Teacher Participation in Curriculum Revision: An Historical Case Study

In recent years scholars representing the various academic disciplines have taken over the task of curriculum revision. These committees of scholars have produced such nationally influential and widely adopted curriculum revisions as the School Mathematics Study Group's modern math and the Audio-Lingual foreign language revisions. Is it advisable to wrest the task of curricular revision away from committees composed of teachers in the local schools? Should the teacher be involved in the curriculum-making process? The historian of education can help to answer these questions by examining how the classroom teacher first acquired the responsibility for planning the curriculum. In what follows the school system of Denver is taken as an historical case study of teacher participation in curriculum revision.