as the twig is bent...so is the tree inclined

With the goal of having the new Common Core Learning Standards in full implementation by 2013, schools across America are reworking and redefining curriculum maps in order to create alignment with the new standards.  Hopefully, schools are also attempting to determine a set of principles which recognize the importance between the interests and needs of the individual student and the goals of society and the economy.  As with most districts, in the Newburgh Enlarged City School District, educators literally inherit a curriculum (or at least a well laid out map of it) when they enter a school building, and although they exert freedom over pedagogical strategies and methodology, curriculum development, in terms of curricular policy, supervision, and evaluation is certainly in no way embedded in the job.  Keeping that in mind, you can imagine my trepidation when I got wind that myself and a small group of my co-workers were going to be working collaboratively to create new curriculum maps for the high school English Department (consisting of about 40 of my esteemed colleagues, many of whom have spent a significantly greater number of years in the trenches than myself).   
To remediate what I felt was a huge gap in the necessary understanding  for me to undertake curriculum map writing with both confidence and proficiency, I turned to William Pinar and his colleagues (Understanding Curriculum, Peter Lang 1995) and spent weeks plodding through the enormous history of research on curriculum studies.  What I amassed from the undertaking was that it is probably safe to say that on average, even competent teachers are not well educated enough in teacher education programs (or their time in the classroom) to successfully engage in this kind of curriculum work without any outside support.  But that fact  certainly isn't stopping, let alone slowing, the race to get this inititative underway in my district.
This project is an attempt to personally rectify this situation for myself, my colleagues in the Newburgh Enlarged City School District, and hopefully, if I can convince the right people to support me, a much wider audience than I can even right now conceive.