Like America, Britain has been intensely concerned that schools provide a labor force able to meet “world-class standards” for the 21st century. The widespread but questionable belief that standards fell during the 1980s prompted Margaret Thatcher's government to pass legislation in 1988 mandating a National Curriculum and an accompanying system of testing. In the history of British education, no curriculum change has been instituted so swiftly nor empowered so fully by statutory “orders.”
Judging from events like the 1989 Education Summit among former President Bush and educational leaders—and the New Standards Project—it seems likely that the United States may soon have some kind of a national curriculum. Though our two countries' educational and political systems have many differences, Britain's experience with developing, implementing, and testing a national curriculum may offer some insights to American educators.
1988 Reform Act
I began teaching in the United States in 1973, but when I returned to Britain in 1989, part of my work was to find out how teaching in England had changed over almost two decades. With excitement, apprehension, and frustration, local teachers told of the new National Curriculum that was predicted to profoundly transform English teaching. The year before, Britain's 1988 Education Reform Act had legislated that each school would provide students with a broad, balanced curriculum. English, mathematics, and science were defined as the three core subjects. Technology, history, geography, a modern foreign language, music, art, and physical education were designated “foundation subjects.”
The translation of government mandate into a National Curriculum occurred quite remarkably in a matter of months, and primary children from 5 to 7 years old have already taken the first round of national tests. By the mid-1990s, all curricular changes will be fully phased in at the elementary and secondary levels. However, refining the form and content of the curriculum and deciding how best to measure standards of attainment is likely to take several more years.
Structuring the Standards
Students' progress through the curriculum is divided into four “key stages.” “Attainment targets” identify “the knowledge, skills and understanding which pupils of different abilities and maturities are expected to have achieved” at each age (Graham 1988). For example, one target for reading requires: ... the development of the ability to read, understand, and respond to all types of writing, as well as the development of information-retrieval strategies for the purpose of study.
At ages 7, 11, 14, and 16, students' progress toward the targets in each subject will be measured against numerical standards, or 10 “levels of attainment.” In science, for example, a 7-year-old who has reached Level 1 will “be able to describe objects in terms of simple properties—shape, colour, texture.” In contrast, a 7-year-old at Level 4 will “be able to draw conclusions from experimental results. Measure variations in living organisms. Construct simple electrical circuits” (Department of Education and Science 1992).
In reading and writing, the 7-year-old at Level 1 will be able to “use pictures, symbols, or isolated letters, words or phrases to communicate meaning.” The 7-year-old at Level 4 will exhibit a performance more typical of an 11-year-old: “Read aloud expressively, fluently and with increased confidence from a range of familiar literature. Write stories which have an opening, a setting, characters, series of events and a resolution” (Department of Education and Science 1992).
At age 14, a student who tests at Level 3 in math will be able to “read, write, and order numbers to at least 1000.” The student at Level 6 “will calculate with fractions, decimals and percentages.” The youth excelling at Level 8 will be able to “work out the slope of a straight line from its equation. Solve problems using trigonometry” (Department of Education and Science 1992).
Though the learning gradient is not constant, students making reasonable progress toward the standards will reach the next level about every two years. On average, a 14-year-old will reach subject targets at Level 5 or 6. A 16-year-old about to leave school could perform anywhere between Levels 3 and 10 in each area, though a special education student might not exceed Level 1. Only the most able students will reach Level 10, a standard currently higher than that of the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE). (Students take this national exam at age 16 in up to eight subjects. Two years later, those who stay on at school take the exam at the advanced level in up to four subjects.)
Defining the Standards
Theoretical discussions about quality education and how we recognize its effects on students' lives have quickly shifted to the practical issue of measurement. Critics of British education have been quick to criticize falling standards but slow to recognize that the performance we expect from students is constantly changing. Society now requires more skills and knowledge than was the case even 10 years ago.
With the intention of making assessment more objective and rigorous, an original emphasis on continuous assessment by teachers has been reversed, a move that many teachers see as counterproductive to raising standards. At present, the balance is at 30 percent for teacher assessment and 70 percent for some kind of formal exam. Simple paper-and-pencil tests look very inviting to officials when they consider that Standard Assessment Tasks the teachers favored could take up to 10 hours to observe. For example, the math tasks for 14-year-olds “included setting up a food stall; using push-penny games to check their ability to estimate probabilities and the construction of a package that will hold exactly ten marbles” (Hackett 1991).
Test critics argue that administering such assessments disrupts the education of students not being tested and prolongs test anxiety over the whole term. Nuttall, who values performance assessment, observes that “the cost of performance assessment, both financially and in terms of the time of teachers is immense” (1992).
The worst-case scenario that many British teachers had feared is now coming to pass: a test-driven curriculum without significant attention to teachers' assessments of student progress through portfolios, presentations, or authentic tasks. Many teachers believe that students themselves need to take an active part in setting, monitoring, and internalizing the standards. The increased pressure for national testing of student performance, however, has removed them from self-evaluation and negotiating grades, and it has reduced the incentives for group work and collaborative learning.
Reporting Standards
The government's proposal to publish tables that will compare schools' test results has drawn profession-wide criticism. Though some claim this information should be made public in a democratic society, others counter that raw-score reporting cannot begin to represent the complex picture of the many different kinds of learning that occur in schools. As Bates (1991) observes: Raw scores only tell part of the story. They tell nothing of other features of a school's life. They take no account of pupils with special educational needs or of those who have done better than could reasonably have been expected of them.
In addition, teachers argue that even when schools appear to be comparable, they often stand on very uneven playing fields in terms of their economic resources and the social backgrounds of students. Yet even with such differences, “Many of the best schools are the ones that do most to improve the performance of children from deprived backgrounds” (Graham 1991). Although the public has every right to know at what levels students and schools are meeting the standards, raw-score reporting is likely to present a reductive picture of complex achievements.
What America Can Learn
The intellectual energy generated among British teachers when they were initially brought together at the grass-roots level to define the content of individual subjects and schooling was itself instrumental for raising standards and teacher morale. But direct consultation between government and the teachers has become increasingly less common. Though teachers commend the curriculum as comprehensive, thoughtful, and appropriate to the task of raising standards, teachers are overwhelmed with the level of curricular detail. For example, the Curriculum for English originally prescribed 159 statements of attainment for oral work, reading, and writing (though they have since been somewhat simplified). If American educators develop their own national curriculum, they will need to balance the impulse to write exhaustive, comprehensive goal statements with the awareness that assessment needs to be manageable by teachers and appropriate to how subjects are actually taught in the classrooms.
The success of any new curriculum—national or district wide—depends largely on teachers' goodwill, even when the change is backed by the law; teachers need to see their classroom experience fully reflected in the curriculum. But when teachers discover that their knowledge has only token value, the sense of ownership of, and commitment to, the curriculum is undercut. If American teachers are to be involved meaningfully in curriculum reform, then government cannot, as in Britain, expect teachers' to respond to proposed reforms in a matter of weeks or even months. Deliberate consultations around proposals affecting the future of a country's educational system, and by implication the kind of society that it will become, are likely to take a year or more. Nor can proposals be overturned overnight by the government, as occurred last year when Prime Minister John Major ordered paper-and-pencil tests to replace the Standard Assessment Tasks that teachers preferred.
Many of the critics arguing for back-to-basics approaches to raising standards of literacy and numeracy appear unaware that the meanings of such terms have changed radically since they themselves were in school. Well-intentioned but often uninformed voices increasingly influence policy decisions in Britain. Because the push in America for higher standards comes both from educators and special interest groups, American teachers, like their British counterparts, will need to develop new ways to explain their theories and practices to the constituencies they serve.
One striking feature of Britain's National Curriculum has been its many revisions. For example, as a result of political pressure from the government, the original legislation for the English curriculum has been rewritten. Though the goal of such rapid, top-down changes may have been to make the curriculum more rigorous, precise, and comprehensive, the action very likely undercut the morale of teachers who were already hard pressed to implement and assess the curriculum before them. In fact, change is happening so quickly, even more elements of the National Curriculum have probably already changed.
