A good understanding of this chapter's content would include an understanding of why each of these terms is important to education.

charter schools
an idea popularized in the 1990s to encourage teachers, parents, and others to develop new approaches to schools and obtain from the state a "charter," or a contract permitting a school to depart from certain state regulations to create an innovative schooling environment.

educational excellence
a term popularized in the 1980s when the report A Nation at Risk drew public attention to the mediocrity of schooling in the United States.

general academic track
the "middle" ability group or "track" that emerged in 20th-century schools between the academic or college preparatory track and the vocational track.

general education
broad education across the major domains of mathematics and science, social sciences, and humanities to produce a well-educated person in a nonspecialized sense.

Goals 2000: Educate America Act
a congressional act to implement a set of far-reaching goals for public education to be reached by the year 2000; outlined by the first Bush administration as America 2000 and continued in the Clinton administration as Goals 2000.

heterogeneous grouping
the practice of placing children with different academic skill levels in the same group for purposes of instruction (as opposed to homogeneous grouping).

homogeneous grouping
the practice of placing children with similar academic skill levels in the same group for purposes of instruction (as opposed to heterogeneous grouping).

labor market
the totality of jobs for which people may offer themselves for employment; the labor market for physicians is typically more limited than the labor market for fast-food workers.

liberal education
historically, the education appropriate to a free person; typically construed today as a broad, general education that equips a person to think well in a wide range of domains and to know at least one discipline in depth.

A Nation at Risk
a 1983 report by the Presidential Commission on Excellence in Education; declared the United States "at risk" in the competitive world marketplace and compared the educational system of the nation to an "act of war" by a foreign power; received great deal of publicity and launched public dialogue on school reform lasting almost two decades.

No Child Left Behind Act of 2001
controversial centerpiece of the George W. Bush education platform, emphasizing educational accountability for school systems, high-stakes testing for all students, and an increased requirement for "highly qualified" teachers.

school choice
an educational policy that supports the right of parents to choose whatever public school they want for their children; justified by the view that students perform better if they attend a school chosen for its compatibility with the beliefs and values of the family.

school restructuring
a general term for any of a number of approaches to school reform that emphasize changing such organizational features of schooling as how decisions are made, the length of the school day, and the allocation of time during the school day.

service occupations
the fastest-growing sector in the late 20th-century and early 21st-century labor market in terms of the total number of jobs; usually refers to relatively low-skill, low-pay jobs providing services to others, such as domestic labor and food service.

standardized achievement testing for accountability
a 1990s emphasis of the contemporary school reform movement, continuing into the new century, that seeks to hold school districts, schools, administrators, teachers, and students accountable for learning through frequent and systematic use of achievement tests to measure student learning.

tracking and detracking
tracking refers to the practice of "ability grouping" students by skill differences in schools for the purposes of instruction and preparation for different academic and occupational futures; detracking is the effort to resist such grouping of students.

voucher system for schools
a proposed approach to public schooling that would provide government money to the family, not to the school system, so that the family could spend that educational allocation (voucher) in any school it chose, public or private, religious or secular.