The commercial exploitation of curriculum creates an anti-intellectual emphasis spawning a trade school mentality to secure jobs and a consumptionist drive to purchase status goods. Safeguards are needed, including disclosure labeling of corporate sponsorship, alternative instructional materials sources, improved teacher and student training, and…

Article points out that there is a stronger opinion these days that educators should be accountable for the progress of students. Accountability is discussed in terms of its strengths, dangers, and successes. (ML)

Summarizes one expert's structural approach to cooperative learning, including its positive effects on social behavior and race relations. Structural techniques such as "numbered heads together" help foster both positive interdependence and individual accountability. The conventional individualistic orientation can be very adaptive, but is also…

Some teachers justify group grading for cooperative projects using specious arguments that invoke real-world comparison, employment skills, motivation, teacher workload, and credit for teamwork. This article argues that group grades are blatantly unfair, invalidate report cards, undermine motivation, convey the wrong message, violate individual…

The structure of No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), whether the NCLB tests are appropriate or not and the adequate yearly progress (AYP) of public school students are discussed. Accountability systems implemented with inappropriate achievement tests are harming students more than helping them.

From talking with educators across the United States, the author has concluded that No Child Left Behind is having "an enormously positive impact." NCLB's most important benefit is a new focus on the academic performance of poor and minority students, English language learners, and students with disabilities. The law has also provided…

Alternative schools are definitive departures from the programmatic, organizational, and behavioral regularities inhibiting school reform. Many reforms now pursued in traditional schools were pioneered by alternative schools. Types include popular innovations, last-chance programs, and remedial programs. Advantages, disadvantages, common elements,…

A non-cushioned adequate yearly progress (AYP) sledgehammer will start pounding many schools from the beginning of 2005. The AYP-failed schools that receive Title 1 No Child Behind Policy (NCLB) funds will be placed on a sanction-laden improvement track than can improve a school all the way into nonexistence.

Assessment for learning involves the frequent, continual use of both formal and informal classroom assessments. It can be as simple as requiring students to respond to a lesson-embedded, one-item quiz as a way of gauging student understanding of what is being taught. Ideally, this innovative approach to classroom assessment is based on a careful…

An era of high-stakes testing and accountability may be producing classroom conditions that undermine student learning. When teachers must focus their energies on preparing students for the test, they have less time to get to know students personally or make them feel valued, respected, and supported. The author reviews research showing that…

Only a cooperative approach to teacher growth can effectively satisfy the compelling need to retrain and upgrade existing personnel. (Author)

Schools should prepare for the time when one-sixth of all Americans will be 65 or older by finding ways for the generations to learn from one another. (Author)

A study shows that schools in Minnesota either have no established goals or have broad goals that are unrelated to teaching programs or tests. (Author/JM)

Small schools (300 to 400 students) offer a real panacea for America's educational ills. New York City's celebrated Central Park East schools lack separate buildings, but have the climate and culture for developing democratic habits of heart and mind. Smallness can facilitate governance, respect, simplicity, safety, parent involvement,…