Much ink has been spilled debating the role of the intellectual. William Tierney's article "Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Role of the Intellectual in Eliminating Poverty" in the August/September 2013 issue of "Educational Researcher" adds to this literature. In his article, Tierney presents recommendations to the education…

This article reviews the impacts of the civil rights policies framed in the 1960s and the anti-civil rights political and legal movements that reversed them. It documents rising segregation by race and poverty. The policy reversals and transformation of U.S. demography require a new civil rights strategy. Vast immigrations, the sinking White…

The author outlines the rise of a hard-science model advocated by the Institute for Education Sciences, including the application of research and development approaches to education following the Second World War, and describes the attraction of these hard-science approaches for education policymakers. He notes that in the face of complex and…

National initiatives to expand the aggregate science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) workforce reflect America's goals to increase global competitiveness. However, the aggregation of STEM stakeholders may elicit a "diffusion of responsibility" because individuals assume others are already acting. Here, we perform a…

The relatively low status of teaching as a profession is often given as a factor contributing to the difficulty of recruiting teachers, the middling performance of American students on international assessments, and the well-documented decline in the relative academic ability of teachers through the 1990s. Since the turn of the 21st century,…

Several states have recently adopted or are pursuing policies that deny or revoke tenure from teachers who receive poor evaluation ratings over time based in part on quantitative measures of performance. Using data from the state of Florida, we estimate such value-added measures to consider the future effectiveness and number of teachers who would…

The widely adopted Common Core State Standards (CCSS) call for raising the level of text complexity in textbooks and reading materials used by students across all grade levels in the United States; the authors of the English Language Arts component of the CCSS build their case for higher complexity in part upon a research base they say shows a…

Urban minority children are increasingly being educated at public schools run by charter management organizations (CMOs) characterized by a highly rule-ordered and regulated environment. These rules, enforced through continuous streams of reinforcements and penalties, while contributing to a tight focus on academics and a safe culture, have…

Performance standards are a powerful way to communicate K-12 student achievement (e.g., proficiency) and are the cornerstone of standards-based reform. As education reform shifts the focus to college and career readiness, approaches for setting performance standards need to be revised. We argue that the focus on assessing student readiness can…

Data-driven decision making has become increasingly important in education. Policymakers require educators to use data to inform practice. Although the policy emphasis is growing, what has not increased is attention to building human capacity around data use. Educators need to gain data literacy skills to inform practice. Although some…

In a symposium at the 2012 National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education annual conference, Claremont Graduate University Professor Daryl G. Smith, a pioneer in the study of diversity in postsecondary educational contexts, critiqued the disproportionate framing of diversity-related research around past, present, and future U.S.…

In the historiography on curriculum reform during the progressive era, one interpretive lens has dominated the study of 20th-century reform for more than 40 years: the idea of the "social efficiency" doctrine. In this historiographical essay, the authors briefly trace the rise of social efficiency as an idea in curriculum history, identify the…

The nation's lawmakers have frequently voiced the basic principle that important policy decisions should be evidence based. In this commentary, the authors describe the approach the U.S. Department of Education has taken in its Increasing Educational Productivity project. The authors argue that the department's actual practice in this instance has…

Seventeen years ago Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) published the landmark article "Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy," giving a coherent theoretical statement for resource pedagogies that had been building throughout the 1970s and 1980s. I, like countless teachers and university-based researchers, have been inspired by what it means…

More than 90% of the nation's 1.2 million military children attend civilian-operated public schools. Education researchers, however, often overlook the educational experiences and needs of military children attending civilian-operated public schools (i.e., schools that are administered by and under the purview of local education agencies). This…