Theory and theorizing in curriculum studies

Ian Westbury

knowledge . . . must be the outcome of a moving, active, dynamic

process of hypothesis formation and testing. Questioning is one

half of the act of which the other half is forming an answer, and it

takes both halves to make up a situation of knowing anything.

Blackburn (1998)

Situating an inquiry: Some autobiographical notes

Lundgren (1991) writes that “a curriculum theory is a method of

inquiry.” My inquiry, began many years ago with my situation as a

beginning teacher in secondary schools in Australia. The two schools I

worked in were populated by pluralities of students who were recent

immigrants from Europe, the Australian-born children of working-class

immigrants, or “old-Australian” children from working-class families.

Many spoke Greek, Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, and the like as their home

languages. We tried to teach these students French as a foreign

language and the 16th-century English of Shakespeare without,

needless to say, much obvious success. Most of our students left school

after grade 10, although in both schools there were small sixth-forms

made up of students who hoped to make the transition to the third level.

Many of our sixth-formers did make the transition, but to lower-status

institutions preparing students for, e.g., teacher education or nursing.

My own secondary school experience had been very different. The

school I attended did have many students who spoke Yiddish, Latvian,

Greek, and the like at home. But the school was a selective ‘academic’

school, i.e., a grammar school in the English sense. Many of the

immigrant students in the school came from families that had been

professional before their post-war displacement. The school itself was

firmly oriented to the idea of further post-secondary education, and

there was a large sixth form. Many of us made the transition to the

university, and to high-status programs within the university.

In hindsight, and reflecting on the differences among these three

schools, it is clear that, in that period, the 1950s and early 1960s, the

Australian school system was beginning to confront what Martin Trow

(1961) termed the “first transition” of secondary education, from the

elite secondary school to the mass, but at that time not-yet-terminal,

secondary school. That was to come, and still later Trow’s “second

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transition,” from a mass terminal to a mass university-preparatory

secondary school, was to emerge. But the school system at large, and

secondary teachers in particular, were unprepared institutionally or

intellectually for these emerging transitions. Thus in the new high

schools that were being built in working-class neighborhoods, teachers

wore British-style academic gowns, symbolizing their sense of shared

identity with the traditional “British” university. Some change seemed

necessary, but what kind?

In this situation I had one further experience that was also to define my

inquiry. Moreland High School was hotbed of teacher unionism and, in

the course of our agitation, we had frequent interactions with the

inspectors in the ministry who managed the secondary system. One of

my colleagues wanted to teach Italian rather than French – and that

seemed to be good idea given our failures with French – but to our

surprise we learned that our solution to respond to our local problems

raised large-scale, and long-term, organizational and institutional issues;

such a change was not (as we had thought) a local matter to be thought

about solely in terms of our needs and aspirations. Schools were more

complex institutions than I had thought; problem-solving and change

involved much more than resolving the question “What do I want to

do?”. To undertake curriculum change in even a single school, the real

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questions were “What do we want to do,” and “How might we do it?”.

Our seemingly simple and straight-forward school-level change, to

substitute Italian for French, spiraled through the system to affect, e.g.,

teachers’ career lines, the student credentialling system, teacher

preparation and certification, etc.. My decision to undertake graduate

work in education in Canada was driven by a sense that there was much

to understand in the situation of schools like Sunshine and Moreland

High Schools – although I was not sure what it was.

At the University of Alberta I discovered that “curriculum” was the

subcategory of North American educational research that claimed to

have my questions in its project. But I also discovered that, in practice,

curriculum was largely about advocacy of the canonical curriculum

reforms of the 1960s, that is, the platforms and ideologies of the US

curriculum projects of the Sputnik era. However (and in a way that

belied understanding), as we read the tracts of this subject-based

movement, e.g., Bruner’s The process of education (1960), we also

heard expositions of “Dewey” and “his” rationale for an integrated

curriculum code, and sought to master the implications of such tool-kits

of “reform” as Bloom’s Taxonomy. Around the edges of all this there

was, on the one hand, developmentalism in various formulations and, on

the other hand, the notion that the “research” task was to establish

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empirically the merits of, e.g., one or another packaging of, say,

inquiry/discovery learning vis-à-vis expository learning. There was

however little first-hand engagement with educational theory and

research.

Later, working in Toronto, I was to make a more coherent engagement

with the North American curriculum “field” – not with the curriculum –

by way of lengthy discussions with Arno Bellack, and he invited me to a

participate in a seminar in Washington, DC on “curriculum theory.” For

Bellack, there had been a time in which “curriculum” had been a field

with a significant and purposeful project and meaningful theories, but

that project had been lost. The question was Could that sense of

significance and purpose be recovered? For the seminar the question

was how to think about theorizing in the curriculum field.

As I anticipated this seminar, I thought that the analogy that lay behind

the formulation of the task as re-theorizing curriculum theory was the

theory or philosophy of history or science, etc., meta-discussions of

disciplinary projects. But nothing resembling such a discussion

occurred; nor did any view of a substantive, contemporary theory of or

for the curriculum come in view. Instead there were, on the one hand,

discussions of the contributions and controversies of what I thought of

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as another day. There was no reference to the curriculum or curriculum

platforms implicit in the college-preparatory subject curricula that

loomed so large. “Theory” was present only by way of advocacy of the

need for precision in language as we distinguished, for example,

“curriculum” from “instruction,” but it was never clear what the

question was that such precision might solve.

It was all very mysterious. The issues around the seminar become clear

only in hindsight. As Lundgren (1991) has observed, American

curriculum field – from its high point of institutionalization in the 1930s

and 1940s to the attenuated field of the 1960s – was centered on

ideology. It was an enterprise directed at socializing teachers and

school people into the platforms and slogans that derived from

interpretations of the turn-of-the-last-century opening of elementary

schools to the rational curriculum code and the emergence, in the 1920s

and 1930s, of the mass terminal secondary school. Within this enterprise

,“reform” became the trope used to frame “old” and “new” educational

ideologies. The end-in-view was not one of exploring and explicating the

underlying codes, but rather “conversion” to the “new” codes – with the

implications of that conversion being left to others to work on. The crisis

in the field that loomed so large in the 1960s, for those who were

focused on the secondary-school curriculum, emerged from the idea of a

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mass university-preparatory high school. This development rendered

moot the old/new binary: even the word “reform” had been appropriated

by the advocates of the “old,” “academic,” subject-framed curricula. And

these new/old reformers had instantiations of their ideology in actual

curricula, like PSSC, which claimed to prepare the baby-boomers who

aspired to be the first in their families to attend a university and have a

career in science. Nothing that the school of education-based,

“progressive” curriculum field had to offer had a larger legitimacy. For

my project this situation was very confusing: “new” was in fact the “old”

curriculum of my Australian secondary grammar school. But, in the

absence of any reference to context or institution, the meanings of “old”

and “new” were not open to examination – and as a result there was no

clear way to explore the “crisis” in the American curriculum field. It fell

upon non-Americans, like Lundgren (1991), facing his very different

situation of a new, mass secondary education to see the sources of this

American crisis in curriculum studies.

I moved from Toronto to Chicago in 1968, at the height of the political

and cultural turbulence of the Vietnam years. This turbulence reframed

the situation around the curriculum field. Race, class, and gender

entered the picture, to reanimate the “old/new” progressive project. But

it was also clear at that time that the state and federal governments had

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become the major players in the steering of the school system. The

steering role that the university-based curriculum field had played in

managing, via ideological socialization, grass-roots educational change

was firmly gone, although some major figures from the pre-war

curriculum field, e.g., Ralph Tyler, were able to make the transition to

new roles as federal policy-makers.

With these institutional changes in its field, the only arena of action of

curriculum was within the university, within teacher education. And

there, within the space opened up as result of the new emphasis on

research within schools of education, there was new need for a new

platform for curriculum studies. And “critique,” set alongside a old/new

advocacy of neo-marxist, feminist, and race theories, gave this

university-based curriculum field a fresh raison d’être. The Vietnam-era

anti-institutionalism reinforced the turn away from the idea of the school

as an institution. In this context curriculum theory could became a

library project, an exploration of texts about texts (see Pinar et al.,

1995).

This turn of the American curriculum field was very different from the

direction curriculum studies was taking in, say, the UK where a

formalized, institutionalized field was being created for the first time as

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part of the transition to mass secondary education. There “old” and

“new” had specific referents in the school and the robust near-

hegemonic framing in a social democrat tradition. A “new sociology of

the curriculum” emerged as an empirical project – as Lundgren (1991)

put it, “an explanation of what the curriculum should contain and how

the teaching should be carried out or why the curriculum has a specific

content” (p. 40). This English project directed at theorizing the

curriculum clearly resonated with the new American curriculum theory

project of the (see, e.g. Apple, 1979), but as an ideological inspiration

for the focus on social class, not as a mandate for the empirical

curriculum-theory project Lundgren was calling for – and was to

undertake. And, as we can now see, that work was very much work of a

time and place. The sophisticated project undertaken by John Meyer and

his colleagues (see McEneaney & Meyer, 2000) seeking to understand

the invisible curriculum code, the world-wide forms of the contemporary

curriculum, has had little resonance in the curriculum field.

But theorizing class, race, and gender, whether in British or American

ways, was not my project. As a social democrat I knew about class and

gender, and viewed the US race problem as an immigrant. And although

my Australian project was fading, I was still interested in the school as

an institution and how it could, and should be thought about.

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The “practical:” a meta-theory for curriculum

Joseph Schwab had emerged as a figure in American education as a

proponent of the post-war university-oriented science education –

developing the platform that school science should mirror the essential

nature of science as, in his words, “enquiry.” He had also been a central

figure in one of the major NSF-suppported curriculum development

projects, the Biological Science Curriculum Study, and thus concretely

represented the “new” curriculum field. However, he was also closely

associated with Ralph Tyler, one of the central figures in the “old,”

progressive field and, a result of this connection and his consuming

interest in education in all of its forms, he was widely seen as being

identified with the curriculum field, albeit in a off-center way. But

Schwab himself inhabited no camp: he was too complex and

sophisticated a figure to be readily labeled.

Schwab was a participant in the Washington curriculum theory seminar.

There he made a (mysterious) reference to a “solution” he was then

working on to the “problem” of curriculum. In 1968, he presented his

“The practical: A language for curriculum” (Schwab, 1969, 1970;1 see

also Schwab, 1978) as an invited address to the curriculum division of

AERA. In this paper Schwab sought a new “theoretical” understanding

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of the thought/action questions around educational theory and

research. He was asking: How do theory and research matter in the

world of schooling? How can educational theory and research contribute

to right action vis-à-vis the ideas of education and the inner work of

schools. I was then a colleague of Schwab’s at Chicago and was able to

experience the educational and intellectual milieu which had spawned

the paper.

The (first) practical paper addressed these questions by developing a

meta-theory of both education at large and curriculum studies as

endeavors built around an end-in-view of what Schwab termed the

“advancement” of schooling. The paper opens with a summary of

Schwab’s analysis and his conclusion:

I shall have three points. The first is this: The field of curriculum is

moribund. It is unable, by its present methods and principles, to

continue its work and contribute significantly to the advancement

of education. It requires new principles which will generate a new

view of the character and variety of its problems. It requires new

methods appropriate to the new budget of problems.

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The second point: The curriculum field has reached this unhappy

state by inveterate, unexamined, and mistaken reliance on

theory. . . .

The third point, which constitutes the main body of my thesis:

There will be a renascence of the field of curriculum, a renewed

capacity to contribute to the quality of American education, only if

curriculum energies are in large part diverted from theoretic

pursuits (such as a pursuit of global principles and comprehensive

patterns, the search for stable sequences and invariant elements,

the construction of taxonomies of supposedly fixed or recurrent

kinds) to three other modes of operation. These other modes,

which differ radically from the theoretic, I shall call, following

tradition, the practical, the quasi-practical, and the eclectic.

(Schwab, 1978, pp. 287–288)

To paraphrase: Although the institutionalized curriculum field is the

category of educational science most explicitly associated with notions

of the “advancement” of schooling, it is not clear that the research or

practical endeavors associated with the field have made a significant

contribution to such advancement. This failure must be understood as

“paradigmatic,” in Kuhn’s (1970) sense: the field’s self-understanding of

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its research and activity has been framed in ways that are not

appropriate to its task. The paradigm for curriculum studies, as part of

educational science, was developed as if the task of the advancement of

schooling was an enterprise requiring the development of knowledge, as

a theoretic enterprise. Concrete experience within this approach makes

it clear that it has not yielded an advancement of schooling. The

implication is that the endeavor needs a new paradigm. Using terms

deriving from his University of Chicago Aristotelianism, Schwab argues

that the curriculum field was better conceived of as directed at the

development of curriculum-making as an “art,” centered on and directed

at action and decision rather than knowing as such. Such an art would,

he suggests, would be directed at deliberative, reflective action towards

the advancement of schooling. Curriculum theorizing and research

would be conceived of in ways that would lend themselves to the nature

of, and needs of, this art.

Schwab’s practical paper develops this meta-theoretical argument by

way of three steps. First, he examines the curriculum field as framed

within a Kuhnian paradigm that is being implicitly evaluated by its

practitioners on a day-by-day basis in terms of its yield vis-à-vis its basic

problematic. Such evaluation has manifestations which can be seen as

“symptoms” that indicate paradigmatic “health” or paradigmatic

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breakdown, that is, a situation in which an underlying paradigm is

failing to yield meaningful and significant questions for the discipline.

He argues that all of the characteristic symptoms of paradigm

breakdown are in evidence around the curriculum field.

As Schwab develops his argument, the next question becomes one of

discerning why the curriculum field’s paradigm might have broken

down. The answer, he suggests, lies in the 19th- and early-20th-century

formulation of scope and nature of all of educational science: to take one

example:

[Bertil Hammer] defined the new scientific discipline [of

education] in relation to three major problems. The first was to

“seek to establish the goal of education, as far as is indicated by

the historical and cultural formation of mankind; this will be the

mission of a philosophical or teleological education.” The second

major problem was to “study the process of upbringing in detail,

such as it appears in the single individual; in other words, to

investigate the biological and psychological conditions that

determine the child’s development: individual or psychological

education.” And finally the third major problem implied “studying

education on the whole as a social phenomenon, of which the

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historical and social conditions need to be clarified: social

(including historical) education.” (Linné, 2004, p. 37)

Here we see Hammer working within the 19th-century paradigm of

educational science, and at a point at which it could not be clear if the

paradigm would yield questions and answers that could offer a key to

the task of advancement in the schools. It is only in hindsight that we

can see that this was a wrong choice by a nascent endeavor. No

concrete advancement of schooling as such has emerged from the

search for knowledge and understanding as the defining activities

and/or forms of work of educational science. Schwab then argues that,

by probing the character of the theoretic paradigm as it has been

manifested within education, we can now understand why no concrete

advancement can emerge from, e.g. Hammer’s understanding of

educational science. But Aristotle also offers the possibility of a radically

different form of knowing, the kind of knowing that is embedded in

thoughtful, reflective action, the practical. The “practical” papers

outlines that possibility.

In developing this analysis, Schwab does two things: On the one hand,

he sketches the scope of a complete “practical” conception of

curriculum work. He then develops his own interpretation of one

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starting point within that more complete outline – centered on method,

deliberation (see Westbury, 1972). The attention of most of those who

have followed Schwab’s hypothesis has been centered on his

development of the idea of deliberation, but there is an equally

compelling set of issues centering on his starting point of subject-

matter, that is, what needs to be thought about, what needs to be known

about the inner work of schools in any truly thoughtful deliberations

about curriculum questions. In other words, the knowledge and

understanding that are the grist for the mill of such deliberations about

curricula and forms of teaching demand forms of curriculum theory

offering explanations of why teaching has its particular character, how

teaching is and could be carried out, and why the curriculum has a

specific form and content. In other words, effective thought and action

requires that the inner work of the school be unpacked empirically, and

the results of the unpacking given theoretical form.

Theorizing teaching

As I sought a research agenda in curriculum studies – and in light of the

“practical” – it was the idea of understanding teaching that gave me my

questions. I wanted to understand teaching not as a form of

“instruction” defined through the lens of a normative educational theory

or psychology but as a real-world, real-time activity in classrooms. This

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question had brought me to the idea of research on teaching,

particularly the kind of work represented by Arno Bellack’s The

language of the classroom (Bellack et al., 1966). I subsequently

discovered other formulations from different traditions advancing such a

view of the classroom – in, for example, Paul Gump’s (1971) ecological

studies of the classroom, in the work of my Chicago colleagues, Robert

Dreeben (see Dreeben 1970; 1973) and Rebecca Barr (1973–74; 1983),

and, later, the work of Walter Doyle (1977). But it was the work of

Urban Dahllöf (1971) and Ulf Lundgren (1972) that showed how such

approaches could be, and needed to be, comprehensively framed by, on

the one hand, a view of the larger social and educational system in

which classrooms were nested, and, on the other hand, by a

conceptualization of the empirical linkages between classroom

processes and the processes of school learning and thus the outputs of

schooling. It was Dahllöf and Lundgren’s conceptions of opportunity-to-

learn (OTL) and the mechanisms around the distribution of OTL – across

groups of students, across time, and across curricula – that became the

central mediating concepts that made the linkage between teaching and

school learning possible. In developing these concepts, and their larger

context within the idea of the school system, Dahllöf and Lundgren’s

frame-factor theory made perhaps the most important contribution to

the idea of school learning that we have.

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But Walter Doyle recently observed that, despite of its significance, such

research on teaching, as a form of curriculum theorizing, has largely

fallen off the map of curriculum research in North America. Schwab’s

“practical” has also dropped off the map. Furthermore, in the

reconceptualist project of advancing curriculum theory as a text-based,

“theoretical” discourse, Schwab’s central empirical end-in-view, the idea

of the advancement of real-world schooling, is also not at the center of

the project of the curriculum field. But while Schwab’s “practical” lost

politically, we still have to ask whether or not, in the light of the

hindsight of 35 years, the thrust of his vision of a “reconceptualized”

curriculum field was essentially correct? Thus the claim at the core of

his proposal was that “knowing” is categorically different from “doing”

and “making” – by virtue of its very nature, i.e., the abstraction and

simplification that is necessary for valid and reliable knowing, the

theoretic cannot map and cannot map onto, and so engage, the

complexities of the action and decision that are integral to the notion of

the advancement of schooling.

But, as I have emphasized, an emphasis on action and decision does not

imply that knowledge is irrelevant to the ideas of action and decision.

Knowing is one of the key starting points in the practical project. As

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Schwab put it, we must know “what is and has been going on in

American schools” (Schwab, 1978, p. 313; emphasis in the original):

At present we do not know. . . . What is wanted is a totally new

and extensive pattern of empirical study of classroom action and

reaction; a study, not as a basis for theoretical concerns about the

nature of teaching or learning process, but as a basis for

beginning to know what we are doing, what we are not doing, and

to what effect; what changes are needed, which needed changes

can be instituted with what costs or economies, and how they can

be effected with minimum tearing of the remaining fabric of

educational effort. (Schwab, 1978, pp. 313–314; emphasis in

original)

Concepts, like OTL, and theories, like Lundgren’s (1972) frame-factor

and curriculum theories, Meyer’s institutionalist curriculum theory, all

ways of thinking about the school and the curriculum, can be seen as

constituting the outcomes of such a project within the “practical.” Such

concepts and theories develop portable, but not generalizable (in the

“theoretic” sense), knowledge that can be used in deliberations

centered on choice and action. The extension of such work would offer

conceptualizations of students, teachers, teaching, subjects, curricula,

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schools, school systems, etc. built in terms of the “need” for an

orientation to action and decision – at the nested levels of the

educational system.

Curriculum theory in a new century: the implications of No

Child Left

Behind

My Australian agenda, although I did not know it the time, centered on

the consequences for a curriculum theory of the deployment of second-

level schooling to “new” populations. The decision to expand the scope

of schooling was, in a sense, determined by social forces and facilitated

by the school system’s political governors. The professional task was to

work out the implications and institutionalize the “new” school, although

the actual form of the new school was also determined by political and

social forces.

Today the “effectiveness” of the schooling that emerged in the crucible

of the 1960s and 1970s is in question. The issue is not – although it

perhaps should be – the idea of the secondary school, but how well an

effective form of the idea is being deployed. I believe that this question

gives is our institutional project. Let me conclude this paper by

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considering how these questions might engage a project for a

curriculum theory for the first years of the 21st century.

In the United States the normative issues around class-, often race-

based educational equity/inequity have been on the ideological agenda

around education since the civil rights movement of the 1960s – and

firmly on the agenda of educational science and curriculum studies since

the 1970s. The Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB)

legislation has, after 30 years, also placed these issues on the practical,

day-by-day agenda of schooling – to the consternation of many, including

most of those leaders of the curriculum field who had most strenuously

highlighted the issue of class- and race-based inequality.

Thus the program and prescriptions of NCLB more or less universally

condemned by those within the American field of curriculum studies.

Needless to say, NCLB does contain many misconceived elements. But,

more important, the demands on schools made by NCLB are creating

embarrassment, angst, and real difficulties. Given that much of this

response, and the real problems it creates, could have been predicted,

why was it adopted? Some legislators, who were usually sympathetic to

the concerns of educational establishment, supported NCLB because

they saw that establishment as having failed, over 30 years, to deliver

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on their claims to know how to address, and to be addressing, the visible

problems of low-SES African Americans and Latinos.

Large-scale student assessment and sanctions for schools that fail to

meet standards lie at the heart of NCLB. But in employing such

strategies, NCLB only strengthened the programs of accountability-

directed assessment that had been in place in many places for much of

the 1990s. These programs, in their turn, had emerged from the climate

of the 1980s which had also sparked the movement for international

assessment, as a form of bench-marking for national assessment.

The programs of testing and assessment put in place in the US over the

past 20 years were responses to a political discourse but, by reifying

elements of the discourse, they also created, in a sense, new phenomena

of underachievement. Thus Figure 1, taken from a UNICEF report,

addresses underachievement cross-nationally, both in terms of mean

achievement levels but also in terms of national variation in

achievement.

______________________

Insert figure 1 about here

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______________________

In other words, instruments such as large-scale international and

national assessment are not neutral means for the collection and

transmission of data or knowledge but are, as Lachmund (1998) puts it,

“actively involved in the production of the phenomena they represent”

(p. 780). The discourses around such new phenomena invite the search

for ways and means for improvement/reform which, in turn, must be

evaluated. Much of this is, at worst, a form of political theater and, at

best symbolic action. But we have to acknowledge that the instruments

created for other purposes have created phenomena, large-scale data

sets, developed over years, that let us understand the inner work of

schooling in new ways. The question centers whether such tools and

programs yield a project that could contribute to the advancement of

schooling, and how that project might be conceptualized.

Figure 2a and b highlight an “instrument,” a visualization of one aspect

of the inner work of schools. The base map shows the high school

attendance zones for 156 high schools in the Chicago metropolitan area

(the heavy line indicated the boundaries of the City of Chicago). Figure

2a presents the quantiles of scores on the statewide test of mathematics

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from 1993; Figure 2b present the quantiles from 2003. This ten-year

period was marked by intensive “reform” around on the part of both the

Chicago school system and the state, which has overall responsibility for

the Illinois school system. An inspection of the two maps suggests that

there is little in the way of major change in the pattern. In Chicago, the

limited change in the pattern we see is the result of changing

demographics in specific neighborhoods; however, in the comparatively

wealthy suburban areas to the north and west of the city there are some

clear changes. Schools that could be predicted to be in the top quartile

in 1993 on the basis of neighborhood SES variables but in fact scoring

lower raised their achievement to the levels of their peers.

I contend that a set of fundamental questions leading directly to

practices in the inner work of schools emerge from the phenomena that

have been created by these instruments. I further contend that these

questions are questions for a curriculum theory that is directed at the

issues around the management of that inner work. Let me illustrate.

• I linked the 1993 Chicago-area school-level assessment data

with the 1990 census and was therefore able to explore the school

data in the light of the characteristics of the attendance zones of

the schools. Eighty-eight percent of the school-level variance in

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achievement across the 156 schools was predicted using four

variables: percent unemployment in the attendance zone; percent

of households earning more than $75K; percent of students in

private schools; and percent of population migrating to the US

between 1980 and 1990.

There are those who say that such a highly-determined pattern is

more or less inevitable, and that the greater variance in US

achievement that is seen in Figure 1 is the result of the greater

inequalities in US society when compared to, say, Sweden. But

must the inner work of schooling have so little potency in its

aggregate effects. Under what conditions can, schools be more

“effective?” and how much more “effective?”. How is greater

“effectiveness” achieved?

• Notions of equity/inequity in the effectiveness of schools are

implicit in these questions. How can equity/inequity be defined,

and then indexed? Thus in the case of findings summarized in

Figure 2, how can we index the data to ask if, for example, a

decade of “reform” had brought about greater equity at the

various nested levels of analysis, i.e., region, and operating

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jurisdiction, school? How might such a data set be employed to

locate and define problems – and successes?

In posing this second project, the analogy I have in mind is public health

where indices of mortality, morbidity, etc. enable the identification of

phenomena in populations or “flocks,” i.e., their location in space and

time, changes, etc.. With such indices in hand, analysis addressing

questions about equality/inequality in, for example, the delivery of

medically-attended birthing across SES groups, and the consequences in

terms of mortality, etc. across geographic and political space, become

possible – and then constitute a basis for the management of the

delivery of health services. Furthermore, on the basis of such analysis,

those working in public health can then pursue the practical and policy

issues around the effectiveness of one or another policy or program in

changing the status and distribution of the “health” of populations,

across levels of analysis.

If this analogy holds – if only for the purposes of a thought experiment –

and if we focus only on the idea of equality/inequality in access to and

the outputs of populations of schools, an agenda for curriculum

theorizing immediately emerges. Furthermore, drawing on work in

welfare economics and public health, we have many resource for such

26

theorizing in the vast array of approaches to indexing

equality/inequality – in ways that capture different welfare functions,

that is, different understanding of implications of one or another notion

of social justice. Of course, if such approaches were to be applied within

education, we would have many empirical questions about, e.g., the

“behavior” of such indices, their sensitivity to underlying changes, etc.

But, with answers to such questions in hand, we have a battery of

sophisticated tools to use to assess the effects of policies on the

educational “status” of flocks of students, as well as the fundamental

question of what “we” can do to intervene purposively and effectively

into the “health” of those flocks – using theories of action based on

understandings of the school and its inner work, that is empirically-

based curriculum theories.

Some examples: Figure 1 indicates that the variation in achievement in

the US is greater than that in other many countries. Table 1, reflecting a

basic approach in the analysis of income distributions, presents a set of

ratios derived from national percentile scores on from the 2003 OECD

PISA math scale (OECD, 2005; Table A4.3) for France, a country with a

high-mean achievement, Sweden, and the US. Such ratios allow us to

locate where, in the within-country distribution of achievement, there

might be differences when looked at the context of other cases. Thus we

27

see that there is comparatively little difference in the ratios for the

p90/p75 achievement band across the countries – indicating broadly

similar effectiveness for higher-achieving students – but perhaps clear

differences in the capacity of different national systems to set floors on

achievement of lower-achieving or lower-aptitude students. We get a

more precise picture of the sources of the patterns of variation

presented in Figure 1. Such differences then invite us to ask important

questions about within-school structures and practices: do, for example,

the forms of the inner work of schools mute or exacerbate the problems

of lower-aptitude students?

________________________

Insert table 1 about here

________________________

Such an approach to locating patterns in large-scale assessment data is

simple to understand and easy to present. Holsinger (2005) has recently

advocated the use of the Gini index as a more direct approach to the

indexing of equalities in a population, noting that as far back as the mid-

1970s educational policy analysts advocated in use its studies of the

distribution of school quality, etc.. However, as he observes that “the

systematic use of the education Gini index never caught on” (p. 305),

because the Gini coefficients of that era were being developed at the

28

national level and, as such, were of little use for policy-makers. Again

the availability of national data sets has changed the context and

Holsinger is able to report several Gini indexes for between- and with-

province variables in Vietnam – and, importantly, begin the task of

interpretation of the indices he develops.

However, there is a range of coefficients, like the Gini coefficient, that

measure different conceptions of as social justice, i.e.,

equality/inequality, and thus ask and answer different questions. Thus

Wagstaff et al. (1991) observe that “what is interesting – and indeed

worrying – about inequalities in health is not that they exist, but that

they mirror inequalities in socioeconomic status” (p. 546). They

advocate the use of concentration curves and indices (see Figure 3) to

reflect the SES dimensions of inequalities. The concentration index can

be readily used to evaluate changes in SES-based inequality across

schools over time.

______________________

Insert Figure 3 about here

______________________

Conclusion

29

By introducing Gini and concentration indices, etc., into this discussion

my intention is to highlight a set of questions for curriculum theorizing:

we have on the one hand “policy” and the role the issues around policy-

making play within curriculum theory. We have on the other hand the

idea of a project that seeks to unpack the linkages between what

schools do and their effects – that has, as its end-in-view the

development of theories of action that can allow for intervention

towards the advancement of education. Data-analysis, seeking to

understand how different approaches to the measurement of “states” of

educational systems might be developed would not be to everyone’s

taste, but when such work is linked to the conceptual, indeed

philosophical, questions around the appropriate selection of one or

another index, it is certainly “theorizing.”

But how is this work curriculum theorizing? There are two answers to

this question: (1) Most fundamentally such theorizing serves, I believe,

to provide a basis for new approaches to the management of schools,

towards, e.g., on the one hand, a focus on equity/inequity in the

deployment of schooling and, on the other hand, for the assessment of

changes in school outputs and of the impacts of “reform” at the various

nested levels of the school system. In this way we would be addressing

Schwab’s fundamental contention that we must know what is happening

30

in the school system if we are to intervene appropriately in the practices

of the system. (2) The patterns of outputs and outcomes that such

theorizing captures demand exploration of the why and how. To

paraphrase Lundgren (1991), how the teaching is and should be carried

out and/or why the curriculum of these schools has this specific content.

Why do we have the patterns that emerge? How do they result from

what happens inside and outside schools? How do they relate to the

differential power and quality of the inner work of schools? In other

words, viewing the schools through such lenses provides a framework

for the diagnosis and intervention into the functioning of the school

system.

A powerful argument can be made, along the lines of the argument I

have developed in this paper, that the pied piper that represents one

old/new understanding of “curriculum theory” and its project has led the

curriculum field in the US to take a wrong turn, to flee from the idea of

advancement and from hard thinking about how the idea of

advancement might be addressed. Schwab argued, in 1968, for a turn to

a vision of curriculum-making and curriculum research as “practical,”

but his (sophisticated) argument fell by the wayside as curriculum

studies made a “theoretical” turn, a turn that shifted the vision away

from work directed at the school towards theorizing “texts.” But when

31

all is said and done, this was not a new turn but a mirror of the old. It

reflected the 19th-century American university’s search for its place in

teacher education via theory in contrast to the secure place of the

normal school with its focus on the crafts of teaching and schooling

(Cruikshank, 1998). It reflected the separation that Dewey (1902; 1976)

highlighted in 1900, between impractical ideologies expressing visions

and ideals for “education” and hard-nosed reality-centered thinking

centered on the practices of schooling. In rejecting that dichotomy

Dewey advocated approaches to the advancement of the institution of

schooling by way of empirically-based understanding in the broadest

sense of that word (Westbury, 2002). I see that as the task of curriculum

theorizing.

Coda

I am aware that this extended reflection does not address in any direct

way theories of the curriculum. Instead my focus is on “texts” and

particularly “contexts” (Lundgren (1991), the texts and contexts of the

curriculum field as I have experienced it in North America. My framing

of the discussion reflects my questions about the theoretical turn in

North American curriculum studies. By embracing “curriculum theory,”

the North American curriculum field has, I believe, taken a wrong turn.

32

How and why this occurred is one of my questions. What kind of

research, theorizing, we should be undertaking is the other.

Note

1. This revised version of the original AERA paper was published by the

Center for the Study of Instruction of the National Education

Association, the sponsor of the Washington curriculum theory seminar.

This paper was followed by three other papers: “The practical: Arts of

eclectic”, “The practical 3: Translation into curriculum” (see Schwab,

1978b) and “The practical 4: Something for curriculum professors to do”

(Schwab, 1983).

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Table 1. Variation in mathematics achievement in France, Sweden, and

the United States: Percentile ratios.

Mean p90/p10 p90/p25 p75/p10 p75/25 p90/

p75

France 544 1.49 1.34 1.38 1.24 1.08

Sweden 509 1.63 1.41 1.49 1.29 1.09

USA 483 1.71 1.45 1.54 1.32 1.10

40