The following four articles were part of an American Economic Association (AEA) Committee on Economic Education's symposium on precollege education. It addressed the Voluntary National Content Standards put out by the Council for Economic Education, which has guidelines for what should be taught at all levels of precollege economics education, and the Advanced Placement (AP) exam which is given to students in the AP economics courses. The first three articles are assessments of the standards and AP exam. As you will see, the authors approach it from quite different perspectives, and, not surprisingly, arrive at different views.
While Stephen A. Marglin and Helen Roberts and Deirdre N. McCloskey see the Voluntary Standards as reflecting the consensus in the profession, their view is, as Marglin put it, “so much the worse for economics.” They see the economics relevant to students as broader than the economics being captured by the standards. Roberts and McCloskey go further than Marglin, arguing that economics should not be taught in high school…or for that matter in college. James Gwartney is much more supportive of the Voluntary Standards; he argues that they “indicate what a balanced presentation of modern economics would look like.” However, he finds the AP curriculum unbalanced, arguing that it poorly serves students of basic economics. In the final article in the symposium, Richard A. MacDonald and John J. Siegfried, both of whom were involved in writing the Voluntary Standards, respond to the articles, explaining why they did what they did and how they might have done some things differently.