This reflective essay traces the author's personal experience with curriculum planning alongside broader shifts in American educational policy over the past two decades. Beginning with classroom-level decisions about balancing skill acquisition and community building, the paper examines how the No Child Left Behind Act intensified emphasis on standardized testing at the expense of interdisciplinary, multicultural, and experiential learning. It contrasts this era with the more flexible, open-ended standards of the 1990s and argues that rigid national testing frameworks fail to account for demographic diversity, socioeconomic inequality, and individual student needs — ultimately limiting both teacher creativity and student potential.
On a very basic level, I have engaged in curriculum planning within my own classroom to meet the desired goals for my class at the end of the year. Students must acquire certain basic skills and cover certain types of factual and literary material. I also desire that my students strive to meet more vaguely determined goals — that they become more critical and creative thinkers, and that they come together as a group to build a classroom community. Looking back, within the limits of the school environment and given the need to meet school district and national standards, I think I have coped with the need to balance these different forces reasonably well. In retrospect, I wish I could have been more flexible over the course of the year, and perhaps tailored some of the activities a bit better to the needs of individual students.
Over the past ten years, given the No Child Left Behind Act, there has been an increased emphasis on so-called basic skills — what we might think of as the four Rs of reading, writing, and arithmetic — as tested by national exams. Less directive formats for teaching these subjects have been de-emphasized. Preparing for the format of the exam is deemed essential because poor performance on national tests can result in reductions in school funding, as well as the community perception that teachers are not doing their job. Even social studies and science classes now stress basic skills rather than more interactive, experiential formats. Physical education, music, visual arts, and other elements of classroom learning have also been cut back or eliminated, because core academic subjects receive the lion's share of the district's budget and scheduled time.
This stands in stark contrast to the 1990s, when interdisciplinary approaches like block scheduling and multicultural subject matter were introduced into many districts. Standards were defined in open-ended value statements rather than quantifiable norms (Mathison & Mason 1989). Some educators argued that this approach unfairly penalized poorer districts, because students in less affluent schools could not be confident that their institutions would meet national standards. Gradually, a more norm-based approach was embraced, culminating in the push for nationalized testing (Rogers, McDonald, & Sizer 1993).
"Why flexibility better serves diverse students"
"Emotional and political costs of rigid national standards"
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