I teach at three different institutions, each of which has different kinds of requirements.

One is a large, public research institution, part of the University of California system. At the UCs, if you are the instructor of record, you can do basically whatever you like. Things like "Student Learning Outcomes" are simply not part of the vocabulary, as far as I've heard, at least not in history.

The second is a small arts college, where only art-related majors are offered but they are four-year degrees; as such, enough classes to complete general education are also necessary, so there's a small "Liberal Arts" department that encompasses everything but art. I'm one of two history instructors there, and I believe I've taught six of the last seven history courses. This college is more concerned with content, because they have to worry a bit about maintaining their accreditation. However, the LA chair is quite hands-off, and as long as their course content aligns roughly with the topic description and meets some very broad learning outcomes, I have considerable freedom. I teach a Western Civ from the Big Bang to the Present in 14 weeks here, which is a daunting task that requires a lot of choices about what to include and what not to. Still, the amount of freedom here is nice. This course is essentially a sandbox, and I'm always altering it to change focus.

My third institution is a fairly well-known community college. Here, the course content is more specific and the SLOs are more explicit. Indeed, in addition to a grade, we must assess each student on our main three SLOs, so one has to be more deliberate in tying assessments (like exams and papers) to those SLOs. However, as with the other courses, I still have considerable freedom. The content requirements are basically subjects that I must cover; their emphasis and interpretation are up to me. Further, the SLOs are also up to me to interpret and implement. They require only that I assess the students on content (which is largely up to me), on skills of historical analysis (which are again largely up to me), and on the relevance of history to their lives. So, although there is a bit of bureaucracy involved here, I cannot complain about it. It asks us to accomplish goals that I agree with, and it gives me a great deal of academic freedom.

Of course, you have to make a LOT of choices when you teach, and I build my courses around large-scale arguments, though it often takes a few runs through a course to really figure out what your argument is. You also find yourself responding to your students' needs and interests. For example, when I first began teaching my global environment history course at the community college, I basically just gave a narrative of world history from an environmental perspective. This worked well enough, but I found that I really wanted to make some more pointed arguments about the world today, that I needed to make the course more coherent, and that I needed to focus my lessons on fewer topics. So this time, I've built the course around describing three "modes" of environmental interaction--foraging, agrarian, and industrial--the way that these modes work to generate environmental (and material) inequality, and the major institutions that have shaped how people interact with their environments, such as the market and science. To an extent, it's still a narrative of world history from an environmental perspective. However, I think this run through the course has had too much economics, and too little dirt under the fingernails. Plus, the population of the course has shifted, and I'm getting more "Environmental Studies" majors than students interested in history. So, I'm going to condense my narrative next time, and then spend the second half of the class on case studies of contemporary environmental problems and their historical origins. That seems a bit more what most of the students really want, and I think it'll help them make more explicit connections between past and present. The current iteration is perhaps a little too abstract.

I teach US history in a private school in the midwest and have a remarkable degree of freedom in my curriculum. All the USH teachers use the same basic texts but within that parameter, we have great freedom to focus on what interests us/our specialities. So, for example, this year I dramatically increased the time I spent on the Civil Rights and Black Power movements without any response from my chair apart from something like "Whoa, were did you find that time?" (One of the things I dumped was a day on the Red Scare. It hurt me, but I think it was worth it.) FWIW, my school doesn't teach to the AP test. Many of our students take it, but we are not required to teach to it.

I wish I had a say, otherwise I'd take out the sections of the Texas curriculum that promote American Exceptionalism. However for secondary level education we don't get much of a say.