One of the key claims of choice advocates is that it will take diverse schooling options to engage all children in learning. In a school system truly open to new providers of instruction and diverse schooling options, private schools and public schools of choice can vie for customers by trying different subject themes and pedagogies. If a school's…

Since 1959, ACT has collected and reported data on students' academic readiness for college. This annual report focuses on the progress of the graduating class of 2014 relative to college readiness on a national level. In 2014, 57% of the graduating class took the ACT® college readiness assessment. The increased number of test takers over the past…

This technical report provides an overview of the New York State Alternate Assessment (NYSAA), including a description of the purpose of the NYSAA, the processes utilized to develop and implement the NYSAA program, and Stakeholder involvement in those processes. The purpose of this report is to document the technical aspects of the 2013-14 NYSAA.…

Media education has been around for quite some time in the West (Bazalgette et al. 1990), but it only started to gain acceptance in Asia (Cheung 2005), particularly in Hong Kong, in the last decade. Recently, it has been gaining more attention in Hong Kong thanks to the curriculum reform in which liberal studies will become one of the four core…

Using a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, The Missouri Institute of Mental Health produced a series of media tools designed to teach fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade children from African-American churches about the science of drug addiction. Beginning with a core curriculum, we created two separate interventions. In the…

Should the 21st-century university have a core curriculum? The report of the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education said nothing about general education, the learning that educated Americans should share. Instead the Spellings commission report highlighted broad access and measurable "value added" as the major…

This article maintains that nobody has a bigger stake in successful global cultural education than the United States Military Academy (USMA) in West Point, New York. Since the early 1990s, a bipolar world dominated by two superpowers has evolved into a world with a far less certain strategic outlook. This has spawned an increase in nontraditional…

Second Life's unstructured atmosphere and wide-open spaces where student creativity can grow and flourish are two of the reasons Pepperdine University Professor Bill Moseley integrated the program into his curriculum. In this article, the author discusses how Second Life works and its challenges. Second Life is often described as a 3-D version of…

Many educators agree that we already know how to foster student success, so what is keeping common sense from becoming common practice? The author provides step-by-step guidance for overcoming the barriers to adopting the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and achieving equity and excellence for all students. As an experienced teacher and…

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has invested in the development and dissemination of high-quality instructional and formative assessment tools to support teachers' incorporation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) into their classroom instruction. Lessons from the first generation of standards-based reforms suggest that intense…

This study reports findings from a year-long pilot study during which 991 students in 9 core courses in the Virginia State University School of Business replaced traditional textbooks with openly licensed books and other digital content. The university made a deliberate decision to use open textbooks that were copyrighted under the Creative…

The crisis in higher education is about more than money. It is about what one has been paying for, paying for dearly. The public, even in these hard times, supports higher education with its tax dollars. And families make huge sacrifices to send their sons and daughters to college. They deserve in return higher education that provides real…

The purpose of this study was to gather data from the Cache County School District to evaluate the perceptions of middle school students related to Technology, Life, and Careers (TLC) curriculum. The elements of TLC have been a core curriculum requirement for middle/junior high school students since 1987. It was designed to focus on the concerns…

Using a multiple-gating procedure, 5 research sites (3 elementary and 2 middle schools) were identified as implementing a Response to Intervention (RTI) framework. This study uses a multiple case study design to describe the RTI implementation in reading at these 5 sites. Findings suggest that the sites studied are utilizing a hybrid model (a…

As part of its College Readiness System, ACT offers the PLAN[R] program as a way for tenth-grade students to review their progress toward college readiness while there is still time to make necessary interventions. PLAN contains four tests--English, Mathematics, Reading, and Science. These tests are designed to measure students' curriculum-related…