Great Expectations: Contemporary Statewide Schooling Reform and Some Victorian Antecendents.

Overview & Synopsis

Between 1972 and 1974, Oregon adopted a series of comprehensive State Minimum Standards popularly titled "competency-based education." This paper addresses two types of research agendas that have emerged relative to these attempts to create a statewide reform. The first involves an ongoing research project whose purpose is to facilitate the implementation and examination of major demands imposed on schools by these policies. The second agenda relates to areas of potential, but unimplemented, research such as (1) an investigation of why state bodies appear to be a contemporary focus for major educational reforms; (2) a review of educational reforms in Victorian England, which appear to be somewhat similar to the Oregon effort, as a vehicle for using historical perspectives in building new conceptual frameworks for viewing competency-based education; and (3) an analysis of interrelationships between competency-based education reform in elementary/secondary education and similar reforms occurring in the preparation of educational personnel by postsecondary institutions. (Author)