No abstract

Under the stewardship of the Department of Education, recent acts of Congress confuse the methods of science with the process of science, possibly doing great harm to scholarship in education. An otherwise exemplary National Research Council report to help clarify the nature of educational science fails to emphasize the complexity of scientific work in education due to the power of contexts, the ubiquity of interactions, and the problem of decade by findings interactions. Discussion of these issues leads to the conclusion that educational science is unusually hard to do and that the government may not be serious about wanting evidence-based practices in education

Propositions about the nature of expertise, in general, and expertise in pedagogy, in particular, are discussed. The time needed to develop expertise in teaching and the highly contextual nature of teachers’ knowledge are also discussed. Four theories of teacher development are presented, with an elaboration on the heuristic value of the theory of Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986). Examples from the pedagogical literature are used to illustrate this theory. The recent research establishing causal relationships between those identified as experts in teaching and their students’ academic achievement is also presented. This research allows those who study expertise in teaching to have a more objective measure for identifying and studying expert pedagogues.

A brief history of high-stakes testing is followed by an analysis of eighteen states with severe consequences attached to their testing programs. These 18 states were examined to see if their high-stakes testing programs were affecting student learning, the intended outcome of high-stakes testing policies promoted throughout the nation. Scores on the individual tests that states use were not analyzed for evidence of learning. Such scores are easily manipulated through test-preparation 2 of 74 programs, narrow curricula focus, exclusion of certain students, and so forth. Student learning was measured by means of additional tests covering some of the same domain as each state's own high-stakes test. The question asked was whether transfer to these domains occurs as a function of a state's high-stakes testing program.Four separate standardized and commonly used tests that overlap the same domain as state tests were examined: the ACT, SAT, NAEP and AP tests. Archival time series were used to examine the effects of each state's high-stakes testing program on each of these different measures of transfer. If scores on the transfer measures went up as a function of a state's imposition of a high-stakes test we considered that evidence of student learning in the domain and support for the belief that the state's high-stakes testing policy was promoting transfer, as intended.The uncertainty principle is used to interpret these data. That principle states "The more important that any quantitative social indicator becomes in social decision-making, the more likely it will be to distort and corrupt the social process it is intended to monitor." Analyses of these data reveal that if the intended goal of high-stakes testing policy is to increase student learning, then that policy is not working. While a state's high-stakes test may show increased scores, there is little support in these data that such increases are anything but the result of test preparation and/or the exclusion of students from the testing process. These distortions, we argue, are predicted by the uncertainty principle. The success of a high-stakes testing policy is whether it affects student learning, not whether it can increase student scores on a particular test. If student learning is not affected, the validity of a state's test is in question.Evidence from this study of 18 states with high-stakes tests is that in all but one analysis, student learning is indeterminate, remains at the same level it was before the policy was implemented, or actually goes down when high-stakes testing policies are instituted. Because clear evidence for increased student learning is not found, and because there are numerous reports of unintended consequences associated with high-stakes testing policies (increased drop-out rates, teachers' and schools' cheating on exams, teachers' defection from the profession, all predicted by the uncertainly principle), it is concluded that there is need for debate and transformation of current high-stakes testing policies.The autho...

This analysis is about the role of poverty in school reform. Data from a number of sources are used to make five points. First, that poverty in the United States is greater and of longer duration than in other rich nations. Second, that poverty, particularly among urban minorities, is associated with academic performance that is well below international means on a number of different international assessments. Scores of poor students are also considerably below the scores achieved by white middle-class American students. Third, that poverty restricts the expression of genetic talent at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. Among the lowest social classes environmental factors, particularly family and neighborhood influences, not genetics, is strongly associated with academic performance. Among middle-class students it is genetic factors, not family and neighborhood factors, that most influences academic performance. Fourth, compared to middle-class children, severe medical problems affect impoverished youth. This limits their school achievement as well as their life chances. Data on the negative effect of impoverished neighborhoods on the youth who reside there is also presented. Fifth, and of greatest interest, is that small reductions in family poverty lead to increases in positive school behavior and better academic performance. It is argued that poverty places severe limits on what can be accomplished through school reform efforts, particularly those associated with the federal No Child Left Behind law. The data presented in this study suggest that the most powerful policy for improving our nations’ school achievement is a reduction in family and youth poverty.