The court decision required high-quality educational standards to be written in specific detail. The master plan identified four elements of an effective educational system: standards for high-quality programs and services; required administrative and instructional practices; equitable funding methods; and accountability. (PB)

Charged to reconsider what indicators would capture and convey important truths about education and learning, the National Center for Education Statistics' Special Study Panel on Education Indicators wrote a 1991 report that rejected most conventional notions of indicators. Instead, they focused on learner outcomes, institutional quality, school…

School choice will not be an issue in 2000 because many parents will have demanded it and public will have rediscovered consumer power as time-honored American way to encourage innovation and improvement. Marysville, Tennessee, schools are good example; nation should watch as California grapples with population challenges. This year, the state…

Argues that standards-based education reform has shifted the focus of school finance from equity to adequacy. Requires an explicit connection between the funding provided to schools and the results produced in terms of student learning. (Contains 19 references.) (MLF)

Although Darling-Hammond's emphases as a teacher, researcher, and college professor shifted over a distinguished 25-year career, her three driving concerns remain the serious and thoughtful training of highly professional teachers; elimination of inequities in school funding, resources, and access to qualified teachers; and personalization of…

Neoconservative advocates of private and religious school choice are trying to exploit the dissatisfactions of poor, predominantly minority parents to create a publicly funded private school system free of public control and oversight. This alternative system would inevitably reproduce and legally sanction the "separate but equal"…

Reviews the impact on education of the first year's application of Massachusetts' Proposition 2-1/2, examines local factors linked to retrenchment policies, and considers the law's distributive impact among variously sized population centers. Analyzes projections of the law's second-year urban impact and its implications for educational equity in…

Our present factory-model educational system, now desperately undergoing "restructuring," was never intended as a social equalizer but as a great American academic and social sorting machine. The archaic, restrictive goals of America 2000 are doomed, along with narrowly defined intelligence quotients. A more revolutionary, restructuring…

Self-interested political, corporate, and education leaders have undermined recent West Virginia court decisions mandating educational reform. Three implications are: (1) principals, teachers, parents, and students must be equal partners in the educaiton reform process; (2) a constituency for rural children is needed; and (3) rural educators must…

In Texas, control of schooling has shifted from the public toward business-controlled management accountability systems--exemplified in the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills ("the Texas Accountability System"). TAAS adversely affects teaching and learning by mandating a "test-prep" noncurriculum, discriminating against…

The current obsession with standardizing curricula and measuring output may further reduce teacher agency and marginalize segments of our society that are already cheated by the system. Enormous discrepancies exist among public-school facilities, resources, and teachers. Multicultural education will suffer unless legislatures address these…

Because many school funding studies are seriously flawed, valid conclusions cannot be reached concerning the effects of school funding in the United States. New evidence from the National Assessment of Educational Progress and two international achievement tests shows that differences among U.S. public school districts (and states) in funding and…

Alternative high schools whose power emanates from variety, choice, and personal relationships are hindered from succeeding by sending schools' practices. Alternatives lack control over who attends, student diversity, time of entry, who teaches, program definition, and graduation policies. They often have inferior facilities and insufficient…

Business should participate in school reform but has too narrow a perspective to guide it. Nationalizing education through comparative testing is a move to cut spending for social services, to increase accountability and efficiency without increasing financial responsibility or equity. Imposing private-sector rules on public education undermines…

Asserts that many privileged parents are sacrificing other children to their own and mortgaging their own children's lives. Affluent high-achievers often back ultraconservatives' efforts to derail detracking reforms, believing education is competitive and their children deserve more consideration than have-nots. Principals must appeal to parents'…