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Matthew Arnold And Minimum Competency: The Nineteenth-Century British Experience With National Basic Skills Assessment, Patrick G. Scott

Faculty Publications

Discusses the British government's introduction in 1861-62 of the Revised Code, under Robert Lowe, tying government funding of elementary schools to annual examination of the progress made by each child in the basic skills of Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, and the satiric perspective on the debate given by the poet and essayist Matthew Arnold, himself one of Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools, charged with implementing Lowe's reforms. Many of the issues about local and national curriculum, state funding of education, the importance of basic or core skills in relation to breadth, and the best means to assess teacher effectiveness have …