By John H. Jackson and Pedro Noguera

By Marion Brady

Exxon-Mobil is airing education-reform television ads. In the one I’ve seen most often, implicit and explicit messages are simple and clear: (a) We live in a dangerous, technologically complex world. (b) Our lives, liberties, and happiness hinge on our ability to cope with that world. (c) Coping requires mastery of math. (d) On standardized math tests, America ranks 25th in the world. (e) Be ashamed and afraid. (f) Get behind corporate education reform efforts.

The official Common App won’t go live until August, meaning that students have to wait until then to actually send them to schools. But there is no law against starting to write essays and figure out the information needed to complete both the undergraduate application and the one for transfer students.

By Vicki Abeles

Hayley Eaton was always an academic achiever. Like many American teens, college was uppermost in her mind, as well as that of her parents and guidance counselors. She signed up for all the available AP and honors courses at her high school and performed well. She didn’t flinch when homework meant getting five or six hours of sleep a night before “waking up and repeating the cycle all over again.” Haley used to joke, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” One afternoon while driving home from high school, Haley nodded asleep and crashed into a tree, totaling her car. She escaped with minor cuts and bruises but the experience caused her to rethink her concept of success. “I’m grateful,” she says. In reprioritizing she found her life goal. Today she’s pursuing a master’s in education so she can help create school reform — away from “endless homework and inadequate high stakes testing” and toward “healthy priorities for young people’s physical and mental health.”

Are you planning to work at a summer job when school gets out for the year, because your salary doesn’t pay the bills?

Are you going to teach summer school, or work on a graduate degree, professional development or some other special sort of training?

Though the big focus today in education is on evaluating teachers and whether student standardized test results should be a part of educator assessment (they shouldn’t), there is no group more affected by high stakes on these exams than the people who have to take them. Results from a single test can determine whether a student moves up a grade or graduates from high school.