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.

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.

The problem is that as people have become increasingly focused on the tests that matter, the tests for which people are held accountable, scores on those tests have often become misleading, sometimes wildly misleading. And that’s ironically undermined what we can say with confidence about how much kids actually know and can do.

nobody is spending a lot of time prepping kids specifically for that test. So when scores go up on one of those tests, we have a fair degree of confidence that kids really know more.

look for the big picture. Make comparisons to countries that make sense to compare us to, but don’t pay attention to small differences, because you can’t trust them.

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.”

Of course the brains of children with behavior problems will show anomalies on brain scans. It could not be otherwise. Behavior and the brain are intertwined.

If these children are not paying attention because of lack of motivation or an underdeveloped capacity to regulate their behavior, their brain scans are certain to be anomalous.

However brain functioning is measured, these studies tell us nothing about whether the observed anomalies were present at birth or whether they resulted from trauma, chronic stress or other early-childhood experiences. One of the most profound findings in behavioral neuroscience in recent years has been the clear evidence that the developing brain is shaped by experience.

Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers. Puberty not only turns on the motivational and emotional system with new force, it also turns it away from the family and toward the world of equals.

emotion and motivation

control

About 116,000 students were educated in 93 virtual schools — those where instruction is entirely or mainly provided over the Internet — run by private management companies in the 2010-11 school year, up 43 percent

“E.M.O.’s” — educational management organizations, a term coined by Wall Street in the 1990s — now operate 35 percent of all charter schools, enrolling 42 percent of all charter school students, according to the report.

for-profit companies (K12 Inc. leads this sector, with 65,396

teachers have been in open revolt. They marched on the capital last spring, when the legislation was under consideration. They complain that lawmakers listened less to them than to heavy lobbying by technology companies, including Intel and Apple.

Gov. C. L. Otter, known as Butch, and Tom Luna, the schools superintendent, who have championed the plan, said teachers had been misled by their union into believing the changes were a step toward replacing them with computers.

middle childhood

is a time of great cognitive creativity and ambition, when the brain has pretty much reached its adult size and can focus on threading together its private intranet service

dihydroepiandrosterone, or DHEA