Psychological Services Providers, the Opportunity to Learn, and Inner-City Students: Beyond Mere Curricular Reform

Abstract

The period from the 1980s to the beginning years of the 1990s has witnessed both the push and pull of educational reform. Several educational challenges have been issued to the nation's public schools: report cards, research projects related to the curriculum, and even a manifesto-a national wake-up call-on schooling. These challenges have ranged from those identifying the attributes necessary for being successful in college (as advanced by entities such as The College Board); those focusing on secondary education (as advanced by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching); those alerting Americans to the gravity of the school crisis (i.e., the National Commission on Excellence in Education's [1983] A Nation at Risk report and John Goodlad's [1984] A Place Called School). Even the casual observer can recognize that recent reports and studies provide fertile soil for debate over issues related to education and schooling in an ever-changing, multicultural country such as the United States. Consistent with the posture of new ideas for education, former President George Bush and his Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander, using some principles drawn from a governors' meeting, advanced a plan entitled 2000 in April 1991. One part of the Bush-Alexander plan focused on developing new standards in English, geography, history, mathematics, and science. It also called for a voluntary plan of measuring, via nationally administered standardized tests, student achievement in these subject areas. A third dimension of America 2000,