5 Things to Know About Curriculum in the United States

There's been a whole lot of discussion of late about curriculum - the what of teaching. Whose to blame for reading curriculum decisions, theories about what's taught in history class, etc. I thought it might be helpful to do provide some general context about curriculum in the United States. (I'm happy to provide sources and/or texts for more and I did not use ChatGPT or AI in any way when writing this post.)

1. Schools in the United States follow what is known as the modern liberal arts curriculum. Students from Kindergarten to 12th grade are expected to study reading and writing (English), math, science, history (social studies), art, music, physical education, and electives. Think of these as the boulders that make up American public education and it came about slowly over the 19th century and settled into place at the turn of the 20th century for a whole lot of reasons. A 5th grade teacher deciding to teach, for example, Spanish grammar instead of English grammar would face a whole lot of pushback for a whole lot of reasons.
2. There is no national education system. Instead, there are 50+ systems all operating within the United States (and abroad.) Each state has its own system. Each territory (American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the United States Virgin Islands) has its own system. The Department of Defense has it's own system. The Bureau of Indian Affairs has its own system. Etc. While there are similarities (i.e. the boulders), there are some pretty profound differences. There are even some fairly meaningful differences between neighboring states. The similarities are, generally speaking, related to #1.
3. The degree to which teachers in a state have a say in curriculum-decision making depends on when their state joined the Union. It's not an exact correlation, but generally speaking, states that seceded from the United States and then re-joined have a strong state-level hand in curriculum decisions. 19 states are "textbook-adoption states" - the state generates lists schools pick from. The other states are leave it up to school districts ("local control.") In some cases, the state is actually prohibited from telling school districts which curriculum to adopt or interfering with district-level curriculum committees. There's a lot tied up here around standards, NCLB/ESSA, but suffice to say, Texas' curriculum adoption approach is not Massachusetts'.
4. Teachers are overwhelmingly women. As public education became an essential part of American childhood in the later half of the 18th century, there were lots of ideas on how to make it work for as many* children as possible. The people most likely to be a position to suggest and act on those ideas were men**. Known as schoolmen, a professional class emerged in the early 20th century to do the work of thinking about how to school. Despite the efforts of many, teachers' were locked into the responsibility of teaching; Schoolmen took over administration, including curriculum. Superintendents' cabinets - people with titles like Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Assessment - are remnants of the partitioning of what to teach pedagogy from what to teach (how to teach.)
5. There is no consensus on what constitutes "high-quality" curriculum. While there have been multiple attempts to define what makes a curriculum "good," there's no one set definition or criteria. The What Works Clearinghouse out of the Department of Education is/was as close as the country has gotten to resolving the matter, recent federal-level decisions have stopped much of that work.
   

My goal in posting this is to provide a bit more context around how curriculum works in the US.

* White non-disabled children.
** Mostly white.

Submitted November 29, 2025 at 08:07AM by EdHistory101 https://ift.tt/geqz8p0