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ADVICE AND DISSENT
This section features discussions on education, learning and teaching, and language with particular focus on English. The primary subjects to be taken up here are notable advocacies and contrary viewpoints in these disciplines and their allied fields. Our primary aim is to clarify matters and issues of importance to language and learning, provide intelligent and useful instruction, promote rational and critical thinking, and enhance the individual’s overall capacity for discernment.
Education research finds teachers matter more than anything else
In an article for the January-February 2010 of The Atlantic Monthly, two-time National Magazine Awards winner Amanda Ripley reports on the stunning education research finding that teachers matter more than any other variable—more than schools or curriculum even! “Parents have always worried about where to send their children to school,” Ripley says, “but the school, statistically speaking, does not matter as much as which adult stands in front of their children. Teacher quality tends to vary more within schools—even supposedly good schools—than among schools.”
Based on this finding, the Obama administration in the United States has embarked on an ambitious new program to identify great teachers, figure out how they got that way, and then create more of them. The US education secretary, Arne Duncan, has now started focusing on great teaching and rewarding good teaching—veering away from the worn-out theme of school accountability to teacher accountability for students’ learning. “This is the wave of the future,” the article quotes Duncan. “This is where we have to go—to look at what’s working and what’s not. It sounds like common sense, but it’s revolutionary.”
Read Amanda Ripley’s “What Makes a Great Teacher?” in The Atlantic Monthly now!
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