Bethpage Union Free School District in New York is a high-performing district by almost any current accountability measure. Yet administrators and teachers worried that they were not doing enough to prepare their students as critical thinkers for the 21st century. Inspired by the curriculum framework of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the…

Since 1990, when a Fort Meyers (Florida) school became the nation's first core-knowledge site, over 50 other schools have taken pioneering steps to teach this curriculum. Core-knowledge guidelines include school-community understanding, acceptance, and involvement; alignment of curriculum with local and state guidelines; and collaboration and…

Eugene (Oregon) Public Schools want to replace the traditional content-driven curriculum with a general concepts-based curriculum stressing the relationships among ideas. To help district educators understand the new model, a coin metaphor describing the two interlocking areas of curriculum (learning core conceptual knowledge and strategic…

Describes one district's struggle to implement Maine's Common Core of Learning, model of education that blurred subject area lines and moved toward integrated framework for curriculum and instruction. Common Core presented a set of outcomes divided into four interdisciplinary categories: human record, reasoning and problem solving, communication,…