Paul Jablon's "The Synergy of Inquiry" (2014) is well-timed. The 2014 deadline set by No Child Left Behind (NCLB, 2002) for universal student proficiency has come and gone, and according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, "proficiency rates last year were below 50 percent for nearly every racial and ethnic group, in…

In this article, I critique a component of the highly structured Open Court Reading curriculum designed to teach elementary children "inquiry and higher-order thinking" skills. The intended outcome of this component is, I argue, the production of critically literate and informed consumers of information. However, both the critical…

As new times become hard times, there may be little time for multimodality in school unless educators confront the accountability culture. This commentary reviews the arguments for multimodal transformations of school literacy curricula and explores the potential of reflective talk about multimodal meaning-making as an assessment practice. Talking…

The United States Department of Education (USED) granted 11 states waivers (eight full waivers and three conditional waivers) to provide what the USED termed "flexibility" from meeting some of the requirements in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Much of the flexibility relieves schools from the Adequate Yearly Progress mandate that requires…

Four critical responses to an article, "The Role of Phonology and Phonologically Related Skills in Reading Instruction for Students Who Are Deaf or Hard of Hearing" (Wang, Trezek, Luckner, & Paul, 2008), are presented. Issue is taken with the conclusions of the article by Wang and colleagues regarding the "necessary" condition of phonological…