Behavioral Objectives and Minimum Competencies: Educational Reforms Designed to Define Academic Expectations, 1957–1983

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 14
  In Roundtable Session: Reconsidering the Standard in Education

Abstract

This paper reports on a slice of a broader analytic history of how educational leaders in the United States have created educational standards over the past 125 years; here we focus on successive efforts to create common, uniform academic learning expectations from the 1950s through the 1980s. We demonstrate how policymakers and educational leaders sought to specify, clarify, and intensify, what students were meant to know and be able to do through an examination of primary source materials from cases studies of Florida, Michigan, and Massachusetts. We argue that the quarter century following 1957—from Sputnik to A Nation at Risk—provided the foundation for several crucial developments in the articulation of learning expectations and academic “standards” for American students.

Authors

• David A. Gamson, The Pennsylvania State University

• Sarah Anne Eckert, The Pennsylvania State University

• Jeremy Anderson, The Pennsylvania State University

• Katharine E Dulaney, The Pennsylvania State University