored a commission to examine the quality of U.S. education. The result of this work was the 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform. The report was authored by university presidents, school board members, school administrators, business executives, and a teacher, and focused on content, expectations, time, and teaching. A Nation at Risk also included suggestions for correcting the alleged deficiencies of the schools in the areas of content, standards and expectations, time, teaching, and leadership and fiscal support. A Nation at Risk called for increased rigor and standardization within a limited range of curricular areas to better prepare students for work in the economy to keep the United States competitive, as well as training the best and brightest children in high needs like science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Like the work in the previous decades, the correctives suggested in A Nation at Risk were grounded in the collective economic needs of the United States as tied to the future growth and security of the nation.

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