A subcommittee of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Executive Committee wrote the "NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing" in 2004. In over a decade since, the everyday experience of writing in people's lives has expanded dramatically. Increasingly, handheld devices are important instruments for people's writing,…

Does the nation need K-12 engineering education standards? The answer to this question is paradoxically both simple and complex, and requires an examination of a rationale for such standards as well as the opportunities and barriers to developing and implementing the standards. In two decades since 1989, the idea of national standards for…

This article presents ideas and suggestions from various physical educators regarding how the National Standards for Physical Education play a role in their daily PE program. One educator shares that in her middle school's physical education program, students who demonstrate competency in many movement forms (and proficiency in a few movement…

The new "Reading and Writing Standards" for years 1-8 (2009) and the "Literacy Learning Progressions" (2010) are the two documents that have been published to inform the New Zealand national standards in literacy. An earlier draft "Literacy Learning Progressions" document was circulated nationwide in 2007 to allow for…

Throughout the 1990s, one state after another adopted prescriptive education standards enforced by frequent standardized testing, often of the high-stakes variety. A top-down, get-tough movement to impose "accountability" began to squeeze the life out of classrooms. Recently, politicians, corporate CEOs, and testing companies are trying to sell…

The Coalition came to power in 2010 with a radical, controversial vision for education and set about transforming the UK landscape. The Secretary of State described how, in future, autonomous schools and colleges would compete with one another to raise standards, high performers would expand and others improve or disappear. His aim is for children…

The United States should not allow itself to be sucked into a competition against developing nations such as China, says Chinese-born American scholar Yong Zhao in an interview with Kappan. Instead, the U.S. should cling to and enhance the characteristics that have made it great, encouraging creativity, flexibility, and curiosity among its…

In this article, the author appropriates from Clint Eastwood's film simply to organize a few remarks on his experience working with Gary Nash on the project to develop the U.S. national standards for history back in the mid 1990s. Sound bites are a powerful political tool, and it did not take them long to realize that the attacks on the standards…

The majority of Americans have a shared vision that K-12 education needs to support children's ability to love, work and participate effectively in a democratic society. The National School Climate Center, a growing number of State Departments of Education and recently, the United States Department of Education believe that when school communities…

This article intends to present an overview of the present organizational aspects of doctoral programs in the USA, followed by a discussion of some challenges both the academic research community and other crucial players will have to rise to. The author's long-standing experience in research programs and institutional structures has led him to…

This paper reflects on the development of teacher continuing professional development (CPD) in Scotland, a constituent part of the United Kingdom that now has significant devolved powers within the United Kingdom--from a time when INSET was ill-coordinated and unvalued to the present reliance on CPD, with substantial investment, as the agent of…

The justification for national standards is that test scores predict a nation's future economic success. There is no evidence that supports this assumption. There is evidence that it is wrong. For more than half a century, reformers have been trying to fix our schools with little success. The obvious conclusion is that something that can't be…

What are the major priorities for preparing educational leaders for their work in school communities? Clues to this question are nestled within higher education curricula. Prevalent 21st-century priorities that governing standards specify, such as innovation, assessment, distributed leadership, and technology, must be vigorously shaped into social…

The author of this paper describes the responsibilities of the National Assessment Governing Board, of which she served as a member from November 1997 to September 2004. The Board is unlike any other board of which she has been a member. At the quarterly meetings, the Board not only discusses and makes major policy decisions but determines the…

Two education bills from George W. Bush's first term are long overdue for reauthorization. One, of course, is the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), passed in late 2001. The other is the Education Sciences Reform Act (ESRA), which in November 2002 replaced the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) with a new Institute of Education…