There were some major social movements in U.S. in the last century. Two of the wonderful movements are the civil rights and women's. As an influence of these liberating movements, there were many good results but some of them may be questionable. For instance, one thing that FDR started(lots of government intervention on domestic policies) trickled down to what would eventually become Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty at a famous speech at Howard University in 65'. Now, Lyndon Johnson being a school teacher himself wanted the prejudicial elements in schools to disappear. Therefore, there began a slew of reforms massively mainstreaming right through the mid 70's (such as IDEA - Integrating students with disabilities education act). Now, what started with good intentions became rather bad in execution. Students who were very ill equipped to be alone in mainstream classrooms were thrusted into regular classrooms who could not follow the curriculum. This often led to discipline problems which in turn led to low standaridized test scores. In addition, Lyndon Johnson's idea of accomodating all students and diverse intellligences led to a teaching style that encouraged lots of group work in the classrooms. As a result, while we celebrated diversity and different answers(rarely a wrong answer), students fell into this misguided notion of relativism where creativity was always preferred over concrete "objective" and "factual" answers. This trend continuted through the mid to late 90's. You ask what was the result, the result is something like what I recently viewed a PBS special "LAUSD, from First to Worst." Whicle promoting creativity, children lacked basic factual knowledge which led to NCLB laws. LAUSD adopts the OPEN COURT as a response to make education more "straight ahead" and less "creative." Your 2004 OPEN COURT training will include researches dating back to the early 80's that state that direct teaching is better than group/paired teaching style. Why should you care? Because recent polls show that more and more parents want voucher school system and teachers rated based on test scores. - You heard me right -> API must go up or lose the teaching job.