"The current school landscape sucks," writes educator and hip-hop artist Gabriel "Asheru" Benn. At least that would be the opinion of most teenagers when you ask them. The problem isn't that our schools aren't good or that our teachers aren't knowledgeable or even likeable. Rather, it's the "rote, transactional" ways…

This article discusses a case for teaching a kind of knowledge that is not in textbooks. The author calls on education leaders to take a crucial step toward getting students to use higher-order thinking skills by drawing a sharp line between firsthand and secondhand knowledge. The best way to do this is to focus attention directly on some part of…

The "elephant in the room" when we talk about preparing critical thinkers for the 21st century, Gallagher believes, is U.S. students' lack of reading proficiency and their general disinclination to read. Gallagher's provocative argument is that a significant factor behind the decline of reading in young people is a set of practices…

Most students in most schools today study subject matter. They and their teachers conceive of the educational task as committing to memory large numbers of facts, formulas, and figures. A far more sophisticated perspective emphasizes teaching disciplines and disciplinary thinking. The goal of this approach is to instill in students the disposition…

The current preoccupation in the United States with test-based accountability is founded on a set of faulty assumptions--about education practices elsewhere in the world, about international test score comparisons, and about the extent to which test scores are valid indicators of the quality of education or the state of the economy. For example,…