As Cassidy et al. (2016) outline in their article, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS; National Governors Association [NGA] Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers [CCSSO], 2010) have taken center stage in education, pushing other important topics and issues aside as teachers scramble to transform their teaching…

The corruption of the social work enterprise is not simply episodic but systemic and long-standing including education, research, governance, and practice. Reform is unlikely since the constituency within the field and outside of it that wishes to change the situation is small and ineffective. The corruption of social work reflects the unfortunate…

The authors share findings from a recent study of teens who freely select to read texts typically marginalized by schools (dystopia, vampire, romance, horror, fantasy), revealing the distinct functional and psychological benefits of pleasure reading. The students who participated in the study that the authors report on were eighth graders who…

In his 2016 article, "What Can Readers Read after Graded Readers?" (EJ1098660), Jeff McQuillan provided data to show that there is an adequate amount of reading material that can be read at or above 98% vocabulary coverage to provide sufficient input to acquire most of the word families from the 2,000- to the 9,000-word-family levels.…

This commentary explains and expands upon Wenger's concept of communities of practice. Knowledge construction to improve common practice within a community committed to learning is critical. Vertical and horizontal communication, interactions within and between boundaries of organizations are necessary for creating learning organizations. One…

This article is a commentary of a paper by Derek C. Briggs and Frederick A. Peck, "Using Learning Progressions to Design Vertical Scales That Support Coherent Inferences about Student Growth," which describes an elegant potential framework for at least beginning to address three priorities in large-scale assessment that have not been…

Persson's (2012a) article offers a timely contribution to the science of giftedness through questioning the validity of research emerging from within this paradigm. Using evidence from a number of disciplines he demonstrates that what is regarded as gifted behaviour in one culture could be regarded as quite ordinary within another. He therefore…

This paper responds to the articles in the recent special edition of The Curriculum Journal (Volume 20, Number 3). The special edition discusses an "archaeological" approach to student enquiry, with associated ideas of personalisation, competency development, and building learning power. We argue that the papers both raise and omit complex issues…

Doug Lederman's article, "Sports Subsidies Soar," discusses the issue on institutional subsidies for sports program. His article invites an obvious question: why are so many universities willing to subsidize athletics through either a direct transfer of institutional funds, assessing a dedicated student fee, or a combination of these? This…

In introducing the articles in this issue, Black and McCormick are struck by two features. The first is that they comprise a rich set of resources for stimulating further thinking about tertiary education. The second, which follows from the first, is that they raise possibilities for further development of this field. They draw attention, in…

The focus article "Road Maps for Learning: A Guide to the Navigation of Learning Progressions" by Black, Wilson, and Yao (this issue) is a veritable tour-de-force, covering a great deal of education ground while spanning the heights from models of the interplay among curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment to interpretations of student…

The International Reading Association's Position Statement on Young Adolescents' Literacy Learning states, "It is during the middle years of schooling that most students refine their reading preferences, become sophisticated readers of informational text, and lay the groundwork for the lifelong reading habit." As the National Assessment of…

Merrifield (2009) provides a useful polemic about the sad state of data analysis too frequently encountered in the school choice literature. Available data come from limited policy experiments with only modest amounts of choice and competition. The effects of very modest changes in school choice on school performance are, as one might expect,…