The Common Core State Standards have been adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia. They enjoy a huge following of well-wishers and supporters who are optimistic that the standards will boost achievement in U.S. schools. Setting aside the cheerleading and fond hopes, what are the real chances of success? The most reasonable prediction is…

This response focuses attention on three key issues raised by Brayboy's talk: training our analyses on the impact of neoliberal policies reshaping schools and societies, developing an engaged anthropology of education to build local capacity, and remembering the centrality of our relationships in the midst of this work. (Contains 3 notes.)

Business leaders, like education leaders, are acutely aware of what this could mean for the future of this country: Young people might be unprepared for rewarding jobs and the demands of informed citizenship, businesses may not find the talent they need to keep innovating, and the economy may stagnate with too little innovation. To turn the tide,…

Math education in the United States remains resistant to systemic change, and our country pays the price. Stemhagen's article "Democracy and School Math" further confirms this trend. Despite repeated calls for reform, decades of research on how people learn, millions of dollars invested in teacher professional development, and years of…

U.S. universities have had century-long success in absorbing existing professions into their curricula--by making academe their gatekeeper. These professions often started with apprenticeships and short training courses leading to a certification examination--and were then elevated and "academized" into a comprehensive body of knowledge,…

Should teachers sacrifice class time for professional development? Two authors present their arguments to this question. The first author contends that teachers should definitely use class time for professional development. Technology is changing and growing all the time, and it is their job to prepare students for the world they will inherit.…

Over the past 7 years, the Oral History Project Team has conducted interviews with individuals who have made signal contributions to evaluation theory and practice, tracing their professional development and contextualizing their work within the social and political climates of the time. By capturing the professional evolution of those who have…

Christine Garbe, a professor at the Institute for German Language and Literature Education at Leuphana University in Lueneburg, Germany, initially focused her research on youth's socialization as readers. Her professional textbooks in this area are innovative. International comparisons of youth's reading achievement drew her attention to…

Last February, in search of expanded thinking, the author led a group of 20 early childhood professionals on a study tour to Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ). The group included two Canadians and two Aussies, with everyone else from the United States. While they knew they had much to learn from the overall system of early childhood education in NZ, the…

Our world today is full of challenges and opportunities. Civilization will survive if, and only if, educational leaders implement postmodern thinking in public education. Postmodernism was originally a critique of modernism. The views of Clarence Johnson in this article support postmodernism as a current state of mind that allows a way of seeing…

Fear, such as fear of saying the wrong thing, fear of doing the wrong thing, and fear of being branded as intolerant, a racist, or worse, can be paralyzing for many school administrators in the United States because developing a culturally proficient school is a difficult task filled with the toughest land mines of all: the perceptions and…

As a result of the Reading First Program of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the view of reading has narrowed. Individual state's Reading First professional development programs, and hence reading teachers across the United States, have spent the six years since the funding of the program in 2002 focusing beginning and developmental reading on…

During the past six months the author was fortunate to travel to Hungary three times. Although all three trips had different purposes, they had one thing in common: professional conversations between colleagues from Hungary and the United States. In this article, the author would like to provide a short overview of these visits, which resulted in…

Therapeutic recreation is a means of empowering individuals with disabilities through arts or sports. The field has developed differently in the United States and the United Kingdom; the former emphasizes professionalization and the latter the right to adult education. (SK)

Laptop computing programs have been in K-12 schools since the 1990s, but in recent months one-to-one learning seems to have reemerged as a top topic in education technology circles. According to Tim Wiley, senior analyst at research firm Eduventures, about 1,000 of the 15,000 school districts in the United States currently have one-to-one…