Everyone in education today is under pressure to get results. The latest benchmark is to get students ready for college. Good thinking or good policy doesn't happen under pressure. The people who have monkeyed with the curriculum over the last 10 years have discovered that too many students graduating from high school need remediation. Why have our students regressed?- because the curriculum that education administrators have imposed on teachers and students is inferior to what we had before. So what's the solution? The same people who have put our students behind the eight ball are still calling the shots, still making policy and it's worse than ever. The latest fad is to teach higher order thinking basically from the time kids enter kindergarten. They need higher order thinking skills to succeed in college- might as well start early. They never bounce their ideas off of developmental psychologists or anyone in a position to know whether or not this latest push makes any kind of sense to children. All that matters is it's rigorous- it's high standards. So what if it's inappropriate and developmentally unsound.
Skills and knowledge have to be taught sequentially. You gradually build a strong foundation to support more challenging material in the future- you don't look at where the student is headed and start there. You look at the student, at where his is, what he can do and what he needs to learn to do so that he can progress to the next skill. But with all the pressure to catch up to Finland, there's no time for any of that. No time to build a strong foundation. College requires higher order thinking? Teach it in first grade!