HGSE in the Media

July 2009

Chinese Immigrants' Kids Play Balancing Role
"Parents come to the United States motivated by their desire to have their children get a better education, achieve upward mobility. And yet, they fear losing them to American cultural norms that are very alien to what they feel is proper." - Associate Professor Vivian Louie (NPR's All Things Considered, 7/30/09) [part one / part two]

Struggles With Summer Homework
"Poor kids fall behind in literacy two months in the summer, and they do not catch up. These losses accumulate over time." - Assistant Professor James Kim (Teacher Magazine, 7/28/09. Registration required.)

CMS Test Results Invite Scrutiny
"The evidence is clear that high-stakes testing can produce severely inflated scores, meaning increases in scores far larger than real improvements in student learning." - Professor Daniel Koretz (Charlotte Observer, 7/26/09)

Sci-Tech Today: Sharing and Fairness
Doctoral Candidate Peter Blake speaks to NECN about his research on young children and sharing. (NECN.com, 7/23/09)

IES Unwraps Two New Education Research Centers
"The National Center on Teacher Effectiveness will be housed at Harvard's Graduate School of Education and headed by Tom Kane and Heather Hill. (Kane, by the way, is apparently a very busy man these days. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation also named him deputy director of their U.S. education program last year.)" (Education Week's "Inside School Research" blog, 7/16/09. Registration required.)

Commentary: What Parents Can Do for Their Kids
"Raising the quality of teaching and learning in American schools is a priority. It receives a great deal of attention in our national discourse and should receive more." - Senior Lecturer Ronald Ferguson (writing on CNN.com, 7/20/09)

In Schools, a Firewall That Works Too Well
"Web site filters in schools have had tremendous success in keeping one group of people from freely searching online. Unfortunately, that group is teachers." - Doctoral Student Justin Reich (writing in The Washington Post, 7/11/09)

Up Close and Personal with Howard Gardner
"Knowledge is not the same as morality, but we need to understand if we are to avoid past mistakes and move in productive directions." - Professor Howard Gardner (The Star [Malaysia], 7/11/09)

'Value Added' Gauge of Teaching Probed
"For their study, researchers [Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor]Thomas J. Kane and Douglas O. Staiger use data from Los Angeles public schools to conduct what is widely considered to be the first experimental test of value-added modeling. The paper is being revised for possible publication in a not-yet-named economics journal, according to Mr. Staiger, who is an economics professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H." (Education Week, 7/1/09. Registration required.)