American High School Curriculum Development Research - From The Imbalance In The Development Of The Basis Of Revitalization

In the past century, the educational goals, that is, college preparation, career adaptation and liberal education for a whole person, of American senior high schools have been getting integrated, and in the meantime, the comprehensive senior high schools have been gaining ground, with different students under the same eaves. After more than a century's changes in number and importance of curricula, the offering of curriculum in senior high schools today is, so to speak, "shopping mall", which is made up of required and optional ones and all sorts of activities and projects conducive to the brain and the mind. The schools manage all these curricula by the number of required courses, the proportion of required courses and the optional ones, and the requirements for promotion and graduation.In the last more than one hundred years, the American senior high schools' curricula advanced in such a course as the author says, from "balance losing" to "basics enhancing". And in the author's opinion, the balance-losing way resulted from different changing factors, the exaggeration of the curricula's role, the power of different educational philosophies, the upholding of different educational values and curriculum propositions, the resistence of school system to reforms, to name a few. As far as the curriculum reform in the past century concerned, it would be safe to say that we saw a "balance- losing" development. In the author's eyes, it's not sensible and reasonable to stick to one side of the truth and turn a blind eye to the other.In 1990s, the departments of education at the federal level and the state level came to see eye to eye in that the miscellaneous curricula in senior' high schools must be neatened, and rough-and-tumble standards for curricula must be standardized. Therefore, the coming-on of the benchmarks for core curricula at the federal level came to be the general expectation. The going-on New Curriculum Standards movement sticks to a belief that only more rigorous and higher expectations lead to higher achievement. In the author's eyes, the curriculum of American senior high schools today has come to a stage of standardization and high expectation. Furthermore, the process of the coming-into-being is a process of dialogue and negotiation, there you can hear voices at different levels and from nearly all the walks of life. Therefore, there is only such question as "Standards, Yes or No?" but not as "Standards, workable or not? ". And the analysis of the conditions under which the curriculum standards can give a full play proves that the curriculum standards must be challenging, developmental and accommodatable, and all the testing and assessment concerned must be aligned with the standards with a view to the attainment of the standards.In the new round of curriculum reform in China, with great importance attached to the academic basics of the school curriculum, the nation-wide curriculum standards must be accommodatable, and the departments of education at the province level must work out their own curriculum standards based on the the nation-wide curriculum benchmarks with a view to enjoy rich and local characteristics, and they should develop curriculum framework to help the teachers to understand the curriculum standards, to provide them with alternative teaching resourses, and to help enhance their professional development, and at the same time, the department at different levels should spare no efforts to keep the testing or assessment aligned with the standards.The Core of academics is the soul of the curriculum. No best but better curriculum, so no end for the curriculum reform.