Every state in the nation will miss the No Child Left Behind Act’s June 30 federal deadline to have high quality teachers employed in all schools. Teachers are the most important factor in educational success for most youngsters, especially those from low-income families. The continuing shortage of good teachers jeopardizes progress in education improvement. Examples [...]
Standards-Based Framework in a Decentralized System Read the full report (PDF) In a relatively short time, the standards-based framework for elementary and secondary education systems has been fully adopted in the United States. In 1983, the report A Nation At Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform challenged the country to significantly raise its educational expectations [...]
Getting Smarter, Becoming Fairer For more than a year, the Renewing Our Schools, Securing Our Future National Task Force on Public Education has investigated innovative strategies and approaches to improving public education. It has considered social, economic and demographic trends and their relationships to education. This work, in addition to several commissioned papers and six [...]
About six years ago, I asked a group of the country’s leading reading researchers how many courses on teaching reading the typical elementary teacher candidate takes in college. The answer was “one course in one semester.” I was shocked by their response, so I consulted my 85-year-old mother, a retired elementary [...]