This commentary suggests a systemic solution to the pernicious problem of big-time college basketball and football.

This commentary discusses the issue of transgender people in higher education

On September 8, 2011 Teachers College Record published a book review of Douglas N. Harris’s recent book Value-Added Measures in Education. In this commentary the author takes issue with not necessarily the book's What Every Educator Needs to Know content but the author's overall endorsement of value-added, and his and others' imprudent adoption of some highly complex assumptions.

As the field of educational games grows and matures it needs to develop appropriate paradigms for research that support that process. Instead of the medical model, the research paradigms are posed as a broader and more appropriate alternative. Ecology embraces a broader ranger of methodologies and foci of study, which the field of learning games would do well to replicate.

This commentary positions respect as an essential concept when thinking about how teachers and other school people should relate to immigrant families. In this piece, respect stands for a form of humanization in response to historical and chronic dehumanization that immigrants have long faced. The piece draws examples from the authors' work with Haitian immigrant families.

This paper was part of a round-table dialogue, hosted at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA), about how academia, as a totalizing institution, constrains intimate relationships. Here, a totalizing institution, in general, is one which extends its reach to all dimensions of experience. In this paper, I attempt to frame the issue of academia as a “totalizing” institution, and to probe the boundaries and dimensions of the conversations which surround it.

This commentary recommends that the Occupy Wall Street protests demand bankruptcy relief for student-loan debtors

The editors of the Teachers College Record announce a new project on adaptive educational technologies.

The accomplishments of Steve Jobs, a college drop-out, raise provocative questions about what students learn in college and what they might benefit from learning in the future. This article argues that the goal of higher education going forward should be to produce knowledge rather than consume it. Knowledge-making will require some significant adjustment in how we teach our students.

Our commentary focuses on the issue of academic integrity and plagiarism for English language learners in U.S. universities. Sensitized by our own experiences of having recently participated in a hearing on plagiarism in a second language learning (L2) context at a local college, we examined existing definitions on academic integrity and plagiarism in U.S. universities. Our thinking is guided by language scholars who argued that the prevalent views of scholarship in U.S. universities and higher institutions in other western societies are inherently ethnocentric. While universities throughout the country are enthusiastically recruiting students from around the world, as part of the nationwide trend toward globalization, we believe U.S. universities need to develop an academic culture that encourages critical examination of our own beliefs and perspectives about what we need to do to help international students in U.S. universities understand authorship, ownership, and scholarship. Otherwise, our attempts at globalization will suffer. We hope our commentary contributes to the building of a culture of critical examination of the heretofore taken-for-granted beliefs and perspectives on teaching, especially in contexts of L2 teaching and learning.

This commentary catalogues the striking absence of education from the 2011 Republican primary debates. In the eight GOP debates so far this year, the term “education” or “educational” has been invoked just 64 times—a number dwarfed by terms like “Reagan” (82 times), “illegal” (109 times), “Obamacare” (125 times), and the number “9” (382 times). Yet despite its absence from the national limelight, the problem of education reform remains as exigent as ever.

Many efforts by self-styled "school reformers" are like a "fractured fairy tale" version of the Icarus Greek myth. Icarus escaped from prison through the ingenious use of wings made of feathers and wax -- a brilliant idea. However, he ignored warnings to stay away from the sun, so the wax melted and he fell into the sea. Some school reformers seize on great ideas, but then, like Icarus, get so exhilarated by them that they, too, throw all caution to the wind. The "fractured" part in this version, though, is that it's not them who end up suffering the consequences of their exuberance. No, it's us teachers and our students who end up "falling into the sea" as a result. The ideas that can get warped and destructive as they are applied in the name of school reform include videotaping teachers, using student surveys, encouraging social emotional learning (SEL), and emphasizing the importance of the parent/school connection. I describe how they, instead, can be used to more effectively help students, their families, teachers, and schools.

Educators must become data literate to meet the increasing demands for the use of data-driven decision making in teaching and administrative roles. Schools of education can and must play a key role in improving the human capacity to use data. This Commentary explores the systemic nature of the issue and provides considerations about how to move the field forward.

Can a teacher be fired for soliciting sex on craigslist? A California court says yes.

Technology clearly warrants a place in today’s classroom but must be kept in place. At stake is the cognitive and social development traditional classroom activity and discussion have long proven crucial in cultivating.

This commentary suggests several important points that deserve attention in the debate over teacher evaluation reform.

This piece of commentary is a response to the NCTQ study released this summer criticizing schools of education for failing to prepare teachers adequately. In it, I try to present the point of view of a hard working teacher educator.

This commentary focuses on the gap between Common Core State Standards (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010) and Professional Standards for the Accreditation of Teacher Preparation Institutions (The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, 2007) in addressing socio-emotional development of English language learners (ELLs). Using a writing sample from Yonsu (pseudonym), a female student whose home language is Korean, I will make a case for the importance of supporting socio-emotional development of growing ELL student population in U.S. schools and their school success. I will then discuss an important challenge this gap imposes on teacher education programs in the United States.

The Memphis area has recently taken steps to bridge the traditionally divisive impact of district boundary lines through a city-suburban school system merger. What still remains to be seen, however, is whether the newly enlarged school system will craft policies that take advantage of the absence of the city/suburban district line. If school officials do so, they will be recognizing a critical but often overlooked principle: when thinking about student assignment across a broadly-conceived community, school policy can, in some ways, become housing policy. This commentary examines the relationship between school and residential segregation, using the example of Memphis to explore several avenues for fostering a more cohesive consideration of school and housing policy.

A review of the recently opened RACE exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the most ambitious effort to educate the public about race and racism in a generation. The exhibit provides an opportunity to reflect on how academic scholarship can contribute to important public education initiatives. The author argues that race education should be organized around a central paradox: the fiction of race, the reality of racism.

Nearly forty years after a landmark Supreme Court decision (Lau v. Nichols) and thirty years after a Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals case (Castañeda v. Pickard) concerning the educational rights of English learners (ELs), the authors argue that the essence of these rulings have yet to be systematically realized. Drawing on evidence from their research, the authors highlight the gaps between ideals and realities that secondary language minority youth face in securing educational opportunities. The authors also raise questions about theory, implementation, and evaluation in EL programs and students’ rights to a full academic curriculum.

In response to a recent article in the New York Daily News regarding the marketing expenditures of the Success Charter Network, this commentary discusses the growing push for public schools (particularly charters) to engage in marketing. The authors argue that this trend is a result of the new educational policy context of merged private- and public-sector worlds. Concerns are raised about the effects of embracing corporate models for educational reform.

Commentary on recent articles on homework in the New York Times.

This commentary calls attention to the “importation” of overseas-trained teachers to teach in the U.S., to the assumption of a widespread teacher shortage in the U.S. (used as a rationale for this practice), and to the authors’ fears that both local and overseas-trained teachers are being used as pawns in a high-stakes political battle.

Despite the current political climate, at a time of growing diversity and deepening inequality, more governmental action, not less, is needed to comprehensively address persisting segregation in schools and in our society. Federal guidance and financial support for integration have made a difference in the past, and the government itself shoulders some of the blame for continuing patterns of segregation. Government will be crucial to helping communities thoughtfully understand what options exist today, and to helping to bridge education and other related policies such as housing to find comprehensive solutions to our persisting racial and economic inequality.