Word: curricula
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Tomorrow Massachusetts high school sophomores will take a lengthy standardized test to determine how much they have learned. This test, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), will provide essential information to secondary school educators about which areas of their curricula are being absorbed well and which areas need improvement. However, there is another side to this exam: The high school class of 2003, ninth-graders this year, will not receive high school diplomas if they cannot pass the English and mathematics sections of the test, which they will first take as sophomores...
...student's graduation from high school should never be contingent on one standardized test. While MCAS will help districts measure the relative success of their curricula in certain areas, it will also inflict too much punishment on too many students. High standards are important to improving student performance, but if they are coupled with a punitive test, Massachusetts education will suffer rather than benefit...
...Curricula at the Fletcher and Maynard schools are currently developed by individual teachers. The merged school will use a standardized curriculum, broadly grouped under four programs: the ATLAS community, the Core Knowledge curriculum, the Literacy Collaborative and the NetSchools program...
...whole desire of the charter school movement, to introduce competition" says TIME writer-reporter Jodie Morse. "If a school is bad, they cut it." Since 1991, 37 states have passed charter laws, which allow local residents to group together and submit charters, or proposals, complete with school philosophies and curricula, for alternative, publicly funded schools that operate outside the public school system, with few regulatory strings attached. Parents then apply for their children to relocate to the schools, where tuition is free. President Clinton has encouraged the trend, and has called for the creation of 3,000 charter schools...
...Cultural Literacy, on the premise that there's a canon of facts that all schoolchildren should know. In lieu of precise lesson plans, teachers are told that third-graders, for example, should study the Punic Wars and sixth-graders selections from Shakespeare. "There's been a real diffuseness in curricula," says former Education Secretary William Bennett, whose new book The Educated Child lays out a grade-school curriculum based on Core Knowledge. "Kids are reading Batman rather than Henry James, and that's got to change...