Defining literacy and citizenship: Official language arts curricula in the United States and France

Since the early 1990s, statewide curriculum standards have become the lynchpin of education reforms in almost every state in the United States. The quality of these standards, however, has been little studied, particularly outside math and science. To fill this gap, this article describes the content of the new language arts standards promulgated by one leader of standards-based reform in the United States, the Massachusetts Department of Education, in comparison with those set forth by the French Ministry of Education. The role of differing conceptions of citizenship in each curriculum is discussed.