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The National Educational Goals, also known as the Goals 2000Act were set by the U.S. Congress in the 1990s to set goals for standards-based education reform. The intent was for certain criteria to be met by the millennium (2000). Many of these goals were based on the principles of outcomes-based education, and not all of the goals were attained by the year 2000 as intended. Many see this as the predecessor to the No Child Left Behind program, which mandated measurable improvement in student achievement across all groups. Goals 2000 established a framework in which to identify world-class academic standards, to measure student progress, and to provide the support that students may need to help meet the standards.
The goals stated in the Summary of Goals 2000 include: [1]
"The Goals 2000: Educate America Act (P.L. 103-227)" was signed into law on March 31, 1994 by President Bill Clinton. The Act provides resources to states and communities to ensure that all students reach their full potential.
It is based on the premise of outcomes-based education that students will reach higher levels of achievement when more is expected of them. Congress appropriated $105 million for fiscal year 1994. States submitted applications to develop school improvement plans, and make subgrants to local schools, and awards for pre-service and professional development.
In 1996, President Clinton introduced a competitive grant entitled the Technology Literacy Challenge Fund (TLCF). The president allocated 2 million dollars to ensure that every child in every school utilize technology to achieve high standards by the dawn of the 21st century. The president urged a variety of stakeholders from the private sector, schools, teachers, students, community groups, state and local governors and the federal government to work in a partnership toward achieving high levels of technology in schools.
In a 1996 letter to school Chief Operating Officers, President Clinton urged states and local school districts to work together in achieving the following four goals:
The overarching problem behind ensuring that every child in every school utilize an equal level of technology is the TLCF was a competitive grant. The issue with the competitive grant notion is that not all schools and therefore children could receive equal levels of technological assistance.
With the passage of Goals 2000, the first National Standards for Arts Education were created. There are content standards for dance, theater, music, and the visual arts. Every content standard is followed by several achievement standards describing how students are to demonstrate mastery of the content standards. The goals are not intended to be a curriculum. Instead, curriculum is to be developed locally on the basis of the goals. Standards are grouped in four divisions—creation and performance; cultural and historical context; perception and analysis; and the nature and value of the arts.
The Music Content Standards for each level are as follows:
With the final language of President George Bush's 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (H.R. 1) came the withdrawal of all authorization for Goals 2000. However, even though Congress had withdrawn its authorization for Goals 2000, if funding was not also withdrawn, the crippled, but alive Goals 2000 program would stagger on. Then, just before leaving town on December 21, 2001, Congress passed the Fiscal Year 2002 Education Appropriations Conference Committee report which eliminated spending on Goals 2000. Goals 2000 was no longer authorized or funded.
Additionally, in an article by Kenneth J. Cooper from The Washington Post dated December 3, 1999, he stated the following:
In the case of two goals, teacher quality and school safety, the panel reported the nation has actually gone backward. The percentage of teachers holding a college degree in the main subject they teach dropped from 66 percent to 63 percent, and there was a significant increase in student use of illicit drugs, from 24 percent to 37 percent in 10th grade.
Outcome-based education or outcomes-based education (OBE) is an educational theory that bases each part of an educational system around goals (outcomes). By the end of the educational experience, each student should have achieved the goal. There is no single specified style of teaching or assessment in OBE; instead, classes, opportunities, and assessments should all help students achieve the specified outcomes. The role of the faculty adapts into instructor, trainer, facilitator, and/or mentor based on the outcomes targeted.
Phonics is a method for teaching reading and writing to beginners. To use phonics is to teach the relationship between the sounds of the spoken language (phonemes), and the letters (graphemes) or groups of letters or syllables of the written language. Phonics is also known as the alphabetic principle or the alphabetic code. It can be used with any writing system that is alphabetic, such as that of English, Russian, and most other languages. Phonics is also sometimes used as part of the process of teaching Chinese people to read and write Chinese characters, which are not alphabetic, using pinyin, which is alphabetic.
Diane Silvers Ravitch is a historian of education, an educational policy analyst, and a research professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Previously, she was a U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education. In 2010, she became "an activist on behalf of public schools". Her blog at DianeRavitch.net has received more than 36 million page views since she began blogging in 2012. Ravitch writes for the New York Review of Books.
In education, a curriculum is the totality of student experiences that occur in an educational process. The term often refers specifically to a planned sequence of instruction, or to a view of the student's experiences in terms of the educator's or school's instructional goals. A curriculum may incorporate the planned interaction of pupils with instructional content, materials, resources, and processes for evaluating the attainment of educational objectives. Curricula are split into several categories: the explicit, the implicit, the excluded, and the extracurricular.
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) was a U.S. Act of Congress promoted by the Presidency of George W. Bush. It reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and included Title I provisions applying to disadvantaged students. It mandated standards-based education reform based on the premise that setting high standards and establishing measurable goals could improve individual outcomes in education. To receive federal school funding, states had to create and give assessments to all students at select grade levels.
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was passed by the 89th United States Congress and signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on April 11, 1965. Part of Johnson's "War on Poverty", the act has been one of the most far-reaching pieces of federal legislation affecting education ever passed by the United States Congress, and was further emphasized by the revised No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.
Founded in 1920, The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) is a professional organization for schoolteachers of mathematics in the United States. One of its goals is to improve the standards of mathematics in education. NCTM holds annual national and regional conferences for teachers and publishes five journals.
Synthetic phonics, also known as blended phonics or inductive phonics, is a method of teaching English reading which first teaches the letter sounds and then builds up to blending these sounds together to achieve full pronunciation of whole words.
The Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) is a Crown agency of the Government of Ontario in Canada. It was legislated into creation in 1996 in response to recommendations made by the Royal Commission on Learning in February 1995.
Music education is a field of practice in which educators are trained for careers as elementary or secondary music teachers, school or music conservatory ensemble directors. Music education is also a research area in which scholars do original research on ways of teaching and learning music. Music education scholars publish their findings in peer-reviewed journals, and teach undergraduate and graduate education students at university education or music schools, who are training to become music teachers.
Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) was a measurement defined by the United States federal No Child Left Behind Act that allowed the U.S. Department of Education to determine how every public school and school district in the country was performing academically according to results on standardized tests. As defined by National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME), AYP was "the amount of annual achievement growth to be expected by students in a particular school, district, or state in the U.S. federal accountability system, No Child Left Behind (NCLB)." AYP has been identified as one of the sources of controversy surrounding George W. Bush administration's Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Private schools were not required to make AYP.
Education reform in the United States since the 1980s has been largely driven by the setting of academic standards for what students should know and be able to do. These standards can then be used to guide all other system components. The SBE reform movement calls for clear, measurable standards for all school students. Rather than norm-referenced rankings, a standards-based system measures each student against the concrete standard. Curriculum, assessments, and professional development are aligned to the standards.
Sandra Stotsky is Professor emerita in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and held the 21st Century Chair in Teacher Quality. Her research ranges from teacher licensure tests, e.g., (1), coherence in the literature and reading curriculum, e.g., (2), and academic achievement in single-sex classrooms, e.g., (3) to critiques of Common Core’s standards in English language arts, e.g., (4) mathematics.(5), and US History and civic education (6), and other aspects of the Common Core project, e.g., (7), and to reviews of books in education, e.g., (8) She is an advocate of standards-based reform and strong academic standards and assessments for students and teachers.
Arts integration differs from traditional education by its inclusion of both the arts discipline and a traditional subject as part of learning The goal of arts integration is to increase knowledge of a general subject area while concurrently fostering a greater understanding and appreciation of the fine and performing arts. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts defines arts integration as "an approach to teaching in which students construct and demonstrate understanding through an art form. Students engage in a creative process which connects an art form and another subject and meets evolving objectives in both."
The Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) program was a program administered by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Primary education or elementary education is typically the first stage of formal education, coming after preschool/kindergarten and before secondary school. Primary education takes place in primary schools, elementary schools, or first schools and middle schools, depending on the location. Hence, in the United Kingdom and some other countries, the term primary is used instead of elementary.
Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of letters, symbols, etc., especially by sight or touch.
The Common Core State Standards Initiative, also known as simply Common Core, was a multi-state educational initiative begun in 2010 with the goal of increasing consistency across state standards, or what K–12 students throughout the United States should know in English language arts and mathematics at the conclusion of each school grade. The initiative was sponsored by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers.
Differentiated instruction and assessment, also known as differentiated learning or, in education, simply, differentiation, is a framework or philosophy for effective teaching that involves providing all students within their diverse classroom community of learners a range of different avenues for understanding new information in terms of: acquiring content; processing, constructing, or making sense of ideas; and developing teaching materials and assessment measures so that all students within a classroom can learn effectively, regardless of differences in their ability. Differentiated instruction means using different tools, content, and due process in order to successfully reach all individuals. Differentiated instruction, according to Carol Ann Tomlinson, is the process of "ensuring that what a student learns, how he or she learns it, and how the student demonstrates what he or she has learned is a match for that student's readiness level, interests, and preferred mode of learning." According to Boelens et al. (2018), differentiation can be on two different levels: the administration level and the classroom level. The administration level takes the socioeconomic status and gender of students into consideration. At the classroom level, differentiation revolves around content, processing, product, and effects. On the content level, teachers adapt what they are teaching to meet the needs of students. This can mean making content more challenging or simplified for students based on their levels. The process of learning can be differentiated as well. Teachers may choose to teach individually at a time, assign problems to small groups, partners or the whole group depending on the needs of the students. By differentiating product, teachers decide how students will present what they have learned. This may take the form of videos, graphic organizers, photo presentations, writing, and oral presentations. All these take place in a safe classroom environment where students feel respected and valued—effects.
In the United States, elementary schools are the main point of delivery of primary education, for children between the ages of 4–11 and coming between pre-kindergarten and secondary education.