Interest in educational reform is a side benefit of recent school criticism. Unfortunately, where the cause of educational failure is understood to be teachers, educational reform has become teacher reform, which most often means that greater effort will be placed on controlling teacher behavior. (LC)

When designing competency based education programs to meet state requirements, California educators would do well to select only a small number of highly significant competencies per basic skill area, for which they can devise on-target instruction and valid competency measures. (SJL)

The state of Connecticut has introduced a fourth-grade mastery test that assesses thinking skills. The test was developed cooperatively by the state's Department of Education, a testing corporation, and several cognitive psychologists; several alternative models of thinking were synthesized to produce a theoretical foundation for the test. (MCG)