Report Roundup

Following is a guide to recent reports in education and related fields and information on how to order copies.

A More Humane High School.

High schools as they now exist are too large, impersonal, and rigid, according to a new report prepared jointly by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the National Association of Secondary School Principals. The report, two years in the making, calls on American high schools to evolve into smaller communities where students and adults know each other well, the curriculum emphasizes depth over breadth, and a flexible learning process replaces the factory-era model of teachers lecturing to rows of students. It also urges that the Carnegie unit, the long-standing gauge of whether students graduate and one of the factors that shape the way the school day is planned, be redesigned or abolished. "High school lays the foundation for what Americans become, and what Americans become shapes the high school," the report states. "Now, buffeted by powerful and unsettling winds, both the high school and the country are searching for stability and renewal." Copies of the document, Breaking Ranks: Changing an American Institution , are available for $19.50 each, plus $3 shipping and handling, from NASSP Sales, 1904 Association Drive, Reston, VA...