Toward a New Mainstream of Instruction for American Schools

Addressing Urban School Reform: Issues and Alliances

“…26 The proper relationship between instruction and evaluation is that evaluation should follow good instruction, not drive it. 27 Most tests are not well suited to drive instruction in reading and subject matter, and instructional materials certainly are not good enough to replace the teacher as a model of language, as an initiator of thinking and reasoning, and as the one most important classroom element in the development of conceptual skills.28…”

“…34 Reading is a form of thinking stimulated by written symbols, and students need to know not only how to decode the symbols but also how to get meaning from text. 35 When they answer questions, students occasionally need to be asked how they arrived at their answers. This explication of students' thought processes needs to become an integral part of the language learning experience.…”