The result: 81 percent of the most critical measures related to student achievement in the urban core of the region are moving in the right direction, from kindergarten readiness to completing some form of college.

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It said that if you'd sat in our schools from the time you're five or six-years old and you had become an A-plus student, you'd completed the core curriculum, you were an exceptional student, and you also had to be drug and alcohol-free -- and the other provision, you had to be applying for citizenship.

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Critics of standards-based reform argue that, in seeking to raise student achievement in core academic subjects as measured by the new assessments, teachers and school administrators have narrowed the curriculum at the expense of artistic, affective, and other "non-core" subjects.

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In North Carolina, for example, every primary and secondary student is tested in each core academic subject each year, and the results are compared with those of the previous year.

UNESCO: II Part Analytic Section

The teacher evaluation system (TEVAL) has student learning, instructional practices, and professional values as its core components.

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