Because public health problems affect schools and communities so pervasively, schools inevitably must alter their mission to act as important service delivery sites for public health services, as well as for some community primary health services. Learning comes easier to healthy children, and health problems interfere with learning.…

Maintains that the effort to develop and implement national standards in the arts is politically correct but not free of psychological or pedagogical viewpoints. Asserts that educators must formulate the right questions and assess objectively the potential outcomes of an arts education program in reformed schools. (CFR)

To shed light on how states can use school performance data to support failing schools, the present study examined a subset of underperforming schools in South Carolina in the wake of a series of state-supported interventions. The study, part of a comprehensive evaluation of the South Carolina External Review Team Program, made extensive use of…

Instead of perpetuating a macroeconomic labor-exchange model, educators must discover how to promote individual career planning for everyone. If each person has one lifelong career, we must help people get and keep jobs, while helping them plan future worklives and balance work roles and responsibilities with other life roles. (22 references) (MLH)

This document provides a portfolio of resources for educators involved in rural school improvement. The Federal Interagency Committee on Education developed a national research and development (R&D) agenda for rural education that focuses on six themes: rural school effectiveness, curricular provisions, school-community partnerships, human…

This document is a background paper for satellite town meeting on the "Goals 2000: Educate America Act." The paper discusses the importance of studying the arts for themselves, and as a means of helping students learn other subjects. It suggests that studying the arts prepares students for the workplace and helps to build the United…

The process of instituting standards is well under way, thanks to mathematics teachers' efforts, the Bush Administration and governors' agreements about establishing national educational goals, and President Clinton's 1994 Goals 2000 legislation. There is no danger of a nationally imposed curriculum. States are using the standards process in…

In developing a national curriculum, ways must be found to challenge students and teachers, preserve initiative, and maintain democratic control. President Bush's New American Achievement Tests will consist of a system of examinations to be administered by individual states or clusters of states. Conversion should embody a grand,…

This 1998 technical report looks at California Early Literacy Learning (CELL), a staff development program designed to help elementary teachers strengthen their teaching of reading and writing. Reading Recovery and other research-based teaching methodologies have been organized into a framework for classroom instruction, and training in the…

For the first year in "what seems like eons," California's school districts will see an influx of new money, a large portion of it earmarked for developing competency in reading for students in kindergarten through grade 3. The expanded funding for reading results from a consensus among policy makers that the achievement of early…

This study used a cross-sectional survey design to determine the extent to which technology has been integrated in the schools with each of the eight National Education Goals as reported by elementary and secondary school principals from urban, suburban, and rural schools. The eight goals are defined in the Goals 2000 legislation enacted in 1994.…

Discusses how three states are implementing the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, focusing on Massachusetts' Common Core of Learning, Delaware's First Schools in the First State pilot curriculum project, and Oregon's Initial Mastery and Advanced Mastery certificates. Notes that one of the aims of Goals 2000 is to make states true laboratories of…

The intensive drive to promote national standards and assessments has gathered support from unproven connections between U.S. economic success and the nature of learning in schools. Now that teachers are being challenged to produce a bottom-up sea-change in their own classrooms, Uncle Sam's presence in the back of the room may be a growing problem…

The Michigan English Language Arts Framework (MELAF) offers an illustrative case of top-down and bottom-up confluences in curriculum policymaking. In several distinct ways, state policy met local initiatives to create dynamic partnerships to spread change. State systematic reformers looked to the grass roots for ideas and percolating initiatives.…

In response to the critical need for geographical knowledge, educators and concerned stakeholders have built a national consensus regarding content standards in "Geography for Life: National Geography Standards 1994." The 18 standards for grades K-4, 5-8, and 9-12 specify the essential knowledge, skills, and perspectives that students…