Today, more than ever, teachers must work effectively and efficiently to meet seemingly contradictory demands placed on them by society. On the one hand, school personnel are tasked with attaining and publicly reporting high levels of student achievement in response to No Child Left Behind. On the other, school personnel must ensure that students…

American teachers unions are increasingly the target of measures, authored by friends and foes alike, intended to limit their power or eviscerate them. One would never guess that the countries that are among the top 10 in student performance have some of the strongest teachers unions. Are those unions in some way different from American teachers…

American educators are very concerned by mandates prescribed in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act and state-level reforms such as new curriculum standards and requirements. The concern is understandable because noncompliance leads to unbearable consequences. Failure to make AYP--adequate yearly progress--can result in a series of punitive…

Over the years, American students consistently have ranked below those from Finland, Canada, Japan, and at least a dozen other industrialized nations on international tests of mathematics, science, and reading. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has done nothing to close this gap. And the authors suspect that the law may be making matters worse.…

Around the world, the importance of education to individual and societal success has increased at a breathtaking pace as a new knowledge-based economy has emerged. As a consequence, most countries have been engaged in intensive reforms of their education systems, and many have focused especially on improving teacher education, recognizing that…

Thirty years ago, at the close of the tumultuous 1960s, futurist Alvin Toffler wrote a bestseller, "Future Shock," which warned of the effects of accelerating change, or what Toffler described as "the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future." In the section of the book which was on education,…