A position paper released on December 5, 2014 by the Philadelphia School Advocacy Partners (PSAP), the advocacy arm of the Philadelphia School Partnership (PSP), calls for an "aggressive expansion of schools that are achieving results for low-income and minority students" (p. 2). The document describes what it terms…

An emphasis on diversity is one of the greatest challenges in my teaching. Everyone, myself included, enters the course with a set of expectations for human behavior, and literature can be very disruptive of these expectations. International literature, for example, often disrupts the narrative expectations of readers who were trained by stories…

It's a hot day in July. The author finds herself in a university classroom in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, listening as an Achenese elementary school teacher narrates a children's story. As the teacher breaks into song in the middle of the story, the 20 other teachers in the classroom join in. The author is awed by their talents and thinks about how…

This document reports on the qualities of a good urban teacher as perceived by urban early childhood and elementary school teachers in 1988. A review of the educational literature indicates that the characteristics of good teaching reflected the time period in which the teachers lived and were prepared. This study focused on preschool, substitute,…

Five years of state test results for Pennsylvania are examined, focusing on differences among elementary schools in which a majority of students do not master basic learning skills. Data are provided for 1,505 elementary schools in about 500 districts. The largest learning problems occur in about 10% of the schools; these schools have been…