Instruction alone is not enough to help all students succeed
Perhaps the greatest victory of the recently, much-maligned era of standards-based reform in US schools is that this new form of accountability made instruction matter. It was no longer acceptable to simply deliver instruction—and either the students got it, or they didn’t—and then regardless, the teacher just moved on.
Under the standards regime, it actually mattered if the students learned the material. And if they didn’t, we, as teachers, would have to try to teach it again in a more effective manner. In other words, standards-based school reform cut to the core of education, what Harvard’s Public Education Leadership Program has called the instructional core: the transaction between teacher, student and content. So many reforms of the past have avoided or simply bypassed the instructional core, but this time the reforms came straight at the central work: teaching and learning. This was a good thing.
