Teacher training no boon for student math scores
By Debra Viadero/Education Week
First-year findings from a federal study of 77 middle schools suggest that even intensive, state-of-the-art efforts to boost teachers’ skills on the job may not lead to significant gains in student achievement right away. The "Middle School Mathematics Professional Development Impact Study," which was released April 6, is the second major experimental study by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences to find that a high-quality professional-development program failed to translate into any dramatic improvements in student learning. A two-year study of efforts to improve teachers’ instructional skills in early reading reached a similar conclusion in 2008. (more...)