What National Curriculum Standards Would Look Like

yglesias:

Public debate about the idea of national curriculum standards is often dominated by a dystopian vision of education reduced to an assembly line process. But as Dana Goldstein argues, that’s not really what this is about. She references the Finnish national curriculum guidelines that we both got to learn about last December as a good example—it doesn’t spell out in detail exactly what teachers are supposed to do, but it does say what the general end targets are.

There are a lot of virtues to this kind of planning. For one thing, if teachers of 7th and 8th grade can know that the national standards for grades five and six dictate that students will “come to understand various ways of dividing history into eras; they will use the concepts of prehistory; history, antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the modern era correctly” then they can rely on the fact that most incoming 7th graders will be familiar with these ideas. And even better, since teachers across the country are working toward similar end points, it’s possible for people to collaborate, to share knowledge, and to avoid re-inventing the wheel. There’s more than one effective way to teach sixth graders about “Finland under Swedish rule” but there’s not an infinite variety of ways. By putting boundaries on what subjects are going to be covered, you create a situation where a new teacher isn’t expected to do everything from scratch but can, instead, pick up on one of a variety of tried-and-true approaches already in use.

It’s also worth noting that this choice isn’t neutral in its distributive impact. National standards strongly favor the interests of children whose parents move around. That disproportionately means low-SES children. National standards are also useful for children whose parents have relatively little cultural capital. The current patchwork system works okay for most families because most parents are able to do an okay job of filling in most of the key “gaps” that may emerge in their kids’ knowledge. But those families that are unable to do the gap-filling most effectively are disproportionately the poorest ones and, more generally, the families whose kids need the most help.

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