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While the importance of effective principals is undisputed, few studies have addressed what specific skills principals need to promote school success. This study draws on unique data combining survey responses from principals, assistant principals, teachers and parents with rich administrative data to identify which principal skills matter most for school outcomes. Factor analysis of a 42-item task inventory distinguishes five skill categories, yet only one of them, the principals' organization management skills, consistently predicts student achievement growth and other success measures. Analysis of evaluations of principals by assistant principals confirms this central result. Our analysis argues for a broad view of instructional leadership that includes general organizational management skills as a key complement to the work of supporting curriculum and instruction.

Educators make bad prognosticators of the future. There is no shame in that. Politicians, stock-market players, CEOs, and gamblers, people with a lot at stake, routinely fail in their predictive efforts. But when school "reformers" try to reorder education based on "21st-century skills," or what some describe as "teaching tomorrow's skills to today's students," they show not only lack of prescience, but also ignorance of the past.

Tragically, our nation is in the midst of a mass extinction that threatens our future and this catastrophe will devastate our nation's ability to compete in the 21st century. America is in the process of systematically wiping out higher level thinking skills. Ironically, when I say "systematically" I am referring to our educational system. The skills needed for tomorrow (creative thinking, critical thinking, and problem solving) are being driven out of our children. Tragically this occurs during the process of becoming "educated." Unfortunately, we are equipping students for yesterday, not tomorrow.

Evidence (and evidence-based reform) are entirely neutral on the nature of teaching. Whatever works is what is valued. The distinction between teaching driven by accountability and teaching informed by evidence is crucial. Using test scores to evaluate teachers and schools, at least as defined by NCLB, runs the risk of focusing teachers on a narrow band of reading and math skills, and school and district leaders often try to improve performance by "alignment," trying to get teachers to spend more time on the skills and knowledge likely to be assessed. In contrast, evidence-based policies have no such limitations.

In a recent blog post, Larry Cuban muses about the enthusiasm of some superintendents, school board members, parents, and pundits for expensive, new technologies, such as "iPads, tablets, and 1:1 laptops." Without any clear evidence, they spend massively on the newest technology, expecting that "these devices will motivate students to work harder, gain more knowledge and skills, and be engaged in schooling." They believe such devices can help students develop the skills they will need in a 21st century labor market-and hope they will somehow help to narrow the achievement gap that has been widening between rich and poor. But, argues Cuban, for those school leaders "who want to provide credible answers to the inevitable question that decision-makers ask about the effectiveness of new devices, they might consider a prior question. What is the pressing or important problem to which an iPad is the solution?" Good question. Now, good enough? I am not so sure. It still implicitly assumes an iPad must be a solution to some-thing in education.

A few months back I got into an interesting discussion with my high school friends on Facebook about the books we read in our tenth grade advanced English class at Westhill High School in Stamford. My friend Debbie, who's clearly even more of a pack rat than my mother, still had the syllabus, and was able to rattle off impressively long list of books that we'd read and analyzed. When I compared it to the number of books my daughter, a high school sophomore, will get through this year in her advanced English class, it's really quite astounding. But actually, it's not. When I look at the school calendar, the entire month of March is lost to CMT/CAPT testing.  And that's just the actual testing. Much of the month before will be devoted to exercises that prepare students for the tests. Not for reading great works of literature and learning to use critical thinking skills, but rather for learning test taking skills.

Few Americans are aware of the extent to which our civilian economy used to depend on the breadth and quality of the vocational education system in our Armed Forces prior to the inauguration of the voluntary service following the Vietnam War.  Millions of young people who were taken in by the Army had basic skills that were a bit shaky and very little in the way of vocational skills.  They were trained as truck drivers, diesel mechanics, aircraft engine maintenance workers, road builders, computer system managers and quality system analysts.  After their tour was over, they entered the civilian economy, ready to be far more productive than they were before they entered the Army.  The services still train the people they recruit.  But now, they aim to keep them, and the rate at which they become available to the civilian economy has been drastically reduced.

For my very smart MIT student, Teach for America, would be a pit stop where she would pick up some leadership skills while teaching disadvantage children on her way to Chase, where she would use her finely honed mathematical and leadership skills in ways that almost certainly would not benefit the students she taught.

David Grissmer and his colleagues noted that three of the data sets had early measures of fine motor skills. They found that, after they statistically accounted for all of the factors that Duncan et al had examined, fine motor skills was and additional, strong predictor of student achievement.

What I think these two instances have in common is that in both cases I responded to the challenge to solve a problem that for whatever reasons caught and held my interest. I could not have solved the problems without the "skills," but I never invested in learning the skills until I was captivated by the problems.

In trying to improve American public schools, educators, policymakers, and philanthropists are overselling the role of the highly skilled individual teacher and undervaluing the benefits that come from teacher collaborations that strengthen skills, competence, and a school's overall social capital

There have been many individuals with the qualities of Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta born in villages like mine in human history, but they have been "educated," in various rigorous ways, to become anything but Lady Gaga. Out of necessity, societies and families must ensure that their future generations have the ability, knowledge, and skills to live a successful life as workers, parents, and citizens. Thus they must have an education, formal or informal, that focuses on cultivating what meets the needs of the society. For a long period of time in human history, many societies have only needed a very narrow spectrum of human talents on a large scale and a very small pool of special talents. As a result, the dominant education paradigm has been to reduce the vast diverse potentials of human talents, interests, and abilities to what the society deems as useful or employable skills and knowledge.

As schools are trying to engage students through the use of 21st century skills there are others schools that are still practicing the art of banning books, and Tucson is not the only one. As astonishing as it may seem as we negotiate our way through 2012, there are numerous books that are being banned, or considered for banning, every year.

What if it is not the student outcomes that have been stubbornly flat? What if it is the constant focus on high stakes testing that has remained stubbornly flat? Is it possible that our students really do have 21st century skills, and it is not reflected on the state assessments?

We examine the link between math skills and labor-market outcomes using a resume-based field experiment.

"Teachers are one of the most important resources a nation has for providing the skills, values and knowledge that prepare young people for productive citizenship - but more than this, to give sanctuary to their dreams and aspirations for a future of hope, dignity and justice. It is indeed ironic, in the unfolding nightmare in Newtown, that only in the midst of such a shocking tragedy are teachers celebrated in ways that justly acknowledge - albeit briefly and inadequately - the vital role they play every day in both protecting and educating our children.  What is repressed in these jarring historical moments is that teachers have been under vicious and sustained attack by right-wing conservatives, religious fundamentalists, and centrist democrats since the beginning of the 1980s. Depicted as the new "welfare queens," their labor and their care has been instrumentalized and infantilized; [1] they have been fired en masse under calls for austerity; they have seen rollbacks in their pensions, and have been derided because they teach in so-called "government schools."  Public school teachers too readily and far too pervasively have been relegated to zones of humiliation and denigration.  The importance of what teachers actually do, the crucial and highly differentiated nature of the work they perform and their value as guardians, role models and trustees only appears in the midst of such a tragic event. If the United States is to prevent its slide into a deeply violent and anti-democratic state, it will, among other things, be required fundamentally to rethink not merely the relationship between education and democracy, but also the very nature of teaching, the role of teachers as engaged citizens and public intellectuals and the relationship between teaching and social responsibility.  This essay makes one small contribution to that effort."

"critical pedagogy "…draws attention to questions concerning who has control over the conditions for the production of knowledge, values, and skills, and it illuminates how knowledge, identities, and authority are constructed within particular sets of social relations""

NCLB's fixation on testing has sabotaged the law's noble intention. Schools have become focused on compliance rather than on innovation and achievement. We've become obsessed with hitting test-score targets and sanctioning schools and educators; instead, we should be focused on improving teaching and learning. We've narrowed the curriculum; instead we should be paving a path to critical thinking and problem solving -- the very kinds of knowledge and skills our children need to be well-educated and to compete in today's global economy.

Reviewers Guarino and Stacy question the emphasis placed on validating classroom observations with test score gains. Observation scores may pick up different aspects of teacher quality than do test-based measures. It is possible that neither type of measure used in isolation captures a teacher's contribution to all the useful skills that students learn in schools. From this standpoint, the authors' conclusion that multiple measures of teacher effectiveness are needed is justifiable. The omission of relevant information is a shortcoming of the report. Key details regarding the study design and methodological approach are lacking.

If somebody told me, 15 years ago, when I was spending many of my days working with community groups in the Bronx and East New York dealing with the consequences of the crack epidemic, that you could solve the problems of neighborhoods under siege by insulating students in local schools from the conditions surrounding them, and devoting every ounce of teachers energies to raising their test scores, I would have said "what planet are you living on?." Students were bringing the stresses of their daily lives into the classroom in ways that no teacher with a heart could ignore, and which created obstacles to concentrating in school, much less doing their homework , that people living in middle class communities couldn't imagine. To be effective in getting students to learn, teachers had to be social workers, surrogate parents, and neighborhood protectors as well as people imparting skills, and at times, the interpersonal dimensions of their work were more important than the strictly instructional components. Now, such thinking is considered a form of educational heresy.