The myth of curriculum narrowing
Students are taking more, not fewer, subjects
If you work in education, you’ve likely heard the claim that schools have narrowed the curriculum to focus primarily on reading and math—often blaming No Child Left Behind or similar federal policies for driving this shift.
If you believe this, you might be surprised to learn that the evidence for curriculum narrowing is quite thin. There is some evidence that elementary teachers have shifted their time allocations slightly toward reading and math. But at the high school level, students are actually taking more classes across a broader range of subjects. And to teach all those classes, schools have added many more teachers in nearly every subject area.
Let’s start with the elementary level. Federal surveys have asked a random sample of public school teachers how much time they spend per week on each subject. These are 1st through 4th grade teachers in self-contained classrooms in public schools all across America.
The time elementary teachers reported spending on English peaked in 2007-8, at 11.7 hours per week. That’s an increase of just 0.7 hours per week compared to 1987–88—or about eight additional minutes per day.
And since 2008, the time spent on English instruction has fallen, to the point that teachers reported spending less time on English instruction in 2015-16 than they had in previous years.
In math, the trend looks a bit more of an upward line. Teachers reported spending about an hour per day on math in the late 1980s; that has since increased to roughly 70 minutes per day.
The decline in time devoted to social studies and science is a bit clearer. As of 1987-88, elementary school teachers reported spending 2.8 hours per week on social studies. That figure fell to 2.1 hours per week by 2015–16—a decline of 42 minutes. Science has suffered similar, albeit smaller, declines.
I’ll leave it for others to project how much these time allocation decisions affect student outcomes. It’s fair to say that English and math occupied a growing share of instructional time during the 1990s and 2000s. Still, that share increased only modestly—from 50.4 percent of a student’s week in 1988 to 52.5 percent in 2008. That’s not exactly a huge increase. Moreover, the latest numbers show that percentage falling to 47.4 percent by 2015-16.
What about the later grades? Here the evidence actually shows that, contrary to fears of curriculum narrowing, students are completing more credit hours in almost all subjects.
NCES has conducted high school transcript studies looking at the credits students accumulate over the course of their high school careers. The first thing to note is that students today take, and complete, a lot more courses than their predecessors did. High school graduates in 2019 earned an average of 28 credits, compared to 23.5 for graduates in 1990. The gains are also consistent across racial and ethnic lines, with White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian students all putting up significant gains.
The second thing to note is that credit accumulation is up in nearly all the subjects. I’ve condensed the categories somewhat, but the graph below shows the results by subject. As you can see, students are earning more credits in English, social studies, math, science, visual/ performing arts, and an “other” category that includes physical, health, and safety education; religious education and theology; military science; and other miscellaneous subject areas. In short, students are not just taking more core subjects—they’re also branching out into diverse elective areas.
The only areas where students are earning fewer credits were career and technical fields. That’s another topic worthy of an additional post, but it’s not a strictly curriculum narrowing issue…
A similar trend appears in teacher staffing: there are simply more teachers across nearly all subject areas. Richard Ingersoll has shown that, while student enrollment rose 22 percent from 1987 to 2017, the number of art/ music, social studies, science teachers rose by 55, 69, and 84 percent, respectively.
I’ve encountered countless assertions that curriculum narrowing is a widespread issue in American schools. I’m certainly open to stronger evidence supporting the curriculum narrowing hypothesis, but I haven’t seen much hard evidence for it. And, at the high school level, the evidence mostly suggests the opposite.
I'm not sure credits alone quite quantify what "narrowing" the curriculum means in practice. Normally "narrowing" means limitations within tested subjects.
Years ago I was reprimanded for daring to teach emails to freshman because (gasp!) it's a business standard. This despite the my then-school corporation's sanctimonious slogans about teaching digital citizenship. I was likewise told that since standardized tests only have short stories, I was forbidden from teaching anything *longer* than a short story.
Thus, the curriculum was narrowed because the content length had to mirror the assessment.
If we define "narrowing" purely in credits and time, sure! It doesn't exist! Silly teachers. Is my story invalid until administering a grand survey about districts which limited teaching because of testing within the 2010's?
Oh, I'm sure my story qualifies as a cognitive bias. Whatever. But sometimes educational data runs around with rulers and denies that temperature exists because the ruler said so.
I believe this on the high school side, there's been a huge change in the discourse in recent years toward more student choice and letting students follow their interests at the high school level.
I'm curious if you have middle school data handy? While it's not huge, the decline in science and social studies seems worrying, especially as we realize that the knowledge-building effects of science and social studies play an important role in literacy instruction. I'm curious if that continues into middle school. Anecdotally, where I work we have very little elementary school science and social studies. In middle school we have more, but class sizes are larger than in English and math and combine multiple grades.
In terms of the assertion that the curriculum is narrowing -- I think the decline in science and social studies at lower grades is plenty of evidence for that claim. Those subjects play an important role, and the substantial decline we've seen, from already low levels, should be a cause for concern in my opinion.