Is There an NCLB Curriculum?

February 4, 2009 - After six years of operation, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law is up for congressional re-authorization. NCLB requires states to have content standards — statements of what kids should know in math, language arts, English and science at various grade levels — and to regularly assess kids' achievement against those standards.

Though the federal government does not have the power to establish or enforce the teaching of a national curriculum, some scholars and policy makers believe that NCLB — by emphasizing standards and regular testing — is creating a de facto national curriculum.  Is there any evidence that NCLB had this effect? Are states moving toward a more unified conception of academic standards?

Penn GSE's Andy Porter and Morgan Polikoff, with John Smithson from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, decided to find out.  They investigated similarities and differences among states' content standards as a first step toward establishing whether or not a national curriculum is taking shape as states work toward NCLB compliance.

Working from sophisticated analyses of "content languages" that break down an academic subject like mathematics into specific areas of instruction (e.g. operations, measurement, basic algebra, etc...) and levels of cognitive demand (e.g. memorization, understanding, making connections, etc...), Porter, Polikoff, and Smithson were able to analyze and compare academic content standards in over a dozen states.  They created state-to-state alignment indexes to show how similar one state's standards are to those in another state.  Further, they developed maps of various states' content standards to illustrate exactly what the states emphasize with their standards - by looking at the maps, one readily sees the story behind state-to-state comparisons.

The findings.  The authors' analysis of state content standards does not reveal evidence that a de facto national curriculum is taking shape in state content standards — alignment of standards among the states is "no better than moderate."  Also, the authors found only moderate alignment between states' content standards in mathematics and science and national professional content standards in these subjects (published by the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics and the National Research Council, respectively). 

Intriguing, though, is the extent to which Porter, Polikoff, and Smithson were able to reveal differences between states' content standards through fine-grain analysis in particular subject areas.  For example, the states with the least alignment in 4th grade language arts were Idaho and Delaware.  For the writing portion of that curriculum, Idaho's sole emphasis is on students generating written work, while Delaware standards emphasize a broader range of cognitive demands, putting a heavy emphasis on evaluation and explanation of writing. 

Here's what the content maps look like:

 

In 8th grade mathematics, on the other hand, the states with the highest alignment are Delaware and Oregon. Fine-grain analysis of these states’ standards in basic algebra reveal that both emphasize very similar math procedures, with Oregon putting a bit more emphasis on students being able to conjecture. Here’s what those content maps look like:

 

This study will be published in a forthcoming edition of Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis (EEPA) — for more information on the study, write to editor@gse.upenn.edu.