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All along, Gates says, he had been asking questions about teacher effectiveness. How do you measure it? What are the skills that make a teacher great? “It was mind-blowing how little it had been studied,

True education reform requires engaging all of the country’s teachers.

high value-added (HVA) teachers — those that do the best job of raising students’ scores on standardized tests.

while the new research may identify HVA teachers, it’s still not clear what constitutes good teaching.

There’s one predictor of value-added, which is teacher experience. In the first couple of years, teachers’ value-added goes up quite a bit. Beside that, people who have more-advanced degrees, [have] higher SAT scores, graduated from a better college, are certified versus uncertified — none of these things are strong predictors of value-added.”

philanthropists doled out $684 million in private grants from 2000-08 to organizations involved in reforming the teaching profession.

biggest chunk of the money — 38 percent — went to teacher recruitment

22 percent was spent on professional development

Since 2000, the foundation has poured some $5 billion into education grants and scholarships.

One of the foundation's main initial interests was schools with fewer students.

designed to—and did—promote less acting up in the classroom, better attendance and closer interaction with adults.

The SOS campaign seems more about catharsis, with vague and mostly platitudinous principles, rather than a strategy offering a specific, alternative vision for school improvement

basic aim

increase public funding through a campaign to roll back accountability

the misconception that matters the most is the notion somehow a good test measures all of what’s important.

you sample from this big domain of achievement a modest number of things that allow you to predict the whole. That’s all a test is

its value is only as a tool for estimating what kids really know about the whole.

According to Cathy N. Davidson, co-director of the annual MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitions, fully 65 percent of today’s grade-school kids may end up doing work that hasn’t been invented yet.

better question is whether the form of learning and knowledge-making we are instilling in our children is useful to their future.”

What she recommends, in fact, looks much more like a classical education than it does the industrial-era holdover system that still informs our unrenovated classrooms.

Montessori (36) curriculum does not mention EFs, but what Montessorians mean by “normalization” includes having good EFs. Normalization is a shift from disorder, impulsivity, and inattention to self-discipline, independence, orderliness, and peacefulness (37). Montessori classrooms have only one of any material, so children learn to wait until another child is finished. Several Montessori activities are essentially walking meditation (Fig. 3).

As in Tools, the teacher carefully observes each child (when a child is ready for a new challenge, the teacher presents one), and whole-group activities are infrequent; learning is hands-on, often with ≥2 children working together. In Tools, children take turns instructing or checking one another. Cross-age tutoring occurs in Montessori mixed 3-year age groups. Such child-to-child teaching has been found repeatedly to produce better (often dramatically better) outcomes than teacher-led instruction (38–40).

Children chosen by lottery to enter a Montessori public school approved by the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) were compared to those also in the lottery but not chosen, at the end of kindergarten (age 5) and the end of grade 6 (age 12) (41). At age 5, Montessori children showed better EFs than peers attending other schools. They performed better in reading and math and showed more concern for fairness and justice. No group difference was found in delay of gratification. At age 12, on the only measure related to EFs, Montessori children showed more creativity in essay writing than controls. They also reported feeling more of a sense of community at school.