In a news briefing earlier today, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told reporters, among other things, not to refer to the Common Core State Standards as a “curriculum,” Valerie Strauss on her Washington Post blog reports.
The US Education Department is trying to control the message that gets out in newspapers and other media by changing the words. Now, I’m just totally confused.
First, the Common Core is organized like and has every sentence like the Maryland “State Curriculum” document, which used to be called the “Voluntary State Curriculum” before we decided it wasn’t really voluntary since schools would be held accountable for the material in it.
Let’s look at an example. The fourth-grade math State Curriculum says:
Determine area … Use rectangles with the length of the sides in whole numbers [0–100]
The Common Core for fourth-grade math says:
Apply the area and perimeter formulas for rectangles in real world and mathematical problems. For example, find the width of a rectangular room given the area of the flooring and the length, by viewing the area formula as a multiplication equation with an unknown factor.
Either Mr Duncan doesn’t know what the word “curriculum” means or the Maryland State Board of Education doesn’t know what the word means. The two documents are nearly identical in structure, and if I call one of them a “curriculum,” I have to call the other one a “curriculum.”
But whether Mr Duncan or the Maryland State Board is mistaken, I have decided I’m just totally confused. I’m sure you can understand my confusion: if the Common Core looks like and acts like a “curriculum,” then I submit, it is a curriculum. You know, like a flying bird that looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, as in the old saying?
Anyway, since I’m now totally confused as to what a “curriculum” is, I call up Dictionary.com, which tells me a curriculum is “the aggregate of courses of study given in a school, college, university, etc.” So, I guess Mr Duncan got it right, and the Maryland State Board got it wrong. I just hope they’re not wrong in adopting the Next Generation Science Standards, which they did earlier today.
As we will cover in another post, Mr Duncan had a few other pieces of advice for education reporters, of which I am one, and I’ll get to those in another post. But on this one, he appears to be correct, and I’ll never again, in my own voice, call the Common Core State Standards a “curriculum.”
Other writers should do the same. They are a body of standards, performance expectations, or similar phrases and sentences that describe what students at every grade level should know or be able to do. They do not prescribe any specific course of study or list of classes.
