Origins of the standardized curriculum
In August 2003, a School District press release announced the distribution of "the District's first-ever mandatory standardized curriculum."
But many teachers, parents, and other long-time observers knew that the news was not entirely true. The District had a standardized curriculum in the early 1990s, which then-Superintendent Constance Clayton asserted would bring "excellence and equity" to Philadelphia's schools.
The debate over standardization is also not new. Education policy expert Jolley Bruce Christman of Research for Action said, "It's an enduring dilemma of education - how much do you standardize, and how much do you leave up to the individual teacher and schools?"
The District's newest standardized curriculum is part of a nationwide movement to define more explicitly what students need to learn. The recent movement towards standardization can be traced back to 1983, when the U.S. Department of Education released a controversial report entitled A Nation At Risk, which asserted that the country's public education system was being "eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity." It went on to claim that American students were not being adequately prepared to compete for the jobs of the future.
In response, business leaders, politicians, and community advocates renewed calls for education reform. These calls led to states' efforts to create academic standards - statements of what students need to know and be able to do in each subject at each grade level. Advocates asserted that standards would better enable schools to prepare students for college and work. This school improvement strategy became known as "standards-based reform."
However, in Philadelphia and throughout the country, experts soon realized that teachers needed more than statements of standards to improve students' academic performance.
Susan Fuhrman, dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, explained the weaknesses of the original standards-based reforms.
"In the early years of standards-based reforms.teachers were expected to make up their own curricula based on the standards," Fuhrman said. This led to variation in how teachers addressed state standards as well as different expectations across classrooms.
As pressure to improve outcomes increased, teachers and schools sought more guidance on how to meet state standards. Schools districts, wary of telling teachers how to teach, responded by trying to describe and model standards-based instruction. During the late 1990s, Philadelphia Superintendent David Hornbeck's administration created detailed curriculum outlines, videos, and instructional materials aligned to standards for teachers, yet avoided creating a mandatory curriculum.
But with high-stakes tests continuing to show that students were falling short of proficiency, many large urban districts, including Philadelphia, moved towards more tightly prescribed curricula.
Experts offer a number of explanations for why districts have advocated uniformity.
"Standardized curriculum in cities has a lot to do with student mobility," Furman stated. "It's important for schools to be on the same page because students move so frequently back and forth among them."
Other rationales include the hope that standards will provide support to new, inexperienced teachers, equal opportunities for students in poorly managed schools, and guidance for principals who must serve as instructional leaders.
While they have become more common, standardized curricula still vary in degree. Fuhrman explained, "You can have a standardized curriculum across a district without having it be very detailed, or you can have a very detailed standardized curriculum where literally.everybody is on the same page on the same day."
It remains to be seen whether standardized curricula will have the positive effect on student achievement in Philadelphia that school officials envision.
-Jessica Oliff