William Schmidt

William Schmidt, Michigan State University Distinguished Professor and the national research coordinator and executive director of the U.S. National Research Center, was the first to apply the expression “a mile wide and an inch deep” to U.S. math and science curricula. Students are taught topic after topic without organization of a larger picture which explains how concepts work together and how they can be applied to the world as a whole.

His current work and research concerns issues of academic content in K- 12 schooling, teacher preparation and the effects of curriculum on academic achievement.

In an interview with FRONTLINE, Schmidt described his opinion of curriculum standards: "I'd say there are two dimensions to it. One is, good standards are coherent. They reflect the inherent nature of the discipline, so that certain things follow other things or precede other things. And that sort of structure of the discipline is represented in the standards. That's part of it. The other part of it is standards that don't just keep repeating the same things year after year, but they move upwards and take children in middle grades to serious, challenging mathematics."

Apart from pushing for a more coherent, more challenging curriculum, Schmidt also pushes for a national test to standardize scores across the country. He explained:

I believe we should have a national vision, a national set of standards. And if we ever did that, then of course it would make the absolute most sense to have a test which would measure those national standards. When you look across the rest of the world, that's one of their secrets. It's well defined, it's well articulated. Children, no matter where they live, all have the same expectations. It's not a matter of which part of the country you live in, or which side of the tracks you live on. It's there for everybody.
In this country, that's not true. And therefore we have such unevenness across the country, and across the proverbial tracks, that this creates huge differences in opportunities for students to learn. Then when we test, we get different results, and then we say "Aha!" But of course it's not "Aha!" It's like, what would you expect if you don't have a comparable curriculum for all kids? Likely, you will get large differences between different groups of children.


Schmidt comments on various aspects of improving U.S. math and science curricula in theoretical and applicable ways
The full interview can be found here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/schools/interviews/schmidt.html