Content and performance standards can underlie high-quality assessments that provide useful information about how students and schools are doing. These data should be used to inform teaching decisions, trigger special supports for students' learning, and evaluate school practices, rather than simply allocating mechanistically determined rewards…

Standards can be used as tools for standardization or customization. To accelerate learning for all students, standards must reject the dominant standardization (sorting) approach to education. Standards should represent attainment levels, be divorced from timetables and age levels, apply also to nonacademic areas, allow choice within limits, and…

National standards are unnecessary for the top quarter of college-bound students. However, a national basic examination covering marketable skills in language and mathematics is crucial to improving the educational system for all other students. Establishing a National Basic Skills Certificate program would appease both liberals and conservatives.…

In the fourth Phi Delta Kappan teacher opinion poll, teachers evaluate both their own schools and colleagues highly, feel that on-campus student misbehavior has declined slightly since 1989, favor cutting administrators to save money, give parents Cs and Ds on child-rearing, think part-time student employment hurts academic performance, and…

The United States is one of few nations requiring considerable administrator training to become certified. Private-school students outperform their public-school peers, even though private-school administrators have considerably less graduate training than public-sector administrators. Using 1987-88 Schools and Staffing Survey data, this article…

Because they fail to set consistent goals or direct funds toward solving systemic problems, U.S. schools are not structured productively. A productive educational system would focus all its energies on a limited number of clearly defined, stable goals and align its functions to achieve them. Productive school leaders would establish standards,…

Children who come to school without numerical game-playing experience have trouble with math relationships in direct-instruction situations. This article explores the varied roles of active thinking, social interaction, previous knowledge, and child-initiated choice in children's development of math concepts. Self-esteem cannot be built by doing…

Despite their clumsy handling of the Ebonics controversy, Oakland school board members should be commended for raising the question of what linguistic skills youngsters will need for their adult lives. Parents who want their children to develop fluency in standard American English must provide language models for their infants and preschoolers.…

Reviews modern and postmodern conceptions of the child and associated educational practices. The modern conception conflated the universal biological child with the individual psychological child. Although this dual conceptualization of child nature was probably necessary to the establishment of free public education, it often hinders effective…

Educational researchers and policymakers need to understand the ecological correlation fallacy, since so much bad research (and policy) has been based on it. Aggregate data may or may not yield results that are true for individuals. Only individual-level data can correctly answer questions about the relationship between variables for individuals.…

America's corporate executives consider a huge world-class workforce superfluous. Corporate restructuring's bottom line was the massive shedding of workers, a reduction in future job opportunities, and a concomitant plunge in income, benefits, and living standards for millions. Experts predict that only 20% of well-trained college graduates will…

The importance of discovering invisible social realities, of looking behind masks presented by everyday consumer goods (like T-shirts and soccer balls), inspired an Oregon high school teacher's efforts to teach about global sweatshops and child labor in poor countries. By examining loopholes in Nike's "code of conduct," students discovered…

Mixed results for U.S. adults on the First International Adult Literacy Survey reveal the worthlessness of posting international test scores without considering cultural, social, and economic contexts. In the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, U.S. eighth-graders' performance was average, but fourth-graders' results were…

Summarizes leading scholars' findings in leadership theory, local politics and government, state and national school politics, and change theory. Integrating this knowledge into a systematic reform effort requires superintendents with integrity and vision; political stability; good board/superintendent relations; long-term, statewide commitment;…

Proponents of public/private school choice assume that private schools are more efficient and that parents can distinguish between schools of differing quality and select schools that perform well. A study based on the 1988 National Education Longitudinal Study data shows that private schools are no more efficient in using educational resources…