American schools have always been locally created and controlled. But ever since the Title I program in 1965 appropriated nearly one billion dollars for public schools, federal money and programs have been influencing every school in America. What has been accomplished in this extraordinary assertion of federal influence? What hasn't? Why not? With incisive clarity and wit, David Cohen and Susan Moffitt argue that enormous gaps existed between policies and programs, and the real-world practices that they attempted to change. Learning and teaching are complicated and mysterious. So the means to achieve admirable goals are uncertain, and difficult to develop and sustain, particularly when teachers get little help to cope with the blizzard of new programs, new slogans, new tests, and new rules. Ironically, as the authors observe, the least experienced and least well-trained teachers are often in the most needy schools, so federal support is compromised by the inequality it is intended to ameliorate. If new policies and programs don't include means to create the capability they require, they cannot succeed. We don't know what we need to enable states, school systems, schools, teachers, and students to use the resources that programs offer. The trouble with standards-based reform is that standards and tests still don't teach you how to teach.

Inquiry, Data, and Understanding is a reflective collection of papers in which Lorin Anderson offers his personal perspective on developments in educational research over thirty years. Following an introductory chapter, in which educational research is defined as disciplined inquiry, the remaining chapters are divided into four sections: time and learning, factors influencing educational effectiveness, international perspectives, and the nature and purpose of educational research. Each section contains an introduction that places the chapters in that section in a historical and personal context. The fourth section, which concludes the book, summarises four lessons that were learned about becoming a researcher. Based on these lessons, the final chapter describes four needs that must be met if school and classroom research is to move forward: * The need for concept-based research * The need to put students back into the equation * The need to stop focusing on correlates of student achievement * The need for research on alterable variables.

This book presents a comprehensive evaluation study of elementary education in Israel conducted over several years and completed in 1977. The study concentrates on Jewish schools, but some data are presented from parallel studies in the Arab Schools. A notable feature of the study is its unusually large scope both in size and content. It sampled nearly ten percent of Jewish schools and fifteen percent of Arab schools. The content includes a great variety of areas: cultural origins, home conditions and socialization patterns of pupils, conditions and practices in schools, teachers' and principals' backgrounds and their attitudes toward central issues in education, pupils' personality characteristics and motivations related to school experience, their learning abilities and achievements in five major school subjects. Special emphasis is given to the disadvantaged pupils, and an examination of the problem of equality of educational opportunity. This study's uniqueness lies in a novel approach in the measurement and analysis of scholastic achievements. Like all studies in the "psychometric" tradition, it places pupils in a position related to an advantaged pupil group. But test construction and most data analyses were carried out by the criterion-reference approach combined with a notion of "master learning." This enabled presentation of the absolute achievement level of a pupil or a pupil group vis-a-vis the optimal and minimal requirements of the curriculum and each school subject, as well as for its various content area. This approach permits much more than the traditional methods, utilization of results for deliberation and revision in educational policies. This applies particularly to curriculum construction and methods of instruction. It may also lead to a more appropriate definition of the disadvantaged pupil. Five chapters of the study present a historical review and sociological analysis of the problems of Israeli education and deal with specific methodological considerations. The twelve following chapters present detailed results and analysis for each topic of investigation.