Chester Finn Jr., a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and chairman of Hoover’s Koret Task Force on K–12 Education, and William Damon, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence, and a professor of education at Stanford University, are part of a broad bipartisan group of educators and business and labor leaders who announced their support for a common curriculum that states could adopt for public schools across the nation.
“By ‘curriculum’ we mean a coherent, sequential set of guidelines in the core academic disciplines, specifying the content knowledge and skills that all students are expected to learn, over time, in a thoughtful progression across the grades. We do not mean performance standards, textbook offerings, daily lesson plans, or rigid pedagogical prescriptions.”
The curricular guides “would account for about 50 to 60 percent of a school’s available academic time,” the statement says, with the rest added by local communities, districts, and states. The three-page statement is on the website of the Albert Shanker Institute.
