Common Core: Same Exclusion, Different Century
For well over 100 years educational leaders in the field of curriculum have gathered to try and figure out what children in the U.S. ought to be learning. In 1893, for instance, the Committee of Ten published its report on the organization of secondary education in the U.S. In 1895 the Committee of Fifteen was similarly formed to organize the elementary level curriculum. There was also the 1913-1918 Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, as well as the 1931 Committee on the Relation of School and College, the 1934 Commission on the Social Studies in the Schools, and the 1945 Commission on the English Curriculum. Indeed, readers might recall the National Commission on Excellence in Education and their 1983 report, A Nation At Risk, which kicked off the modern era of high-stakes, standardized testing. The United States simply has a long history of relatively small groups of people influencing the direction and tenor of education policy and curriculum nationally.
Over the last few years my friend and colleague Anthony Brown (University of Texas, Austin) and I have been looking at who was included and who was excluded in the early history of curriculum development in the United States. In surveying the decades around the turn of the 20th century we saw a clear pattern: There were numerous “official” conversations about the curriculum in the United States, but the only conversations that were being heard, discussed, and acknowledged in education policy circles consisted mainly of white men hailing from universities and other official educational institutions like the National Education Association or governmental agencies, with the occasional mention of Jane Addams, Carter G. Woodson, or W.E.B. DuBois included for token diversity.
As scholars of color who teach and research about curriculum studies as well as educational history and policy