Clarifications to recommendations made in the Utah Education Reform Committee report, "A Call to Action," are presented in this addendum. Earlier recommendations relating to teachers are revised and clarified and new ones relating to class size, teachers' duties, instructional materials, and the student-parent-school relationship are…

The syllabus for New York State's elementary and secondary education second language programs is intended to inform local school district personnel about important characteristics of successful programming and provide a framework for development, management, and implementation. It specifies educational goals and components of the intended learning…

The way that the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Student Financial Assistance (OSFA) should conduct its quality assurance function of monitoring a processing contractor is described. For the following quality assurance procedures, information is provided on the goal of the procedure, activities to be measured, measures, and the role of…

Comments and recommendations to promote excellence in the Pennsylvania state system of higher education are offered for the consideration of policy shapers and decisionmakers. The following topics are addressed: setting priorities and determining system goals; building public confidence; clarifying roles and responsibilities of the state system;…

Eight priority recommendations are outlined for attracting and preparing teachers, developing the new teachers, improving the teaching climate, and rewarding effective teaching. Consideration is given to issues related to effective teaching within the framework of seven areas: (l) early student interest; (2) entry into teacher education; (3)…

Several major reports on the status of education in the United States have been presented to the public and to educators and government bodies in recent years. Nine of these reports provide the source material for this document on the state of the search for educational excellence: Adler's "Paideia Proposal,""A Nation at…

Developed to encourage and promote the establishment and maintenance of standards of excellence in all school library media centers, standards presented here are designed to be the minimum acceptable for Alaska schools. Each school is urged to use the standards as a base to develop a quality library media program which reflects the unique…

The materials status report for Uigur, a Turkic language spoken in the Sinkiang-Uigur Autonomous Region in northwest China and in the Soviet Socialist Republics of Kazakh and Uzbek, is one of a series intended to provide the nonspecialist with a picture of the availability and quality of texts for teaching various languages to English speakers.…

The feasibility of reducing scoring costs for the Test of Spoken English (TSE) by using one rater was investigated. Currently, two raters are used. It was found that, because of the possibility of different standards used by potential raters, it does not appear feasible to use a single rater as the sole determiner of speaking proficiency under the…

A project was conducted to provide inservice training for 100 teachers of specially designed vocational programs and to determine the best practices for program management and standards. Included among the major accomplishments of the project were the following: a review of literature on specially designed vocational programs and their management,…

Because we live in a society that increasingly depends upon technology, a growing number of voices are calling for the mandatory study of technology by school-aged children worldwide. Technological literacy is the ability to use, manage, assess, and understand technology, and involves the application of knowledge and abilities to real-world…

The Technology Student Association (TSA) is the only student organization dedicated exclusively to students enrolled in technology education classes in grades K-12. The effect that TSA has on a student member is often difficult to document. It is only through direct interaction with the student that these effects can be recorded; this in turn…

This manual has been revised since the last guide published in 1971 to keep flexibility as a fundamental objective. The manual contains suggestions, recommendations, and minimum requirements regarding school facility planning. A new chapter entitled "Energy Conservation Through Better Construction" has been added to the manual.…

The results of a comprehensive investigation of all aspects of the U.S. Military Academy are presented in this report. Specific problems that were noted by the Study Group are: (1) a slackening of the pursuit of excellence; (2) a concomitant decline in the standards demanded of cadets at the academy; (3) an apparent lack of accepted common…

The effort to institute minimum competency testing (MCT) is nearly universal despite the need to debate its basic definitions, implications, and consequences beforehand. There are seven distinct reasons for the MCT movement: (1) legislative zeal; (2) unfavorable allegations by local and national press; (3) economic accountability; (4) the…