Standards
Resources and Evaluation Standards
Resources and Evaluation
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
1015 18th Street, NW, Suite 300
Washington, D.C. 20036
Phone: (202) 223-5452
Fax: (202) 223-9226
Website: http://www.edexcellence.net
The Fordham Standards Project (http://www.edexcellence.net/standards/best.html) looks at state standards across the country, including an overview of the way specific subjects are treated throughout the nation, as well as a look at the best out there.
Achieve, Inc., Resource Center
on Standards, Assessment, Accountability, and Technology
Website: www.achieve.org
Achieve, a private, not-for-profit organization, assists Governors and business leaders in their efforts to improve student achievement to world class levels through the development and implementation of high academic standards, assessments, and accountability systems and the effective use of technology to achieve standards. Achieve is developing a national clearinghouse of information and research on academic standards.
No Excuses Campaign
214 Massachusetts Ave., NE
Washington, DC 20002-4999
Phone: 202-608-6205
Fax 202-608-6087
Website: http://www.noexcuses.org/
The No Excuses campaign is a national effort to mobilize public pressure on behalf of better education for the poor. It brings together concerned citizens who are committed to high academic achievement among children of all races, ethnic groups, and family incomes, in the belief that there is no excuse for the academic failure of most public schools serving poor children.
Parents Raising Educational Standards in Schools (PRESS) P.O. Box 26913 Milwaukee, WI 53226 Phone: 414-607-3950 Fax: 414-607-3951 Email: presswis@execpc.com Website: www.execpc.com/~presswis
PRESS is a grass roots education group started by a handful but now made up of hundreds of school board members, parents, educators and civic leaders who are motivated, dedicated, and concerned about their children’s education.
Education Leaders
Council
1001 Connecticut Avenue, N. W., Suite 204
Washington, D.C. 20036
Phone: 202.822.9000
Fax: 202.822.5077
ELC is committed to changing the terms of the education debate in this nation, away from business-as-usual and toward raising standards and getting results. Publications include The Standards Primer: A Resource for Accelerating the Pace of Reform. Designed as a guide through the maze of confusion surrounding the standards-setting efforts of recent years, this book reviews the history of standards, looks at states' successes and failures, and provides a resource directory to help standards-setters find the help and guides they need.
StandardsWork, Inc.
1001 Connecticut Avenue N.W.
Suite 901
Washington, DC 20036
Phone: 202-835-2000
Fax: 202-659-4494
E-mail: connect@goalline.org
Website: www.goalline.org, www.standardswork.org
StandardsWork provides technical assistance to states, districts, communities and organizations that want to implement standards-driven reform.
Curriculum
Resources and Vendors
The Association Montessori
International, AMI/USA
410 Alexander Street
Rochester, NY 14607 1028
Telephone: 716-461-5920
Fax: 716-461-0075
E-mail: AMIUSA@AMI.EDU
Website: http://www.ami.edu
The Association Montessori International was founded in 1929 by Dr. Maria Montessori to maintain the integrity of her life’s work, and to ensure that it would be perpetuated after her death. AMI’s activities include:
The Center for Civic Education
5146 Douglas Fir Rd.
Calabasas, CA, 91302-1467
Phone: 818-591-9321
Fax: 818-591-9330
E-mail: cce@civiced.org
Website: http://www.civiced.org/
The Center for Civic Education is a nonprofit, nonpartisan educational corporation dedicated to fostering the development of informed, responsible participation in civic life by citizens committed to values and principles fundamental to American constitutional democracy.
Coalition of Essential Schools
1814 Franklin Street Suite 700
Oakland, CA 94612
Phone: (510) 433-1451
Fax: (510) 433-1455
Website: http://www.essentialschools.org
The Coalition of Essential Schools is a high school-university partnership that works across the country to redesign the American high school for better student learning and achievement. Member schools hold common principles that focus each school's effort to rethink its priorities and redesign its structures and practices. Each school develops its own programs, suited to its particular students, faculty, and community. The member schools serve as examples of a variety of thoughtfully redesigned schools. The Coalition creates professional development activities and programs specifically for planning and member school faculties and routinely shares results of its research findings with the schools.
The Coalition of Essential Schools was born out of the research of educator and school reform leader Theodore R. Sizer. He distilled the findings of his Study of High Schools (1979-84) into five imperatives for better schools, fleshed out in Sizer's Horace's Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School (Houghton Mifflin, 1984).
Core Knowledge Foundation
801 East High Street
Charlottesville, VA, 22902
Contact: Dr. Connie Jones
Phone: 434-977-7550
Fax: 434-977-0021
Website: http://www.coreknowledge.org/
Email: coreknow@coreknowledge.org
The Core Knowledge Foundation, a non-profit organization founded in 1986, is dedicated to excellence and fairness in early education.
The Core Knowledge Sequence is a consensus-based model of specific content guidelines that, as the basis of about 50% of a school's curriculum, can provide a solid, coherent foundation of learning for students in the elementary and middle grades.
The Sequence offers a planned progression of specific content knowledge in history, geography, mathematics, science, language arts, and fine arts. It represents a first and ongoing attempt to state specifically a core of shared knowledge that children should learn in American schools.
Direct
Instruction in Education
by Martin A. Kozloff, Louis LaNunziata, University of North Carolina at
Wilmington,
James Cowardin, Achievement Charter Systems,
January, 1999
This paper examines Direct Instruction--one branch of the "instructivist" approach in education (Finn & Ravitich, 1996). The paper is divided into the following sections: 1) a definition of the instructivist approach; 2) the mission of instructivist educators; 3) varieties of instructivist education; 4) principles of instruction and classroom organization derived from research on learning; 5) a description of a class where Direct Instruction is used; and 6) correction of certain myths about education guided by instructivist principles--myths that decrease students' access to effective education.
Link Institute
270 Redwood Shores Parkway, PMB 514
Redwood City, CA 94065
Phone: 650-631-1066
Fax: 650-631-0366
Website: www.linkinstitute.org
Patricia Farnsworth, President
Link Institute, a non-profit organization, is committed to promoting and supporting schools with rigorous academic content and virtue-based character education. Link Institute works with parents, teachers, administrators, and policy-makers to further this vision of excellence. Link Institute develops and distributes ideas, materials and tools that foster content and character in the classroom.
Mathematically Correct!
PO Box 22083
San Diego, CA 92192-2083
Email: math@mathematicallycorrect.com
Website: http://www.mathematicallycorrect.com
Mathematically Correct is devoted to addressing the concerns raised by parents and scientists about the invasion of our schools by the New-New Math and the need to restore basic skills to math education.
MontessoriConnections provides all who are interested in Montessori education with information about and links to schools, training centers, businesses or organizations associated with Montessori, as well as other areas of information for administrators, teachers, parents and students.
National Association for Music Education lists national standards for music education and many useful links.
American Music Conference provides research information and links.
National Paideia Center
School of Education
Campus Box #8045
UNC-Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599
Contact: Terry Roberts
Telephone: (919) 962-7379
Fax: (919) 962-7381
E-mail: npc@unc.edu
Website: http://www.unc.edu/depts/ed/Paideia/testfr.html
The Paideia Program seeks to provide a rigorous, liberal arts education in grades k-12 that allows all graduates to have the skills necessary to earn a living, to think and act critically as responsible citizens, and to continue educating themselves as life-long learners.
The National Paideia Center seeks to do the following:
National Right to Read Foundation
P.O. Box 490,
The Plains, VA 20198
http://www.nrrf.org/
The mission of The National Right to Read Foundation (NRRF) is to return to the schools of America reading instruction which follows scientifically based reading research.
The Riggs Institute
4185 S.W. 102nd Avenue
Beaverton, Oregon, 97005
503-646-9459 / fax 503-644-5191
Email: riggs@riggsinst.org
Website: http://www.riggsinst.org/
The Riggs Institute is a non-profit literacy agency that offers practical help, through training and literacy materials, to teachers, parents and tutors to learn to teach the basic phonics, reading, spelling and writing skills students need.
Saxon Publishers, Inc.
2450 John Saxon Blvd.
Norman, OK 73071
Customer Service/Sales: 1-800-284-7019, Local: (405) 329-7071
Fax: (405) 360-4205
Website:
http://www.saxonpub.com
E-mail: info@saxonpub.com
Saxon Publishers, Inc. was founded on the premise that math was not being taught effectively and that it was not the fault of the teachers nor the students, but the textbooks they used. Most textbooks were divided into large chapters that took many days to cover. Saxon divided its textbooks into daily lessons, each containing a small increment of new learning. Every day's homework, called a problem set, contained problems that encompassed all the previous concepts and skills covered that year.
Initial use of the algebra textbook yielded very favorable results in studies comparing it to other textbooks. The pedagogical approach that underlies all the programs that Saxon publishes contains continuous distributed review, incremental development, and frequent cumulative testing.
The use of Saxon textbooks, now spanning from kindergarten through calculus and now including physics, has resulted in documented success - from increases in scores on standardized tests to increases in enrollments in higher level mathematics and science courses. Teachers have reported back increased confidence and enthusiasm for mathematics following the use of the Saxon program.
Saxon Publishers has recently expanded its scope to include phonics.
Spalding Education International
2814 W Bell Road
Phoenix, AZ 85053
Phone: 602-866-7801
Fax: 602-866-7488
Website: http://spalding.org
Spalding Education International is a non-profit organization dedicated to teaching teachers and home schoolers how to teach reading using the phonics-based Spalding Method.
Success for All Foundation
200 West Towsontown Blvd.
Baltimore, MD 21204-5200
Phone: 1-800-548-4998
Website: http://www.successforall.net/
Success for All is a comprehensive restructuring program for elementary schools, especially those serving many disadvantaged and at-risk students. Its goal is to ensure that every child becomes a confident, strategic, and motivated reader and writer throughout the elementary years.
The Textbook League: California watchdog group that provides independent, expert appraisals of textbooks that publishers are currently selling to schools.
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