The at-risk concept has become a deficit notion. Policymakers neglect those for whom at-risk programs are intended, ignoring accounts of institutional injustice previously accompanying the term. At-risk has become an administrative agenda that identifies failure before it occurs. Effective reform efforts require parents, teachers, and students who…

Examines assessment policy in Arizona over a decade, using interview, observation, and archival data. Policy shifted from basic skills and standardized testing to progressive reform by performance testing to high-stakes standardized testing using state standards. The Arizona Student Assessment Program is described, discussing the Academic Summit…

President Clinton's human capital agenda emphasizes efforts to ensure the future strength of the United States economy by investing in education and training citizens. The paper describes the agenda and the legislation it shaped, focusing on K-12 reforms and the changing federal role in education. (Author/SM)

Suggests that parenting is a societal construction, and that construction includes multiple messages from policymakers, popular media, researchers, and educators that too many parents are either incompetent or unwilling to parent effectively. The paper suggests that Erikson's psychosocial theory of the individual life span can guide consideration…

The "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas" decision was a crucial 20th century civil rights event. However, civil rights leaders underestimated the depth of racism and the enormity of the task of getting all black agricultural workers into the mainstream economy. That task, left over from slavery, still faces the American…

Examines opportunity-to-learn (OTL) standards, which define conditions that schools, districts, and states must meet to ensure students an equal education. Offers an explanation of the states' historical inability to influence equal education, and proposes principles for designing new state policies. Includes recommendations to the states for…

Using Halpern's 1997 psychosocial model of cognitive development, this article evaluates and extends the literature demonstrating that gender differences on standardized tests of quantitative reasoning may reflect underlying differences in cognitive processing that may be explained in part by socialization patterns inherent in American culture.…

Since 1954, the force of law has been required to achieve much of America's school desegregation. Though "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas" (1954) provided a legal basis for equal education, many inequalities still exist. In order to fulfill "Brown"'s mandate, the education community must accept its leadership…

Describes planning backwards, the Coalition of Essential Schools' educational policymaking strategy for high schools. The article discusses five possible dilemmas in planning backwards: outcomes or exhibitions, local or remote authority, rigid or flexible standards, apartness or authenticity in assessment, and curriculum scaffolds built of courses…

Critical and revisionist historians of American education have generated a model of education in a capitalist society that has a functionalist orientation. However, this model does not properly acknowledge the importance of society's contradictions, disjunctions, and incoherence in social and educational change. (FG)

Paper considers the strategy of using aligned policies to encourage more ambitious instruction for all students from the perspective of elementary classroom teachers charged with implementing such instruction. Nine elementary teachers' responses to their local school district's efforts to press more ambitious ideas about literacy instruction are…

The article explains briefly the provisions of Goals 2000, emphasizing its support of ongoing educational change at the state and local levels and state flexibility to develop diverse approaches to reform. To illustrate this flexibility, the article describes reform activities in Vermont, Delaware, and Oregon, and explains how these states are…

The article addresses the demographic circumstances of student diversity, which have grown significantly in American schools in recent years and have posed a challenge for school reform. The article examines the emerging knowledge base and discusses federal education reform policy changes related to student cultural and linguistic diversity. (SM)