High-poverty schools need more resources and teaching specialists--not more blame and stigma. Bruce Hansen taught in schools labeled "bad" and schools labeled "good." Those experiences have caused him to reflect on the stark inequities between schools with different socioeconomic statuses and the harmful effects of such labels…

For teachers to combine the all evidence they gather on a student's performance--including ratings on non-achievement factors like that one's effort level--into a single grade is as inadequate as if a physician summed up a patient's physical condition with one number. Instead of funneling all information on performance into one grade, Guskey says,…

The disruption of the pandemic underscored inequities in education systems and prompted educators to think beyond traditional measures of student achievement. However, as students returned to the classroom, conventional narratives of learning loss reemerged. Learning loss implies students, not systems, need to be "fixed," which misses…

New research sheds light on the claim that U.S. students' achievement lags behind that of students worldwide. This research reveals a paradox: While large amounts of U.S. students who take the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) fail to meet its Proficient benchmarks in reading and math, when students' results on NAEP are…

The author, a professor and former student at Harvard, was intrigued by how much the percentage of students with disabilities at that college has increased in recent decades. He began simply asking certain students, "How did you get here?" Drawing from in-depth interviews conducted with 16 Harvard attendees who had disabilities that…

Despite the best of intentions on the part of overworked and undertrained classroom teachers, instructional planning can too often be described as idiosyncratic, haphazard, and lacking any logically or pedagogically defensible structure. In this article, Tim Westerberg highlights the importance of a unifying planning framework that ensures…

If educators want to improve reading achievement on scale, Shanahan notes, we need to organize school days more effectively, so they support increased literacy learning--not hinder it. He presents suggestions for increasing the amount of literacy instruction elementary students receive, through more flexibility of scheduling and more wisely…

What is Goal Attainment Scaling? In this article, Lee Ann Jung defines it as a way to measure a student's progress toward an individualized goal. Instead of measuring a skill at a set time (for instance, on a test or other assignment), Goal Attainment Scaling tracks the steps a student takes over the course of a year in a targeted skill. Together,…

Educators at a turnaround school in Boston describe how they built a foundation for achievement gains by building and safeguarding relational trust among staff. The school, Henry Grew Elementary, focused in particular on fostering educators' readiness to trust, clarifying roles, and solidifying routines to support connection and risk-taking.

Many U.S. schools now have adolescent students who are recent immigrants arrive throughout the school year--sometimes with little English or having had interrupted formal education in their home country. Teachers need strategies to involve such "newcomer" students in classroom work right away. The author describes a framework of…

For students, the authors argue, the ability to assess their own learning--that is, to actively understand their own progress and trajectory--can have a significant impact on achievement levels. The authors discuss factors associated with "assessment-capable learners" and offer examples of how to foster such characteristics in classrooms.

As the pandemic lessens slightly and schools begin to reopen, many voices urge schools to go down three faulty paths to recovery and improvement: using testing to address "learning loss," an unintegrated focus on social-emotional learning, or a push for continued ed tech and online learning. The authors suggest alternative paths that…

The logic behind "continuous improvement" sounds simple--but it takes a skillful leader to make the process pay off. While the logic behind the popular "continuous improvement" process seems simple, the authors' study of schools using approaches based on continuous improvement revealed that skilled leadership is as important as…

Authors William H. Parrett and Kathleen M. Budge, who work with high-poverty schools and have researched their success, share key elements of such schools' "transformational journeys." Even during the pandemic and its aftermath, some high-poverty schools have kept building their staff's capacity and confidence and gradually lifted…

Happiness leads to greater success and higher achievement, so it makes sense to infuse joy into school leadership to create positive results. Cunningham and Rainville offer up four key pieces of advice to school leaders on how to incorporate gratitude, compassion, and empathy into their leadership practice and, as a result, transform school…