Yes, there are costs to standardization. But there are also benefits. Standardizing the curriculum means that the work of preparing educational materials (such as textbooks) can be shared across many teachers. Students move between schools pretty often, and certainly they move between teachers within schools. Standardization makes it easier for students to move without getting completely lost. Standardization also allows easier assessment, which some people think is important.
You might be right that we should give up on the idea of a standardized curriculum, but it’s not the least bit obvious to me which way the cost-benefit tradeoff goes. It’s not even obvious to me how we could test this. You’d have to have some curriculum-agnostic way to know how well the education system was working, and I don’t know how to do that.
You might be right that we should give up on the idea of a standardized curriculum, but it’s not the least bit obvious to me which way the cost-benefit tradeoff goes.
You are right that I’m calling to a revolution that’s not immediately obvious. Thank you for pointing that out. It might make sense for me to start a deeper project for making that case on a deeper level that mind produce an article.
Standardizing the curriculum means that the work of preparing educational materials (such as textbooks) can be shared across many teachers.
Getting rid of a central curriculum would stop two teachers from using the same textbook. On the other hand it would make it easier for the people who write the textbook. The could simple write the textbook that they consider to be optimal for learning instead of having to focus on covering exactly what the specific curriculum of a school district or a particular state’s education policy lays out.
The people who write the textbook should decide what goes in it. Not a politician or bureaucrat that draws up a curriculum. If the textbook is good teachers are going to use it.
In the US, at the k-12 level, the school buys the textbook, not the teacher. The books are owned by the school, rented to the student, and used by several students over several years. Teachers turn over quickly, however, and so it would be quite costly if each time a new teacher starts teaching a course, the school has to buy a new set of books.
The increased costs of producing textbooks for every preference show up as acquisition costs, and the schools are reluctant to pay those costs simply to satisfy the preferences of teachers who might not be there next year or who might change their minds.
A student can choose whether to go to school A or B. I’m not opposed to schools making decisions about what to teach at school level.
It might be even good if it’s general knowledge that students who go to school A get taught from the Bayesian statistics handbook while school B rather teaches math like calculus.
Schools should be free to develop profiles of what they want to teach because of what they consider to be useful for students to learn.
How much freedom a specific school gives individual teachers can be up to the school.
I think that when a school makes a decision to buy a particular textbook it has a lot to do with what kind of textbook the teachers at that school find helpful.
I think that if a school buys textbooks based on what a bureaucrat thinks instead of based on what the teachers who interact with the students on a direct basis think, that’s bad for education.
Yes, there are costs to standardization. But there are also benefits. Standardizing the curriculum means that the work of preparing educational materials (such as textbooks) can be shared across many teachers. Students move between schools pretty often, and certainly they move between teachers within schools. Standardization makes it easier for students to move without getting completely lost. Standardization also allows easier assessment, which some people think is important.
You might be right that we should give up on the idea of a standardized curriculum, but it’s not the least bit obvious to me which way the cost-benefit tradeoff goes. It’s not even obvious to me how we could test this. You’d have to have some curriculum-agnostic way to know how well the education system was working, and I don’t know how to do that.
Thoughts on how this could be tested?
You are right that I’m calling to a revolution that’s not immediately obvious. Thank you for pointing that out. It might make sense for me to start a deeper project for making that case on a deeper level that mind produce an article.
Getting rid of a central curriculum would stop two teachers from using the same textbook. On the other hand it would make it easier for the people who write the textbook. The could simple write the textbook that they consider to be optimal for learning instead of having to focus on covering exactly what the specific curriculum of a school district or a particular state’s education policy lays out.
The people who write the textbook should decide what goes in it. Not a politician or bureaucrat that draws up a curriculum. If the textbook is good teachers are going to use it.
In the US, at the k-12 level, the school buys the textbook, not the teacher. The books are owned by the school, rented to the student, and used by several students over several years. Teachers turn over quickly, however, and so it would be quite costly if each time a new teacher starts teaching a course, the school has to buy a new set of books.
The increased costs of producing textbooks for every preference show up as acquisition costs, and the schools are reluctant to pay those costs simply to satisfy the preferences of teachers who might not be there next year or who might change their minds.
A student can choose whether to go to school A or B. I’m not opposed to schools making decisions about what to teach at school level.
It might be even good if it’s general knowledge that students who go to school A get taught from the Bayesian statistics handbook while school B rather teaches math like calculus.
Schools should be free to develop profiles of what they want to teach because of what they consider to be useful for students to learn. How much freedom a specific school gives individual teachers can be up to the school.
I think that when a school makes a decision to buy a particular textbook it has a lot to do with what kind of textbook the teachers at that school find helpful.
I think that if a school buys textbooks based on what a bureaucrat thinks instead of based on what the teachers who interact with the students on a direct basis think, that’s bad for education.