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was also concerned about her students’ lack of engagement — so few were completing the assignments she emailed to parents

Playing with her family’s laundry marked the first time Maliah seemed happy — actually happy — since the start of the pandemic.

Nobody should ever be penalized or put at a disadvantage for the supplies they don’t have,” Dillingham thought to herself. “But everyone’s got laundry!”

a discrete set of standards and outcomes

we've spent billions of dollars on technology that by almost every measure has had little or no widespread effect.

I compared my results against national data, and I began beating the averages.

the obvious struck me as interesting: even Rafael Nadal has a coach. Nearly every élite tennis player in the world does. Professional athletes use coaches to make sure they are as good as they can be.

They don’t even have to be good at the sport. The famous Olympic gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi couldn’t do a split if his life depended on it. Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.

why school is so important. On a raw level, school can show students what it feels like to concentrate at different levels–what it feels like to write a paper, solve a difficult math puzzle, and synthesize various skills. That way, students develop a taste for cognitive satisfaction and learn to look for it throughout their lives.

, I don’t think that skills like memorization have decreased in importance. Sure, it may seem like we don’t need to commit facts to memory anymore and that the relevant skills today are navigation, retrieval, and analysis (how quickly you can find something, whether you can find it again later, and absorb what you need from it as quickly as possible). But memorization is still important; even in today’s world, where you have a universe of information at your fingertips, you have to remember how to navigate information, how to find it again, how to use tools to find it again as well as what you found in the past and how that might relate to the information rushing at you in the present. So in this sense, memorization is inextricably linked to navigation, retrieval, and analysis. The more you remember at any given point, the more space you have left in your “working memory” to perform complex cognitive processes.

Dr. Mason, who teaches economics at the University of North Florida, believes his students are just as intelligent as they’ve always been. But many of them don’t read their textbooks, or do much of anything else that their parents would have called studying. “We used to complain that K-12 schools didn’t hold students to high standards,” he says with a sigh. “And here we are doing the same thing ourselves.”

all evidence suggests that student disengagement is at its worst in Dr. Mason’s domain: undergraduate business education.

“Business education has come to be defined in the minds of students as a place for developing elite social networks and getting access to corporate recruiters,”

I’ve never observed anything else that has had the impact on teacher personal learning like the introduction of the iPad.

students having their own highly engaging and personalized learning device and their own space to learn in. They share better, problem solve better and most importantly learn that there is more than one way to solve a problem

The best examples to depict these points would be in the areas of math and writing

Gates sees this problem largely as a matter of incentives. Publications such as U.S. News and World Report reward colleges for the resources they spend on students and their exclusivity, but not necessarily for their results. High SAT scores will move a colleges up in the rankings (and so, it should be noted, will having a high graduation rate). Making sure your alums have a well-paid job, or a job at all, will not. To begin fixing this problem, we need need flip U.S. News' logic, Gates said, and reward schools that "take people with the low SAT and actually educate them well."  

researchers found they could pick out the best teachers in a school and even predict roughly how much their students would learn if they rated the educators through a formula that put equal weight on student input, test scores and detailed classroom observations by principals and peers

Judging teachers primarily by student performance on state tests, for instance, turned out to be highly unreliable, with little consistency from year to year. Judging them chiefly by a principal's observations failed to identify those teachers who could be counted on to boost student proficiency on state math and reading tests.

This should be a very big red flag to all those policy makers who think they can have test-based accountability be half or more of a teacher's evaluation