The Educated Reporter: In other news, the equator is really hot.

The Educated Reporter: In other news, the equator is really hot.

In other news, the equator is really hot.

by Linda Perlstein

A headline like “Better teachers help children read faster” seems to be stating the obvious, doesn’t it? Getting past the headline (reporters do not write headlines and spend a lot of time trying to get past them), journalists atAssociated Press and Education Week had solid reasons to cover a new piece of work about teacher effects in the primary grades, especially given the current debate on value-added—hey, how often do we get a twin study in education research? And they did a good job explaining the work.

Even given its apparent methodological strengths, though, I’m not convinced that the original report in Science