In 1999, Ministers responsible for school education agreed to the new set of "National Goals for Schooling in the Twenty-First Century," with the aim of providing high quality schooling in Australia which would secure for students the necessary knowledge, understanding, skills and values for a productive and rewarding life. As a…

The current status of education for 1994 is presented in the form of education "indicators"--key data that measure the health of education, monitor important developments, and show trends in major aspects of education. The 60 indicators have been divided into 6 areas: (1) access, participation, and progress; (2) achievement, attainment,…

Both the Department of Education (ED) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) support a wide variety of studies of systemic and other educational reform in science, mathematics, and technology. Many of the studies have common or complementary purposes. To provide more comprehensive knowledge as a basis for decision making and to manage resources…

Since the creation of the National Cooperative Educational Statistics System in 1988, states have joined with the National Center for Education Statistics to produce and maintain comparable and uniform education statistics. Through the National Forum on Education Statistics, states have met to develop and propose a set of basic data elements for…

This paper summarizes and extends an earlier study that reviewed the literature on technology effectiveness, focusing on computers, traditional distance education, two-way interactive telecommunications, multimedia, and the Internet. It also adds some tools for technology evaluation as well as a rationale for using regions to distribute…

This report sets the 1990-91 baseline from which the nation's urban public schools will measure their progress on the six National Urban Education Goals. The report contains four major chapters measuring the status of urban schools using various indicators. The first chapter presents data on the demographics of city schools and compares those…

This study is an exploratory analysis of class-level data concerning junior high school (JHS) students' affective and motivational beliefs. It examines class-level information on selected psychological characteristics that students, who read at the fifth-grade level, bring to learning mathematics and that teachers encounter during instruction.…

Differences in education and labor market outcomes across groups completing high school at different ages and by different means (e.g., by graduation as compared with receiving a general education development diploma) may be due to a variety of factors, including all those that influence a person to leave school early. For an early school-leaver,…

An overview of an international conference held on the campus of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) to take stock of the development and use of educational quality indicator systems at the local, state, national, and international levels is provided. Major implications and findings of the education summit held at the University of…

The desire for a national picture of educational quality remains a continuing but unresolved goal. A question has been raised among high level policymakers regarding the feasibility of using existing data collected by the states to construct education indicators for state-by-state comparisons of student performance at the national level. A…

Since the implementation of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2002, the impact upon America's schools has been signicant in many areas. In a positive sense, NCLB has caused schools and school districts to examine the performance and academic achievement of subgroups, often for the first time. This examination has certainly highlighted…

"Harvard Education Letter" is published bimonthly at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This issue of "Harvard Education Letter" contains the following articles: (1) Beyond the Gap: What Educators and Researchers Are Learning from High-Achieving African American and Latino Students (Michael Sadowski); (2) Aiming for AYP:…

Literacy is a term that has been defined many ways, with definitions ranging from those that are very narrow to those that are very broad. Among the more wide sweeping was that of the 1991 National Literacy Act, which defined literacy as a wide range of language tasks associated with everyday life, including those "necessary to function on…

In March 2003, the Education Commission of the States, the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, and the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education established a collaborative project to help states improve higher education performance by assisting with examination of state higher education policies and with…

Increasingly, researchers, policymakers, school leaders, and concerned citizens are recognizing that high schools in the United States are in need of major reform. Current research shows that high schools are not preparing students for college, work, or life, and that they are leading to increased alienation among students. In a much-noted speech…