Basically, to simplify this, to me it is a concern along the continuum of individual rights versus the common good.  The argument relates to diversity versus benefits of conformity and constructing commonality.  Like trying to put square pegs in round holes, we aren't all going to fit.  Yet, if I sought a physician I would really hope he had a bag of different tools just in case.

Can you imagine a national curriculum attempting to teach the same material to a student in Brooklyn, NY and a student in Wyoming?  Private control of education is critical if we are to build our education system back where it should be.

I see no reason a standard set of skills do not span borders without providing the ability to tailor the material to reflect the community or culture it is being taught to.

This has been examined recently.






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James

     Talk about a huge can of worms!...The idea of nationalized standards is as questionable as the concept of a nation itself.  Not only does it pose the challenge of agreeing on the standards themselves, but most importantly, how can unified assessment be achieved?
     Several years ago the AFT (American Federation of Teachers) did a survey of the state standards of all fifty states.  There findings didn't surprise most educators: most states had too many standards and far too many of the standards were poorly written, vague and made true assessment difficult. 
     My county - Pinellas County, Florida - began an admirable and ambitious project six years ago to revise our "Sunshine State Standards" and condense them into "Essential Learnings".  For example, what does a student in an American History class really need to know and be able to do when they leave high school?
     County curriculum supervisors of secondary education selected teachers to write these over the summer.  Our Social Studies team met for two weeks and broke into smaller teams, with my colleague and I writing the Essential Learnings for American History (that's 16 high schools).  In essence, the vision was that these standards would be a work in progress, that each year we would receive feedback from teachers and a few years later this would culminate in "common end of course exams" for each course.
     While the writing of our American History standards went well enough (we are still very proud of the outcome and how easy they are to follow; I'd be happy to send them as an attachment!), the process itself reflected how difficult a national discussion might be; the World History folks got to a heated argument over whether students needed to differentiate between the Italian, French, and German Renaissance...we laughed and thought we'd be happy if our students came into American History with a grasp of the concept of Renaissance! :-)
     After two weeks, the Essential Learnings were finished and sent to all teachers in the county at the start of the next year.  The following summer the teams met once again for revision, excited about the feedback we would get from our colleagues in American history.  Our supervisor came in the first morning with his envelope.  He pulled out one piece of paper...a single email from a single teacher!
     This long story illustrates that the best efforts - and these are at the local/district level - can and will be compromised by:

a lack of oversight by the district; a lack of assessment of teachers to ensure they can effectively cover the standards; the need for administrators to be qualified enough to assess teachers; the need to account for remediation when kids come in without prior knowledge, skills, or even much reading comprehension; as well as the training necessary to support teachers in effective instruction/assessment.
     Talk of nationalized standards is helpful, but only to the extent to which it leads to a general discussion and examination about teaching and learnings.  Without that dialogue, we can write as many "standards," "benchmarks," "essential learnings," "strands," or "outcome" we like.  We'll be no closer to real implementation or students' learning really improving.

Brandt Robinson

To me as a parent, nationalizing the school curriculum is just removing the decision makers one step further from the kids and parents impacted by those curriculum decisions.  This is big-league social engineering by the education-industrial-governmental complex at its best (worst).  Must every youth in America that is the same age be studying the same thing at 9:01am every Monday?

This sounds nowhere near like a democratic society to me!

btw Clay... I love the picture you added to your post... so appropriate...*g*

Being a science teacher I don't see as much difficulty with this issue as may exist in others. As I stated earlier, there is no reason it cannot be a mix of some standard criteria and other left to more regional levels of government. It does not need to be all in/all out.
I already feel there are TOO many curricular criteria and I would prefer it be greatly reduced in number at any/every level. Too many are teaching details rather than ensuring the appication and understanding of the major concepts.
I'll go ahead and say it - evolution is a great example. I would be incredibly surprised if there is any curriculum globally that omits atomic theory. It is, of course, the unifying theory for understanding matter and its changes - chemistry. To omit it would prevent any student from understanding how matter does what it does.
Yet so many districts challenge and want to limit the learning of evolution - the grand unifying theory of biology [my term yet accurate none the less]. To omit or even fail to use evolution as a common thread throughout a biology curriculum is to limit any every students understanding of life on Earth. It SHOULD be a national standard along with Atomic theory, science as a process, and Newton's Laws [perhaps others].
From this starting point, a limited, small number of national standards could be produced to ensure regional biases are prevented from eliminating fundamental scientific facts, concepts and theories.
Then the national science curriculum can provide EXAMPLES of how to approach the standards allowing regional freedom to be sensitive to regional socioeconomic, cultural, religious or other issues.
In summary:
fewer standards to allow focus on primary concpets and issues and allow them to be presented and applied in numerous contexts.
a few national standards to prevent elimination of fundamental theorems/concepts etc for [what seem to be] primarily religious reasons.
numerous examples and ideas to help teachers provide access to the standards in sensitive ways.
Personally I do not see anything democratic about science standards. Science may be debated and the big ideas are occasioanlly [if rarely] challenged. But science is not democratic by nature. The evidence substantiates [hopefully] the concepts.

James

I think any sort of a national curriculum should focus solely on basic citizenship skills, including...
1. How local, state and federal government works
2. Real experience in the democratic process in the student's school and community
3. Good speaking and writing skills
4. Basic understanding of civil and human rights laws

But beyond that very little else.  No science, math, art, music, drama, computers, reading.  Those are aeas of learning that individual communities and individual studentss and their families can pursue on their own in their schools or other learning environments.