Introduction

Innovation is one of the buzzwords in the lexicon of education reform. Ironically, innovation has been part of a persistent pattern of school and curriculum reform. Tradition-alists wanted schools to stick with the conventional aims of education: developing basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic; acquisition of knowledge; employing traditional methods of teaching, with textbooks as the backbone of coursework. Many early scholarly critics of progressive education such as William Chandler Bagley and Isaac Kandel viewed progressive education as a soft and misguided attempt at reform. The era of systemic reform and accountability was a culmination of long-term criticism and controversy over progressive education and worries over the performance of schools. Accountability spawned a new set of controversies, over national history standards and outcome-based education in the 1990s, and over state history standards, ethnic studies, multicultural education, and Common Core State Standards.