Special education, a discipline that aims to provide specialized instruction to meet the unique needs of each child with a disability, has turned 40 years old in the United States. Ever since the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (P.L. 94-142) in 1975, every state has been directed to provide a free and appropriate…

Alarmed by the possibility of social studies being overlooked in this context of new national disciplinary standards, National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) and the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools convened a meeting of 15 national organizations representing civics, economics, geography, and history, to begin a conversation about…

Professionalization is an important but overlooked dimension in education politics, particularly the politics of accountability. To isolate the importance of professionalization, this article compares accountability movements in K-12 education with similar movements in higher education. I draw on three pairs of reports that have sought to impose…

The field of dance arts education in the United States is in an entirely different place today than it was at the turn of the century. Much of this change is due to a convergence of events that involved: federal and state legislation, policy, and funding that supported dance in arts education; a forty-year transition of dance out of departments of…

Talk of "turning around" troubled schools has become synonymous with firing educators, but a nonprofit organization in Chicago with a successful track record takes a different approach. In 2006, Strategic Learning Initiatives (SLI) signed a contract with the Chicago public schools to help 10 schools serving grades K-8. More than 95…

Given dwindling budgets, collaborations that can enhance effective and efficient use of resources increase in importance. This is particularly important with respect to efforts at schools to provide student and learning supports. Schools that formally connect to work together can be more effective, realize economies of scale, and enhance the way…

How a school is organized--or, more specifically, the extent to which teachers work together and treat one another as professionals--can influence elementary school students' mathematics achievement. So suggest the authors of a recent study on the impact of school organization on longitudinal student achievement (Moller, Stephanie, Roslyn A.…

Like other districts with schools that are not meeting adequate yearly progress (AYP) goals for five consecutive years, Hawaii is restructuring its low performing schools as required by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law. Unlike most other districts, however, Hawaii, a single statewide district, has been doing it for five years with the support…

The Obama administration has grand hopes for turning around the nation's lowest-performing schools, in part by allocating $3.5 billion for School Improvement Grants. Unfortunately, there simply aren't enough qualified principals to replace those mandated to be fired under two of the four school improvement models that the federal government says…

"Education Matters" is the monthly newsletter of the Association of American Educators (AAE), an organization dedicated to advancing the American teaching profession through personal growth, professional development, teacher advocacy and protection. This issue of the newsletter includes: (1) The War on Progress: Why the National…

The inclusion of universal design for learning (UDL) in the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act 2008 (HEA) demonstrates its escalating importance in the education field. UDL concepts and practices are not yet broadly integrated into all education policy. Policy has been slow to catch up to this quickly growing practice. To address that…

On April 30, 2008, at the White House Rose Garden, President Bush announced that Michael Geisen, a middle school 7th-grade science teacher from Prineville, Oregon, would be the recipient of the 2008 National Teacher of the Year honor. The National Teacher of the Year is selected by a National Selection Committee, which consists of 15 major…

Oakland Community Organizations (OCO) has worked for over ten years to improve educational opportunities in low-income neighborhoods in Oakland, California. The work of thousands of parent, teacher, youth, and community leaders has resulted in the formation of nearly fifty new small schools and more than ten charters, creating settings for…

The responsibilities of the modern school superintendent may already seem boundless, from making the most of shrinking budgets, to working 21st-century skills into the K12 curriculum, to meeting the escalating standards of NCLB testing. But thanks to the initiatives of two national organizations dedicated to improving the use of educational…

For a great portion of the history of the American education system, multiage education was the norm in one-room schoolhouses throughout the nation. The current graded, curriculum-centered approach in the U.S. appeared during the mid-nineteenth century with the rapid economic development and massive immigration into the country. Concurrently, some…