State-Mandated Curriculum
In many states, legislatures are now mandating the curriculum to be taught in all public PK-12 schools. The purpose of the mandated curriculum is to transmit knowledge and skills deemed essential by the state legislature or education bureaucracy. The required curriculum is often presented as a laundry list of required objective in each subject area (or at least each basic subject area) at each grade level Objectives tend to be within the lower categories of Bloom's taxonomy, at the knowledge or comprehension level. (See Table 19.1 later in this chapter.) There are seldom any connections made between the objectives in different content areas. Even the objectives within a given content area are usually discrete from one another. In short, in terms of purpose, content, organization, and format, state-mandated curriculum tends to be at the lowest level of curriculum development. It is therefore very difficult for teachers in states with mandated curricula to function beyond the imitative maintenance level of involvement in curriculum development.