Turbulence in American Secondary Schools: What Reforms Last?

The education system of the United States includes 16,000 local education agencies, each with considerable power to determine its own curriculum. But this pluralistic, decentralized system also exhibits remarkable uniformity and consistency. This uniformity is due, in part, to the irresistible national tides of trends and movements for reform. After reviewing the cyclical history and current reform trends in the turbulent history of secondary curriculum in American schools, we have concluded that some reforms carried on these national waves anchor securely in the nation's high schools, but many others disappear like ships lost in a Bermuda Triangle of education. Our theory explains why some reforms last while others disappear and why still others vanish, but then reappear ephemerally in subsequent periods. Despite the recent intense criticism of the American secondary school and new efforts to reform it, we believe only marginal change rather than fundamental transformations will take place in the mid 1980s. While the research for this paper is primarily based in American experience, we have pointed out parallels between the findings of American research and the thrust of selected analyses of educational change in some European and other countries. Curriculum policy in American secondary education displays a striking mixture of stability and change. On the one hand, Cuban (1984) discovered that certain patterns of classroom instruction have endured for over fifty years. Among the lasting features are whole group instruction, the predominance of teacher talk, classroom dialogue in the questionand-answer textbook format, and the restriction of student movement * This article continues the series on Secondary Education under the special editorship of Mark Holmes.