"What year are you preparing your students for? 1973? 1995? Can you honestly say that your school's curriculum and the program you use are preparing your students for 2015 or 2020? Are you even preparing them for today?" With those provocative questions, author and educator Heidi Hayes Jacobs launches a powerful case for overhauling, updating, and injecting life into the K-12 curriculum. Sharing her expertise as a world-renowned curriculum designer and calling upon the collective wisdom of 10 education thought leaders, Jacobs provides insight and inspiration in the following key areas: * Content and assessment: How to identify what to keep, what to cut, and what to create, and where portfolios and other new kinds of assessment fit into the picture. * Program structures: How to improve our use of time and space and groupings of students and staff. * Technology: How it's transforming teaching, and how to take advantage of students' natural facility with technology. * Media literacy: The essential issues to address, and the best resources for helping students become informed users of multiple forms of media. * Globalization: What steps to take to help students gain a global perspective. * Sustainability: How to instill enduring values and beliefs that will lead to healthier local, national, and global communities. * Habits of mind: The thinking habits that students, teachers, and administrators need to develop and practice to succeed in school, work, and life. The answers to these questions and many more make Curriculum 21 the ideal guide for transforming our schools into what they must become: learning organizations that match the times in which we live.

The report analyzes an array of issues pertaining to accessibility, student achievement, governance, and operation of charter schools in California. Four specific research questions were investigated: (1) What population of students attends charter schools? (2) Is student achievement higher in charter schools than in conventional public schools? (3) What oversight and support do the chartering authorities provide? (4) How do charter schools differ from their conventional public school counterparts in terms of their operation, including finances, academic achievement, and staffing?

Shows how charter schools have changed in the years since their development, looks at their role in educational reform, and provides background information and details for the future of chartering.

Offers practical advice on using and improving assessment for learning in the classroom.

This book breaks new ground on how policymakers and journalists can fairly assess charter school performance. The editors and authors show how good approaches to charter school assessment would also work for regular public schools, which is important because of the requirements of No Child Left Behind.

Represents the content of science education and includes the essential skills and knowledge students will need to be scientically literate citizens. Includes grade-level specific content for kindergarten through eighth grade, with sixth grade focus on earth science, seventh grade focus on life science, eighth grade focus on physical science. Standards for grades nine through twelve are divided into four content strands: physics, chemistry, biology/life sciences, and earth sciences.

After decades of reform, America's public schools continue to fail particular groups of students; the greatest opportunity gaps are faced by those whose achievement is hindered by complex stressors, including disability, trauma, poverty, and institutionalized racism. When students' needs overwhelm the neighborhood schools assigned to serve them, they are relegated to increasingly isolated educational environments. Unconditional Education (UE) offers an alternate approach that transforms schools into communities where all students can thrive. It reduces the need for more intensive and costly future remediation by pairing a holistic, multi-tiered system of supports with an intentional focus on overall culture and climate, and promotes systematic coordination and integration of funding and services by identifying gaps and eliminating redundancies to increase the efficient allocation of available resources. This book is an essential resource for mental health and educational stakeholders (i.e., school social workers, therapists, teachers, school administrators, and district-level leaders) who are interested in adopting an unconditional approach to supporting the students within their schools.