Goals of Education in the United States





Global Goals for Education
Education is a local, regional, state, national, and global issue. This IAE-pedia entry is about goals for education in the United States. However, we begin with two very general quotes about global education. Notice that neither of these statements provides details of curriculum content, assessment, or years of available or required schooling.


 * “Education is a human right with immense power to transform. On its foundation rest the cornerstones of freedom, democracy and sustainable human development.” (Kofi Annan; Ghanaian diplomat, seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations, winner of 2001 Peace Prize; 1938–.)

On 16 February 2012, the General Assembly of the United Nations passed the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Education and Training. Quoting from that document:


 * The General Assembly,


 * Reaffirming the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations with regard to the promotion and encouragement of respect for all human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion,


 * Reaffirming also that every individual and every organ of society shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms,


 * Reaffirming further that everyone has the right to education, and that education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and the sense of its dignity, enable all persons to participate effectively in a free society and promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations and all racial, ethnic or religious groups, and further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace, security and the promotion of development and human rights… [Bold added for emphasis.] See http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/education/training/UNDHREducationTraining.htm.

Pay particular attention to the last paragraph in the United Nations statement. It asserts that education is a human right, but it also asserts that one of the purposes (goals) for education is to “enable all persons to participate effectively in a free society and promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations and all racial, ethnic or religious groups.”

Some History of Education in the United States
The U.S. Declaration of Independence signed on July 4, 1776, contains the following statement:


 * “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The U.S. Declaration of Independence does not say anything specifically about education or schooling. However, notice that there is some similarity between this declaration of inalienable rights and the third paragraph in the United Nations statement quoted above.

Thomas Jefferson, third president of the U.S., played a major role in writing the Declaration of Independence. He was a strong proponent of education. This next quote is from a bill Thomas Jefferson brought before the Virginia Legislature in 1778. The legislation was titled A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge. It was not passed. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_and_education.


 * “At every one of these schools shall be taught reading, writing, and common arithmetick, and the books which shall be used therein for instructing the children to read shall be such as will at the same time make them acquainted with Graecian, Roman, English, and American history. At these schools all the free children, male and female, resident within the respective hundred, shall be intitled to receive tuition gratis, for the term of three years, and as much longer, at their private expence, as their parents, guardians or friends, shall think proper.” [Bold added for emphasis.]

Notice that the goal was to provide free education up through the third grade for free (not slave) boys and girls. For information about the literacy level in the U.S. at that time, see http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/winter11/literacy.cfm. A free third grade education for all—stressing reading, writing, and arithmetic—was still a rather “far out” idea. At that time, schools and schooling were determined at a local level, with each village, town, or city developing its own schools and curriculum.

The U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments to the Constitution) do not mention education or schools. The 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states:


 * The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Thus, education and schools were rights left to the states.

Movement Toward National Educational Goals and Standards
Historically, educational goals and standards in the U.S. have largely been determined first by local communities and later by the individual states. During the past century, there have been a number of approaches to changing this situation. Three important ones are:


 * Broadly-based businesses such as the textbook publishing industry and other media, and the computer industry.


 * Professional educational societies and organizations.


 * State and Federal Governments.

Broadly-based Businesses
The publishing industry provides a good example. For a great many years, the McGuffey Readers were the standard for elementary school curriculum. Quoting from the Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGuffey_Readers):

McGuffey Readers were a series of graded primers that were widely used as textbooks in American schools from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, and are still used today in some private schools and in homeschooling.

It is estimated that at least 120 million copies of McGuffey Readers were sold between 1836 and 1960, placing its sales in a category with the Bible and Webster's Dictionary.… No other textbook bearing a single person's name has come close to that mark.

Today we have a massive textbook publishing industry. Publishers strive to develop textbooks that fit the nation as a whole, and then modify their books to meet specific requirements of particularly large state markets.

The “new kid on the block” is a combination of computer-based instruction and distance learning. These provide nationwide examples of content, teaching methodologies, and assessment. Indeed, recently developed Massively Open Online Courses (MOOC) are reaching international audiences and contributing to global educational content standards. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course.

Professional Societies and Organizations
Many professional educational societies and organizations have helped to establish national standards. Social Studies provides an excellent example. Quoting from http://www.answers.com/topic/overview-of-social-studies-education:

The contemporary social studies curriculum has its roots in the Progressive education movement of the early twentieth century. With its emphasis on the nature of the individual learner and on the process of learning itself, the movement challenged the assumptions of subject-centered curricula. Until this time, the social studies curriculum was composed of discrete subject areas, with a primary emphasis on history. To a slightly lesser degree, geography and civics were also featured, completing the triumvirate.

There were indications that change was coming when the 1893 Report of the Committee of Ten on Secondary School Studies advocated an interdisciplinary approach in the social studies. By 1916 the National Education Association (NEA) Committee on the Social Studies was urging that an interdisciplinary course of instruction be created based on the social sciences. When the NEA 1916 report established social studies as the name of the content area, it presented the scope and sequence that is still in use at the start of the twenty-first century. Social studies received further support when the 1918 Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education called for the unified study of subject areas heretofore taught in isolation. This course, called social studies, would have as its main goal the cultivation of good citizens…

The National Council for the Social Studies was founded in 1921, and is the largest organization in the United States to focus exclusively on social studies education.

Many of the academic discipline organizations include a focus on goals and standards for precollege education. Here are a few examples that have had nation-wide impacts:


 * American Association of School Librarians. See http://www.ala.org/aasl/.


 * International Reading Association. See http://www.reading.org/.


 * International Society for Technology in Education. See http://www.iste.org/standards.


 * National Association for Music Education. See http://musiced.nafme.org/resources/national-standards-for-music-education/.


 * National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. See http://www.ncate.org/Standards/tabid/107/Default.aspx.


 * National Council for the Social Studies. See http://www.uni.edu/icss/standards.html.


 * National Council of Teachers of English. See http://ncte.connectedcommunity.org/Home/.


 * National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. See http://www.nctm.org/standards/content.aspx?id=16909.


 * National Science Teachers Association. See http://www.nsta.org/.

Nationwide State and Federal Government Approaches
A third approach to national educational goals and standards has been via organizations representing the states and by the Federal Government. The Common Core State Standards are a major current initiative to develop standards that are national in scope. They cover English Language Arts, Math, Science, and History. This is an initiative by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers. Quoting from http://www.corestandards.org/:


 * The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.

Information Age Education is publishing a 10-part series of IAE Newsletters on CCSS beginning with the October 15, 2012, newsletter. See http://i-a-e.org/iae-newsletter.html.

Federal involvement in education has a long history. In 1867, President Andrew Jackson signed legislation that created the first Department of Education. See http://www.cis.drexel.edu/faculty/shelfer/public_html/busrefpapers/edu.htm.) The Department of Education was demoted to an Office of Education in 1868. Quoting from the Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Education)


 * As an agency not represented in the president's cabinet, it quickly became a relatively minor bureau in the Department of the Interior. In 1939, the bureau was transferred to the Federal Security Agency, where it was renamed the Office of Education. In 1953, the Federal Security Agency was upgraded to cabinet-level status as the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

The Office of Education grew within the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. By 1979, the Office of Education had 3,000 employees and an annual budget of $12 billion. President Jimmy Carter advocated for the creation of a separate Department of Education with its own cabinet-level status. Congress approved this, and the newly established Department of Education was provided an annual budget of $14.2 billion and a staff of 17,000 employees. Rapid growth has continued, with a 2012 budget of approximately $68 billion.

There is a growing history of the states and the Federal Government working together on educational goals and standards. Quoting from U.S. Chamber of Commerce document, Background to Standards Implementation ( http://icw.uschamber.com/content/uneven-progress):


 * Developing and implementing academic standards and their impact on college and career readiness have been major objectives for state and federal policymakers since the 1980s. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush convened governors for a historic education summit to focus on key national education goals. This discussion led to the creation of the National Education Goals Panel and the National Council on Education Standards and Testing. Many of the ideas developed from this effort were incorporated into the Goals 2000 Act, one of the first education policy initiatives by the Clinton administration in 1993.


 * Goals 2000 created the National Education Standards and Improvement Council (NESIC), which was intended to provide an independent, voluntary certification of state academic standards, “opportunity-to-learn” standards, and assessment systems. Opportunity-to-learn standards were provided to ensure a minimum level of necessary conditions for learning, including resources capacities. Because these standards represented a departure from the long tradition of state and local control over education, these concepts quickly became controversial and were repealed when Republicans took control of Congress in 1994.


 * Congress passed the Improving America's Schools Act (IASA) in 1994. IASA largely began what has been nearly a two-decade focus on academic standards in federal education law. This statute required that states develop and implement academic standards for elementary and secondary education as a condition of receiving federal education funding under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). This requirement was expanded and enforced as part of the latest reauthorization of ESEA, referred to as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). Importantly, under both statutes, states retained control over the content of their academic standards and related assessments.

Some General Goals for Education
There is widespread agreement that students deserve to have good educational opportunities. There is less agreement on what should be the specific goals of education, and there is still less agreement on what the standards should be for content, teaching, and assessment.

In the U.S. at the current time, the Secretary of Education indicates that “the goal” of precollege education is college and career readiness. See http://i-a-e.org/iae-blog/college-and-career-readiness.html. That is a gross over-simplification of what our educational system is about, and it misses much of the breadth in the list of goals provided in this document.

The early part of my teaching career focused on teaching math and uses of computers to help solve math problems. I built on this background as I first began teaching teachers in summer institute programs funded by the National Science Foundation. At that time, the goals of education seemed clear and simple to me. They were:


 * 1) To help students learn some facts.
 * 2) To help students learn to think, solve challenging problems, and accomplish challenging tasks using the facts.

The teachers I taught soon taught me how naïve I was. As I moved more and more into being a math educator, computer educator, and teacher of teachers, I gradually came to understand the complexity of education and the wide range of goals that help to define our educational system.

About 25 years ago, my colleague Dick Ricketts and I spent considerable time analyzing the commonly discussed goals of education and we published our findings as an appendix in Long-range Planning for Computers in Schools (Moursund and Ricketts, 1988). Since then I have used this list in teaching many different courses and in several of my books. Gradually I have refined and updated the list. This IAE-pedia entry represents my latest thinking on the topic. I hope it will help you to develop a personal philosophy that will serve your needs as an educator.

The list has been divided into three categories: Conserving Goals, Achieving Goals, and Accountability Goals. In most societies, education has a major goal of conserving and preserving the culture and values of the society. Interestingly, this tends to create some stress between Conserving Goals and Achieving Goals. As students gain increasing knowledge and skills, they sometimes rebel against the conservative nature of schools and their society.

Conserving Goals
G1 Security: All students are safe from emotional and physical harm. Both formal and informal educational systems must provide a safe and secure environment designed to promote learning.


 * Comment: In recent years there has been a great deal of media coverage about potential physical and emotional harm that students may encounter in school. This includes bullying, shootings, access to inappropriate information through use of the Internet.

G2 Values and Diversity: All students respect individual differences and the traditional values of the family, community, state, nation, and world in which they live.


 * Comment: A good summary is provided in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. See http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/education/training/UNDHREducationTraining.htm. Quoting from the document:


 * Reaffirming the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations with regard to the promotion and encouragement of respect for all human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion,


 * Reaffirming also that every individual and every organ of society shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms,


 * Reaffirming further that everyone has the right to education, and that education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and the sense of its dignity, and enable all persons to participate effectively in a free society and promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations and all racial, ethnic or religious groups, and further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace, security and the promotion of development and human rights…

G3 Sustainability: All students value a healthy and sustainable local, regional, national, and global environment, and they knowingly work to improve the quality of the environment.


 * Comment: The following is quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability:


 * …since the 1980s sustainability has been used more in the sense of human sustainability on planet Earth and this has resulted in the most widely quoted definition of sustainability as a part of the concept of sustainable development, that of the Brundtland Commission of the United Nations on March 20, 1987 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brundtland_Commission): “sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”


 * At the 2005 World Summit on Social Development it was noted that this requires the reconciliation of environmental, social equity, and economic demands—the "three pillars" of sustainability…

Achieving Goals
G4 Full Potential: All students are knowingly working toward achieving and increasing their healthful physical, mental, and emotional lifelong potentials.


 * Comment: Notice the emphasis on students “knowingly” working to increase their potentials. The goal is to empower students to empower themselves to develop life-long physical and mental habits that promote and sustain personal well being.

G5 Basic Skills: All students gain a working knowledge of speaking and listening, observing (including visual literacy), reading and writing, mathematics, logic, and storing, retrieving, and communicating information. All students learn to solve problems, accomplish tasks, deal with novel situations, and carry out other higher-order cognitive activities that make use of these basic skills.


 * Comment: Basic skills tend to have long (perhaps lifelong) value. However, new developments can change existing basic skills and add new basic skills. For example, the fluent use of Information and Communications Technology systems is an emerging basic skill.

G6 Setting and Achieving Personal Learning Goals: An alternate title for this goal is Self-assessment and Self-improvement. All students learn to self-assess, set personal goals based on these assessment, and work to achieve these personal goals.


 * Comment: This goal focuses on a person taking personal responsibility for their own education. Such knowledge and skills, along with self-understanding of one's interests, intrinsic motivation, drives, and ambition, can serve a person through their lifetime.

G7 General Education: All students have appreciation for, knowledge about, and understanding of a number of general areas of education, including:


 * Artistic, intellectual, scientific, social, and technical accomplishments of humanity.
 * Cultures and cultural diversity.
 * Geography.
 * Governments and governance.
 * Health and medicine.
 * Nature in its diversity and interconnectedness.
 * Religions and religious diversity.
 * Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
 * Social science.


 * Comment: A good education is a balance between breadth and depth, and it varies considerably from person to person. “Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.” (Thomas H. Huxley; English writer; 1825–1895.)

G8 Lifelong Learning: All students learn how to learn and how to make effective use of what they learn. They have the inquiring attitude and self-confidence that allows them to pursue life’s options. They have the knowledge and skills needed to deal effectively with changes that affect them.


 * Comment: The pace of technology-based change is quickening, and the total collection of human knowledge is growing very rapidly. All students need to develop lifelong habits of mind that help them to gain the knowledge, skills, and understanding needed to effectively accommodate ongoing change. Some current areas of rapid change include genetics (genome projects), nanotechnology, cognitive neuroscience, medicine, and computer technology.

G9 Problem Solving: All students make use of decision-making and problem-solving skills and tools, including the higher-order skills of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. All students pose and solve problems, making routine and creative use of their overall knowledge and skills, and currently available technologies.


 * Comment: Recognizing, understanding, clearly communicating, and effectively working to solve problems lie at the heart of each academic discipline. See http://iae-pedia.org/Problem_Solving.

G10 Productive Citizenship: All students act as informed, productive, and responsible members of countries, organizations to which they give allegiance, and as members of humanity as a whole.


 * Comment: The world is growing smaller. In some sense, each person is a citizen of the world, one or more countries, one or more states/provinces, and so on. During a lifetime, a person is apt to hold a variety of jobs and/or pursue a variety of careers. A person is apt to belong to a variety of organization and/or groups.

G11 Social Skills: All students interact publicly and privately with peers and adults in a socially acceptable and positive fashion.


 * Comment: Information and Communication Technology has brought us new forms of communication and social interaction, including desktop conferencing, picture phones, instant messaging, email, and groupware.

G12 Information and Communication Technology (ICT): All students have appropriate knowledge and skills for using our rapidly changing ICT as well as related technologies relevant to their lives and our world.


 * Comment: ICT is both a discipline in its own right and a driving force for change in education and in many different areas of technology, science, and research. Computational thinking is becoming a standard complement of each academic discipline. See http://iae-pedia.org/Computational_Thinking.

Accountability
G13 Assessment: The various components of an educational system that contribute to accomplishing the goals (such as those listed above) are assessed in a timely and appropriate manner. The assessments provide formative, summative, and long-term impact evaluative data that can be used in maintaining and improving the quality of the educational system.


 * Comment: Accountability and assessment are strongly intertwined. In the past two decades, the issue of authentic assessment has received a lot of attention. As ICT is more thoroughly integrated into curriculum content, authentic assessment of student learning becomes a new challenge to educational systems. Electronic portfolios are gradually increasing in importance as an aid to authentic assessment.

G14 Accountability: All educational systems are accountable to key stakeholder groups, including:


 * Students.
 * Parents and other caregivers of the students.
 * Teachers, administrators, and all employees and volunteers in educational systems.
 * Voters, taxpayers, and funding agencies.
 * Employers.


 * Comment: Accountability includes gathering and effectively using information from formative, summative, and long-term residual impact assessments that are fair, reliable, valid, and timely. It is difficult to make changes to our educational system because of the need to address the widely divergent interests of the various stakeholders. However, this democratic approach to our educational system is one of its strengths.

An educational system is a compromise among known teaching and learning theories, current and other possible teaching practices, and stakeholders. The complexity of an educational system and its compromises makes it difficult to substantially improve the system. However, there are powerful change agents at work, such as Information and Communication Technology, research in cognitive neuroscience, and national and global competition. We have the technology and research base to substantially improve education.

Final Remarks
Informal and formal education taken together is a complex and challenging human endeavor. Educational leaders and others interested in education address these challenges by developing educational goals, standards, and ways to meet the goals by achieving the standards. All of these activities are human endeavors—they are not exact sciences

There is an emerging discipline named the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, but it is still in its infancy (Moursund, 2010 and 2012). This discipline is being substantially impacted by computer technology and our growing ability to develop and teach Massive Open Online Courses (Moursund, 2/27/2012).

Information Age Education Resources
This is a collection of IAE publications related to the IAE document you are currently reading. It is not updated very often, so important recent IAE documents may be missing from the list.

IAE Blog
College and Career Readiness.

Empowering Students.

High School Graduation Rates Are only One Measure of Educational Success.

[http://i-a-e.org/iae-blog/entry/we-can-improve-education-part-1-asking-the-right-questions.html We Can Improve Education. Part 1.]

[http://i-a-e.org/iae-blog/entry/we-can-improve-education-part-2-information-retrieval-and-the-common-core-state-standards.html We Can Improve Education. Part 2.]

Authors
The content of this document represents the work of David Moursund and Dick Ricketts, with editorial assistance by Ann Lathrop.