The political reasons for the social efficiency ideology in education are based on the assumption that curriculum standards reflect the standards of school education expected by society, that curriculum standards encompass what students need to learn in school, that curriculum standards dictate what teachers should teach, and that standardized tests reflect the content of curriculum standards. Teachers become the accountable links in the curriculum-delivery process, which risks overemphasizing the impact of teachers because teachers control neither the students nor the social context of a school (Schiro, 2013). The focus of this study is on the recontextualization (Bernstein, 2000) of teaching content from the programmatic curriculum arena to the actual teaching in the classroom arena and the underlying assumptions of knowledge that underpin teachers’ different selections of teaching content and teaching modes. 

The purpose of this paper is to explore the implications of a standards-based curriculum for what constitutes knowledge in different teaching contexts. The research question is: how is the logic of uniformity within curriculum standards recontextualized into actual teaching in different school environments, focusing on the concepts of knowledge underpinning the teaching?