NATIONWIDE CURRICULUM BASIS URGED

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, January 3, 1992                   TAG: 9201030108
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Short
NATIONWIDE CURRICULUM BASIS URGED
A high-level advisory panel is urging voluntary national curriculum standards to say what American schoolchildren ought to know, and a system of tests to determine what students have mastered.
The congressionally appointed National Council for Education Standards and Testing wants a federally funded successor agency to advance the idea of national standards and tests. The new agency should help develop the standards and tests, and give its blessing - "certification" - to the standards, the council's report recommends.
The recommendations were a rare consensus among Bush administration officials, education-minded governors, congressional leaders, teachers' unions and other education groups. And they suggest that in its drive to improve the schools, American education may be moving away from the decentralization of policy and curriculum that has been its hallmark.
The panel members insisted the standards are not an effort to set a national curriculum - a notion that has long been anathema to American educators. Rather, their goal is to describe the core knowledge that students in subject areas need to be taught.
In science, for example, the standard might prescribe that students have a basic understanding of the biological functions of plant and animal structures.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB