Hooked on Reading | LFA: Join The Conversation - Public School Insights:
by NEA's Read Across America
By Dennis Van Roekel, President of the National Education Association
It starts early. When we are maybe age three or four or five. When we are young and impressionable. Someone close to us opens a book and reads to us about animals that talk, ghosts that live in haunted castles or pirates in search of buried treasure.
And we are hooked. We can't wait for someone to read us another story that causes our imaginations to run wild. If you've ever shared a book with a child, you know the joy and excitement this small act can bring. It's almost comical how some children want to hear the same story over and over and over — they are so spellbound by it.
Research shows that children who are read to at home have a higher success rate in school and frequently develop stronger reading skills. Reading is the foundation of education.
Unfortunately, too many children have no one to read to them. The National Center for Education Statistics tells us that almost 50 percent of children ages three to five do not get read to on a daily basis. This is staggering.
We at the National Education Association (NEA) are working to change this. We offer a number of
resources to help educators improve reading instruction and to help parents develop reading skills in their children. And each year we host
Read Across America, an initiative that celebrates reading and literacy and encourages more adults to
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by James Cibulka
Public Comment Period February 15–March 29
By James G. Cibulka, president, Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation
Education reform over the past decades has ushered in changes in standards, assessment, curriculum, and teacher evaluation. Most recently, the focus has turned to teachers and their professional preparation; research has shown that teachers are the most significant in-school influence on student achievement. While education reform is often politicized, the opposing sides share considerable common ground. In the end, those vested in the topic of education reform agree that every student deserves the best teachers and education possible.
The Council for the Accreditation of Education Preparation (CAEP)
[i] takes up its responsibilities as the new national accreditor of educator preparation providers at a time of high interest in P-12 student performance and in the capabilities of the education workforce. In this context, accreditation must be a strong lever in shaping educator preparation, assuring the public of the rigor of educator preparation programs.
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Not all of the works Smokler writes about fall into the category of Y.A., or, for that matter, are even books (and his book, of course, is intended for grownups). There are William Shakespeare plays and Emily Dickinson poems and even the fantastic David Foster Wallace essay, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." Many of the books he reconsiders, for instance, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye, while not explicitly intended for teens by their authors, have been huge hits among that readership. The Phantom Tollbooth is widely considered a book for younger readers, and A Separate Peace andThe Bell Jar—the latter of which a friend told him, "is for teenage girls what On the Road is for teenage boys"—are surely read most by people under 20. But more than whether the books are Y.A. or not, the idea of reading what you read then to know yourself better now is part of why I started the Y.A. for Grownups column in the first place. I wanted to reevaluate books I'd read as a kid with grownup eyes ... and I did that, but I also developed an appetite for new Y.A., and a desire to look at what it means to read those books in "reverse," as 
Glenn Geddie, Texas School Employee, 
It is a well-known true fact that the fastest way to improve schools in order to launch students on a path to 21st century prosperity is to close them. In fact, nine out of ten advocates of closing schools in order to promote enhanced choice and excellence have found that choice and excellence are enhanced when schools are closed. Unfortunately, closing a school while the students are still inside can prove difficult, especially in this era of putting students first.
