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by dragonwriter 704 days ago
> For English, it's quite different because many countries list it as their official language but may have diverged spellings and meanings and there is no single body to direct the curriculum. The most notable is the US

The US doesn't have an official language, though most institutions operate primarily in English, and all US states that have one or more official languages include English on that list.

1 comments

Nor does the US have an official curriculum. In the 80s, there was a wide variation both between and within states as to what a student with a high school diploma might have been expected to know. When the state of Illinois increased the graduation requirement for high school students from 1 to 2 years of mathematics, my high school added a second-year general math class because too many students couldn’t pass pre-algebra because fractions were beyond their ken. (The graduation requirement was subsequently amended such that no math below algebra could be counted for graduation and then later that students needed to have taken at least math up to the level of algebra and geometry because of districts stretching algebra I into a two-year sequence).
Common Core was probably the closest to a consistent curricula but then got bogged down in politics.
Most (maybe all now?) states have standard state-wide curricula. Some are painfully vague, some are painfully detailed. When I was looking at this when I got my credential, it seemed like many small-to-medium sized states copy-pasted their curricula from other states.
> Nor does the US have an official curriculum.

The US (i.e. the federal government) has no legal authority over education at all -- schools are run at the state level, and individual states often do have standard curricula.