It means engaging learners in the process of making sense of the systems that give shape and order to that world. It means helping them discover their own place in it, their own ability to act upon it, their own capacity to make a difference in it. Given the performance, scope, and size of American education, this is an enormous challenge. Over the next decade, enrollment will increase by another 3 million students. Just to maintain the current level of class and school size in grades K-12, the nation will need 190,000 additional teachers and more than 6,000 additional schools.
Recent reports repeat a well-known story.
The most rigorous international comparison of education ever conducted shows that in mathematics, our eighth-graders on average score below their peers in 41 countries. In science, they score below the eighth-graders in such countries as Hungary, Korea, Japan, the Czech Republic, and Singapore. To improve student learning, we must begin by strengthening curriculum, instruction, and assessment. These fields of education have generated distinct bodies of research, couched in the different idioms of the content areas, psychology, and statistics. Only by bringing together these languages can we work together effectively to improve achievement.