July 2011

Ensuring quality in digital learning

Given the rapid growth in digital learning, how can we ensure that these new approaches to teaching and learning are of high quality? Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute tackles that question in a paper released today by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He envisions a complex future for digital learning, where schools pull […]

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Student teaching criticized in new study; schools of education fire back

Knowing the subject matter is all well and good, but one skill that many new teachers lack as they embark on their first year of teaching is how to control a classroom, or so say many critics of teacher education. This critical skill along with the other practical aspects of teaching — how to teach […]

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Holding students back: An international analysis

A new international analysis of countries that hold high proportions of students back to repeat a grade versus those that do not suggests grade repetition is a bad idea. Countries like the United States that have relatively high rates of students repeating a grade do relatively poorly on the tests, while those that have low […]

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Back to the future: Private funders and the effort to improve teaching

Private funders have been trying to influence and improve the teaching profession for more than 100 years, and a new report on philanthropic support of teaching outlines that history. The report is funded by the Ford Foundation, and is glowing about the role that private funders, from the Carnegie Corporation to the Bill and Melinda […]

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Is dropping out of high school deadly?

Dropping out of high school can certainly restrict your options in life, but a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that the deaths of a quarter of a million Americans in 2000 were due to low education levels. A New York Times article today about the study focused on the number […]

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