What's at Stake in the K-12 Standards Wars

Contents: Sandra Stotsky: Preface - Hung-Hsi Wu: The 1997 Mathematics Standards War in California - Ralph A. Raimi: Judging State Standards for K-12 Mathematics Education - Paul Clopton/Wayne Bishop/David Klein: Standards-Based Mathematics Assessments: Appearances May Be Deceiving - Stan Metzenberg: National Science Standards: Where is the Evidence Supporting Them? - Alan Cromer: The Science Standards Wars: What Is the Basis for Scientific Inquiry? - Paul R. Gross/Sandra Stotsky: How Children Learn Science: Do We Now Know? - Sheldon M. Stern: Why the Battle over History Standards? - Robert M. Costrell: Discipline-Based Economics Standards: Opportunity and Obstacles - Thomas Carnicelli: The English Language Arts in American Schools: Problems and Proposals - Sandra Stotsky: The State of Literary Study in National and State English Language Arts Standards: Why It Matters and What Can Be Done about It - Jeanne J. Smoot: Toward Improved English Language Arts Standards for K-12: What a College Professor Wishes Her Students Had Read - Mary Campbell Gallagher: Lessons from the Sputnik-Era Curriculum Reform Movement: The Institutions We Need for Educational Reform - Michael McKeown/David Klein/Chris Patterson: The National Science Foundation Systemic Initiatives: How a Small Amount of Federal Money Promotes III-Designed Mathematics and Science Programs in K-12 and Undermines Local Control of Education.

The Editor: Sandra Stotsky is Research Associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She received her Ed.D. in Reading from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In addition to numerous articles in professional journals and a monograph on state standards in the English language arts and reading, she wrote Losing Our Language: How Multicultural Classroom Instruction Is Undermining Our Children's Ability to Read, Write, and Reason and edited The Immigrant Experience, a series of library reference books.

«In discussions of K-12 standards and assessments, we hear a great deal from the education establishment, but very little from academic scholars, especially in mathematics and the sciences. It is impossible to understand exactly what the educational issues are and what we should be trying to do in standards-based reform if we do not also hear from the experts in the academic disciplines our students must study. This collections of essays by nationally known scholars and scientists constitutes the first substantial effort to correct this situation; every essay is food for thought for educational policy makers.» (Eugene Hickok, Secretary of Education, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania)
«This is the most deeply researched and powerfully reasoned book yet written on K-12 educational standards in math, science, history, and language arts. It is a superb work. I am dazzled by the learning and patriotism of the teachers, scientists, and scholars who have probed so deeply into current state and national standards, carefully assessing both their quality and the 'research' used to justify them. This is must reading for anyone in a position to affect educational policy.» (E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English, University Professor of Education and Humanities, University of Virginia)
«Standards-based school reform frequently inhabits a world right out of Alice in Wonderland - one in which standards aren't really standards and reform contributes absolutely nothing to the improvement of schools. Sandra Stotsky has assembled a set of papers to cut through the false claims and distortions. This is an indispensable volume.» (Tom Loveless, Brookings Institution)
«'Standards Wars' is a valuable guide to the big battles about academic standards that erupted in the 1990s. The contributors analyze the bitter debates that accompanied efforts to set standards at the national and state levels and shed light and reason on important issues that should concern parents,