Why the US Has No National Curriculum: What It Means For Your Child’s Learning
Last month, I was idling in the car pickup line at my kids’ elementary school, waiting for my fourth grader to get out, when my neighbor Sarah rolled down her window and waved me over. She’d moved from Austin, Texas, to our small Ohio town that August so her 10-year-old son Jax could be closer to her mom, and she held a crumpled 5th grade social studies worksheet, her brow furrowed. “He just did a whole year of Texas state government last year,” she said. “Now here we are, doing Ohio state government again, and he hasn’t had a unit on how the federal government works since third grade. Is this normal?”
I’ve worked as a public school 6th grade teacher, and I still sub a couple days a month at the local middle school, so I got to explain what most people don’t learn until they move or have a kid bounce between districts: the US has never had a nationalized curriculum. Education policy is mostly left to states, and then individual school districts pick what textbooks, units, and lesson plans they use, based on their state’s own standards. What that looks like for regular families is exactly what Sarah was dealing with: gaps, repeats, and confusion when life requires moving. I told her about my own oldest son, who did half of 8th grade in our district, then we moved across the state for my husband’s job for a year. Our old district introduced Algebra 1 in 8th grade for advanced kids; the new district didn’t offer it until 9th. They put him back into 8th grade general math, and he spent the whole year reviewing material he already mastered. He got in the habit of skipping homework because he didn’t need it, and he still struggles with turning in work regularly in high school, three years later.
Most people who oppose a national curriculum do it for good reason. I have a cousin who teaches high school on the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona, and she’s spent the last decade advocating to get more indigenous history and water policy issues specific to her reservation into her curriculum. A one-size-fits-all national curriculum could easily erase that kind of locally relevant, meaningful learning that matters more to her kids than any generic textbook chapter. I also get the concern about federal overreach; the idea that a group of people in Washington DC shouldn’t get to decide what every kid in every corner of the country learns. That makes sense to me.
But that doesn’t mean the current system works for most families. Last spring I subbed for a 7th grade science class in a district 30 minutes from here, where the state board of education had voted two years prior to remove most references to human-caused climate change from the middle school curriculum. The unit I was covering that day was climate, and the textbook only mentioned it as a possible natural trend. That’s a gap no parent can fix easily if they don’t even know it exists. Military families, who move every 2-3 years on average, tell stories all the time of their kids repeating a full year of math or missing a core prerequisite for AP classes in high school, just because the sequence is totally different from state to state.
I don’t expect the US to adopt a full nationalized curriculum anytime soon, and I’m not even sure that’s what I want. But there are small, concrete things parents can do right now to avoid the biggest pitfalls of the current system, whether we ever get national standards or not.
First, if you know you’re going to move within the next year, reach out to your new school district as soon as you have an address, and ask for a full grade-level curriculum map. Most districts post these online, but if they don’t, the front office will send you one. Then, sit down for 10 minutes with your kid’s current teacher, and map out any gaps between what your kid will learn before you move and what they’re expected to know when they arrive. For example, if the new district expects all 6th graders to know how to write a five-paragraph essay, and your current district doesn’t cover that until 7th grade, you can do one short writing exercise a week over the summer using free resources from your local library, and that’s enough to get them caught up. It doesn’t require a tutor or expensive curriculum.
Second, if you’re settled in one district, join the district’s curriculum advisory committee. Most districts have one, made up of teachers, parents, and community members, and they almost always have open spots because most people don’t even know it exists. You don’t have to have a degree in education to join; just show up to the quarterly meetings, and ask for the content you want your kid to learn. I joined ours two years ago, and we added a half unit on personal finance for 10th graders that wasn’t there before, just because three of us parents asked for it.
Third, if you just want to check for big gaps, pull up the Common Core State Standards online once a semester. They’re free, they’re just a baseline of what most experts agree kids should know by each grade, and even though they’re voluntary, most states use some version of them. It takes 15 minutes to cross check what your kid’s current unit is covering against the baseline, and if there’s a big gap, you can bring it up to your kid’s teacher. Most teachers are happy to point you toward extra resources.
Last week, Jax came over for a playdate with my oldest, and he was working on that social studies unit. He’d already mastered the state government section, so his teacher let him skip the review questions and start the upcoming unit on the three branches of federal government that he’d never gotten to. Sarah checked the Common Core baseline, saw that civics was supposed to be covered in 5th grade, and talked to the teacher, which took 10 minutes at a parent-teacher conference.
It’s a small fix, and it doesn’t fix the bigger issues with how we handle curriculum across the country. I still go back and forth on whether a light-touch national curriculum, with baselines that leave plenty of room for local additions, would be better than what we have now. Some days I think it would cut down on a lot of the chaos families deal with. Other days I think local control is too important to give up. For now, checking the baseline once a semester and speaking up when I see a gap works for my kids. It’s not perfect, but it’s enough.
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