Represents the content of science education and includes the essential skills and knowledge students will need to be scientically literate citizens. Includes grade-level specific content for kindergarten through eighth grade, with sixth grade focus on earth science, seventh grade focus on life science, eighth grade focus on physical science. Standards for grades nine through twelve are divided into four content strands: physics, chemistry, biology/life sciences, and earth sciences.

What happens to federal and state policies as they move from legislative chambers to individual districts, schools, and, ultimately, classrooms? Although policy implementation is generally seen as an administrative problem, James Spillane reminds us that it is also a psychological problem. After intensively studying several school districts' responses to new statewide science and math teaching policies in the early 1990s, Spillane argues that administrators and teachers are inclined to assimilate new policies into current practices. As new programs are communicated through administrative levels, the understanding of them becomes increasingly distorted, no matter how sincerely the new ideas are endorsed. Such patterns of well-intentioned misunderstanding highlight the need for systematic training and continuing support for the local administrators and teachers who are entrusted with carrying out large-scale educational change, classroom by classroom. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments 1. Making Education Policy Here, There, and Everywhere 2. Doing Standards: Content and Context 3. Interactive Policymaking 4. Making Policy, Making Sense 5. Resources for Sense-Making 6. The Schoolteacher and Interactive Policymaking 7. Policy in Practice 8. Implementation Reconsidered Appendix: Research Methods References Index Policy implementation is like the telephone game. . . . the player at the start of the line tells a story to the next person in line, who then relays the story to the third person in line. . . . by the time the story is retold by the final player, it is very different from the original. --chapter 1

Providing a clear framework, this volume helps school leaders align assessment and reporting practices with standards-based education and develop more detailed reports of children's learning and progress.