Special Issue on Sociology of the Curriculum || State Control of the Curriculum and Classroom Instruction

State Control of the Curriculum and Classroom InstructionAuthor(s): David Lee Stevenson and David P. BakerSource: Sociology of Education, Vol. 64, No. 1, Special Issue on Sociology of the Curriculum(Jan., 1991), pp. 1-10Published by: American Sociological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2112887 .

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STATE CONTROL OF THE CURRICULUM AND CLASSROOM INSTRUCTION

David Lee Stevenson David P. Baker U.S. Department of Education The Catholic University of America

This article examines the relationship between the level of the state (national or local) that has control over curricular issues and the content of classroom instruction of mathematics in over 2,200 classrooms in 15 educational systems. In educational systems with national control, classroom teachers are more likely to teach the same mathematics curriculum than are teachers in educational systems with provincial or local control. Furthermore, when the control of curricular issues is at the national level, the amount of the mathematics curriculum that teachers teach is generally not related to the characteristics of the teachers or of the students, whereas in educational systems with provincial or local control, it is related to teachers' and students' characteristics.

The renewed interest among sociologists in the study of the school curriculum has pro- ceeded along two lines of inquiry. The first line of inquiry is the changing content of a national curriculum and the process by which a subject in the curriculum becomes defined and institutionalized (see, for example, Good- son 1988; Goodson and Ball 1984). Studies in this area emphasize the historical development of the curriculum and how political factors shape its contents and definition (Apple 1979). The second line of inquiry has been the changing content of official primary and secondary curricula of national educational systems around the world. Studies of this topic have documented that official curricula of national educational systems have tended to converge toward a world standard for curricula topics during the past 100 years (Benavot and Ka- mens 1989; Benavot, Cha, Kamens, Meyer and Wong forthcoming). Although these lines of inquiry differ in their theoretical perspectives, they both focus on the official curricula of schooling. However, evidence suggests that the official curriculum may be only loosely connected to what teachers teach in the classroom (Cohen et al. 1990).

This article examines the implemented curriculum-that portion of the curriculum that is taught to students in the classroom. The implemented curriculum has been neglected by sociologists, although it is a topic of general interest to curricular and instructional special- ists (Cohen et al. 1990; Freeman and Porter 1989). Recent work in this area has focused on understanding differences in the content and method of instruction among teachers using the same textbooks or following the same curricular guidelines. These studies have been lim- ited to examining differences among teachers within an educational system.

Our topic, the relationship between state control of the curriculum and classroom instruction, falls in the large middle ground between analyses of the official curricular categories and detailed studies of classroom practice. For studies of the official curriculum, it examines whether there is variability in the slippage between the official curriculum and the implemented curriculum in the classroom. For studies of classroom instruction, it examines whether institutional features of the educational system constrain teachers' classroom practices. The relationship between institutional characteristics and classroom practice is rarely studied, partly because such analyses require data at the classroom level that are comparable across educational systems.

STATE CONTROL OF THE CURRICULUM

The nation-state, through a variety of political processes, exercises control over the curriculum. There are, however, considerable

The views expressed here do not necessarily re- flect the position or policy of the U.S. Department of Education, and no official endorsement should be inferred. Earlier versions of this article were presented at meetings of the Seventh World Con- gress of Comparative Education and the Compara- tive International Education Society. This work was supported by a grant from the National Science Foun- dation. Address all correspondence to Dr. David P. Baker, Department of Sociology, The Catholic Uni- versity of America, Washington, DC 20064.

Sociology of Education 1991, Vol. 64 (January):1-10 1



2 STEVENSON AND BAKER

differences in how states exercise this control. One important difference is the level of the state that is responsible for controlling education. Ramirez and Rubinson (1979) described this feature of state control as the political incorporation of education. Political incorporation is seen as varying along a dimension with two poles. At one end are systems that are centralized at the highest levels of the state (federal or national ministry offices); at the other end are decentralized systems that are controlled at lower levels of the state (provincial or municipal). ' The degree of political incorporation of curricular matters affects the methods of political control of the curriculum and, therefore, classroom practice. Consider the differences between state control over the curriculum in a decentralized system, the United States, and in a centralized system, France.

The United States

In the American educational system, with its local political control of the curriculum, the sources of influence on the environment of teaching are more complex, which results in less overall specification of instruction. The administrative mandates as to what teachers should teach are varied and weaker, and there is a greater diversity in the textbooks that are available for teachers to use and in the types of training available for teachers (Meyer and Rowan 1978; Rowan 1990). Since American schools receive local funding and rely upon community support, they are likely to be more responsive to local constituencies. All these features can lead to great variability in the content of the implemented curriculum. For example, a study of five U.S. states revealed that 70 percent of the school districts had their own official curriculum and 55 percent of the districts had their own timetable for the

implementation of the curriculum (Floden et al. 1988).

In the United States, the technical activities of schooling, instruction, and learning are also buffered from inspection and assessment by the state. The state seldom attempts to assess these organizational outputs of schooling, in part, because of a lack of market pressures, since neither the survival nor the profitability of the school (particularly in the public sector) is determined by the quantity or quality of instruction. While schools keep elaborate records of certain types of educational outputs, such as attendance, enroll- ments in courses, and the number of gradu- ates, they seek to avoid inspection of instruction. Thorough and frequent inspec- tions of instruction can reveal inconsistencies and inefficiencies and thereby challenge existing organizational arrangements (Meyer, Scott, and Deal 1983).2

Teachers in the decentralized American educational system have considerable autonomy and discretion in how they handle classroom instruction and learning. They often modify the official or standard curriculum to meet their needs or those of their students and, therefore, even within a school may differ greatly in the amount of material they cover, the type of topics they cover, the amount of time they spend on instruction, and their use of curricular materials for the same subject (Cohen et al. 1990). In addition, their work is seldom directly monitored. In a nationally representative sample of high school teachers, 76 percent of the teachers stated that they were observed only once during the school year (Rowan 1990).

France

If state control over the curriculum is located at the national level, as it is in France,

1 Centralization of education is, in many ways, a more general notion than is political control. For example, before the consolidation of schooling by the nation-states during the nineteenth century, the Roman Catholic system in many parts of Europe approximated a centralized system. Although the apparatus of the state adds some degree of efficiency to control at any level, we would expect to find similar effects on instruction in prestate centralized and decentralized systems of schools.

2 The development of state accountability systems and the publication of annual school report cards that publicize students' scores on standard- ized tests may have increased the pressure on teachers to teach the "test curriculum." While such pressures may reduce instructional differences, they are coupled with a movement to allow schools to develop the measures on which they will be held accountable and to restructure schools to allow teachers to exercise greater professional judgment about their work. For a more detailed discussion of state accountability systems, see Stevenson and Orland (1990).



STATE CONTROL AND CLASSROOM INSTRUCTION 3

the environment of teaching is less complex and there is greater specification of instruction. Through the ministry of education, there is an administrative mandate for what the curriculum should be. Such a mandate is reflected in the curricular guidelines; the training of teachers; and the content of curricular materials and of examinations, such as the baccalaureate examinations.

The national educational agency also may institute a set of bureaucratic controls to ensure that the curriculum is implemented. For example in France, the Inspecteur general de l'Education nationale, is officially responsible for maintaining standards throughout the educational system. State inspectors visit schools, evaluate the performance of teachers, and give marks for each teacher. The final mark for each teacher is a combination of the state inspector's evaluation of teaching and the headmaster's evaluation of the teacher's administrative efficiency. These marks have a direct bearing on the teachers' salaries (Lewis 1985).

Hypotheses

We have two hypotheses about the relationship between the level of state control over curricular issues and the implementation of the curriculum in the classroom.

Hypothesis 1: In educational systems with state control over curricular issues at the national level, teachers will be more similar in the content of their instruction than will teachers in educational systems with state control over curricular issues at the local or provincial level.

Hypothesis 2: In educational systems with state control over curricular issues at the national level, local factors will have little influence on how much of the curriculum is covered in the classroom. In educational systems with state control over curricular issues at the local or provincial level, local factors will influence how much of the curriculum is covered in the classroom.

DATA AND METHODS

Testing these hypotheses requires detailed data about classroom instruction in educational systems that differ according to which level of the state education is politically incorporated. The Second International Math-

ematics Study (SIMS), undertaken by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), provides this type of data. This large data set represents a powerful analytic resource for the cross-national study of education. The countries in which SIMS collected data are diverse in their size, geographic location, and level of development. The use of a standard sampling procedure within each country yielded high- quality samples of classrooms. Extensive efforts were undertaken to assure that comparable data-collection procedures were used in each educational system.

The SIMS data were collected in 20 educational systems.3 Of these 20 educational systems, 15 had full classroom-process ques- tionnaires.4 In each educational system, a four-step, stratified-random sample of eighth- grade mathematics classrooms was drawn, yielding over 2,200 classrooms.5 For each class, detailed information was collected from the teacher about the amount and type of instruction in mathematics during the year. Specifically, teachers in all the educational systems were asked whether they had taught the same 157 items in mathematics during the year.

For each educational system, a board of educational experts designated which of the 157 items in mathematics were part of the national curriculum in mathematics for the eighth grade.6 SIMS did not evaluate how

3We analyze national educational systems, except for Canada, because data were collected separately in British Columbia and Ontario. Because of some minor differences in data collection in these two provinces, we analyze them separately.

4 The SIMS data for French Belgium, Hong Kong, Nigeria, and Scotland did not include information about the implementation of the curriculum. The Flemish Belgium sample did, and we will use it to represent Belgium. Swaziland was dropped from the analysis because only one-fifth of the teachers completed this part of the instrument.

s See Garden (1987) for a detailed description of the SIMS study.

6 In each country, this board was made up of representatives from the ministry of education, the teachers' union, teachers, and school district-level administrators. The panel was asked to assess which of the items from the item pool would most likely be part of the standard eighth-grade mathematics curriculum in their country. The




much this so-called national curriculum over- lapped with the official curriculum in various parts of each educational system. At the least, the measure of national curriculum, which we used here, represents the largest possible set of mathematics skills that an eighth-grade teacher would cover, on average, in the course of the year.

Description of Measures

Ramirez and Rubinson (1979) defined the political incorporation of education as the extent of state control over schooling. They suggested that a valid measure of political incorporation is the level of political control over education; the more that control occurs at the national level, the more schooling is politically incorporated with the state. As an indicator of this construct, we have slightly modified a scale developed by them. We used a seven-point scale and ranked each country in terms of the political level that had the greatest control over the curriculum: (1) local control, (2) local and provincial control, (3) provincial control, (4) local, provincial, and national control, (5) local and national control, (6) provincial and national control, and (7) national control. In coding each system on this scale, we consulted standard reference sources -the International Encyclo- pedia of Education (Husen and Postlewaithe 1985) and the International Handbook of Education Systems (Cameron 1983; Cowen 1983; Holmes 1983)-as well as an IEA publication with descriptions of the educational systems (Travers and Westbury 1989). Three raters independently scored each educational system on the scale. The level of agreement among the three raters was above 93 percent.

From the SIMS data, we constructed several indicators of different dimensions of the implemented curriculum. First, we took the number of items in the curriculum (as determined by the panels of educational experts) as an indicator of the size of a system's official mathematics curriculum. Second, for each educational system, we calculated the percentage of the mathematics

curriculum that a teacher taught during the year and calculated a mean and standard deviation as indicators of the amount of the curriculum covered in the system and the variation in the amount of the curriculum covered. Third, we calculated the percentage of teachers in each educational system who taught each item in the curriculum. As an indication of agreement among teachers' implementation of the curriculum, we counted the number of items that were taught by either 90 percent or more of the teachers or 10 percent or less of the teachers.

Finally, we have measures of local factors that may influence the implementation of the curriculum for each class, such as the range in the mathematics abilities of students; the level of mastery of mathematics; the age and sex of the teacher; and the number of years the teacher has been teaching per se, as well as teaching mathematics. We also have measures of the number of periods of mathematics per week and the average length of a mathematics period.

Plan of Analysis

First, we correlated measures of various dimensions of the implementation of the curriculum with the indicator of state control of the curriculum. Next, we used a model of teachers' coverage of the curriculum and estimated this model with each system's data. There are several advantages to this type of analysis, which is a standard approach to analyzing data on students or classrooms and national factors (Heyneman and Loxley 1982, 1983). Since our hypotheses are about relationships between institutional characteristics of systems, we required indicators of the curriculum's coverage at the system level and, therefore, did not combine all classrooms into one sample. This approach allows our analysis to incorporate differences in the size and nature of the mathematics curriculum in each system. It also allows us to handle some of the minor differences in question- naires and procedures that are almost inevita- ble in a comparative study of this size and complexity.

RESULTS

In the first column of Table 1 are measures of the size of the eighth-grade mathematics curriculum in each educational system. While

Japanese ministry decided that the items were too easy for the vast majority of its eighth-grade students, so seventh-grade classrooms were sampled.




all the educational systems in the sample had eighth-grade mathematics, the size of each curriculum varied. The sample mean was 125.1 items (or 80 percent of the 157 items), with a standard deviation of over 16 items. The range in size was substantial. Three educational systems (Japan, Hungary, and New Zealand) had a large curriculum that covered approximately 140 items (or over 90 percent of the 157 items). At the lower end, Belgium (Flemish) and Luxembourg had curricula that covered approximately 95 items (or about 60 percent of the 157 items).

The second column in Table 1 shows the mean number of items of the curriculum that were taught during the eighth grade by each system's teachers. Here there is considerable variation, with a standard deviation of 20 items and a range of over 70 items. Japanese teachers taught the most, with a mean of 117.2 items (or 75 percent of the 157-item pool), while Canadian (British Columbia) teachers taught the least, with a mean of 42.7 items (or only 27 percent of the 157-item pool).

The fourth column in Table 1 is the mean number of items taught as a percentage of the total number of curricular items. In none of the educational systems did the "average teacher" cover the entire eighth-grade curriculum. The sample mean is 65 percent, with a standard deviation of over 15 percent. There is also a large range in coverage, with teachers in Belgium (Flemish) and Japan providing instruction for over 80 percent of

their curricula and teachers in British Colum- bia and the Netherlands providing instruction for under 45 percent of their curricula.

Even though all the educational systems had eighth-grade mathematics in their curricula, the data in Table 1 indicate that the content of the mathematics curricula of these educational systems varied. In addition, the amount of instruction varied considerably across educational systems. Although school curricula may have become institutionalized at the world level, our data suggest that systemic variations in content and instruction still exist.7

The results displayed in Table 2 confirm our first hypothesis; they indicate that in educational systems in which state control of the curriculum is at the national level, there is a modest tendency for more uniformity in the number of items that teachers teach. The correlation between an educational system's standard deviation in the mean number of items taught and state control is negative and significant, but only after we made a minor correction for the Hungarian and Israeli samples. There is a stronger association between the minimum number of items taught in a classroom in an educational system and

Table 1. Coverage of the Mathematics Curriculum

Standard Percentage of Items in the X Items Deviation of the Curriculum

Educational System Curriculum Taught Items Taught Taught

United States 128 93.6 20.5 73.1 England 146 96.7 26.8 67.6 Netherlands 127 55.2 16.2 43.5 Belgium (Flemish) 95 81.0 15.0 85.3 New Zealand 148 98.9 21.3 66.8 Canada (British Columbia) 127 42.7 16.0 33.6 Canada (Ontario) 118 87.1 16.6 73.8 Finland 124 81.5 15.6 65.7 France 108 84.6 7.9 78.3 Hungary 142 65.9 (86.0)a 35.8 (26.3)a 46.4 (60.6)a Israel 118 70.0 (620)b 22.5 (19.1)b 59.3 (52.5)b Japan 146 117.2 10.0 80.3 Luxembourg 97 71.7 10.9 73.9 Sweden 122 60.1 13.9 49.3 Thailand 131 103.2 15.4 78.8

a Classrooms only in the Budapest area. b Classrooms only in the reformed system (seventh to ninth grades).

7 Our analyses of these data do not indicate a ranking of an educational system's overall efficiency in mathematics instruction. We interpret the ranking only as an indication of variation in the "size" of and "conformity" to the official curriculum.




our indicator of state control. Educational systems with state control of the curriculum at the national level display less variation in the amount of instruction and have fewer teachers who teach little of the curriculum.

We also suggest that teachers in educational systems with state control of the curriculum at the national level would be more likely to teach the same material. To examine this issue, we constructed three indicators of the similarity among teachers' classroom instruction and correlated these indicators with our measure of state control of the curriculum. The first two measures are the number of items that 10 percent or less, or 90 percent or more, of the teachers in an educational system taught. These two measures indicate the extent of agreement in instruction among teachers. The first measure indicates the extent of agreement in coverage during the seventh and eighth grades, and the second measure indicates the extent of agreement during the eighth grade. Both these agreement measures are moderately correlated with the level of state control of the curriculum.

We constructed a third indicator of agreement that takes into account the variation in the size of the mathematics curriculum. We divided the number of items that at least 90 percent of the teachers taught in the seventh or eighth grade by the number of items in the curriculum. The correlation between this measure and state control is similar in strength to the item counts. For each indicator, the analyses suggest that teachers were more likely to teach the same material if they taught in educational systems with national control of the curriculum.

To test our second hypothesis, we re- gressed the mean percentage of the curriculum covered in eighth grade on indicators of

local factors. The same equation was estimated for each sample of teachers (see Table 3).

If our description of the effects of state control are correct, we should find that the regression equations for educational systems with state control at the local or provincial level are significant. All the educational systems with local curricular control had significant equations, while only two with national-level control (Finland and Sweden) had significant equations. The correlation between the measure of state control of the curriculum and the squared multiple correlation coefficients resulting from the equations is - .67 (p = .03).8

Among the educational systems with state control of the curriculum at the local or provincial level, local factors account for from a low of 9 percent in the variation of instruction in the Netherlands to a high of 24 percent in England and Wales. In these educational systems, a range of local factors predicted instruction. Teachers in these systems seem to be particularly sensitive to both the average level of mathematical mastery of

Table 2. Correlations of the Level of State Control of the Curriculum with Items Taught in the Classroom in 15 Educational Systems

Percentage Standard Least Number of of Curricular

Deviation of Number of Curricular Number of Items Taught Mean Number of Mean Number Curricular Items Taught Curricular by More than Items in the of Items in Items in Grades Items Taught 90 Percent Curriculum Taught the Curriculum Covered 7 and 8a in Grade 8a of the Teachers

-.10 (- 07)b - .27 (-. 48**)b .46** (.58**)b .39** (.58**)b *47** (-49**)b .45** (.45**)b

** p<.05. a By less than 10 percent or more than 90 percent of the teachers. b Coefficients in parentheses calculated with partial Israeli and Hungarian samples.

8 Since there is a moderate difference in the number of classrooms sampled in decentralized systems (X = 187) versus centralized systems (X = 133), the slight difference in statistical power that this might cause could favor our hypothesis. We note, however, that even the smallest samples among the decentralized systems yielded significant local factors, while the largest samples (larger than the smallest decentralized samples) among the centralized systems did not have significant effects of local factors on the implemented curriculum. Furthermore, controlling for sample size in the correlation between the level of state control and the squared multiple correlation coefficients only reduces the coefficient by .06 (from - .67 to - .61 [p = .01]).




the class and the diversity of ability within the class. Following these factors, the amount of instruction depends on the number of mathematics sessions and the length of these sessions.

In Sweden and Finland, the two educational systems with national state control of the curriculum and significant equations, the overall level of mathematical mastery is the only significant variable. This finding may be expected, since in both countries, the mastery of the class may be related to the ability tracks in the eighth grade, and classes in these tracks, by central administrative definition, should receive different amounts of mathematical instruction.9

We can explore two possible statistical artifacts within these results. One is that the lack of significant regression equations for the educational systems with state control at the national level could result from a lack of

variation in local factors. Educational systems with national control of the curriculum could also be the kind that equalize between- classroom factors. The between-classroom local factors could be so similar that the nonsignificant equations result from a lack of between-classroom variation in local factors. To examine this possibility, we correlated the standard deviations of each of the eight indicators of local factors with the measure of state control of the curriculum. All but one of these correlations are small and not significant. The exception is that educational systems with national state control of the curriculum tend to diminish the between- classroom variation in the number of mathematical instruction sessions per week (-.74, p = .001). In general, the between-classroom variation in local factors does not vary by the level of state control of the curriculum.

A second consideration is whether there is a spurious correlation between the level of state control of the curriculum and our various indicators of instruction. We examined bivari- ate associations at the system level, but other system-level factors could either mediate or negate the correlations we report.

Table 3. OLS Regression of Local Factors on the Percentage of Mathematics Curricular Items Taught

Significant Local Factors

Teacher Factors Time Factors Student Factors

Experience Average Range Mastery Teaching Experi- Periods Length

Educational Inter- of of Mathe- ence per of System N R2 F cept Class Class Age Sex matics Teaching Week Period

Decentralized' United States 253 .10 3.1 .61b .0014 .0084 England and

Wales 204 .24 6.7 .17 -.041 .002 -.006 .0051 Netherlands 206 .09 2.5 -.03 .031 .037 Belgium 120 .16 2.3 .47 .065 New Zealand 151 .19 3.8 .27 .0014 .0075 .0074 .0047

Centralizedc Canada (British

Columbia) 73 NS Canada (Ontario) 126 NS Finland 176 .12 2.7 .45 .0008 France 286 NS Hungary 56 NS Israel 85 NS Japan 193 NS Luxembourg 79 NS Sweden 172 .09 2.8 .28 .0014 Thailand 80 NS

8 Predominately local or provincial control. b The regression coefficients are unstandardized and significant at least with p < .05. c Predominately national control.

9 At this educational level, Finland has three ability tracks by classroom in mathematics (the short course, the long course, and the heteroge- neous course) and Sweden has two ability groups by classroom (general and advanced).




We examined four such factors - two indicators of the economic development of the country (1980 gross national product and gross domestic product) and two indicators of the size of the educational system (the population in 1980 and the gross primary enrollment ratio in 1980). We took the natural logarithm of each indicator and calculated a partial correlation between the measure of state control and the various indicators of instruction, controlling for each factor.

Neither the level of development nor the size of the system correlated with the level of state control of the curriculum. Although there is a slight tendency for the larger educational systems to have state control of the curriculum at the local level, the correlation is not statistically significant. '0 In each of the partial correlations, the pattern of correlations between state control and instruction did not change after these other variables were controlled.

DISCUSSION

State control of the curriculum occurs in a variety of ways. In some educational systems, there is state regulation of the curriculum at the national level, often through a ministry of education, while in other educational systems, regulation of the curriculum occurs at the provincial or local level. Our results indicate that which level of the state has responsibility for curricular issues is related to patterns of instruction in the classroom in two ways. First, in educational systems where state control of curricular issues was located at the national level, teachers were more likely to teach the same mathematics curriculum in the classroom than were teachers in educational systems with provincial or local control of curricular issues. Second, in educational systems where state control of

curricular issues was located at the national level, the amount of the mathematics curriculum that teachers taught was generally not related to characteristics of either the teachers or the students. In educational systems with provincial or local control of the curriculum, such "local factors" were related to the amount of the curriculum that teachers taught in the classroom.

We argue that institutional characteristics of educational systems, such as which level of the state controls curricular issues, influence the core activities of schooling, classroom instruction, and students' learning. Our findings underline the importance of state control of the curriculum for the study of national patterns of classroom instruction. We would posit that other institutional characteristics, such as national entrance examinations, are important for explaining national differences in students' learning.

Our findings also have implications for current debates about curricular reform in countries with different types of educational systems. In educational systems with decentralized control of curricular issues, reform of the official curriculum, whether forged at the national, state, or district level, is less likely to be fully implemented in the classroom. The lack of uniform implementation is not necessarily due to active resistance or a lack of concern among teachers, but rather can be traced to the greater autonomy of teachers in the classroom. Thus, in decentralized systems, one often finds cycles of "institutional success" or national victory in the creation of policies and "organizational failure" or local defeat in their implementation (Meyer 1986).

In highly centralized systems, curricular reforms can be instituted more efficiently and, therefore, policy debates are intensified, narrowed, and take on a partisan character. It may also be more difficult to win battles for reform because the battle lines between large political interests are more sharply drawn.

State control of the curriculum is, however, only one indicator of the environment of classroom instruction. Classroom instruction is also influenced by many other factors, such as the coherence of the curriculum, national entrance examinations based on the classroom curriculum, patterns of recruiting and training teachers, teachers' unions and professional associations, the reward structure for teachers, and the degree of collegiality among teachers within a school. Such factors can

10 The correlations between level of economic development and curricular coverage and the size of the educational system and curricular coverage were generally not statistically significant. There are two implications of these findings. First, the lack of associations raises questions about hypotheses that suggest that curriculum coverage may be sensitive to economic and technical development (for example, see Benavot and Kamens 1989). Second, the lack of associations suggests that some structural characteristics of educational systems may not influence the implementation of curricula.




influence the environment of classroom teaching and may not be captured in a single measure of state control of the curriculum.

While there appear to be emerging official world curricula (Benavot, Cha, Kamens, Meyer, and Wong forthcoming), the implementation of curricula in classrooms varies significantly, both across and within national systems of education. Such differences in the patterns of classroom instruction have important implications for the study of curricula, as well as for cross-national studies of academic achievement.

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David Lee Stevenson, Ph.D., is Senior Research Associate, Office of Research, U.S. Department of Education, Washington, DC. His main fields of interest are comparative education, social organization of schooling, and educational policy. He is currently working with David P. Baker on cross-national analyses of instruction and academic achievement. He is also examining the organization of secondary schools and the current educational reform movement in the United States.

David P. Baker, Ph.D., is Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC. His primary fields of interest are comparative education, stratification, and immigration. In addition to his current work with David Lee Stevenson, he is examining the expansion of Catholic schooling in the United States and academic achievement in Japan and the United States.



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Special Issue on Sociology of the Curriculum || State Control of the Curriculum and Classroom Instruction