9731070 Donahue This award will support the partnership efforts of the National Alliance of State Science and Mathematics Coalitions and the Educational Commission of the States (ECS) as a one-year "proof of concept" project to build state-level reform infrastructures in three states. The proposal identifies a model for infrastructure that entails eight critical components. These components involve a coalition of leadership across educational, business, and policy boundaries: a seasoned process for reviewing and assuring alignment of state policies with standards-based reform; a process for responding to gaps in systemic reform strategies; a process for assisting districts in the state as they select and implement standards-based curriculum, mechanisms for focusing resources in the state on systemic reform; mechanisms for collecting, analyzing, and communicating data on various performance indicators; and mechanisms for using such data in formative fashion to adjust systemic reform strategies. The NASSMC/ECS partnership presents a powerful opportunity of joining the efforts of mathematics and science educators (represented by NASSMC) to the policy levers in respective state education systems (represented by ECS) to create important, reform capable networks.
