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Abstract
This case study of the development of the Illinois Learning Standards of 1997 parallels a study of the development of the Norwegian compulsory school curriculum of 1997, Læreplanverket 1997. The pair of case studies is designed to explore the administration of state-based curriculum-making and, in particular, the use of the administrative tools of compartmentalization, segmentation and licencing. Often the use of these tools serves to make the curriculum as a guiding instrument largely symbolic and/or ideological.
Notes
1. The language commonly used to describe the state’s educational structure in Illinois is confusing. ‘ISBE’ refers to both the Illinois State Board of Education as the governing body for the state’s school system and the agency that supports the work of the Board. The nine members of the Board are appointed by the state’s Governor with the consent of the state’s Senate. The executive officer of the Board, who is also the head of the state education agency (SEA), is termed the State Superintendent of Education. The structure of the Illinois public education system is complex. State-level administration and regulation is the responsibility of the ISBE. However, within the broad framework of US public education, both policy-making and service-delivery are largely matters for local educational authorities (LEAs), that in Illinois range in size from Chicago with its 415,000 students and 19,000 teachers to small rural LEAs that administer only one or two small elementary (K–8) schools.
2. State legislation and regulations specifies the minimum high school graduation requirements in terms of courses and number of units; it also specifies the courses that must be included the curriculum of a state-recognized high school. The content of these courses is not specified. The state’s legislature has also imposed many ad hoc curricular mandates on schools, e.g. (1) Anabolic steroids. School districts shall provide instruction in the prevention of abuse of anabolic steroids in science, health, drug abuse, physical education or other appropriate courses of instruction in grades 7 through 12 and to students who participate in interscholastic athletic programmes; … (2) Black history. All public schools must include in their curricula a unit of instruction studying the events of Black history; … to include the history of the African slave trade, slavery in America and the vestiges of slavery in the United States, (3) Conservation education. All public schools must provide instruction, study and discussion of current problems and needs in the conservation of natural resources and (4) Holocaust and genocide study. All public schools must provide a unit of instruction studying the events of the Nazi atrocities from 1933 to 1945 and include lessons studying other acts of genocide to include those in Armenia, Ukraine, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, the Sudan, etc.
3. ‘Local’ meaning vested in LEAs. Some LEAs have centralized curriculum decision-making; others have delegated much decision-making to the school level. The frameworks for secondary programmes have been (traditionally) influenced by university admission requirements, state legislation and national developments, but determined by LEAs.
4. The Report Cards include school- and district-level results on the state’s tests see http://www.illinoisreportcard.com/, accessed 14 July 2015.
5. This movement had a platform filled with mixed messages. On the one hand, the advocacy centred on more ‘demanding’, ‘reformed’ and ‘active’ learning. On the other hand, the advocacy highlighted the idea of ‘standards’, that is, baseline expectations for student learning along with the evaluation of students’ achievements around those standards (see Cohen, McLaughlin, & Talbert, Citation1993; Wixson, Dutro, & Athan, Citation2004).
6. Education is a state responsibility in the US constitution. There has been a traditional jealous protection of state and local curricula across the country. In other words, the developments around the standards of the 1990s were themselves a significant new movement.
7. In 1993 Marshall Smith was to become the federal Under Secretary for Education in the Clinton Administration. At the time of that appointment he was Dean of the School of Education at Stanford University. He had been the Chief of Staff of the Secretary of Education in the Carter Administration (1979–1981).
8. One side issue in this mobilization is important for an analysis of the US standards movement of the 1990s. In most states schools are ‘owned’ and directed by LEAs that, as taxing bodies, generate significant local funding for schools. The outcome can be significant within-state differences in programmes and courses as well as facilities like school libraries and science laboratories, information technology, and curricular opportunities, as well as teacher salaries. Illinois had some of the widest inequities in expenditures, and thus facilities, in the US. Needless to say, because of the fiscal implications, many states fiercely resisted the opportunity-to-learn standards that the time many policy analysts were recommending (see Porter, Citation1993).
9. Spagnolo had been the director of the Virginia SEA and had directly experienced the political turbulence there around that state’s early initiatives around curriculum-making as standards development (Fore, Citation1998).
10. i.e. covering the subject areas of ELA, fine arts, foreign languages (advisory standards), mathematics, physical education and health, science, and social science (and history).
11. As Spagnolo (Citation1997) was to write in a paper given 3 years later addressing standards-setting from ‘the policy maker’s point of view’: ‘I believe that [the policy maker’s] perspective is bound up in two fundamental elements. One is an educational element and the other is a political element …. There is the problem in putting these things together so they make sense from the perspective of an educator. … I will tell you that it is a daunting task because in this state, for example, we have 177 legislators, 9 members of a State Board of Education, and a Governor’s staff, all of whom know more about this than I do’ (Spagnolo, Citation1997, pp. 1, 2).
12. The project was begun after a formal action by the state’s legislature for ISBE to initiate the project: ‘The State of Illinois, having the responsibility of defining requirements for elementary and secondary education, establishes that the primary purpose of schooling is the transmission of knowledge and culture through which children learn in areas necessary to their continuing development and entry into the world of work …. The State Board of Education shall establish goals and learning standards consistent with the above purposes and define the knowledge and skills which the State expects students to master and apply as a consequence of their education’. ‘Each school district shall establish learning objectives consistent with the State Board of Education’s goals and learning standards for the areas referred to in this Section. (see http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/publicacts/94/094-0875.htm).’
13. This data is drawn from the published listing of all participants in the Illinois Standards Project; work roles and employers are included in the listing (see Illinois State Board of Education [ISBE], Citation1997). The occupational roles of members of the ILS commission in Table and Figures and were classified as follows: (1) ISBE: ISBE professional staff and consultants; (2) Other state: representatives of other state agencies, e.g. the Governor’s office, Illinois Department of Public Health; (3) School: school-level teachers and administrators; (4) Intermediate: intermediate agency (i.e. LEA-level) supervisors and administrators; (5) University: university administrators and faculty; (6) Public and professional: representatives of educational, public interest groups; (7) Business: representatives of business firms and (8) Other: other. The category of ‘other’ includes committee members identified as parents, the president of the Illinois Council on Economic Education, a dance consultant, an educator from the Shedd Aquarium (Chicago), a writer, a drama and a music consultant, the executive director of the Illinois Alliance for Arts Education, and a program director from the state’s Arts Council.
14. As were the applied sciences like agriculture, engineering and medicine as well as such fields as nursing (see Ausubel, Citation1967).
15. In 2001 the ACT test battery, a college-aptitude test widely used in Midwestern universities, along with another ACT-developed off-the-shelf prevocational test and an ISBE-developed science test, became the core of Illinois’s upper-secondary certification system without any public assessment of its content validity in the light of the ILS. The design for the earlier grades testing involved developing test specifications and setting standards for evaluating individual school performance: ‘below standards’, ‘meets standards’, ‘exceeds standards’. Test specification and standards-setting were not included in the scope of the work of the ILS commission.
16. See note 13.
17. Three of the 32 members of Coordination team came from universities but, in contrast to the university representation in the writing committees, these were university administrators.
18. We can gain further insight into the nature of the segmentation around the ILS curriculum-making process by examining the titles of the members of the different task groups. All but one of the members of the Co-ordination and External Review teams classified as coming from intermediate agencies were superintendents or directors of education; the exception was the director of a major agency in Chicago for in-service education. On the other hand, all but one of the members of the writing groups who came from intermediate agencies had job titles suggesting that their roles involved interfacing with teachers and schools; the one exception was the director of assessment in the Chicago Public Schools who served on the fine-arts writing team.
19. ‘We on the committee know that many of our professional colleagues are confused by the results of our efforts, knowing our commitments and what individual [school] districts have already accomplished …. [But] we were advised that the documents that would be produced were not be ‘Committee documents’, but that the committees were only one of the inputs that were important. The documents were state documents!’ (Ogle, Citation1997; emphasis in the original).
20. ‘The filters through which each word and priority [of our drafts] were being ‘sifted’ were very political in nature. Through many discussions and conference phone calls, specific decisions affecting all of the content areas, and ours in particular became clear: First, the audiences that were reviewing our work were not ready to accept what we considered to the ‘state of the art’, i.e. integrated language arts with a focus on constructing meaning and engaging in integrated learning; Second, embedding the learning of phonics and spelling in meaningful tasks and uses of language was not acceptable; Third, we found a lack of understanding of the reading process as an evolving process …; Fourth, although we are committed to reading and literacy as affective processes that must engage students at a personal level, this concept was found to be unacceptable by others. All mention of ‘affect’ and constructing personal meaning were deleted from our work; Fifth, many words common to our understanding were too politically ‘hot’ or controversial and were removed. Even the term ‘cultural’ or ‘culture’ as in ‘representing a diversity of cultures’ had to be changed (after much protesting by us) to ‘societies’ as a palliative to allow its continued inclusion; and Sixth, much as we wanted to include visual literacy and recognition of new forms of communication, we were overridden (Ogle, Citation1997, pp. 80, 81).
21. See Jerald, Curran, and Olson (Citation1997) and Stotsky (Citation1997)
22. Other reviews of the ELA standards were more critical: ‘… the standards for each cluster say that students should “read age-appropriate material with fluency and accuracy”, but there is no further guidance given as to how challenging and complex the literature should be at each grade cluster’ (Gandal, Citation1997, p. 51). Other reviews of the ILS have been scathing: ‘The Illinois standards are overstuffed, not with particulars but with vast headings.’ ‘ Month-long benchmarks abound (e.g., a middle school benchmark: “Explain relationships among the American economy and slavery, immigration, industrialization, labour, and urbanization, 1700 to the present”). Items are repeated across grades, as though all eras of history are to be taught at all grade levels in equal depth and breadth—exactly the opposite of a well-articulated, teachable kindergarten through twelfth-grade progression of instruction’. ‘The Learning Standards are unteachable and untestable in predictable ways because of their broad generalizations.’ (Gagnon, Citation2003, p. 62).
23. ‘The performance descriptors are a supplement—not a replacement—for the ILS. They are intended to help teachers align their curricula to the standards and to help students meet performance expectations at ten stages of educational development’ (ISBE, Citation2002). However some states included performance standards in their state content standards.
24. The policy goals of the standards movement were, of course, ambiguous. In a follow-up evaluation of the ‘implementation’ of the ILS, DeStefano and Prestine (Citation2001) noted that lower-achieving districts and schools were ignoring the ILS in favour of aggressively monitoring their outcomes on the state’s assessment programme. The sanctions associated with poor test results offered more powerful incentives to these districts than the idea of learning standards.