Pros and Cons of Standards and National Curriculums
Characteristics of a quality curriculum at the bottom of the page.
Pros
- Need to know what needs to be taught – guidelines
- Practical – provides a framework from which teachers can work
- Agreement on broad common principles
- Provides for equality of educational opportunity assess to knowledge for all students
- Goal is to ensure vocational and economic success for individual and nation
- Easier to transfer between schools
- Less expensive
- Fill political agendas
- Less teacher education with the teacher as a facilitator
- Curriculum focus on basic skills
- Teach to the test
- Focuses on observable behaviors, artifacts, and objective results
- Easy to assess
- Claims to be the whole curriculum – research based
Cons
- Not every school is the same
- Student achievement based solely on external tests
- Focus on product instead of process (lack of critical thinking, problem solving)
- Focus on societal needs as compared to individual
- Focus on goal or objective without critical conversation as to a relevant authentic purpose
- Less professional freedom and judgment, teacher autonomy, teacher as a technocrat
- More competitive on an individual basis – no collaborative effort
- Values are excluded subject orientation
- Doesn’t realize the complexity of curriculum development
- Lose teachable moments
- Lack of democratic value without a democratic process
- Standards are written and enforced by non-educators
- Lose student teacher interaction
- Focuses on observable behaviors, artifacts, and objective results
- Leads to testing lower level knowledge, comprehension, and memory emphasis
- Lack of creativity
- Lose student autonomy
- Imposed ideologies
- Imposed religion
- False sense of democracy
- Lose community support
- Narrow scope
- Ignores the process of curriculum development
- Usually has a subject matter focus rather than personalize for each student
The public's reasoning about standards is largely misunderstood because of a reasoning fallacy of generalizing that if something is good for an individual, it is good for everyone. For example: High scores on tests grant entry to elite universities, therefore high scores must be right for the nation as a whole.
Most parents would probably like their children to have high scores. However, looking at our nation as a whole we should come to a different conclusion. In that situation we would want a combination of people that are able to be leaders, followers, heroes, creators, producers, so that the society could function for the benefit of everyone.
Reflect on how the following characteristics for a quality curriculum may or may not be achieved by standards
- Standards are connected to community needs and student needs
- Empower teachers
- Based on principled procedures
- Flexible and able to change
- Includes time lines for student's learning, development, and growth
- Describes a whole curriculum
- Hidden curriculum is considered
- Identifies big ideas, concepts, and outcomes
- Includes assessment: formative, summative, diagnosis, and generative
- Students have a large say in evaluation
- Includes ways to satisfy accountability