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by Mike Schmoker
Table of Contents
Education is not just another issue. It is the most powerful force for accelerating economic growth, reducing poverty and lifting middle-class living standards. Well-educated adults earn much more, live longer and are happier than poorly educated adults.
—David Leonhardt, The New York Times
If David Leonhardt is even half right, educators face a moral obligation: to act on the best evidence-based practices that will ensure that record proportions of students receive a quality education. But we have yet to act on those practices.
Why? Because we continue to be more enamored with "innovation" than with evidence. In the main, educational initiatives are rarely selected on an empirical basis; they are chosen on the basis of "whims, fads, opportunism, and ideology" (Corcoran, Fuhrman, & Belcher, 2001; Sawchuk, 2015). For decades, we have preferred the easier work of adopting new, unproven initiatives to the harder work of mastering and implementing proven practices. It is within our power to change this—to enable unprecedented numbers of students to live longer, happier, more productive lives.
In the years since the first edition of this book was published, the case for the evidence-based elements advocated here has grown prodigiously: our best researchers now agree that their effect—if implemented—would be both rapid and dramatic.
That may sound intemperate. It is not. The notion that schools can improve both swiftly and significantly is not new and continues to gain support (Ripley, 2013). Michael Fullan, among our most eminent educational researchers, doesn't hedge: if we actually implemented the most "high-leverage" practices, they would result in "stunningly powerful consequences" for students (Fullan, 2010). And as researcher Bruce Joyce discovered, the best evidence-based practices are (1) virtually always effective and (2) they work "rapidly"—within the first year of implementation (in D. Sparks, 1998, p. 34). The schools described in these pages affirm this.
In my own effort to promote such "stunningly powerful consequences," I have updated every chapter to help educators navigate recent educational developments and mandates; to share the upsurge in evidence that supports the core elements advocated here; and to add more detailed guidance on how to implement them.
To that end, I have added:
I hope these updates and additions will make this second edition clearer and more helpful to readers as they seek to achieve "stunningly powerful" results in their own schools.
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