An Analysis of Curriculum Policy-Making

Any organization or institution with purposes of its own develops policies-a body of principles to guide [Lerner & Lasswell, 1951, p. ix]-for dealing with recurring or crucial matters. Schools normally formulate policies on a variety of matters including promotion of students, grading, grouping of students for instruction, and dress for students. Schools also implement policies formulated by other bodies, most notably policies of the district administration, the state and local board of education, and the U. S. Congress. The policies executed by schools include specifically educational policies as well as others which, while they may have educational aspects, are not unique to schools or even characteristic of them. Among the most important of the specifically educational policies of schools are those pertaining to what children study in school. Children in school are normally required to study certain subjects and forbidden to study others, encouraged to pursue some topics and discouraged from pursuing others, provided with opportunities to study some phenomena but not provided with the means of studying others. When these requirements and pressures are uniformly and consistently operative they amount to policy, whether we intended so or not. We shall call such explicit or implicit guides to action curriculum policy and the process of arriving at such policy we shall call curriculum policymaking.