Employing standardized achievement tests to ascertain educational quality is like measuring temperature with a tablespoon. Such tests are prone to testing-teaching mismatches, omitted items, and confounded causation problems. Actually, three factors influence students' scores: what's taught in school, native intellectual ability, and out-of-school…

For urban schools, concerns over curriculum standards come second. First must come a plan to stop teaching values that reinforce a curriculum for unemployment. This paper presents three methods to counteract the impact of anti-work curricula: teacher development, student development (via a school-to-work curriculum), and shaping a curriculum that…

The Annenberg Rural Challenge believes that high academic standards can help achieve excellence, but can also be exploited to serve other political purposes. Standards should originate in the community. The policy statement discusses three kinds of standards, the dangers of standards, and the relationship between high standards and educational…

Details Florida's accomplishments and challenges as policymakers and educators focus on increasing student achievement through higher student and teacher standards, assessment, and accountability mechanisms. Already recognized for its articulation procedures, Florida continues to improve and expand partnerships and agreements between and among…

Articles on Black college faculty recruitment and retention and student financial aid examines these issues: senior Black faculty and diversity issues, recruiting Black faculty to small towns, the supply of doctorates, doctoral fellowship programs targeting minorities, financial aid information on the Internet, and an online college…

Critiquing Nina and Sol Horowitz's article advocating high-stakes tests, the author deplores deleterious effects of too-rigorous standards on poor students and recent immigrants. Without large-scale initiatives to affect their lives out of school, urban youngsters' prospects are dim. A National Research Council report offers testing guidelines.…

Assessment can have a profound transformational impact on a college or university, but for this to occur, such core values as improvement of student learning through collection of performance-related data must be integrated into the institutional culture. At Truman State University (Missouri), an initially modest commitment to improving student…

Examines the effects of the weakening of Russian educational standards on the quality of higher education and its applicants. Maintains that loosening the standards for competitive examinations has forced the higher education institutions to develop a system of college preparation and to institute concessions on enrollment. (MJP)

Eight ways in which colleges and universities can help reform of public education are outlined: communicating the need for reform, helping develop standards, aligning college admissions and placement with the new standards, improving teacher professional development, improving preservice teacher preparation, reframing the research agenda,…

Feminist and multicultural practices in public education can help achieve cultural inclusiveness. The paper examines multiple literacies and literacy learning in culturally diverse and gender fair schools, suggesting whole language programs, reader-response criticism, and feminism to expand the educational canon and ensure a public education…

California schools are ranked near the bottom in student achievement. The University of California can improve public schools through outreach programs; by improving its own curricula, particularly in mathematics and science, to become more interdisciplinary and inquiry-based; and by focusing on teacher education. Discusses obstacles to, and…

Study examining the earnings of students accepted by elite colleges but who chose to attend less-selective institutions finds that students do not enhance earnings by graduating from colleges with high average Scholastic Assessment Test scores, suggesting that admissions decisions fail to account for intangibles such as students' ambition,…

A study investigated use of various test accommodations for 3,025 third-graders, 2,990 seventh-graders, and 796 eleventh-graders with disabilities in Missouri. Three accommodations (extended time, small-group administration, and read-aloud) accounted for nearly all of the students using an accommodation. Students using one accommodation were…

Bucking a longstanding tradition of local control, the Idaho Legislature launched mandatory statewide standards in reading in 1999. The Idaho Reading Indicator now monitors the progress of early readers three times a year. Innovative local strategies to help struggling readers are described, and the importance of a systemic approach to reform and…

The Goals 2000: Educate America Act, the centerpiece of the Clinton administration's education reform program, provides a fascinating case study of the challenges facing an activist administration in trying to craft federal legislation that can provide national direction and leadership in a highly decentralized education system. Goals 2000…