For this extra credit I attended the deliberation of the first group of section 9. Their deliberation discussed who should make the curriculum for k-12 schooling. Their three approaches were to put the people at either a community, state, or federal level in charge of the curriculum.

Their first approach focused on the community level, essentially basing it around a group similar to a school board where members of the community weigh in with their opinions on the school’s curriculum. This was a very interesting approach because I never thought to go about public schooling in that manner. In my past experiences at school board meetings, there are always parents from both sides complaining about how the school is run. At the same meeting there could be one who says the school is too strict and another could say they are not strict enough. Although this is highly anecdotal, I believe when a small community is left in charge and curriculum is added to the mix, it will not be very productive for students nor community members alike. Even though this approach is unconventional, the moderator and deliberation group did a great job basing the approach around solving problem around the values of equity and fairness. I also would like to add a thought I just had that by placing the curriculum in the hands of the community, it could lead to very unique approaches on what the result of public schooling would be. This could mean less of a focus on the big three subjects: math, English, and science, and more of a focus on practical teachings or the arts. I still believe there would be too much disparity between different communities to even be plausible though.

Next, the group introduced the state approach. While I believe there could have been some more useful statistics regarding the discrepancies between states as much of the current curricula is determined at the state level, the group did an overall good job of presenting relevant information. Their main focus was on the value of fairness and alleviating major discrepancies that could occur between small communities while still attempting to cater to students at a more personal level by keeping it at a state level. In their examples for other nations with great education at a federal level, they chose counties such as Singapore and Finland which themselves are the same size or even smaller than states in the US. This could prove that that population and geographical size could be perfect for deciding the course of education for the young population. This approach could be the great middle ground between the other two, but that doesn’t address the possible inequity between states’ education systems as is currently being seen in the US.

This disparity could be solved by their third approach, leaving curriculum up to the federal level. While on paper this approach looks good for achieving equality across the nation’s education system, in practice it is not very practical. The current education system has many federal influences and many times students or whole communities slip through the problematic cracks of the broad system. That is why it is my belief that a good balance of the three would probably be best for the American education system.

All in all, this deliberation was very thought provoking. The topic itself was well chosen because even as I was writing this blog post, I thought of so many more nuisances regarding the subject.