Education Reform Professors Help Create Manifesto Opposing National Curriculum

Two University of Arkansas professors were among five organizers of a manifesto released May 9 opposing a national education curriculum.

"Closing the Door on Innovation: Why One National Curriculum is Bad for America" was initially signed by more than 100 leaders in education and other fields who represent diverse viewpoints and oppose federal government efforts to create a national curriculum and testing system, according to a news release.

Jay Greene, head of the department of education reform in the College of Education and Health Professions, and Sandra Stotsky, holder of the Twenty-First Century Chair in Teacher Quality in the department, organized the manifesto with Bill Evers, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Greg Forster, senior fellow at the Foundation for Education Choice, and Ze'ev Wurman, an executive at a Silicon Valley startup and former senior policy adviser at the U.S. Department of Education. Greene wrote Education Myths, published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2005, with Forster and Marcus Winters.

The manifesto was drafted in response to the call for a nationalized curriculum in the Albert Shanker Institute Manifesto, "A Call for Common Content," released March 7, and to the effort by the U.S. Department of Education to have two federally funded testing consortia develop national curriculum guidelines, national curriculum models, national instructional materials, and national assessments using Common Core's national standards as a basis for these efforts, cited in  the news release. The Common Core standards were created through an initiative coordinated by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers. Stotsky was appointed to serve on the Common Core Validation Committee and was one of the five members who voted against accepting the final version of the standards, citing assessments of their quality and the non-transparent process used to develop the standards and the national curricula and testing system.

The manifesto organized by Greene, Stotsky and the others contends that there is no constitutional or statutory basis for national standards, national assessments or national curricula and that there is no consistent evidence of national curricula leading to high academic achievement. The manifesto also states that the national standards on which the national curriculum would be based are inadequate, that there is no evidence for a "best" design for curriculum sequences in any subject, and that no other country offers a single high school curriculum for all its students.