I am on other lists for research based education PER, and there have been a
number of recent posts about the problem that is posed by state and district
mandates. Essentially the use of research based curricula is often
difficult to implement within district and state guidelines. Often
districts mandate specific sequences at specific times so that research
based curricula which integrate topics do not fit in.
Then the state tests are looking for things that really do not evaluate
understanding of physics, but want just memorized knowledge. It turns out
that research based teaching such as Modeling does get good results on state
tests, but it is often difficult to convince school administrators of this
when students are taught to understand concepts rather than just memorize.
NCLB has made the use of good pedagogy much more difficult, and has promoted
lower level review. The study by Rice University showed that this was acute
in schools with a lower SES population while schools with higher SES are not
affected as much. Often the higher SES schools just hand the students a
review book and tell them to review at home, and spend extremely minimal
class time on it.
As I pointed out one miracle school in NC cheated by changing the scantrons.
This sort of thing is much more prevalent than the authorities wish to
acknowledge.