Many years ago I was browsing through the laws of Oregon and came across the list of what state law required public schools to teach their students. As I recall, the statutory list included only three things: (1) Respect for the flag and country, (2) kindness to animals, and (3) the achievements of Frances E. Willard. At that time (and maybe even today) the academic requirements come from regulations issued by state agencies and the federal government, and not from the law.
This came to mind when I read the Oregonian's story from a few days ago about the small public high school in (I believe) Paisley (one of the few public schools that has a dormitory for boarding students) and how its curriculum is limited by having only nine teachers. Shortly afterward I met a young Japanese man who had come to the United States for a year of high school with the goal of learning to speak English. That brought to mind the controversy over CIM/CAM, the Certificate of Initial Mastery and the Certificate of Advanced Mastery, which were supposed to revolutionize Oregon education by imposing achievement standards, but have served mainly to make teachers and school districts unhappy.
We will never agree as a state on what the schools ought to teach, but we might reframe the question to be what we expect students to learn -- what they should be able to do when they graduate. As a starting point, suppose the state said that 90% of the high school graduates should be able to do X of the items on this list: (a) play a team sport; (b) fill out a job application; (c) explain how credit cards and compound interest work; (d) calculate the areas of geometric figures and use algebra to solve story problems; (e) write a 1000-word description of a significant event in American history, such as the Revolution or the Civil War, and then write a 100-word summary of that description; (f) describe the relationship among plants, animals, oxygen, and carbon dioxide, (g) take apart and reassemble a small appliance; (h) talk about themselves in a foreign language; (h) tell what to do (other than calling AAA) when your car won't start, and (i) describe why buttermilk pancakes require baking soda as well as baking powder. (The last one eluded me until I read an article about food chemistry in my 20s).
This is an incomplete list. Please suggest additions. The basic ideas I'd like to suggest are that (1) schools shouldn't be expected to teach the same things to all of their students, and (2) schools should be measured by the range of skills their students can put into use, rather than on how well they do on two or three standardized tests. My Japanese acquaintance said that the Japanese schools do a good job of teaching children how to write English, but not how to speak it -- the students can pen an elegant essay in perfect handwriting, but can't ask an American how to get to the bathroom. We ought to be teaching our children not just how to draw the map, but how to use it.