Considering the importance of education in the life of a 21st-century person, it is remarkable that the training of teachers continues to be as inconsistent, and in many cases, as lackadaisical, as it is. For all the evidence indicating that excellent teachers rank high on the list of factors essential to student success, one would expect that…

Improving teacher preparation is critical to long-term improvement in teacher quality. More than 200,000 new teachers enter classrooms each year. Increasing student enrollment, the retirement of baby boom generation teachers, and high attrition in their first five years (between 40 and 50 percent of new teachers leave the profession) have…

As numerous studies from 1906 on have confirmed, children lose ground in learning if they lack opportunities for building skills over the summer. Nonetheless, summer learning loss comes up but rarely in the national discussion of education reform. By the end of summer, students perform on average one month behind where they left off in the spring.…