AERA Sessions Run Gamut From NCLB to Instant Messaging

San Francisco

The American Educational Research Association’s annual meeting here nearly coincided with the centennial of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. But if San Franciscans could rebound so completely from a natural disaster that devastated their city, they surely could cope with 14,000-plus educational researchers descending upon them from all corners of the globe.

This year’s meeting, held April 7-11, drew researchers from 49 countries and featured 4,000 different sessions on everything from instant messaging to neuroscience.

Predictably, a popular topic of debate and discussion was the No Child Left Behind Act. One facet of the 4-year-old federal law is that it requires school districts to allow students who attend public schools that repeatedly fail to reach performance targets to transfer to ones that do reach those targets. Nationwide, only a small percentage of eligible students take advantage of that option. But what...