ACEI/Alliance for Curriculum Reform.

In 1994, ACEI joined the Alliance for Curriculum Reform (ACR), a group of 31 national, not-for-profit, non-government, professional education organizations that share an interest in improving pre K-12 curriculum and instruction. ACR's mission is to provide unified leadership, with an emphasis on helping to develop and implement voluntary national curriculum standards. The Association is represented at ACR meetings by ACEI President Sue Wortham and members Sandra Stone and Phyllis Benner. Shirley Raines and Jerry Odland are alternates.

ACEI became a member of the Alliance in an effort to gain a stronger voice in school reform and restructuring. Like other ACR member organizations, we believe that careful attention to curriculum and instruction is a vital part of any effort to improve education.

The move to develop performance standards goes hand-in-hand with the reform movement. The following article by Anita M. Seline reports on an Alliance meeting held in Alexandria, Virginia, this past April to discuss the move for higher standards for students.

The effort to improve performance assessments is at a critical juncture, and ACR can influence its success or failure. Education organizations involved with ACR must be prepared to defend and push for continued reform, said leaders at a recent ACR meeting.

"Performance assessments are vulnerable. It's up to the members to provide political support," stressed Ramsay Selden of the council of Chief State School Officers, at an ACR meeting last spring. "There are chronic naysayers about performance assessments who are too effective," he added. "There is no discussion about what to do with those questions. The far right is raising questions about performance standards, and it's creating the potential that our efforts to move to performance standards will fall through."

Roy Truby, Executive Director of the National Assessment Governing Board, cautioned, however, that Alliance members cannot ignore those who criticize the performance assessment movement. "We have to talk with people who don't agree with us or who appear not to agree with us," he said. "We sometimes talk about the right wing in ways that we would not tolerate people speaking about other groups." He continued, "We've lost the language argument on outcomes-based education. We are going to have to have much more dialogue [on performance based assessment)."

But some participants reminded the speakers that performance assessment must be linked to staff development. "I don't see any reform coming without staff development because teachers won't understand it," said one participant. Eugene Paslov of the New Standards Project told participants to "keep the faith" about changing performance assessments. "It is vital to the survival of our schools," he said. "If we can't show in a comprehensive way that our youth are performing as well as children in other countries, then we face the possibility of the loss of the American public school system. We are at the brink. "

During the second day of the conference, Milt Goldberg, who headed the Federal Commission on Time and Learning, spoke about the Commission's findings. The Commission studied classrooms across the country and identified five hurdles blocking better learning and teaching in America's schools.

First, the school day is designed so that every student, regardless of his or her learning style, is given the same amount of time to learn something. The faulty thinking," Goldberg explained," is that if a student needs more time, there's something wrong with that student. Second, the push to implement new and higher standards for students without changing the structure of the school day puts more pressure on the system. You've got a school system organized the same way it was 150 years ago."

Another problem is the "battle" in the class room between academic and non-academic time. The fourth hurdle described by the Commission is teachers. They want more time to prepare for teaching, while at the same time reformers are telling them that they must play a stronger role in the schools. "There is an unfortunate perception that unless [teachers are] in front of a class, they're not working," Goldberg said.

The family is the final hurdle. For many students, when school ends at 2:00, they are released to the streets or to go home and sit in front of a television. Many children have little or no adult supervision and, therefore, little homework is completed. Schools, Goldberg said, must recognize this problem and respond to it. Goldberg gave examples of schools that have cleared individual hurdles, but he said that no school has cleared all of them.

Goldberg said educators must think about making a radical change to the system, and must be prepared to take on special interests. In addition, the community must be involved in the discussions from the start, he said, noting that change has succeeded in schools that have responded to the needs of their neighborhoods.

Goldberg also believes that American schools assess students too much, much more so than other countries. Many participants agreed with this. "Not every shoe fits everybody," said Gwen Alexander of the National Council of Teachers of English. "We must restructure our schools to meet the needs of students." Glen Cutlip of the National Education Association said that the NEA had looked at some of the same issues that the Commission studied.

Schools are constrained by time limits and time is the driver," Cutlip said. "Teachers have no control over how time is used in the classroom."