The Department of Education is a federal-level agency that performs several valuable and necessary functions both in education and for the country as a whole. In light of some calls to eliminate the Department of Education, it’s worth taking a closer look at what the agency actually does, and what impact it has on U.S. […]
In my last post, I mentioned that I was going to do a deeper dive on a survey published by Pew Research in April of 2024 because there were some distinctly odd things about how the data were presented. The survey had this title: About half of Americans say public K-12 education is going in […]
In Part 1, we talked about the three ways teaching is viewed culturally — as profession, job, or calling — and we looked in depth at arguments for considering teaching a profession. In Part 2, we discussed whether teaching is or should be a calling. In Part 3 we’ll look at teaching as a job […]
In Part 1, we talked about the three ways teaching is viewed culturally — as profession, job, or calling — and we looked in depth at arguments for considering teaching a profession. In Part 2, we’re going to examine teaching as a calling. In every interview I ever had for a teaching position, I was […]
It would be overstating things to say that how we define teaching is a hot topic. In light of teacher shortages and high teacher attrition, things like cultural definitions can seem a bit fringe. But I think it’s a question that bears some careful consideration because of those attrition rates, especially among new teachers, and […]
For the first time in 27 years, the U.S. government is updating its classification system for its citizens. The next time the U.S. census is administered in 2030, respondents will have many more options to choose from when they select their race and ethnicity. While this may seem unconnected to education, it’s not. Under the […]
A very recent study from 2023 posed the question of which type of feedback produced the best improvement in writing performance. The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied and was predicated on earlier work that suggested students who generate self-feedback using external criteria (as opposed to individual feedback provided by a […]
Edutopia publishes a list of their favorite academic studies each year and one of the studies they cited this past year was a survey of other studies on the benefits of using picture books as a part of math instruction. It’s not a meta-analysis because they weren’t crunching numbers; rather, it was a compilation of […]
Last week was STAAR Test week in Texas and the first time all public school students in the state took the newly updated and revised STAAR test. This test represents a major overhaul in the content, context, and cognitive demand of the STAAR test, from an instrument that was almost entirely multiple choice with one […]
Diversity is good for students. Quite a lot of research — really a lot — shows that the segregation of schools, both racial and economic, impedes student achievement. One study of the New Jersey public schools from 2020 found that racially diverse schools reduced the achievement gap between white and non-white students: “the achievement gap […]