Prompt: A nation should require all of its students to study the same national curriculum until they enter college.
Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the recommendation and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, describe specific circumstances in which adopting the recommendation would or would not be advantageous and explain how these examples shape your position.
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Educational inequity is a significant issue in conversations of national development and investments toward the future. Differences in academic outcomes are known to exist in disparate regions within a country. The United States educational system provides an excellent case study for regional differences and attempts to level the playing field for primary and secondary schools across the country. One idea that has gained traction within the last 15 years is the Common Core, a set of national standards in teaching and testing developed as part of the "No Child Left Behind" policy. Although this idea is rooted in equality across public school systems, it fails to recognize the root problem in educational inequity, and instead focuses on superficial solutions for academic equality.


A national curriculum is designed to ensure that all students receive the same level of education. However, a mandatory national curriculum restricts the freedom of teachers to educate how they know best. A common complaint with the United States Common Core system is that teachers are unfamiliar with the teaching methods central to that system. For example, the Common Core seeks to use visual and multimodal examples in teaching mathematics and geometry. However, without the appropriate training to accompany this teaching, teachers can be as lost as students. Moreover, the decision on what to include in the curriculum can be highly contested and often arbitrary. The A.P. U.S History curriculum, for example, fails to focus on the civil rights movement and reconstruction. If a teacher is not well-versed in those fields, students may never learn much at all about those topics. In an ideal educational system, a baseline national curriculum would exist, with input from all instructors, allowing teachers flexibility to teach in the way they are most able.


While reaching this ideal should lead to improved equity in outcomes, the issue of assessing students' learning complicates the implementation of a national curriculum. As it stands, standardized testing is the primary method for assessing students learning. With a national curriculum, teachers become incentivized to teach to the test, rather than teach toward a deeper understanding of the content. Testing then becomes the bellweather for a school's success. As it stands in the United States, the schools where students perform best on testing receive more funding. For a fully equitable educational system, testing must not be seen as the sole measure of education, and should be separate from conversations of funding. A national curriculum must develop in conjuction with a more holistic measure of understanding than a single.

Despite best intentions, the empahasis on developing a national curriculum detracts from a more central issue in educational inequity – funding inequity. Public school funding in the United States is typically generated by property taxes, causing underfunded areas to continue with underfunded schools. A conversation on standardizing the curriculum must address inequities in funding, training, as it optimizes the abilities of both the students and the teachers.