Pros and Cons of Standards and National Curriculums
The page includes: flawed assumptions, a list of pros and cons for standards or a standard national curriculum. Also includes, characteristics of a quality curriculum to use to evaluate standards and standard documents to see how they may or may not help achieve the established goals of local educational systems, curriculums, teachers, and learners.
Standards assume three big flawed assumptions:
- There is a set of skills and knowledge that everyone must have in order to live a successful life in the world. Which also implies that life would not be successful without knowing all of that information.
- All children are capable of and interested in acquiring the skills and knowledge. Most often at a similar pace.
- Every child can, at least be average. Impossible with norm referenced standardized assessment, where there is one below average child, for every above average.
As a result a system is created that focuses on rules, homework, grades, and passing tests. At the cost of each child’s individual talents, passions, or unique ways of learning.
Therefore, 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, based on a diversity of brilliant people. A curriculum with the following characteristics:
Characteristics for a quality curriculum
Use these quality characteristics to consider the quality of different sets of standards. And how they may or may not help achieve the established goals of local educational systems, curriculums, teachers, and learners.
- Standards are big ideas that allow a curriculum to be personalized for each learner to develop their individual brilliances.
- Standards are connected to community needs and learners needs
- Empower teachers
- Based on principled procedures
- Flexible and able to change
- Includes flexible time lines for 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
- Learners have a large say in evaluation
- Includes ways to satisfy accountability
Pros for standards & national curriculums
- 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 for standards & national curriculums
- 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
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