News
- November 03, 2014
- October 28, 2014
The hard-fought contest holds symbolic significance for the Democratic Party.
It's a battle of old versus new in California.
The typically overlooked race for state superintendent of public instruction is under a national microscope as it pits incumbent Tom Torlakson, a former teacher closely aligned with labor unions and the school establishment, against fellow Democrat Marshall Tuck, a charter school administrator backed by education reformers who advocate for controversial policy shifts like school vouchers and changes to teacher employment laws.
- October 28, 2014
Substantial systematic differences exist in children’s home learning experiences. The few existing parenting programs that have shown promise often are not widely accessible, either due to the demands they place on parents’ time and effort or cost. In this study, we evaluate the effects of READY4K!, a text messaging program for parents of preschoolers designed to help them support their children’s literacy development.
- October 27, 2014
- October 23, 2014
In the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment, young children were offered one small marshmallow now, or two marshmallows in 15 minutes if they could resist eating the first one. Children with low self-regulation ate the first marshmallow. In follow-up studies these youngsters tended to grow up to be teenagers with lower SAT scores, higher body mass indexes and higher rates of drug abuse.
- October 20, 2014
The evidence is already quite strong that staying at home during a child’s first year of life can have long-term benefits. That’s why most industrial nations (though not the United States) guarantee at least some paid parental leave for working mothers and fathers. What’s been less clear is whether stay-at-home parenting also benefits older children who may already be in elementary or even middle school. On the one hand, the additional income from a second salary is crucial for many families. On the other hand, it is hard to match the attention and guidance that an involved parent can provide.
- October 15, 2014
The newly created positions are intended to improve educational technology and provide greater equity in educational opportunities.
The Stanford Graduate School of Education has established two new endowed faculty chairs — one for the study of educational technology, the other for the study of poverty and inequality in education — and appointed, respectively, professors Dan Schwartz and Sean Reardon, as the inaugural recipients of these chairs.
- October 14, 2014
- October 07, 2014
By Sarah D. Sparks
Want to find a better teacher for English-language learners? Start by looking for teachers who add the most value for any students, rather than limiting the search to those who may have had specialized training to work with ELLs.
- October 01, 2014
- September 30, 2014
- September 17, 2014
Perhaps there are people who know from early life what they want to do for their life’s work, but I suspect they are rather rare. The actual process of getting to the right place, at least from my experience, involves a series of iterations that require learning one’s own skills, matching skills with life plans and objectives, and probably something that looks a lot like luck. This essay represents my attempt to extract the separate facets of arriving at my current position as an economist who tries to match evidence about education with policy.
- September 04, 2014
This fall Teach for America welcomes its “most diverse” corps in its history, according to a recent press release, with 50 percent of its teachers identifying as people of color.
“We’re proud that our incoming corps is more diverse than it’s ever been,” said Elisa Villanueva Beard, the group’s co-CEO. “We know that teachers from all backgrounds can have a meaningful impact on their students’ trajectories.”
Really? How meaningful?
...
- August 21, 2014
- August 15, 2014
- July 29, 2014, EdSource
A Stanford University study of a 60,000-student district in California, which is unnamed as part of an agreement between researchers and the district, looked at 12 years of English learner data. Researchers found that many students enrolled in English immersion classes, which focus on teaching English and offer no instruction in students’ primary language, were reclassified as fluent in English before finishing elementary school, said Ilana Umansky, now an education professor at the University of Oregon and co-author of the study. That jump start didn’t help them in middle school, though, when their peers who had been enrolled in bilingual or dual immersion classes began getting reclassified and performed better on tests that measure academic proficiency.