Public education, at least as it has been known for the past several generations in the US, is under threat. Conservative state legislatures from Arizona to Florida have enacted sweeping voucher legislation, channeling taxpayer dollars to private schools. At the same time, a vicious culture war has engulfed the public education system in…

In the fall of 2015, Jonathan Howland interviewed about a dozen independent school heads to inquire about novel programs and developments in their schools that, if they take root and flourish, could be "game changing"; about their vision of independent schools 40 years hence, in mid-21st-century America; and about impediments to reaching…

Today's education technology holds immense promise, but what matters more than the tools themselves are how they are used in schools and in classrooms. In "Breakthrough Leadership in the Digital Age," Frederick M. Hess and Bror Saxberg argue that educators have tended to think of adopting technology as a way to "reform" or…

The article "Getting lost in translation" by Harris, Chapman, Muijs and Reynolds addresses the engagement of policy-makers and educational practitioners with (the results of) educational effectiveness and improvement research. In this commentary the article is discussed from the perspectives of research utilisation, the solidity of the…

Twenty-first-century biology is inherently interdisciplinary. Every aspect of biology, from molecules to organisms to ecosystems, is richly informed by the physical, mathematical, and computational sciences. It is both an exciting and daunting time for biology educators--exciting because of the vast opportunity for important new discoveries that…

The Summer 2013 issue of "Voices in Urban Education" presents an interview with Dania Vazquez, founding principal of the Margarita Muñiz Academy, a Boston public high school offering dual-language education in Spanish and English. The first dual-language high school in Massachusetts, this Innovation School opened in the fall of 2012 with…

The grim statistics are well known, but bear repeating: in Chicago, close to 60% of Black boys do not graduate from high school, and only one in forty receive a bachelor's degree by age 25. In the fall of 2006, Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men-Englewood Campus, the nation's first all-male charter public high school, was opened. In 2010 and…

Personally, the authors have seen the evolution of teacher education for over 30 years. From "diagnostic/prescriptive teaching" through "reflective practice," the quality of the programs and students has improved greatly. Turning that subjective appraisal into a quantifiable evaluation is a tricky enterprise in education. However, the demand for…

This article presents an interview with Lucy Beckham, the 2010 MetLife/NASSP National High School Principal of the Year, and principal of Wando High School, one of South Carolina's largest and highest-performing schools. Wando High School in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, has 3,250 in enrollment and has 209 staff members. Beckham shares her story…

Reform of teacher preparation is once again in the air. In his first major speech about education, President Obama said that "recruiting, preparing, and rewarding outstanding teachers" will be one of the new administration's top priorities. The priorities set forth in the stimulus package, as well as the Congressional debates about the…

Significant limitations have emerged in America's science training pipeline, including inaccessibility, inflexibility, financial limitations, and lack of diversity. We present three effective programs that collectively address these challenges. The programs are grounded in rigorous science and integrate through diverse disciplines across…

This paper reflects on experiences of working with schools in urban contexts as they have attempted to improve the quality of learning. Set within the context of the English education system during a period of intense national pressure to "raise standards", these experiences have been focused around issues of performance and leadership…

This article presents an interview with Ray Landers, the 2009 MetLife NASSP Middle Level Principal of the Year. Landers talks about how he and his staff members put programs in place to erase poverty gap at his school. He stresses the need to make sure that principals empower teachers so that collaborative decision making can take place.

Examines recent responses of several school effectiveness researchers to concerns of their critics. Examines complexity of debate over school effectiveness research (SER), value of pragmatism, impact of social class, significance of methodological problems, value of current attempts to theorize SER, relationship of SER to educational politics and…

School-effectiveness researchers have had difficulty quantifying stability in effectiveness over time. Responding to Peter Tymms's argument that Gray and associates have not provided an authoritative statistical analysis of school effectiveness (in a study of 30 British secondary schools), this article asserts that this study was concerned with…