More About Education Reform

We aim to provide an accurate but simplified overview of the exciting, complicated and controversial world of education reform. Our goal is to help interested spectators and participants understand education reform and the ways it can help them meet their goals.

Efforts to improve education can generally be classified as emphasizing one of four broad categories:

Curriculum - the knowledge and skills that we want students to learn

Instruction - the ways we expect teachers to teach and students to learn

Assessment - how we know if students have learned what we want them to learn

School Site - where the learning happens

Education reform efforts also include two areas that cut across the four categories described above. These are:

Equity - how education can better serve those who are currently underserved
Systemic Reform - one prominent branch of current education reform, maintains that all the features described here must align and change in a coordinated, mutually supporting manner.
Who - a list of organizations providing resources and or services to facilitate education reform. Also check out the School Reform Networks at a Glance, a resource guide to some of the nation's largest and best known school-reform networks maintained by the students of the University of Texas Pan American and the Center for Applied Research in Education.

A similar page describes environmental education and facilitates connections between EE and education reform, using these same categories.