To prepare 21st-century superintendents, we must abandon the present university-based, research-oriented preparation model in favor of a professional studies model that is more intellectually challenging and more practical. This article recommends certain changes in administrator preparation programs and outlines skills needed by tomorrow's…

Schools of education at elite, research-based universities have pursued three impractical survival strategies: interdisciplinary appeasement, academic intensification, and search for legitimacy as a social science. Such schools must repudiate the academic reward system and concentrate on preparing research-sensitive practitioners and conducting…

Education coverage, although steadily improving, is subject to the policies and whims governing the reporting, editing, and packaging of the news. Reporters emphasize events rather than trends, report administrators' rather than teachers' views, and overlook the effects that changes in children have had on the schools. This special report outlines…

In poor, urban schools, so much time is spent controlling and disciplining children to obey authority (or to learn the hidden curriculum), that scant time is left for "real" teaching and learning. This article shows how school culture (conditions, norms, relationships, and structures) can be changed to educate all children adequately. Includes 10…

While forging a political and social consensus to support existing compensatory education efforts, supporters have exhausted any notion of whom they mean to help, what their problems are, how to determine success, or how best to help. This article redefines high risk youth, dispels some common misconceptions about low-achievers, and outlines…

Given the breadth and complexity of the current school improvement movement, the upgrading of physical structures may be the only specific reform area demanding a straight-forward approach. The widespread physical disrepair and overcrowding characterizing today's innercity schools provide students with no viable alternative to urban squalor and…

Despite obvious need, a strong, empirically based rationale, and a growing political will, the promised new era in childcare and early education has faced complex challenges. This article discusses inequity, discontinuity, and fragmentation in providing these services and explores some ameliorative strategies within a new policy context. Includes…

The author travels 400 years into a future boasting honored teachers and cherished children, but lacking butterflies (extinct because of 20th century pesticide residues). The big advance, besides miniaturized solar collectors, is people's inability to tell lies. Perceptions are trusted, and emotions are accurately read. Also, children are taught…

Challenges abstract mathematics requirements in U.S. high schools. Refutes various philosophical and psychological assumptions underlying math instruction, particularly the correlation between simple numbers and the physical world, the math/logical thinking connection, and frequency of use arguments. Suggests that high schools require only one…

Explores the profound connection between human memory and imagination. Educational ideas that find only incompatibility between memorizing and developing imagination and procedural skills are inadequate. Viewing teaching as story telling transforms the curriculum from a huge mass of predigested material to a collection of great stories reflecting…

Teachers are largely responsible for bringing the substance and spirit of science to each new generation. When appropriately linked with and supported by university and industrial scientists, teachers will better represent the culture of science and technology and respond to society's ever-changing needs. Includes five references. (MLH)

Describes the Houston (Texas) Mathematics and Science Improvement Consortium sponsored by the National Science Foundation and coordinated by the Baylor College of Medicine. The project, using paracticing scientists and mathematicians as mentors for secondary science and math teachers, resulted in improved teaching skills, increased teacher…

Keeping all adolescents in high school longer will not necessarily solve illiteracy, crime, and unemployment problems. Dropout prevention programs are already on a collision course with demands for higher promotion and graduation standards. What urban dropouts need is to exchange city slums for a revised version of the Civilian Conservation Corps,…

Presents the case for preserving and nourishing the teacher preparation option as an integrated part of the undergraduate liberal arts curriculum. Describes the Consortium for Excellence in Teacher Education's new reform efforts, stressing the principles of development and integration. Includes three references. (MLH)

Students at Willamette University (Salem, Oregon) desiring to become teachers must major in the liberal arts. The college curriculum has long emphasized reading, writing, broad cultural experiences, and appreciation for our culture's politics and technology. Through disciplined study in their major fields, future teachers develop the capacity for…