Transforming schools through mastery learning may solve education's existential crisis, offering today's learners the relevance and individualization they need while returning to the most ancient form of assessment, proving that learning has occurred. Mastery learning requires significant change to all the norms and practices of school, altering…

Since the passage of No Child Left Behind, large-scale assessments have come to play a central role in federal and state education accountability systems. Teachers and parents have expressed a number of concerns about their state testing programs, such as too much time devoted to testing and the high-stakes use of testing for teacher evaluation.…

Discusses the inadequacies of the California High School Proficiency Examination and examines how the test has usurped every school board's responsibility to define and implement a meaningful education. (Author/IRT)

A response to criticism by researchers House, Rivers, and Stufflebeam published in the June Kappan. (Editors)

Michigan's superintendent of public instruction is convinced that a state testing program can provide the kind of information educators need to improve instructional planning. (Author)

Describes the program the Michigan department of education mounted to improve the way in which the media report the results of the Michigan Educational Assessment Program, a program that tests the basic skills of all fourth-, seventh-, and tenth-grade students each year. (IRT)

Discusses efforts by South Dakota, Oregon, Massachusetts, Kentucky, and Virginia to assess students using the Internet and computers. (PKP)

The author finds an unacceptably high level of elitism in California's program for "Mentally Gifted Minors." (IRT)

Defends California's program for "Mentally Gifted Minors" from charges of elitism. (IRT)

Discusses the situation in Florida where districts must report the results of program evaluations made by the state department of education and gives suggestions for the way in which these scores should be made public. (IRT)

Describes the operation of the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, which coordinates planning for educational computing in Minnesota and delivers certain computing services to the institutions that lack the means to provide these services on their own. (Author/IRT)

Compares the results of the first and second years of testing in the Florida minimum competency program to show that the program is working. (IRT)

Examines the statewide testing programs of North Carolina and Alaska, showing how the legislative goals, objectives, and expectations for these tests are seldom met. Such testing programs cannot realistically serve both accountability and achievement monitoring functions. (12 references) (MLH)

For too long teachers have been forced into a defensive posture, protecting their professionalism and their students' learning from the accountability hawks who know little about teaching and learning, the author asserts. In this article, the author details how Nebraska educators have turned the tables on accountability by placing utmost…

As a result of efforts to reform New Jersey's method of financing education, education has become enmeshed in state-level politics while, critics assert, little is being done to improve urban education. (Author/IRT)