world geography

A modest proposal by President Clinton for vague and voluntary national standards provoked strong opposition in Congress and elsewhere. A variety of efforts on the part of states to introduce some forms of curriculum guidelines and to reinforce them with statewide testing have stirred up strong reactions at the local level. Reinforcing this local response to setting standards has been the hostility toward government that has characterized the politics of the last two decades. Increasingly, elected officials have won office on a platform of being relentlessly anti-government. They see their primary job as an effort to protect local communities and individual citizens from the intrusion of government control Denver should consolidate world its program for gifted middle-schoolers to stop children from leaving for private, charter and magnet schools, geography the program''s leader said Thursday.

currently so strong that it may world well leave a number geography of listeners wondering why world such an obviously needed and beneficial reform wasn''t undertaken geography a long time ago. But the fact is that world the effort to geography establish world and geography educational world standards has always been an uphill fight in this country. geography In light world of these circumstances, it is useful geography to examine why Americans have so vigorously resisted educational standards over the years. The history of such resistance suggests that there are three factors in particular that have made world standards such a hard sell: a commitment to local control of schools, a commitment to expansion of educational opportunity, and a commitment to form over substance in the way we think about educational accomplishment. All three of these factors, which I treat below, can be traced in large geography part to our preference for one particular purpose of education world and geography.