A state legislator who played a key role in enacting the nation's first charter school law in Minnesota tells the story of shaping the ideas and the bill. She now looks for ways that charter schools can coexist with traditional public schools to deliver a better education for all children.

A striking convergence of research, documentation, commentary, and policy in the past five years strongly suggests that an almost exclusive focus on academic knowledge and skills is an incomplete solution. Additional behaviors, skills, and mindsets--sometimes called metacognitive skills or 21st-century skills--are just as necessary for academic…

New York City's Department of Education offers a course called Digital Literacies, in which overage and undercredited high school students in more than 60 schools develop key skills needed for life after high school, whether it entails further education, employment, or, more commonly, both. With a "blended learning" design, it is more than the new…

In this article, the author makes a distinction between two kinds of change: tinkering change and systemic change. Tinkering change includes reforms intended to address a specific deficiency or practice. Such tinkering change can be contrasted to what Shakespeare termed "sea change" in "The Tempest" ("a sea change into something rich and strange")…

In this article, the author uses the academic/vocational split to reflect on some broader educational and cultural issues, for he thinks that the distinction as it is played out in school has much to teach people, whether or not they are directly involved with the issue of vocational education or, as it is now often called, career and technical…

As students move up through the grades, the academic demands on them increase, and a great many of those increases come in the form of reading. The academic tasks students encounter in the upper elementary grades, and even more so in secondary school, involve a great deal of reading in support of learning new and complicated content. As the…

Three highly regarded organizations, the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP), Phi Delta Kappa (PDK) International, and the Lumina Foundation for Education, undertook an important project to collect the opinions of middle school students using a scientific polling process. The idea to poll middle school students took shape…

The social studies teachers of North Fork Senior Secondary School (a pseudonym) had organized an activity to raise students' levels of awareness of the tragic events taking place in Darfur by giving them a taste of what it is like to experience a famine. The North Fork "famine" would last from Friday afternoon at 3:00 until Saturday at noon.…

The student-centered learning practices associated with constructivism could benefit from the increased class time that block scheduling offers. But, in this article, the author observes, too often block scheduling is adopted as an end in itself, not as a tool to facilitate a specific pedagogical approach. The author expands on his observation in…

Drawing on case studies of six urban and suburban secondary schools in Ontario, Canada, examines characteristics and role of school leaders in supporting and sustaining educational reform. Discusses three implications for developing sustainable leadership. For example, education systems should see leadership as a vertical system that extends for…

A teacher integrates character education into content lessons by lacing a "character cocktail" with community, manners, and ethical decision-making. (MLF)

Describes features of excellent mathematics department in California high school serving multiethnic, low-income students. Explores reasons why these low-income students outperform students from wealthier school districts on independently designed mathematics tests, but have significantly lower SAT-9 mathematics scores than students in other high…

Describes an innovate approach to teaching high school French using something called the box of mysteries. (PKP)

Discusses major findings and recommendations in recent report entitled "Aboriginal Education in Winnipeg Inner City High Schools," published by the Manitoba branch of the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives. (PKP)

Discusses report on the reading, mathematics, and science performance of Canadian 15-year-olds on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Program for International Student Assessment in 1999. Reports equity outcomes (effect of socioeconomic status on performance) in Saskatchewan are better than in the other provinces or any of…