Archived: The Educational System in the United States: Case Study Findings

Curriculum
Many factors contribute to decisions regarding the development and implementa-
tion of curriculum in schools in the United States. Some of these factors include
whether the state or district (or both) have developed curriculum guidelines and
whether the state and local guidelines are in accord with each other. Another pos-

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sible factor is whether the state or district mandates that the schools follow these
guidelines or allows them to develop their own curriculum. Additionally, schools
that retain local autonomy over curricular decisions may choose either to adopt
or ignore state or district guidelines. This choice is likely to be influenced by the
school’s history of achievement, community standards, financial resources, and its
perception of these factors in relation to the curriculum guidelines being provided
by the state or district. For example, principals and teachers at schools that con-
sistently scored well above the mean on state assessment tests said that the state
curriculum guidelines were not relevant to curriculum development in their
school. They viewed the state curriculum guidelines as setting minimum achieve-
ment levels rather than a challenge or goal. On the other hand, we found that
principals at schools where students were consistently performing below the
mean on the state assessment test hoped to bring their school’s curriculum into
greater alignment with state guidelines. Meeting the state curriculum guidelines
was a goal for these schools, and the mechanism by which they often chose to
achieve it was through the use of textbooks that incorporated topic areas assessed
by the state standardized assessment test.
We found that midlevel and low-achieving elementary schools, especially those in
Metro City, explicitly chose textbooks that incorporated the recommended state
curriculum. By contrast, teachers at Rockefeller Elementary developed their cur-
riculum independently of a textbook series. A document describing the fourth-
grade curriculum at Rockefeller Elementary for 1994–95 stated:
This document outlines the goals of our present fourth-grade curriculum.
Teachers actively partake in the ongoing evaluation and revision of curriculum
and utilize various materials, programs, activities, and strategies to implement
the following goals.
Another factor that influenced curriculum implementation in schools, primarily at
the elementary and middle schools, was the number of students requiring bilin-
gual education. Several of the schools we visited enrolled large populations of stu-
dents who were not native speakers of English. These schools provided separate
bilingual curriculum tracks for native Spanish-speaking students. According to one
administrator, West City students generally stayed in the bilingual tracks for three
or more years before making the transition to English language classes, and the
curriculum provided within the bilingual track was the same as that provided to
English-speaking students. The district administration for West City schools had
also decided to provide resource teachers to assist bilingual classroom teachers
with curriculum issues and to facilitate students transition from classes taught in
Spanish to those taught in English.

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