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Commentary
As Dan Goldhaber noted in his article in the Spring 2016 issue of Education Next: "Of the characteristics [of teacher quality] that were measured in the still-revered 1966 Coleman report titled Equality of Educational Opportunity, those that bear the highest relationship to pupil achievement are first, the teacher'
Commentary
So far as we know, low achievement hasn't been remedied by any of the strategies or programs that educators or policy makers have tried out since 1965 — the date of the first authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. We've already made a mess of
Commentary
As the dean of a prominent graduate school of education noted in an article published several years ago: "Schools are not the major cause of the achievement gap." He also noted how ineffective most education reforms have been and how little improvement we have seen. It is understandable
Commentary
Yesterday as today, what we call reading skills heavily influence academic achievement. They further influence the development of writing skills beyond the early years of schooling when writing is almost a transcription of a child's speech patterns. The development of reading skills, especially a reading vocabulary, and then
Commentary
Most books on public education in any country do not favor workforce preparation for all students in place of optional high school curricula or student-selected post-secondary goals. Nor have parents in the USA lauded Common Core's effects on their children's learning or the K-8 curriculum. Indeed,
Commentary
There is one good reason that the most recent review of research on teacher professional development in mathematics in the USA almost uniformly finds it ineffective: It doesn't lead to student gains. The majority of our K-12 teachers were in the bottom third of their academic cohort in
Commentary
Despite the billions that have been spent on professional development for K-12 teachers in the United States, we actually know extremely little about the characteristics of effective professional development programs. The major reason lies in deficiencies in the research on professional development. A major review in 2008 of the research
Commentary
Federalism refers to a balance of power between a central government and the various states or provinces in a country, each component of government having powers and responsibilities of its own. Even though, as we all know, we have three levels of government in the USA — federal, state, and local,