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I think a lot of his decisions are based on leadership,” Smith says of Edwards and his management. “You’ve got to have the right people on the bus, but not only that, they’ve got to be on the right seats on the bus.

instead, it tells teachers to seek their own content and align it to the subject curriculum

Teachers are expected to share lessons with colleagues electronically via ANGEL, the district’s content-management software, created by Washington-based Blackboard Inc., and all four schools in the district’s 1-to-1 program each employs a technology facilitator to aid that process. The district’s three elementary schools only began distributing laptops to its third graders this year.

"Technology allows them to become more productive and effective serving citizens with scarcer resources," says Andrew Bartels, analyst at Forrester Research.

Still, White House chief information officer Vivek Kundra last February announced an initiative to consolidate hundreds of redundant federal government databases. Kundra also called for stepping up the federal government's reliance on cloud-based systems to deliver public services.

"The longer-term effect is that this will help spur economic activity by creating governments that better facilitate commerce," says Rubel. He says tech-savvy government services "create better public policy outcomes for citizens."

Sovde, a former mathematics teacher and principal in the Bellevue (Wash.) Public Schools, says one of the tests PARCC is developing is a diagnostic assessment for the start of the year. He declares about the optional test, “If I were a district administrator, I would be jumping all over it, because it’s going to give you a good handle right up front about where your kids are.” All the new assessments will measure the abilities of students to solve problems, think conceptually, reason mathematically, and demonstrate more skills than rote memorization. “That’s going to be a shift, a different way of doing business,” says Sovde. The final, end-of-year summative assessment will require students to use computers or handheld devices to solve problems or think about mathematical issues. “It won’t be just a paper-and-pencil test put on a screen,” Sovde explains.

SBAC will ask students tailored questions based on their previous answers. It will continue to use one end-of-year test for accountability purposes but will create a series of interim tests to inform students, parents and teachers about whether students are on track.

more deeply than assessments do now into what students are learning in math and how they are learning it. “I think we’ll see some questions that apply to real-world settings, and I wouldn’t be surprised if students have to describe in writing how they got an answer rather than just filling in a blank with it

Savvy students denigrate that plagiarist. “It’s stupid to get caught taking things from the Internet,” one told me. “No one should be doing that” because it lacks subtlety. They rationalize other forms of cheating as more acceptable. Some claim thoughtless pedagogy justifies their own copying of homework. “We aren’t going to respect teachers who give us photocopied worksheets as ‘busywork.’ We’re not going to waste our time doing that.” Others assert they are “sticking it to the man,” who makes them overwork. Still others say that “as long as we do well on the tests, the homework doesn’t matter.” Grades are “the bottom line.”

They would not do it, they say, “if the school worked better.”

Conventional wisdom says the smaller the classes, the better the education, because teachers can pay more attention to each child. But while smaller classes are popular, decades of research has found that the relationship between class size and student outcomes is murky.

A study released in May by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University found that the Florida program had no effect on student achievement.

"They intuitively believe that small class sizes will allow more individual attention."

Whereas the best public-school systems in the world—Finland, Singapore, South Korea—recruit all of their teachers from the top third or better of their college graduates, in America the majority come from the bottom two-thirds, with just 14 percent of those entering teaching each year in high-needs schools coming from the upper third. And the numbers may be getting worse. According to a recent survey conducted by McKinsey, a meager 9 percent of top-third graduates have any interest in teaching whatsoever.

teacher quality is a national priority: Educators are paid competitively; education schools are highly selective; jobs are guaranteed for those credentialed; and professional development is ample and subsidized.

“If you want to change public education, you have to do something that feels like a threat to the status quo,” says Canada. “If we don’t fight about this, if we can shake and be friends, we ain’t going to change. And if we don’t change, huge numbers of kids ain’t going to make it. There is no Superman coming to save them. All they have is us.”

The US teaches procedurally in math, they noted – repetition of the same procedures until a student can remember reflexively how to solve a particular type of math problem. In China, students are encouraged to understand the connections between each step of the problem so that they can think their way through them, even if the order is forgotten.

Once one student in the classroom explains a problem correctly, the next student has to explain it, too. That is often repeated until most or all of the students can confidently work their way through a problem, Miller says. It’s a bit different from the US practice of calling on one or two raised hands, then moving on.