I understand your approach but you have things mixed up imo.
The shool administration needs to be local to a reasonable degree. It starts with things as simple as predicting schooling demand. Did a new company create 50 jobs in the district? Means probably 20 more kids to come than before anticipated. The state road is in for a major reconstruction? Some kids are not reachable for this school with the bus in reasonable time anymore…
This also goes the other way round. The availability and attractiveness of the schools will affect other local government decisions.
Meanwhile curricula definitely should be standardized and there should be a high level of federal standardization, leaving space to specific local topics like local history, geography and the like.
Against which reference would you test your teachers qualification? I would argue for that you need a standardized expectation of what teachers need to be able to do and therefore you will have a standardized curriculum for teaching teachers how to teach. You will have the same situation for electrical engineers, for doctors, for air traffic controllers…
So for all these people to be able to learn the standardized qualifications necessary to do their jobs reliably they need a standardized higher education. And that standardized higher education needs as standardized main education to build up on.
In my country we have state level curriculums. They are like 90% the same, but for some topics they aren’t. This was causing quite a headache for instance in university with maths. Some people already knew some Linear Algebra from high school, others already had imaginary numbers and yet again others had learned their trigonometry with hyperbolic functions instead of the standard sine and cosine for some reasons. Would have been better if the supposedly equivalent diplomas from the different states actually were equivalent.
I understand your approach but you have things mixed up imo.
The shool administration needs to be local to a reasonable degree. It starts with things as simple as predicting schooling demand. Did a new company create 50 jobs in the district? Means probably 20 more kids to come than before anticipated. The state road is in for a major reconstruction? Some kids are not reachable for this school with the bus in reasonable time anymore…
This also goes the other way round. The availability and attractiveness of the schools will affect other local government decisions.
Meanwhile curricula definitely should be standardized and there should be a high level of federal standardization, leaving space to specific local topics like local history, geography and the like.
What makes you prefer standardized curricula, rather than rigorous testing and well supported teachers?
Academic rigor, we will agree, is crucial - constraining how teachers work is, in my view, not.
Against which reference would you test your teachers qualification? I would argue for that you need a standardized expectation of what teachers need to be able to do and therefore you will have a standardized curriculum for teaching teachers how to teach. You will have the same situation for electrical engineers, for doctors, for air traffic controllers…
So for all these people to be able to learn the standardized qualifications necessary to do their jobs reliably they need a standardized higher education. And that standardized higher education needs as standardized main education to build up on.
In my country we have state level curriculums. They are like 90% the same, but for some topics they aren’t. This was causing quite a headache for instance in university with maths. Some people already knew some Linear Algebra from high school, others already had imaginary numbers and yet again others had learned their trigonometry with hyperbolic functions instead of the standard sine and cosine for some reasons. Would have been better if the supposedly equivalent diplomas from the different states actually were equivalent.