NCLB: Impact on Curriculum

The Standards Movement and Curriculum in the United States

Toward the end of the last century, there arose a “standards” movement. Standards often come in three kinds and are easily confused. First are curriculum standards, or goals to be achieved by students at various ages or grade levels. It is these kinds of standards that are the primary concern of this chapter, because such standards determine the curriculum to be mastered by students. It is recognized that the concept of curriculum could mean the whole panoply of events and expectations that students are exposed to, both what is hidden and what is manifest. For some curriculum theorists, virtually everything can be counted as the school curriculum, from the philosophy of the school and its rules and regulations, to its teachers, texts, tests, and buildings. Students must negotiate all of these phenomena in some, and thus all affect what students learn in and from school. For this chapter, however, we will use curriculum in its restricted sense, as the school subjects taught, or the elements of a particular subject matter.

In the best of worlds, a set of standards to guide instruction are determined after intense and prolonged debate by teachers, parents, developmental psychologists, assessment [Page II-364]experts, and the business community. In the real world, however, curriculum standards may be overly influenced by special interests. Publishers with interest in phonics have helped write literacy standards, representatives of manufacturers helped write economic standards, lobbyists of the dairy council, chemical, and pharmaceutical companies have influenced science standards, and so forth. Thus curriculum can be made to serve economic and political ends. There is no science, only politics and values, from which to derive curriculum, and it is this that accounts for the passion aroused by some curricula issues.

...