Standards don???t mean a thing without that curriculum-swing

Photo by Katherine Johnson

In case you hadn’t heard, a group of 140 (and rising) education leaders—including Fordham President Chester Finn and some unlikely confederates (Randi Weingarten and Linda Darling-Hammond, for two)—have proposed the creation of voluntary common curricular materials. Federalist eyebrows rise in unison because, inevitably, this sort of thing gets dubbed a “national curriculum” even though there could be many of them and they’d all be voluntary for states, districts, schools, and teachers to use as they see fit. (In fact, our friends at Common Core have already produced a terrific specimen of such materials for ELA.) As Finn told Catherine Gewertz of Education Week, providing quality curriculum materials that states, schools, and teachers may choose to utilize, augment, or ignore shouldn’t rile people up. The fact that too many of our nation’s students attend schools teaching content-deficient curricula should. So should the fact that many teachers have been pleading for sound curricular materials to accompany the standards they’re charged with bringing to students.