Half a century after Brown v. Board of Education, the great progress made in education can be marked, but the gap remains. Some federal and state political leaders have made gung-ho proclamations about leaving no child behind. Yet they send in too few troops, too lightly supported, and with too little planning. The vaunted "historic investments"…

The most recent Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools found that 74% of Americans believe that the achievement gap between white students and African American and Hispanic students is primarily due to factors unrelated to the quality of schooling that children receive. This assumption is supported by…

The national dialogue about the achievement gap can help policy makers and educators find ways to better serve minority students. However, school policy and practice must be founded not on perceptions of group stereotypes, the authors argue, but on knowledge about each student's needs and strengths. In this article, the authors present information…

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, the 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, has become a symbol of all things good and bad in education. While the basic concepts of the legislation--accountability for results, research-based education programs, increased parental options, and expanded local control and…

The Political rhetoric about school reform makes it sound easy. Apparently, whatever the proposed reform--testing, reduced class size, vouchers--there are no tradeoffs or "costs" to consider. Or the tradeoffs are judged to be so insignificant that they do not merit discussion. There is also an unspoken premise that countries with effective…

During the last two decades of the 20th century, Japanese students' exemplary performance on international achievement tests, coupled with the nation's dramatic economic growth, made the Japanese education system a focus of attention from outside observers. Educators, scholars, and journalists all scrutinized the Japanese schools in an attempt to…

Russia's educational system has been successful in producing graduates who excel in mathematics, the sciences, and foreign languages, but these are not the only areas that we might look to as models. Russian and American cultures and educational practices differ in significant ways, and not all of the practices described here would be workable in…

In this article, Bobby Ann Starnes, discusses cheating in the classroom and in the political world. She uses specific examples from her own school experiences and from president Bush's "Texas Miracle." She discusses what students consider as real needs for cheating, which include students staying eligible for sports or membership in student…

There are only three South Korean universities that count in Koreans' eyes and they enroll 15,000 students, chosen from 873,000 applicants (1.7%), based on the results of a national exam. The night before the national exam, many mothers pray all night in temple. (They also prayed the previous 99 nights, but not so long.) The country comes to a…

This analysis of a November 2001 case in Botetourt County, Virginia, looks at whether the Fourth Amendment right against an unreasonable "seizure" or the 14th Amendment "liberty" for parents to control the care and custody of their children requires a ban on, or at least immediate notification regarding, detentions of a certain length when public…

Policy makers really sounded off this spring about public education. State legislators derided No Child Left Behind (NCLB) for taking away state prerogatives in setting education policy and the National Governors Association essentially tell federal officials to stay away from repeating NCLB at the high school level. President Bush tried to move…

There's parent involvement and then there's parent involvement. There's the kind that has parents volunteering their time in schools, making costumes, or organizing and staffing the school carnival fund-raiser. This is helpful activity by any measure--helpful in the service of kids and not to be minimized. But there are other levels of involvement…

Last month, Phil Riner began discussing his project of teaching digital photography and prosocial behavior skills to inner-city fifth-graders. This work led him to generate some very specific procedures for camera care and use. Phil also taught the students some simple rules for taking better photos. These rules fell into four broad categories:…

Education reformers have increasingly invested in developing collaborative communities within schools as a central strategy for improving teaching and student learning. This strategy comes in various guises, including small schools, small learning communities, and teacher teams. Several assumptions about how these communities will enhance…

Often times, teachers and prospective teachers repeat the "common knowledge" that young children have short attention spans. How often this becomes another self-fulfilling prophecy as teachers switch frequently from one activity to another, before student attention can wander, in an imitation of the Sesame Street model of teaching as…