Instead of forging superficial connections, starting where your students are is about showing kids how to learn in ways that work best for them. It's about creating spaces in the classroom where our students can feel comfortable being who they are rather than conforming to who we think they should be. It's about helping kids feel safe enough to bring with them their skills, strengths, culture, and background knowledge—and showing them how to use these to acquire the curriculum.

Students who won lotteries to attend charter middle schools performed, on average, no better in mathematics and reading than their peers who lost out in the random admissions process and enrolled in nearby regular public schools, according to a national study released today.

On average, though, the charter middle schools in the study enrolled a lower percentage of students who are eligible for free and reduced-price school meals than charters nationally, and served smaller percentages of students scoring below proficiency levels on state exams than their national peers.

ClarkAC wrote: I think this just adds weight to the notion that the devil is in the details. Some charters (i.e., some KIPP schools - not all) are producing great results. Some are not.Some kids getting vouchers are doing much better. Some are not.Some traditional public schools are great. Some are not.On average, no one solution shows impact because we are looking at averages.I agree. We need to get under the hood. Until then, we won't find the solutions we seek. 6/29/2010 12:38 PM EDT on EdWeek

By John I. Goodlad

We need to be aware that recent decades of research on cognition reveal hardly any correlation of standardized test scores with a wide range of desired behavioral characteristics such as dependability, ability to work alone and with others, and planning, or with an array of virtues such as honesty, decency, compassion, etc. Employers dissatisfied with employees who studied mathematics and the physical sciences in first-rate universities often call for higher test scores. Is academic development the totality of the purpose of schooling?

The consequence, of course, was the substantial narrowing of pedagogy to simply drilling for tests. We do not need schools for this. It is training, not education, and access to it can be obtained almost anywhere at any time in this increasingly technological age. That would leave the opportunity to turn schools, whose prime function has long been child care, into centers of pedagogy with the mission of guiding what education is: the process of becoming a unique human being whose responsibility it is to make the most of oneself.

Arthur E. Levine, a former president of Teachers College, where Dr. Ravitch got her doctorate and began her teaching career in the 1970s. “Now for her to suddenly conclude that she’s been all wrong is extraordinary — and not very helpful.”

In 2005, she said, a study she undertook of Pakistan’s weak and inequitable education system, dominated by private and religious institutions, convinced her that protecting the United States’ public schools was important to democracy.

She remembers another date, Nov. 30, 2006, when at a Washington conference she heard a dozen experts conclude that the No Child law was not raising student achievement.

“Accountability must be a reciprocal process,” according to the Harvard University professor Richard F. Elmore. “For every increment of performance I demand from you,” Elmore explains, “I have an equal responsibility to provide you with the capacity to meet that expectation. Likewise, for every investment you make in my skill and knowledge, I have a reciprocal responsibility to demonstrate some new increment in performance.”