The Lure of Curricular Reform and Its Pitiful History

The faith of education reformers in curricular change remains unshaken, Mr. Cuban observes - despite ample evidence that this strategy has rarely produced the intended results. The most common strategy that reformers have used in this century to get students to know and do the right things is to change the curriculum. That popular strategy has largely failed. If this history of failure were to be known more widely, it might embarrass the present generation of reformers who scale steep hills to plant the flag of curriculum reform. It is humbling to realize how little each generation learns from the experience of its equally earnest forebears out just how crude a tool curriculum change is for transforming student knowledge and behavior. A few examples should make the point. In the first few decades of this century, temperance advocates were successful in lobbying state legislatures to introduce mandatory public school courses on the evils of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs. By midcentury, insurance companies, automobile manufacturers, and activist citizens - worried about rising numbers of highway fatalities - had formed statewide coalitions to introduce driver's education into the high school curriculum. To reduce the incidence of social diseases and to cultivate proper sexual behavior, reformers around the country convinced school officials to require instruction about the reproductive system and family life. More recently, AIDS has frightened school boards into requiring that every child in elementary school learn about this grim disease. The theory behind these efforts is that teaching children about social problems and their solutions for a couple of hours a week will prevent them from engaging in destructive activities.[1] The failure of these strategies is clearly reflected in young people's continued alcohol and drug abuse and unsafe sexual practices. But what about statistics showing sharp reductions in smoking and deaths on the highway? Aren't they evidence of success? Hardly. Campaigns to reduce smoking began seriously in the late 1950s and escalated to include warning labels on cigarettes in 1964, bans on television and radio advertising, and a constant flow of health information linking lung cancer and heart disease to smoking. With regard to highway fatalities, improved engineering of roadways, increased diligence on the part of automakers in installing safety devices, and national campaigns to educate drivers about the lethal combination of alcohol and driving have all helped reduce highway deaths. In both of these cases, however, there is one age group in which the incidence of the targeted behavior remains at high rates: youths under 18 - the very people who have most recently taken courses in driver's education and studied the effects of alcohol and tobacco abuse. Using the official curriculum to require the young to learn what to do and what not to do has largely failed to cure the social ills that prompted the curricular reforms. One could argue that these previous curricular reforms were forced on the schools by nonprofessionals, mere amateur reformers who knew little about academic content or the complexities of schooling. Perhaps if academic experts had rolled up their sleeves, the outcomes would have been different. Consider, then, the 1950s and 1960s, when a federally and privately funded revolution was launched by subject-matter specialists to change what students studied in math, science, and social studies. Aiming for more rigor and understanding of content, these researchers and curriculum designers also sought to get students to think like scientists and mathematicians. For well over a decade, new texts were written and published, and teachers attended summer institutes to learn the new content and approaches to teaching. When researchers examined courses and the ways texts were used in classrooms a decade after the introduction of the new math, the new biology, the new physics, and the new social studies, what they found was a tiny fraction of teachers hewing fairly closely to what was intended by the specialists. …