President Bush's National Math Advisory Panel has released its final report and several Pulse Contributing Editors discuss the merits of the effort while none if surprised by the panel's focus on "core math skills."

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Having 30% -40% of our students drop out of school; and losing 40%-50% of our new teaching corps is not acceptable.

There is no evidence whosoever that says that a nation that is trailing in math test scores will somehow trail in GDP or whatever it is you really care about. This is just plain silly, but we keep repeating the mantra that we are behind Korea in math as if it has been proven that this matters in some way...

In a world-class display of side-splitting math teacher humor, National Math Advisory Panel member Francis “Skip” Fennell told the New York Times, “Just as “plastics” was the catchword in the 1967 movie The Graduate, the catchword for math teachers today should be ‘fractions.’“

Recent pronouncements from Washington regarding math education have suggested that pedagogical points of view don't matter in the teaching of mathematics. For example: "There is no basis in research for favoring teacher-based or student-centered instruction," Dr. Larry R. Faulkner, the chairman of the panel, said at a briefing last Wednesday. "

Too bad he, Secretary Spellings and by extension, their boss - The President of the United States, are demonstrably wrong.

The NY Times reported on March 14, 2008, "Report Urges Changes in Teaching Math." No little irony that this appeared on Pi Day, probably the only time in the school year when many mathematics teachers across the country try to find a grade-appropriate activity/lesson on the same topic. This is about as close as America comes to a national curriculum in mathematics...

Essayist and NPR commentator, Sandra Tsing Loh, has written a terrific article celebrating the wonders of urban public education for March 2008 issue of The Atlantic Magazine.

Smaller schools score higher across the board.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has come up with a bad solution to a problem that doesn’t exist!

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It is possible that we have already had some success in forcing Presidential candidates to take a stand on NCLB. There certainly is a strong contrast between the rhetoric on education of the Republications and the Democrats.

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Banking on the next generation of teachers may still be a long shot, given the current training systems in place.

Teach for America (TFA) really may be more like Enron than Google... TFA is spending about $125,000 per teacher!

Now is a critical time for educators -- school board members, administrators, teachers and other staff -- parents and community members to contact their Congressional representatives and demand a thorough overhaul of the law.

We need to continuously be challenging ourselves, and asking whether we are doing enough...

With the US Supreme Court's recent ruling in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (05-908) and Crystal Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education (05-915), we have formally returned to legally sanctioned segregation...

How long will it take for "Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under My Bed!" to be in your school library? Will "Help! Mom! Hollywood's in My Hamper!" be tested by Accelerated Reader?

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In 1998, Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam, published results of an extensive, meta-analytic review of research regarding the instructional payoffs of well-conceived classroom assessments. These two British researches concluded that classroom assessment, if properly implemented, could not only improve how well students were learning what was being taught in class, but could also meaningfully boost students’ scores on external achievement exams.