Adult Learners Fuel Tennessee's "Drive to 55"

Every state wants to boast the nation’s most prepared workforce. This distinction draws new business and industry to that state, resulting in economic prosperity. Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam has set a goal of providing a 55% post-secondary credentialed workforce by 2025 in order to keep the business and industry currently located in the state. Tennessee’s key resource to accomplish the goal is its adult learner. The state has nearly one million adults with some college but no degree. Tennessee must find new and innovative ways to capture this wealth of opportunity for the state’s prosperity and future growth. The author discusses the current plan and proposes five key factors to engage the adult learner.

Teaching and Learning from Within: A Core Reflection Approach to Quality and Inspiration in Education

Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction

Social Studies, Literacy, and Social Justice in the Common Core Classroom: A Guide for Teachers

The Moral Work of Teaching and Teacher Education: Preparing and Supporting Practitioners

The Academic Impact of Enrollment in International Baccalaureate Diploma Programs: A Case Study of Chicago Public Schools

This study examines whether students’ enrollment in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Program improves their ACT composite scores, probability of high school graduation, and probability of college enrollment. Using data on the IB enrollment status of 20,422 students attending thirteen 13 CPS high schools from 2002-2008, I estimate that IB enrollment increases students’ ACT scores by as much as 0.5 standard deviations and their probability of high school graduation and college enrollment by as much as 17 and 22 percentage points, respectively. Though selection bias may contribute to overstating the estimates, the conclusion from the sensitivity analyses is that it is unlikely that this internal-validity challenge negates the principal finding.

Peer Contexts: Do Old for Grade and Retained Peers Influence Student Behavior in Middle School?

This study analyzes the association between the presence of old for grade and retained peers and the propensity for seventh-graders to engage in deviant behaviors in school. We also examine the propensity of students to receive an out-of-school suspension, one of the more severe consequences for disciplinary infractions. Consistent with peer influence theories of adolescent behavior, we find that students who attend school with many old for grade or retained students are more likely to commit offenses in school and to be suspended. Furthermore, we find that the vulnerability of students to these peer influences on behavior tends to vary by age, gender, race, and retention status.

Central Office Leadership in Principal Professional Learning Communities: The Practice Beneath the Policy

This paper explores to what extent central office administrators lead meetings of principal professional learning communities in ways that promise to strengthen principals’ development as instructional leaders and the conditions that help or hinder administrators in the process.

Scripted Curriculum: What Movies Teach About Dis/ability and Black Males

This article provides an analysis of movies at the intersection of race, gender, and dis/ability with particular attention to how Black, dis/abled males are represented through master narratives about Black males that interpenetrate with dis/ability tropes. At the focus of this analysis are movies such as Unbreakable, Source Code, Avatar, and Hancock. The framework of critical race studies in education (CRSE), critical race theory in particular (CRT), with critical dis/ability studies (CDS) helps to flesh out how commonly recycled tropes are used to construct intersectional narrative threats about black males around the themes of dysfunction, marginalization, and miscegenation. These narratives are discussed through the added metaphors of space and race, and presence in absence. Implications for the education of Black males and special education are discussed and recommendations for educators and educational researchers are provided.

Promoting Student Engagement in the Classroom

This article reviews the contemporary literature on the structure and correlates of student engagement, and proposes a robust yet practitioner-friendly conceptual framework for better understanding how student engagement in the classroom can be fostered. Numerous research-based practical suggestions are provided for applying this framework in classroom settings.

An Examination of Teachers’ Perceptions of Principal Support for Change and Teachers’ Collaboration and Communication Around Literacy Instruction in Reading First Schools

This study examines the empirical link between teachers’ perceptions of principal support for change and teachers’ reports of the degree of collaboration and communication with one another around literacy in Reading First schools. Multilevel analyses showed a significant and positive association between principal support for change and the degree of collaboration and communication.

Research Quality: Quantitative or Qualitative?

This note will report on distortions from both quantitative and qualitative research. In the end I will argue that we should throw the terms out altogether and, instead of teaching graduate students in a class labeled ‘qualitative research’, that we should teach graduate students in a class simply titled ‘research methods’.

Readings on Equal Education

At the Heart of Work and Family: Engaging the Ideas of Arlie Hochschild

Me-Search and Re-Search: A Guide for Writing Scholarly Personal Narrative Manuscripts

Visual Thinking Strategies: Using Art to Deepen Learning Across School Disciplines

The Sex Education Debates

Is the Use of Untested Technologies in Classrooms Unethical?

This commentary asks whether using untested technological tools in classrooms in unethical. Practices in the medical profession are compared to classroom uses of technology and the suggestion is made that all tools used in classrooms should carry a warning label

The e-Learning Reader

Cultivating Inquiry-Driven Learners: A College Education for the Twenty-First Century

Assessing the Educational Data Movement

Exploring Cultural Dynamics and Tensions Within Service-Learning

Excellence for All: How a New Breed of Reformers Is Transforming America's Public Schools

Sponsors of Policy: A Network Analysis of Wealthy Elites, their Affiliated Philanthropies, and Charter School Reform in Washington State

Using social network analysis, critical policy studies, and literacy theory, this study analyzes the network of policy actors involved in the campaign to pass a charter school initiative in the state of Washington. This study finds that through a combination individual donations and the support to key local organizations provided by their affiliated philanthropic organizations, a small group of wealthy individuals leveraged a disproportionate amount of influence over the direction and outcome of the charter school initiative in the state of Washington, particularly relative to the average Washington voter.

A Grand Experiment in Reading Instruction: Interim Report 2

The UK and the US are implementing very different models for teaching reading, constituting a Natural Experiment. Preliminary results of the experiment as of June 2013 are reported.