ACR Vision and Mission
The Alliance is a collaborative of organizations, and serves as a national forum to stimulate dialogue and action advancing coherent, balanced, and comprehensive preK-12 curricula, assessment, instruction, and related research.
Specifically, ACR works to:
- Foster regular communication between and among organizations on important education developments.
- Provide a forum for examining significant, timely education policies and activities.
- Provide a structure for cooperative projects related to the ACR mission.
By a "coherent, comprehensive, and balanced curriculum" we mean, in general, curricula that are planned and supported to provide a high-quality education for all children, coherently and appropriately connected among and within subjects and content areas and across grade levels. It is ACR's belief that no learner's potential should be limited by the curriculum, its delivery, or the educational opportunities that are made available to the learner.
About The Alliance for Curriculum Reform
The Alliance for Curriculum Reform is a collaborative, non-profit organization
that brings together the leaders, insights, and resources of more than
twenty national education associations concerned with P16 curriculum and
school reform.
This site offers convenient links to ACR member organizations, P16 standards
resources, research and resources for teachers and administrators, and
more. The Alliance's Center for Curriculum Leadership and Research, housed
at the University of Cincinnati, host events and develops resources to
assist in bringing research and exemplary practice to schools and communities.
Check back often for new ideas, links, research, and resources!
The Alliance was created in 1990, when many leaders of discipline, teacher, and administrator organizations involved in the early stages of standards-based school reform met together to consider common issues in improving schools. Funding for these initial meetings was provided by the MacArthur Foundation and by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Since 1990, the Alliance has been active behind the scenes in assisting its member organizations with developing content-area standards and accompanying standards-based school improvement efforts. ACR was key in the revision of the Indicators of Schools of Quality, used by the regional accrediting associations to influence educational improvement in more than 35,000 schools.
The Alliance has also developed several resources for the field, including The Handbook of Research on Improving Student Achievement, a summary of pedagogical research in every content area to assist P12 educators in improving practice; and the Assessing Student Learning book and CD-ROM, the first large-scale effort to compile practical guidance from nationally recognized authors regarding the assessment of students in every major subject area. Other recent efforts have focused on the preparation of new teachers and the uses of P12 student achievement data in teacher evaluation and school improvement.