To prepare students for a tech-intensive future, educators cannot hold on to 20th-century learning practices. They must reimagine education and cultivate an updated skill set. Lessons led by caring educators will continue to help students be strong learners and critical thinkers; but "human" skills will equip them to handle an uncertain…

In response to a report from the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, President Obama issued a challenge to the U.S. education system to create more than 1,000 new STEM-focused schools, including 200 high schools. Inclusive STEM-focused high schools--which focus their efforts on females, minorities, and students who are…

Charter schools--what was their original promise? They would enroll diverse groups of students. They would give teachers the room and power to innovate. They would be educational laboratories that would find new ways to reach students, and they would share those lessons with other public schools. But charter schools haven't lived up to their…

This article traces the evolution of kindergarten from its focus on children, to its focus on outcomes, to its current focus on literacy and math. The early childhood parts of kindergarten are losing ground to growing allocation of kindergarten time to academic content. A more ecological approach to kindergarten involves reincorporating play into…

One of the problems of educational research is that the Research & Development community has not kept the educational community informed of the progress it has made in attaining objectives. Article relates to this problem. (Author/ML)

The undergraduate curriculum in colleges and universities in the United States can be viewed in three large and distinct periods. Knowing these periods, one can determine the interaction between education and society, can suggest what will come next, and can help make one comfortable with a patchwork curriculum. (Author/MLF)

In 1983 Manchester High School (CT) became involved in a five-year planning process to reshape the school curriculum through redefinition of the competencies needed by its students to achieve success in the future. The five-year plan is outlined along with a discussion of establishing a flexible planning process that allows the school to shape the…

Describes a program of educational improvement wherein the community and teacher interacted to save precious time in the classroom and enhanced the relationship of parents and educators. (RK)

Discusses "backward design," a strategy for planning curriculum and school improvement by first thinking carefully about desired results and then working backward to develop meaningful assessments and learning plans. For this design to work, educators must identify desired results, analyze multiple sources of data, and determine appropriate action…

Discusses the need to include teachers in the development of educational reform. (MD)

Membership appeal for Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. (DS)

Discusses how schools can avoid mistakes in building their school-improvement plans. The two most common mistakes are (1) using measures of student learning that are not sensitive to the actual learning occurring, and (2) having no system for interpreting and using the data. (Contains 1 figure and 11 references.) (WFA)

Shifts in funding priorities at the National Institute of Education may indicate significant changes in the types of activities NIE will support in coming years. Less emphasis will be placed on curriculum development activities and more on research and strengthening others' development capabilities and efforts. (Author)

Article discusses various aspects of relevancy and proposes ways to increase the choices of students in preparing for their role in society. (GB)

Two educational development programs--a revolutionary project in Cuba and an evolutionary project in Jamaica--have implications for the rest of the world. (Author)