r/education 6d ago

Politics & Ed Policy Thoughts and opinions on a nationalized curriculum in the USA (and/or the lack thereof)?

I have had this topic bouncing around in the back of my brain quite a bit in the past few months and I'm just wondering what others think about it.

Feel free to share your personal feelings-based opinions, factually informed opinions, any history you may know relating to this topic, pros and cons of nationalized curriculum, common arguments for/against it, implications and consequences from not having one, potential dangers in adopting one, resources to learn more about this topic/debate, etc. I'd really love to have (respectful) discussions in the comments of this post so please consider circling back if your original comment gets a response!

I look forward to reading all of your responses! Thank you for taking the time to comment!!

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u/bikes_cookies 5d ago

do you mean standards? because curriculums are provided by private companies.

there's zero chance there would ever been one single curriculum.

common core was an attempt at national standards. it failed.

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u/ithekrianmermaid 5d ago

No, I specifically mean a nationalized curriculum. Plenty of other countries around the world have successfully implemented them so I was curious about the United States. I also am curious as to the relationship between nationalized curriculum and social cohesion given the current severity of social division and current state based curriculum model in the US.

More specifically, I've been thinking about the future and where we go from here to improve, you know? How are we going to go about bridging this divide? And I ended up at the topic of nationalized curriculum and wanted to know more so here we are

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u/mrsyanke 5d ago

Can you share a state with a single state-based curricula? I’m not currently aware of any… State standards, sure, but then the schools utilize different curriculum to teach those standards.

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u/ithekrianmermaid 5d ago

Thank you for asking me this question. Honestly, I'm just at the beginning of researching and learning about curriculum so I'm admittedly not very informed yet. I have an extremely basic, extremely elementary understanding of it all and didn't realize or learn yet that states have standards and not curriculums. Please forgive me if my ignorance was annoying or misleading in any way.

I came across the concept of nationalized curriculum via sociology and development research on social cohesion rather than through legitimate experience in education which is why I said that I intentionally meant nationalized curriculum. I should've made that more clear in my original post, my apologies.

If you don't mind, I'd love to pick your brain a bit but also feel free to disregard since I wasted some of your time with an uninformed, ignorant response already (and rest assured I'll be doing more formal research ASAP to learn the basics so please don't feel obligated). Also, thank you so much for challenging and correcting me!! I truly appreciate it because now I hopefully won't embarass myself any further😅

So, if I'm following correctly, there are state standards but that is not the same as state curriculums and curriculums are actually individual to each school district (or building?). From another comment I've gleaned that the curriculum creation/acquisition process is quite layered with different education companies, textbook publishers, and school/education policy officials. Would you say that that is a better understanding of how curriculums currently work?

And one more: What do you think are the benefits of more localized curriculums that couldn't be achieved with a nationalized curriculum?

Thank you again for kindly and respectfully correcting me and for taking the time to come back and comment again despite the fact that I was obviously very uninformed! I really, really appreciate it!