School Reform at the Crossroads: Confronting the Central Issues of Teaching

Abstract

Despite many serious efforts at school reform, the nation is little closer to attaining its educational goals than it was a decade ago. Policy makers are just beginning to realize that most schools and teachers cannot provide the kind of teaching for all students that new standards demand, not because they do not want to but because they do not know how, and the systems in which they work do not support them in doing so. The policy challenge ahead is to develop schools' capacity to teach challenging content to diverse learners by ensuring teachers access to the knowledge they need to be effective and by developing new organizational forms that can support more powerful teaching and learning.