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The end of schooling as we know it?

About a year ago, the Journal of Curriculum Studies received a contribution written by Daniel Tanner, one of the most experienced and respected scholars in the field of curriculum studies and a long-time friend of the Journal. It turned out to be an angry account of the impact of the ‘No Child Left Behind’ policies and their successor, the so-called ‘Race to the Top’ programme. There is plenty of evidence to support Tanner’s view: many prominent US scholars have come forward in recent years denouncing the ‘Collateral Damage’ (Berliner and Nichols 2007) of these policies or bemoaning ‘The Death and Life of the Great American School System’ (Ravitch 2011). According to such critics, the question seems to be whether such policies can lead to the end of schooling as we know it, destroying the possibility of a public school as a common good for all people. In spite of comprehensive scholarly and other criticism, there is no sign that the present US administration will leave NCLB or the ‘Race to the Top’ behind. Moreover, NCLB is one of the biggest export hits in the history of modern schooling. Similar systems have been introduced in most countries in the world within the last decade or so. The drive towards such policies is still very much alive: recently, the school board president of the city of my university (Vienna, Austria) announced the introduction of high-stake testing into the capital’s school system as a response to devastating results in a national mathematics test of fourth and eighth graders where the city came in at the very bottom of every league table. Of course, many local educators have pointed to the fact that such strategies have never had a track record of sustainable success anywhere. But, most probably, this will not dissuade the city government, as similar arguments have not been able to stop the influx of NCLB policies elsewhere. How can a policy, that claims to be evidence-based, be gaining more and more international traction in spite of so much evidence-based opposition? It is not only that the critics are not heard: in many places, former professorates and departments of curriculum studies are turned into franchises of exactly the same kind of empirical research and development, which is grounding the current data-driven approach to accountability and schooling. Indeed, one sometimes wonders, whether it is the field of curriculum studies itself, which is being left behind by the seemingly unstoppable success of the high-stakes and standardization community. Of course, one can ask if the seemingly devastating impact of such accountability policies on public schooling is just a US phenomenon, due J. CURRICULUM STUDIES, 2013