In a NY Times op-ed piece--
Every State Left Behind--, Diana Ravitch makes the case, contrary to Bush administration policy, for a single national set of tests, standards and curriculum for America's schools.
Two of these (which are really just one--tests imply standards), are a good idea for more than the reasons she cited. We need to be able to compare educational success or failure at all levels, to be able to hold states up against each other to see who is finding the most success for their efforts, and we need to be able to compare our children's abilities to those of the rest of the world.
But a national curriculum? Huh? This goes virtually undefended in the editorial. The only place it's even vaguely alluded to makes no sense at all:
It is fair to say that we will not reach that goal if we accept mediocre performance and label it "proficient." Nor will we reach that goal if we pretend that mathematics taught in Alaska or Iowa is profoundly different from the mathematics taught in Maine or Florida, or for that matter, in Japan and Hungary.
We're really left to guess, but one might imagine she's saying that because the mathematics are the same, the teaching methods ought to be the same as well in all of these places. Yeah . . . so why not just take the Japanese textbooks and give them to the students in Florida? Well, they're in Japanese. Which represents a pretty large cultural difference. If you translated the Japanese textbook word for word, it would still not work well in Florida, despite it's containing the right mathematics for a rigorous national test. There are just too many cultural differences. You can extend this to see that there are too many cultural differences for a single curriculum to work everywhere. That's as true of the differences between inner city Cleveland and suburban Pheonix and rural Montana is it is between the US and Japan.
In addition, the best way to sap the life out of a great teacher is to give her a canned curriculum and force her to teach it. Both my parents were teachers, I've been a teacher, my wife has, I have numerous friends who are teachers. Teachers are thoughtful, creative people who went into teaching to use their thoughtfulness and creativity to reach kids. They know their students better than the federal government does. They are most engaged when they have the most control over their own classrooms.
Another thing about tests: they should be used as measurement tools only. The notion of rewarding schools or states or districts or teachers on the basis of their students' test scores--part of "No Child Left Behind" is basically sick. It punishes schools that need the most help, and it destroys pedagogy, forcing teachers to "teach to the test" and to pressure children to perform, rather than to learn. It causes anxiety in kids and in the end I think the students would rather be left behind.
Finally, I'm not sure what prompted the editorial in the Times in the first place. Education seems to have fallen completely off the President's and Congress's plates.