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…

What is striking about the Goals 2000 initiative is its virtual omission of the student, except as passive receptacle. To claim that students will learn more with heightened expectations is misleading. For content to take root, it must connect with students' internal "prepared structures" and become a "comfortable friend." In…

Teachers, principals, school systems, parents, and textbook publishers have been blamed for students' failure to meet tougher standards. Instead, expectations for achieving unreasonable state and Goals 2000 standards should be critically examined. Testing state legislators, school board members, administrators, and teachers might illuminate the…

Title II of Goals 2000 created the National Educational Standards and Improvement Council (NESIC), a federally funded agency to devise national content and performance standards in key academic subjects and certify state-submitted standards. Since Republicans have taken over Congress, this council is finished. Any private successor must mount…

The inequities of schools (for both students and teachers) can only be perpetuated by the imposition of national standards through Goals 2000. Since school culture is embedded in our social structures, we should totally reinvent schools by helping children become caring adults, builders of communities, sharers of learning, lovers of the printed…

Although one national goal proposes that all Americans will have all knowledge necessary to compete in a global economy and exercise citizenship responsibility, others fail to explain how children incarcerated in standards-driven schools will make sense of the world. The microsociety school approach radically recontextualizes in-school learning by…

Goals 2000 is the offspring of "A Nation at Risk," a 1983 teacher- and school-bashing report. IBM CEO Louis Gerstner named the problem and defined the solution, claiming the need for choice, competition, and technology, recasting students as human capital, and marketizing the teacher/community relationship. Tables summarize critics'…