A companion document to the White Paper Innovation Nation (Cm 7345). It presents a progress report on 'Lord Sainsbury's October 2007 Review' (The Race to the Top: A Review of Government's Science and Innovation Policies) on the Government's science and innovation policies.

Racing to the Top Using Math and Science is the true story about how the author used wisdom, Math and Science in and outside the classroom to become valedictorian of his high school class.

Everyone wants: High schoolers to graduate well-prepared for jobs. Improved STEM literacy. Greater achievement for inner-city children. Happiness for all children. So why are liberals spending billions of dollars working against those goals? In Race to the Bottom, Luke Rosiak uncovers the shocking reason why American education is failing: Powerful special interest groups are using our kids as guinea pigs in vast ideological experiments. These groups’ initiatives aren’t focused on making children smarter—but on implementing a radical agenda, no matter the effect on academic standards. Nonprofits pump billions into initiatives meant to redress racial inequities. Rather than fixing the problem, districts with a big gap between white and black test scores hire consultants who claim the tests are meaningless because they are “racist.” These consultants’ judgments allow school districts to ignore their own failures—ultimately hurting minority students and perpetuating racism. That is just one example. Drawing on his years in investigative journalism, Rosiak did a deep dive into school files, financial records, and parents’ stories. What he found is that nonprofit influence has crept into the educational bureaucracy all over America. Corrupt school boards and quack diversity consultants abound. Teachers drawing government pay claim it’s unsafe to return to in-person school, but “double dip” teaching in-person private classes. And amid all this focus on money and equity, academic standards are crumbling, which hurts American kids in ways we’ll be suffering for decades. Race to the Bottom is the first comprehensive exposé of the way radical ideology and self-serving administrators are destroying academic quality in America’s K-12 schools. Rigorous and deeply-researched, this is essential reading for anyone who cares about the future of our kids.

"In Improbable Scholars, David L. Kirp challenges the conventional wisdom about public schools and education reform in America through an in-depth look at Union City, New Jersey's high-performing urban school district. In this compelling study, Kirp reveals Union's city's revolutionary secret: running an exemplary school system doesn't demand heroics, just hard and steady work"--

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life. This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture. Visit the book's free Discussion Guide here.

This book brings together and builds on the current research efforts on adaptation, conceptualization, and theorization of Lesson Study (LS). It synthesizes and illustrates major perspectives for theorizing LS and enriches the conceptualization of LS by interpreting the activity as it is used in Japan and China from historical and cultural perspectives. Presenting the practices and theories of LS with practicing teachers and prospective teachers in more than 10 countries, it enables the reader to take a comparative perspective. Finally, the book presents and discusses studies on key aspects of LS such as lesson planning, post-lesson discussion, guiding theories, connection between research and practice, and upscaling. Lesson Study, which has originated in Asia as a powerful effective professional development model, has spread globally. Although the positive effects of lesson study on teacher learning, student learning, and curriculum reforms have been widely documented, conceptualization of and research on LS have just begun to emerge. This book, including 38 chapters contributed by 90 scholars from 21 countries, presents a truly international collaboration on research on and adaptation of LS, and significantly advances the development of knowledge about this process. Chapter 15: "How Variance and Invariance Can Inform Teachers’ Enactment of Mathematics Lessons" of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com Theory and Practice of Lesson Study in Mathematics: An International Perspective shows that the power of Lesson Study to transform the role of teachers in classroom research cannot be explained by a simple replication model. Here we see Lesson Study being successful internationally when its key principles and practices are taken seriously and are adapted to meet local issues and challenges. (Max Stephens, Senior research fellow at The University of Melbourne) It works. Instruction improves, learning improves. Wide scale? Enduring? Deep impact? Lesson study has it. When something works as well as lesson study does, while alternative systems for improving instruction fail, or only succeed on small scale or evaporate as quickly as they show promise, it is time to understand how and why lesson study works. This volume brings the research on lesson study together from around the world. Here is what we already know and here is the way forward for research and practice informed by research. It is time to wake up and pay attention to what has worked so well, on wide scale for so long. (Phil Dara, A leading author of the Common Core State Standards of Mathematics in the U.S.)