This document presents a summary of the purpose, activities, and findings of the National Commission for Excellence in Teacher Education, focusing on the Commission's Final report "A Call for Change in Teacher Education." The report was organized around five themes: (1) supply and demand for quality teachers; (2) programs for teacher…

A Malaysian perspective on the secondary school curriculum and the adolescent is offered in this paper. The discussion initially reviews characteristics of adolescents, focusing on their psychological needs, and particularly, friendship, love and affection, interests, discipline and responsibility, environmental pressures, dislocation of the line…

Interrelationships among policy issues facing education in 1978 and 1979 are explored in this paper. The policy issues covered are based on over 1,000 concerns raised during an issue identification project that involved reviewing documents and interviewing educators. These concerns were sorted into categories in a process that led inductively to a…

Educational accountability is central to the reputation of the nation's community colleges. Some community colleges are adopting mastery learning, competency-based education, curriculum tracking, and/or minimum competency-testing as a means of remaining educationally accountable. Mastery learning programs, under which students are required to…

Case studies of attempts to implement accountability and assessment programs at Northeast Missouri State University and the University of Missouri, Columbia, illustrate the benefits and impacts of such programs. The programs variously incorporated demographic data, national standardized test results, and surveys of student attitudes. The American…

This report describes and evaluates Title I, the largest federal aid program in elementary and secondary education, with appropriations of over $3 billion in 1980. It assesses the impact of the program and introduces new efforts that were undertaken to enhance state and local coordination. Special attention is given to how the amendments of 1974…

A critical position paper on research on many types of tests and the history of the testing movement is presented. The report, "A Nation at Risk" receives particular criticism. Although the accountability of teachers, schools, and educational administrators is seen as necessary, it is argued that a means of insuring accountability has…

The accountability model presented in this report was developed by the Student Support Services staff of Gavilan College (GC) to help meet public demands for learner success, to increase efficiency, and to promote a proactive mode of delivering student support services. Introductory material traces the development of the model and discusses the…

This paper provides the background for and provisions of the accountability materials that were authorized by the Louisiana Bureau of Elementary Education to monitor schools' compliance with the Louisiana Competency Based Education Law. In order effectively to manage the two major components of the law--the Pupil Progression Plans and the…

The future relationship between the government and higher education institutions in England is addressed in 10 papers from a Leverhulme seminar of the Society for Research into Higher Education. Major seminar themes included the role of the state in directing higher education, the need for institutional autonomy, the balance of powers between…

In most educational literature, the subject of costs has been isolated from curriculum, personnel, and program effectiveness. A dichotomy has existed between fiscal and curricular decision-making. The Resource Cost Model (RCM) was designed to help policymakers measure to what extent differences in the costs of educational services are attributable…

Developments in several states suggest that a state-imposed accountability system is gradually taking shape. State authorities have established both incentive systems to reward high-performing school districts and systems of sanctions to be applied to districts with a record of repeated low performance. To accomplish this, a majority of states are…

This paper explores some definitions of school-based budgeting and other forms of decentralization, attempts to determine the extent of their adoption, develops some indications of decentralization results, and provides suggestions for further research directions. The paper addresses (1) how often decentralization involving a change in resource…

The Department of Education considers the Carl D. Perkins Vocational Education Act reauthorization one of the critical education issues facing the 101st Congress. This area is of the highest priority because of the importance of vocational education to the rejuvenation of U.S. education; to the educational aspirations of the poor, disabled, and…

Adult basic education (ABE) teachers are committed to understanding their students and to teaching something useful, something relevant, and something that will give students more control over their world or community. The goal of ABE teachers must then be to be familiar with their students' understanding of their world. ABE teachers are logically…