Urges educators to beware adopting new programs during the coming academic year. A better approach is to adapt worthy innovations without throwing out last year's innovations. The history of American educational practice supports this approach, emphasizing the value of familiar continuity sprinkled with modest and occasionally some significant…

A British headteacher ponders a tumultuous decade in school management. The national curriculum was one major problem. There have also been radical, deleterious changes in the ways schools are funded, governed, managed, planned, and inspected; how teachers are educated; and the terms and conditions of teacher employment. Competition for pupils has…

The deficit model of assessment dominating education in postwar Britain largely disappeared in the 1970s. Inherent weaknesses of the 11-plus exam, which still survives, may explain current obsession with formative assessment. Record keeping, grading, and other difficulties with changes wrought by the 1988 Education Reform Act and the National…