There's a great article for educators in this month’s Atlantic. The entire article is very much worth reading, but to honor everyone’s time, I’ve summarized the most salient points below, and I've included some lines verbatim for clarity's sake.

• Teach for America’s (TFA) voluminous research data seems to now point to an inescapable conclusion: more than any other variable in education -– more than schools, curriculum or textbooks –- teachers matter. What school or classroom a student sits in tends not to matter nearly as much as who leads that classroom.
• TFA has been tracking hundreds of thousands of students for more than a decade. Variables that intuitively would seem to predict teacher success in the classroom –- ...

Okay, maybe not my absolutely favorite website, but the one I freely peruse while sitting at my desk at work. It's the Reading Rockets site that PBS does. They have a number of literacy-centric sites, but Reading Rockets is the best. Funded by a major grant from the US Dept. of Education, here's a chunk of their mission statement:

Reading Rockets aims to inform and inspire parents, teachers, childcare providers, administrators, and others who touch the life of a child by providing accurate, accessible information on how to teach kids to read and help those who struggle. The project is guided by an advisory panel made up of leading researchers and experts in ...

I just finished reading SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Perhaps you read their first book Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, which was one of the top-selling nonfiction books of 2005. Both books are outstanding and offer readers a novel perspective on some of our most perplexing social problems. Levitt is a University of Chicago economist and Dubner is a professional writer who team up to bring economic theory and practice to real-life problems.

In their latest effort, they write about one of the huge problems that confronted our country in the early 1900s. At that time people were ...

So I was watching a chunk of the 24-hour broadcast of the movie "A Christmas Story" -- the unwrapping presents montage at the end, in which the two boys pull some unidentifiable clothing items from boxes, glance over at each other, and without missing a beat toss the clothing over their shoulders in disgust. As a kid I was kind of like that with any gift that wasn't a book.

My daughters at least have the same enthusiasm for books as they do toys. The big book gift I gave my 10-year-old daughter this year was a quintet of John Bellairs novels I found at a used bookstore. We got into Bellairs together when ...