ian westbury
TRANSCRIPT
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