A common argument leveled against charter schools is that they attract the most motivated and intelligent students from already struggling public schools. Marcus Winters seeks to examine this claim, known as "cream-skimming," by comparing the performance of New York City's (NYC) charter middle schools with a set of traditional selective…

This commentary begins by summarizing the five contributions to this special issue and briefly recapping the background to the topic of student learning in higher education. Narrative and systematic reviews are compared, and the relative value of different bibliographic databases in the context of systematic reviews is assessed. The importance of…

The curriculum resources used for teaching secondary mathematics vary considerably from school to school. Some schools base their teaching largely on a single published scheme, while others design their own schemes of learning, curating their resources from a range of (often free) online sources. Both approaches seem problematic from the…

In this article, Charlie Taylor offers a commentary on Yang et al.'s 2021 "Reading in a Foreign Language" article, "Text Difficulty in Extensive Reading: Reading Comprehension and Reading Motivation." In their study, Yang et al. analyzed the effects of text difficulty on the reading comprehension and motivation of high school…

What explains the persistent gap in college retention between white American college students and those who are members of ethnic minority groups? Some argue that a large part of the answer is campus racial climate: a negative climate disproportionately harms minority students and leads to worse outcomes. Existing theory provides some basis for…

Christopher Jencks is the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Here he comments that Downey and Condron (2016) (DC) argue that the sociology of education suffers from a one-sided view of schools' contribution to inequality. He agrees that most sociologists who study what goes on inside schools tend to portray…

Black and Hispanic students are undeniably underidentified as gifted and underrepresented in gifted education. The underrepresentation of the two largest groups of "minority" students is long-standing, dating several decades, and is a serious area of contention. Most debates focus on the efficacy of traditional intelligence tests with…

Aka (2019) conducted an year-long large-scale study demonstrating that Japanese high school students who undertook extensive reading performed better than a control group who undertook grammatical instruction. Those showing the greatest gains were those of lower and intermediate proficiency. The students' achievement was measured in terms of…

The "Whites as victims" motif in conversations about race has been well documented in recent decades. When discussing affirmative action hiring policies, a common belief expressed by Whites is that people of color have been permitted to progress unfairly at the expense of harder working Whites. Whites using this discourse see themselves…

In almost any conversation about accountability for private schools, accountability for public schools is assumed. This is a dangerous myth. By assuming that the edifice that states and the federal government have created over the past several decades actually holds schools accountable, school choice advocates immediately find themselves in an…

In this article, the author argues first, that critical-thinking skills do exist independent of disciplinary thinking skills and are not compromised by interaction effects with the major; and second, that standardized tests (e.g., the Collegiate Learning Assessment, or CLA, which is his example throughout the article) are the best way to measure…

The online writing software Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) is a useful tool for assigning writing assignments in large college classes. In this system, students submit essays online and are guided in how to rate essays using criteria written by the instructor. The instructor does not have to grade the essays, and CPR has educational benefits that…

From the housing crisis to high debt, from stagnating incomes to high unemployment, the Great Recession has touched most aspects of many people's lives. College graduates, a highly educated group often insulated from the worst of economic challenges, have not been spared. Their unemployment rate reached 9.1 percent in 2010--the highest annual rate…

Much of the literature on social class and language study in schools argues that for middle-class parents and their children, languages are chosen for their capacity to offer forms of distinction that provide an edge in the global labour market. In this paper, we draw on data collected from interviews with parents and children in middle-class…

A new report by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), "Differences by Design?," compares differences in approaches and demographics between and among charter school models and local "traditional public schools." Using three national data sets, the report effectively captures the national universe of charter schools. It…