Except in authoritarian regimes — even there I hesitate to generalize — there are almost no examples of successful curriculum implementation. In every instance of national curriculum reform that I have studied, each has failed. Perhaps each was intended to fail; surely policymakers knew that inadequate funding, insufficient teacher preparation, often the curriculum content itself would make unlikely the reform’s success. The point of such “reform” often appears political, a show to assure the public that whatever emergency politicians have alleged the nation or province faces will be remedied by their reform of the school curriculum.
The case of the United States may be the most familiar. After the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, Americans were shocked, triggering a panic over America’s military superiority. Neither the U.S. military nor the Eisenhower administration came in for criticism, however. Politicians promptly blamed teachers, inspiring John F. Kennedy to become the first U.S. presidential candidate to make the public school curriculum a national campaign issue.
After his election in 1960, the first ever U.S. national curriculum reform was initiated, led not by public school teachers or education professors but by psychologists — Harvard’s Jerome Bruner most prominently — and subject-matter specialists: physicists and mathematicians were instructed to compose curriculum that would not depend on teachers’ expertise, in fact bypassing teachers to deliver their sophisticated material straight to students.
That movement foundered as students, their parents and teachers struggled with both the content and structures of the new curriculum, most memorably the “new math.” The Kennedy curriculum reform dissipated during the final years of the turbulent 1960s; by 1968 presidential candidate Richard Nixon was campaigning on a “back-to-the-basics” platform.
Right-wing Republicans seized the curriculum issue again in the 1980s. This time the emergency — what presumably placed the nation at risk — was not military but economic competition, and the arch-enemy was not the Soviet Union but Japan (soon to cede its position to China). No Child Left Behind (NCLB), led by the George W. Bush administration but with bipartisan support, exploited racial and income inequality to scapegoat teachers for politicians’ failures to address those very issues.
The Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative was a gentler version of NCLB; today right-wing Republicans cry “emergency” over the 1619 Project and critical race theory, two efforts to study the role of race in American life. While data are not yet definitive, moving the curriculum online during the COVID pandemic appears to have been a curricular catastrophe, and not only for minority and impoverished students who lacked devices and access to the internet. Even prosperous parents were displeased with online learning. In the United States, curriculum reform has never been only or even primarily (except the 1930s Eight-Year Study) about curriculum reform.
To study the situations in other countries, I spent the last decade focused on curriculum studies, the field that studies curriculum reform and related topics, in Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa. The project centred on interviewing emerging and senior scholars concerning their own scholarship, often about curriculum reform.
In Brazil, a key concept was “recontextualization,” both an empirical description of how teachers responded to national and international initiatives but also a recommendation as to how teachers should respond. Creating wiggle room for Brazilian teachers to recontextualize reform is a tripartite governance structure — federal, state, municipal — that, in Rio de Janeiro at least, ensured that teachers found openings in governance structures, allowing them to reset standards according to local conditions, including their own classrooms.
In China I worked with scholars who formulated the 2001 reform — revised now several times — that mixed pre-1949 Chinese ideas with Western conceptions of student-centeredness. That landmark reform ran into the College Entrance Examination, commonly known as the Gaokao 高考. Its oversized importance, determining not only the calibre of university to which one is admitted but one’s life chances generally, made it an immovable roadblock.
In India, exemplary educational traditions associated with Gandhi and Tagore have faced political pressure from the Bharatiya Janata Party and its program of propaganda, most recently insisting that students from kindergarten through university study the exceptionality of cows in India, a curriculum reform dictated by Prime Minister Modi’s National Cow Commission.
In Mexico, politically progressive curricula were long ago replaced by neoliberal priorities, refocusing the school curriculum from socio-economic justice toward economic development. In post-apartheid South Africa, many teachers were unprepared to exercise the academic freedom suddenly conferred upon them after decades of authoritarian control. Except for an almost century-old Eight Year Study in the United States, only in Finland have I found suggestions of successful curriculum reform and implementation.1
My conclusion? In consultation with experts, it is teachers, not bureaucrats and certainly not politicians, who should be in charge of curriculum reform and implementation.
References
1 Spiller, P. 2017. “Could subjects soon be a thing of the past in Finland?” BBC News Finland, May 29. www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39889523 (accessed July 12, 2021).
Curriculum reform in Finland: An example of success
Phil McRae
ATA Associate Coordinator, Research
From 2014 to 2017, Finland reformed its national core curricula from early childhood to the secondary (high school) level. As a result, the core curricula were established in a coherent line throughout the entire education system.
The aims of the curriculum reforms were to build on the strengths of the education system and meet the challenges of rapidly evolving school communities in an increasingly complex and volatile world.
Key reforms included a focus on the meaningfulness of learning, the engagement and well-being of students, and equity as a key principle of a high-quality education that respects children and childhood.
In Finland, the collaborative relationships with teachers and school leaders through an extensive design process was essential in order to reach a common understanding of the basic questions behind the reform: Why does Finland need change? What should schools do differently? How might a new curriculum come alive in each different school community?
This participatory approach with teachers and citizens secured the commitment of all those whose input was needed to carry out the reform and make it live in schools. In Finland, the phrase “implementation of the curriculum” is seldom used. Instead, they talk about how teachers can “construct their own professional guidelines” based on the local curriculum.